#albeit your analysis is EXTENSIVE and well done

[lunarcloak]

First bit: TOTALLY Agreed. I've seen some people talk about the fact that Kaiser should score a goal right now, but that would not be development. That would just send him back into the cycle he's been perpetuating for years now. I think course of action has to go realisation -> processing -> development for it to work.

Exactly like you said, the way it's going for Nagi and Rin, who are both in the "processing" stage of it. Arguably the lowest state, because at this point they know what the problem is but are having a hard time fighting the internal struggle.

On a plot scale, it makes sense that Kaiser is the "final main rival", so to speak, because he's Isagi's only rival on a global stage. Nagi should probably go through his development now in the FC Barcha match, and Rin should ideally sort his shit out this match for things to even out. This allows the perfect segue into the U20, wherein they're going to have to work as a team again. (I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about the possibility that Sae might be on the Japan U20 Team. SO MUCH. But I shall refrain. Really makes you think about the possibility of a connect between Kaiser and Sae-)

For Kaiser's development to hit rock bottom now MAKES SENSE. It allows for him to "destroy" an old, self destructive mindset and make room for a more progressive one to be a better rival for Isagi.

I'M SO GLAD YOU BROUGHT UP BAROU. The parallels are there. But Barou's problems were entirely egoistical, while Kaiser's are far more deep rooted into his life. It's a very very different scale, and so it cannot be resolved as quickly as Barou's was.

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I absolutely LOVE your interpretation of the fact that Kaiser wanted to live, and that was how his love for football was born, but he misunderstands the root of that fire to be the fact that it was destructive, rather than a moment of birth.

His entire shtick is that he genuinely does not understand a world where "good" qualities like happiness, kindness, generosity etc can coexist with the desire to be loved. Because he was brought up in the exact opposite manner. This is not to say he is ignoring it, or that he won't understand it-- he's incredibly smart, and more than has the capacity to. I think it's more of a psychological block than he himself realises.

-------

I've thought about this and posted about this before too, but oh my god, the fact that Kaiser is a foil to Isagi in the most unexpected way is truly insane.

Nagi acts as Isagi's foil in the fact that, he's always been naturally talented from the first time he kicked a ball, whereas Isagi has had to work for every touch of the ball and every goal. Now, when Isagi is at his peak performance because of all the work he's learned to keep putting in, Nagi's at a rougher spot because he's finally reached a threshold that he cannot cruise by.

Rin acts as Isagi's foil in the fact that, he never played football because he wanted to win, or because he liked the game. To him, it has always revolved around someone else, labels someone else placed on him. Isagi has always, ALWAYS, played football for himself. Their playstyles are so similar-- and for what? Rin's playstyle isn't even his own, it used to be a copy of Sae's. It's only more recently that he's learned to play as Itoshi Rin, not Itoshi Sae. And even then he's in a rough spot rn. But arguably doing the best of all of the rivals.

Before these backstories dropped, I thought Kaiser would be Isagi's foil in the fact that, Kaiser uses his metavision to fuel all the energy on the field towards himself. Make it so that he's the focus, the only beacon of light on the field so that everyone else is cast in shadow. Isagi uses his to make use of every single person on field, play off of them, and then interpret all of that to make his own plays the best possible option, and the most efficient to make it a goal for HIMSELF. Wherein Kaiser casts everyone into shadow, Isagi brings everyone into the light so he can shine brighter.

AND TECHNICALLY IT IS. BUT IT'S SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT.

Because Kaiser is now ALSO Isagi's foil in how they were brought up. THEIR PLAYSTYLES MIRROR THEIR UPBRINGING. Isagi was loved. So he makes use of the inner confidence it's given him to boost himself up. Kaiser was never loved, so he craves "love". But he thinks there's not enough of it for everyone. The next best option is to make it so that it's only possible to look at him (love him? worship him?) and nobody else.

What happens when he's not worth looking at (loving)?

------

ABOUT KAINESS. Honestly?? Not so hot take but they're both unreliable narrators. Kaiser omits the sweet memories altogether, and Ness glorifies them. I don't trust EITHER of their interpretations of the memories. I think there's a middle ground there, where what they had was real, but in a twisted way because it served both of their twisted motivations. It's a hard life, for traumatised teenagers.

(Also, lots of hugs for you to share that personal experience to explain your take on a character. You're doing awesome, OP, all the virtual love I can give you!!) -----

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SUCH A PHENOMENAL POST. You stated everything I was thinking about perfectly. Hope you have a lovely day!!

On Kaiser’s Trauma

I’ve thought it over, and I think there’s really no way for Kaiser to awaken this match. Be it scoring a goal or getting one over Isagi, he is not winning. I don’t see it at all.

I’ve reviewed the previous character development arcs, and one thing Kaneshiro has been staunch about is that internal development comes first before external development:

Chigiri - Chigiri had to get over his fear of losing his old self by putting his leg at risk again before the narrative rewarded him with a goal.

Bachira - Bachira had to overcome his fear of being alone before being rewarded with, not a goal, but with a friend who met him where he was.

Barou - Barou had to experience his arrogance being crushed and overcome the subsequent resignation he felt before he could reclaim his role as “main character.”

Hiori - Hiori had to first come at peace with giving up soccer entirely—something he had been hesitant to do, even when it hurt him, because he didn’t know what else to do—before discovering what soccer really means to him.

Yukimiya - Yukimiya found salvation when Isagi saw him as he was desperately fighting for a chance while he could still see.

It’s a bit different for Isagi’s main rivals, though:

Nagi - Nagi got motivated to put in an effort because of Isagi -> Got stronger during Second Selection -> Went back to old habits just to beat Isagi once -> Regressing in the rest of the NEL arc

Rin - Rin had to stop seeking answers outside of himself -> Unleashed his true ego during the U20 match -> Subconsciously sought affirmation from Sae at the end of the match -> Felt rejected by Sae -> ??? (The current match against PxG is ongoing, so I don’t know how he is right now)

Nagi’s and Rin’s development arcs are not linear, and currently both are in the lower curves of their arcs. This is because they haven’t fully solved their internal problems. Until Nagi finds a reason to push himself outside of beating Isagi and until Rin gets over his brother issues, they can never fully grow.

Likewise, Kaiser, who is undoubtedly also a main rival, has to first fucking get therapy process his childhood trauma before he can truly awaken.

But trauma is not easy to overcome. In fact, you don’t even really “heal.” Kaiser “getting over it” in just one match is impossible. As such, I don’t see him winning. At least not now.

Isagi throwing Kaiser’s words back at him by calling him a “clown” has gotten some people to think that Kaiser’s awakening is imminent. After all, a similar thing had happened to Barou before when Isagi called him “donkey.”

But Kaiser is not Barou. Both may be arrogant, but one of them didn’t grow up under domestic violence. And as I’ve said before, internal development comes first. Barou’s internal problems, compared to Kaiser’s, are much easier to resolve.

And unlike Barou’s, Kaiser’s problems are not confined within soccer. They seep into his every being and in all aspects of his life, as we can see in how he treats himself and others off the field.

To begin, let’s talk about what Kaiser thinks of himself:

Alternatively, Hoshi’s translation of Kaiser’s monologue goes like this:

These guys are “humans.” Different from me, they were born wanted “humans.”

Having been abandoned by his mother and growing up abused by his father, Kaiser’s sense of worth is so low that he thinks he was born without it—which is wrong. Everybody is born deserving to live.

But Kaiser thinks otherwise. He sees himself as not even human because nobody wanted him alive. Still, he has this strong desire to live—a desire that had first made itself known to him at this moment:

Right before this, he had looked so dead inside:

He didn’t flinch when the cops came to arrest him. He didn’t try to fight for the escape money he had stashed away. He was so passive and tired and helpless that he might as well be truly dead.

But at that moment his father was about to destroy his soccer ball? A fire lit up inside him. A fire so bright and strong that he got to beat seven cops while handcuffed.

That fire was the love he had for soccer. All his life he’d been in a passive position, but when he fought for what he love, the reins of his life got transferred into his hands.

And in that moment, Michael Kaiser, for once, was truly alive.

Now, he’s living his life in constant search of that fire—or “proof of his existence,” as he puts it.

However, Kaiser has misunderstood what that fire is. After all, how can he recognize love when he’s never been loved?

Only pain and violence are familiar. Thus, it is honestly no surprise when he misattributes “proof of existence” to “inflicting malice on others, living on inside them as a scar.”

For Kaiser to grow, he has to redefine “proof of existence.” How can his own existence depend on the number of people he defeats? That’s unhealthy. And as with Rin’s problem, it’s just seeking answers outside of himself.

But for Kaiser to even begin redefining it, he must first learn to recognize love for what it is.

Love was the fire that was lit inside him. He must go back to it. (Like how Bachira awakened by going back to how he used to play as a child.)

Love is also the main thing that sets Isagi apart from him—the former having been raised by loving parents and having companions sincere to him—so it’s crucial that he learns this if he wants to defeat Isagi.

How can he do this? With the way he was raised, I don’t think Kaiser can learn love on his own. He has to learn it from others. But before that, he must see himself as “human.” While he still views himself as “non-human,” Kaiser won’t be able to connect deeply with “humans” and welcome any love from them.

And this is the crux of his problem...

Kaiser has made attempts to be more “human,” but...

... he’s going about it so horribly wrong 😭😭😭

@galaxynajma also sent this question:

What do you think is the new reason for why kaiser does this every morning: His morning routine consists of: standing before the mirror naked, gazing at himself while having a conversation (to himself), getting into the mindset that nothing is impossible, and then smiling while thinking ‘this is me’. (Trivia from Blue Lock wiki)

“This is me” is Kaiser reaffirming to himself that he is becoming more “human” when he sets out to achieve the “impossible.”

How to be Human 101

Okay, fuck, to be completely honest, I have no idea! I didn’t expect to get this psychological while I was writing 🫠

I had… written myself into a corner. But anyways, I’m gonna try seeing this through...

So, I’m no psychologist, but… I relate on a deeply personal level with Kaiser’s “human vs non-human.” But in my case, I had used the words “normal vs not normal.”

(This is gonna get a little bit personal, but bear with me!)

This distinction was something I strongly felt during my peak depression years. I felt like nobody truly understood me because they hadn’t been through what I had been through. Whatever the doctors said just went from one ear to another because I couldn’t trust them. In my head, had categorized them as one of the “normal” people—their lives were so put-together and they were so in control and on top of things! Not like me, who was drowning.

I also slowly distanced myself from friends because they, too, were the “normal” ones.

One friend, however, stuck around. She didn’t mind me going missing for months without a word. And whenever I showed up again from who knows where, she would always excitedly welcome me back as if I never even left. And this was the friend who I thought to be always better than me in every way because she was prettier, smarter, and had a better financial status. So I never really expected her to get me.

But oh, she did. I found out that she wasn’t “normal,” too. She too had her own problems, and we got to share our sorrow with each other...

So, I guess what I’m trying to say here is that...

It’s not really a matter of erasing the distinction between “human” and “non-human.” It’s enough, for now, that Kaiser finds another “non-human” like him, and with whom he will slowly start to feel “human”—worthy of living and being loved.

I know Kaneshiro isn’t fond of therapy talk, but for Kaiser, I think it’s a must that he gets to open up to someone. He doesn’t have to share the full story. He just has to be sincere about it.

And who is the closest “non-human” that we have around Kaiser who’s also unwanted by his family?

Ness.

This doesn’t even have to be about shipping. And I know their relationship is looking pretty grim right now because of how Kaiser has been treating Ness since the beginning, but...

...I still believe that this, at least, was real.

Together, they can learn what it is to be “human.”

In summary, for Kaiser to awaken, he must first resolve his internal problems. To do this, he must...

Find a fellow “non-human.”

See himself as “human.”

Recognize love for what it is.

Redefine his “proof of existence”

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, *bows

---

Okay, so I don’t normally do this at the end of my posts, but I just recently launched my Alpha Reading Service. If you liked my analysis above and would like me to review your story the same way, do check it out!

Or, if you don’t need any alpha reading, consider tipping me on Ko-fi instead. Thank you!

[traintrainingmontage]

Skarloey Appreciation Essay: Interpersonal Intelligence

I know that I still have several ficlet ideas to write, but instead, have an analysis. This one's about Skarloey, mostly because he's my absolute favorite, but also because there's a lot to say about him. This is primarily based off of the Railway Series and Model Series seasons 1-5, since they're what I'm most familiar with (although it's been a while since watching the show, so please pardon me if I miss anything from that perspective).

For this analysis, I want to briefly mention how the various sagely characters excel in different types of intelligence. Some know a lot about the world and are happy to share their knowledge (Edward), while others are highly experienced and have that experience to fall back on when trying to guide and help others (Toby). However, out of all of them, I would argue that it's Skarloey who has the best interpersonal intelligence, in that he's great at creating healthy relationships between himself and others, and by extension, maintaining a measure of relative peace on his railway.

(There's also an Edward Appreciation Essay for you all to enjoy!)

Interpersonal intelligence is defined as "the ability to understand and interact effectively with others. It involves effective verbal and nonverbal communication, the ability to note distinctions among others, sensitivity to the moods and temperaments of others, and the ability to entertain multiple perspectives" (University of Tennessee).

To start, I'd like to give some examples of how Skarloey is good at this. Skarloey is a "do no harm, but take no shit" kind of character. When done well, this kind of character tends to be highly compelling. (In fact, Toby could also be classified in this way, albeit differently flavored.) Some Skarloey-specific examples include:

-Skarloey scolding the coaches after they sabotage Sir Handel (Old Faithful). Skarloey essentially scolds them for endangering the passengers, and when they try to blame Sir Handel, Skarloey's not having it. What's particularly notable is that he doesn't take sides here; he doesn't validate the coaches' feelings nor does he defend Sir Handel. Instead, he focuses on their professionalism, and the coaches really don't have anything to say in their defence.

-Building on the previous point, this whole event, especially with Skarloey pushing himself on the passengers' behalf, resonates with Sir Handel. It ends with Sir Handel thinking that "Skarloey is the best engine in the world," which is high praise coming from an engine that referred to Skarloey as "rubbish" in his debut (Sir Handel). It's almost a shame that Skarloey left for six years to be mended, as if he'd stayed, a number of Sir Handel's more overbearing qualities might have been ironed out sooner.

-Skarloey's own character growth is also on full display in terms of the way he treats others. The worst comeback he actually has in the RWS, toward anybody, is when he says to Sir Handel that all respectable engines want to work, and then immediately follows that up with advice for Peter Sam (Peter Sam and the Refreshment Lady). Every other time another engine says something rude or ridiculous, Skarloey says nothing and winks at some other engine, or keeps it to himself ("Rusty told Duncan about the bad bit of line, and warned him to be careful. 'Huh!' he grunted, 'I know my way about, thank you! I don't need smelly Diesels to tell me what to do.' Rusty looked hurt. 'Never mind,' said Skarloey, 'you've done your best.' He said no more, but he thought a great deal.") (Rock n' Roll). He's come a long way from the hot-tempered engine who threw petty insults at Rheneas (Stick-in-the-Mud).

-Skarloey delivers lessons in ways that aren't just "you shouldn't do this because I said so." This way of giving advice to headstrong engines often gets ignored, as seen when other sagely engines try it. Instead, he takes a more cunning approach, as seen by his tactic of goading Sir Handel into facing off against George (Steam-roller). There are other engines who are cunning, certainly (just look at Donald and Douglas, or some key Thomas moments), but they don't really try to pit other engines against each other. The only other one who does in a notable way is Diesel, and he's not really protagonist material for most of the series.

In this case, the other engines (let's be real, it's Peter Sam and Duncan) are fed up with Sir Handel's boasting, so they tease him. However, he just shrugs them off. By contrast, Skarloey recognizes that trying to be straightforward won't work, so he decides to appeal to Sir Handel's pride in the hopes that he and George might teach each other a lesson. It's a strategy that ends up working exceedingly well, and also doesn't undermine his standing with Sir Handel himself. Honestly, Skarloey can be a little bit devious and that's such a fun character trait (it shows up again when Skarloey just doesn't tell the others that Culdee's Godred story is made up (Bad Look-out), choosing to let them stew and perhaps be a little more mindful of their behavior, and those moments are some of my favorites).

-Skarloey earnestly compliments others when they do well. He's incredibly grateful to Rusty for fixing the track, and tells him so. He speaks earnestly about Rheneas, and compliments Culdee upon hearing about his railway. Not a lot of other characters do this unless under duress or when they feel bad for taking things too far! In fact, tying into this point is that Skarloey doesn't kick others when they're down (see above), and stops the other engines' teasing when it gets out of hand (Peter Sam and the Prickly Problem).

There are certainly other examples of Skarloey's excellent character (one of my favorite character traits of his is how he owns up to his mistakes and even talks about them as proof of how he's grown instead of trying to hide shameful moments from his past, making him more relatable), but I'll instead pivot to why he's my go-to for a shining star of interpersonal intelligence by comparing him to some of the fandom's other favorite sages.

-Edward is probably the most wholesome character in the whole series. He's kind, he's giving, he doesn't complain, and you just want the best for him. However, he's also been worn down by life to an extent. His coworkers are often rude to him for no reason, even while they begrudgingly respect him, and unlike Skarloey, who is undoubtedly the moodmaker on his railway, Edward simply isn't; Gordon is. While I feel bad that Edward is treated this way, I also can't help but wish that Edward would have stood up for himself and others more, particularly in the early days when the railway's culture was still being figured out, because everyone on the NWR always has something to prove. It's super fulfilling when Edward proves his worth and shows that not only is he still useful, but that he has an unmatched will. However, while letting his actions speak for themselves is great, all he's really done is prove that he too can still run with the young'uns. He's earned their respect in terms of his abilities, but not their respect for his authority as an experienced engine with good advice to give, or their respect as an equal, really. He's a coworker who's shown that he can handle his work, but his opinion doesn't hold as much weight as theirs.

Perhaps part of this is that Gordon is a physically larger engine with an ego to match (after all, size DOES matter in the inherent engine pecking order, and the Skarloey Railway engines are all the same size so that's much less of an issue). Perhaps it's that Edward simply isn't confrontational, and would rather just let a lot of this slide. Perhaps another part of it is that the NWR just has so many more engines now and without that groundwork, it's very unlikely that the railway's culture can be changed at this point without a lot of effort from multiple engines. However, everybody constantly picking at each other's old wounds and feeling defensive all the time does not lend itself to a kind railway. Edward just doesn't stop that nonsense in its tracks the way Skarloey does, and he doesn't really come to the defense of some of the smaller engines. He moreso manages the fallout and is a counselor for the others, reactive but not necessarily proactive. Edward is a kind, nice character, and I absolutely adore that about him, but he often comes across as just rolling with the punches or being a shoulder to cry on for the others instead of taking a proactive role in setting the other engines straight. (To be fair, what he needed most was James or Henry having a character arc that would let them get out of the shadows of their inferiority to Gordon or their own selves/circumstances and back Edward up more often so that people actually heeded and respected his advice, but that's hardly Edward's fault.)

-Toby, on the other hand, takes no shit from anybody and will bite you if you give him grief. That's also a great character trait, but it has the side-effect of making him difficult to get along with. He's filled with great advice, but the other, haughtier engines don't want to listen so Toby doesn't want to give it; he's happy to watch them fail abysmally and come crawling back. I absolutely love Toby as a character, but these kinds of people are rather difficult to get along with in real life. I find that Toby and Duck are particularly similar in this regard; they don't take shit from the other engines, but come off as more prickly for it. Everyone except their closest friends are coworkers at best, and so they also don't necessarily improve the vibes of the railway as a whole. Toby and Edward are two ends of the spectrum, two extremes in this regard.

Thus, to me at least, it's Skarloey who wins out in terms of being the most interpersonally intelligent sage character, who makes his railway a good place to be for everybody on it. He uses a couple of different strategies to help other engines see sense, whether it's being straightforward with them, using a story as an example, or cajoling them a little bit. He scolds others when necessary, but doesn't use their shame as ammunition and doesn't tear them down. People may not like the story "Pop" Special because it makes Duncan seem too nice, but I like it in the sense that it shows how decades of being around people who are good to you and treat you well can lead to an insular, angry person becoming kinder and more thoughtful. Who made that the culture on the railway and enforced it? Skarloey.

Like I said at the start, this analysis is limited to the Railway Series and Model Series seasons 1-5, so I'd love to hear others' opinions on what I've put forth here. I hope you enjoyed; ficlets to come soon(-ish)!

[danteinthedevildom]

A Royal Pajama Party “Analysis” - Part 6 (of 7)

We’re almost at the end (hooray - these posts have absolutely killed me to finish), so time to go onto the “platonic” route.

Unfortunately the Devilgram’s ending isn’t 100% perfect if you want a fully platonic route. I may be wrong here - it’s been a while since I actually read the Devilgram at this point, so my memories are a little hazy - but I believe the only way to really end it prior to the screenshots I’m about to show you involve responses that are a little more dismissive (from what I can remember, it essentially requires turning down everything, even the content that could be read as purely platonic). Which means, unfortunately, your options are generally “somewhere between romantic and platonic” and “no interest at all”. 

That said, this route is much easier to read as platonic, and I think is meant to cover ground for players who fall into one of two categories:

- Have no interest in Diavolo romantically

- Don’t want to end on a more suggestive note (since the kiss route leads to implied NSFW)

So you can read romance into it as much as you can ignore it. I like being able to focus on both sides, however, since sometimes you want the Devilgrams to explore more of the friendship between yourself and the brothers rather than an inherent romance - ergo, “platonic” route. 

That’s a much longer intro than usual, so I’ll cut it off there. As usual, this post covers content locked behind Story Keys, so here’s your cursory spoiler warning!

As I mentioned last post, you’re given an option to end the Devilgram in one of two ways: with a kiss (leading you down the more romantic route), or with a hug (by claiming you don’t want any funny business, to which he admits he just wants to hold you). We’re following the hug route.

I can likely guaratee you, after everything we’ve seen so far, Diavolo’s never had the chance to hold someone at night. No-one’s stayed long enough for him to spend time doing “nothing at all” with them, so it’s immediately clear that physical affection likely isn’t something he’s afforded often, let alone for the duration of a night - particularly considering the concept of a sleepover is new to him (as we saw in the first two posts) and just how generally awed he is by your continued presence and happiness being there. 

In other words, the changes of anyone having let him close enough to hold them before this point for this long are extremely slim. 

Which means, in turn, he’s almost definitely never been held. 

(There is, after all, a difference between holding someone who’s just putting up with it and actually being hugged back). 

The only person who might have done would be his father, when he was younger; I’m not wholly sure how close Diavolo is with the Demon King, but considering how overprotective he was, I’d assume he’d have given a little baby Diavolo at least a reasonable amount of hugs. Whether he did or not, however, that’s really it. That’s Diavolo’s list of “people who have held him for an extended period of time”. 

Even more likely, that’s his complete list of “people who have felt comfortable, happy, and content enough around him to let him fall asleep with them”. 

We already know that for a majority of his lifetime, it was just him, his father, and Barbatos - and before that, just him and his father. There really aren’t a lot of people he can put on that list, especially considering his status (and age) when the Demon King went to sleep. When the last of his restrictions were finally released.  

No wonder he’s so desperate for affection. No wonder he’s so horrifically touch- and love-starved. His entire life, he’s had practically no-one. Moreover, his only dedicated friends are:

- His butler (who tends to his duties with utmost professionalism, and with whom it wouldn’t be appropriate to form the sort of friendship and attachment he wants)

- Lucifer (who for centuries has been bitter over the oath, and takes his duties seriously out of pride and gratitude/servitude rather than affection - and has, in several situations, been genuinely put out/underwhelmed by Diavolo’s attempts to deepen their friendship)

- Queen Rose (who we’ve seen relegated to all of one visit per year, with an unknown connection and attachment to Diavolo, and who clearly isn’t important enough to have been given much of a story beyond the one event)

Demons he has no deep connection with, and is granted little to no physical affection from. 

Even the brothers have each other. Even at their very worst - with the issues between Satan and Lucifer, and the treatment they give Mammon - we’ve seen several images of them being physically affectionate. And that really does range from slumping over each other in sleep, to being used as weights for Beel’s training, to diving in close for group selfies. 

It doesn’t seem like much - and honestly, I do enjoy the headcanon that maybe as a species they just don’t tend to be as touchy-feely as humans - but it’s significantly more than we see (and hear) Diavolo get. It’s still physical contact that’s comfortable and affectionate; a physical show of care.

Diavolo has even said in Chats before (specifically in the one shared between you, him, and Barbatos) that he wants to stay at the House of Lamentation because they’re noisy and active. Because he’s used to silence and isolation and he wants to experience a place full of sound and activity and interconnecting relationships. Because he wants to be involved in something he doesn’t have. 

What you’ve afforded Diavolo in this moment is something so rare for him, it’s either happened very little in his life or never at all. 

This normal show of affection - something we can all get simply by turning to a friend, or a partner, or a family member; something we use as greetings and as comfort and often without a thought - is completely outside his typical experience. 

So, it’s bliss; by literal definition, “a state of perfect happiness, oblivious to everything else”. It’s not just warm, or happy, or perfect - it’s a feeling so outside of what he knows, it transcends all positive emotion. 

Your affection narrows down his focus away from the Devildom - from his worries, from his fears, from his unhappiness and his insecurities and his loneliness - and centres it entirely on you.

There’s a reason he wants to spend more time with you. A reason you’re his greatest person; a reason this night is so special to him. 

You give him everything he’s never had, but always wanted - and you do it as easily and thoughtlessly as drawing breath. 

For someone who’s struggled just to keep his desired friends by his side, that likely means the world to him. 

+

As his monologue continues on, we reach a sort of... wavering point.

This is the part that makes it a little blurry between the lines of romance and platonic feeling. You can clearly see how this dialogue is meant to be vague enough to appeal to both sides; by only lightly mentioning that he’s “feeling” something, you can read it as either romantic feeling or platonic feeling, albeit the second line tips it, initially, in favour of a romantic reading. 

However, I think this scene can still be fairly platonic when you consider that you are the only person to have ever made him feel this happy. 

Diavolo is a demon. He’s a royal demon. He’s the stand-in leader of an entire Realm, with hundreds of thousands of subjects under his command. He’s been alive for a relatively unknown but doubtlessly extensive amount of time. His concerns and worries far exceed that of anything a single human on Earth could fret over - because he’s not just fretting over a kingdom, or a nationality, but an entire race of beings that he holds direct responsibility for. 

A single human life, in contrast to that, is likely nothing more than a split-second blip on a radar. There and gone before he could even have seen it.  

Whatever he expected from the Exchange Programme, the importance of a single human likely wasn’t something he had in mind. Your importance as a whole for the future he wanted, yes; for what you represented, and what you could achieve, almost definitely. But for you, as a person? You, for all the good and the bad, the experiences and memories, the thoughts and feelings, that make you who you are?

In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t matter. That you are human and alive and perform well in the Programme to ensure peace between the Realms does.  

Because you will fade away in less than a second. Because you will be gone before long, and your existence to him is like fruit fly to us. Short. Uneventful. Insignificant. 

His infatuation with humanity doesn’t necessarily mean an infatuation with individual humans. You can be enamoured with rabbits and set up a sanctuary for them, but that doesn’t mean you’ll see the inherent nature and personal significance of any single one. 

He likely never would have thought that one of the Exchange Students would become this important to him. 

He likely never would have thought that a human, plain and simple as you are, would open up this many feelings, experiences, possibilities. 

(He likely never would have thought that you could change his life as drastically as you have.)

Why would he? After all, you’re just human. Your life is so fragile, it could end with the barest twitch of his finger. How could something so frail possibly have such an impact on him - do things that no demon has ever been able to do?

And yet, you’ve done so much. In a few years at most, you’ve changed his life in ways he’s always struggled with. You’ve given him all the things he wanted; all the things he’s missed. 

You. A human. A tiny, fragile, impossible little human. You’ve done things greater beings have been incapable of. Things even he - with all his power and wisdom and life experience - couldn’t do.

How could he have possibly expected that?

(He might have hoped for it. Hoped that something good would come from the Exchange Programme; hoped that he’d be able to experience those things he’d never been able to with someone new and fresh in his life. But he still can’t have imagined that it would happen so soon, so easily, so naturally. That it would have been entirely because of you.)

As a slight aside, though a very related one, I’m deeply interested by Diavolo’s second line: “Oh, but your humanity only makes you even more captivating”

Here’s an English Lit tip for all of you: if a character says “oh” like this, the utterance is almost always used to emphasise an already-intense emotion. It’s the little oh you see in fanfic; that single sound to release everything a person feels in one breath. It’s used a lot in epics, and especially in 19th centuary texts, when the narrator is lamenting or expressing woe. 

Here, it sounds wistful. Longing. Amazed. Dreamy. Awed. Reverent. This isn’t something he’s saying intentionally. 

These utterances are almost always kept to narration; to the depths of a character’s thoughts, where they can express themself the most in its truest form. They’re used to incite a reader’s emotion, their empathy, and to highlight the sheer emotive weight of a scene. It’s very rarely verbal, unless they’re utterly overcome with feeling. 

The fact that Diavolo’s saying it out loud, therefore, means it’s not intentional. These are his deepest thoughts said aloud, so intense and true it’s impossible for him to keep it locked inside his mind. 

That’s simple fact. He’s purely, utterly enraptured by you. 

The analysis on that sentence could end there. The admittance, unwittingly, that you are captivating as an example of how significant you are to him. However... 

While it does highlight that he already finds you awing, it also notes that it’s your humanity that makes you even more enchanting. Not just the fact that you’re you, or that you’re human and he finds the depth of his feeling surprising - but that the very notion of your humanity enthralls him. 

We’ve already seen his interest in humanity span decades before your arrival, if not centuries. We therefore know that the fragility of your life and the existence of your humanity means something to him in a way it doesn’t - or wouldn’t - to other demons. 

He’s fascinated by the concept of humans, and you are human. Naturally, he’s going to be awed that a human is important to him by default; simultaneously, he’s thrilled by the fact that you’re representative of the World he adores.

+

Moving on from that focus, the next scene. It’s the conclusion of this route, and thus the final shot in the Devilgram if you decide to end it this way. 

This, is mostly just sweet. I couldn’t avoid adding this in. 

It’s a callback to the start of this post - the fact that Diavolo has likely never been able to hold someone for the night, and that he’s thoroughly excited for the chance to do so with you. 

Diavolo wants to cherish holding you. He wants to savour having you in his arms as you go to rest. 

He knows it’s something that won’t happen often, if it ever happens again. So he wants to make the most of it. He wants to ingrain it in his mind, lock it up tight with the memories he holds closest to his heart. 

There’s a little more I have to say about the concept of sleep and especially willingness and comfort sleeping around another person, but there’s a better way to present that in another screenshot - one we’ll see in the next post. It deserves more space than I have left here, so I’ll relegate that to a few screenshots I wasn’t able to fit in elsewhere. 

It’s a bit of a topic change, but a good one. Do you recall the post wherein Diavolo reads his favourite poem to you? In that post, I went over the fact that he reveals you to be - in no uncertain terms - his greatest person. 

I also noted in the post that he doesn’t say this by default. You have to choose for him to say that by picking the option along the lines of, “Who’s your greatest person?”. The devs kindly allow you to decide just how close to Diavolo you want to be, and whether or not he’s comfortable admitting in such open terms how important you are to him. 

In the screenshots below, then, I’ve shown the other route; the one wherein you asked if Barbatos was his greatest person. 

Diavolo’s response?

It’s much more vague. He doesn’t even vaguely state that his greatest person is you. In fact, it sounds very much like he still doesn’t know who his greatest person is. 

At least until you consider that final line.

“Should that day come, you’ll be the first to know”. 

This comment speaks volumes. In a very subtle way, it’s Diavolo showing you that he trusts you most; that, out of everyone he knows, he’d go to you first to tell you who his most important person is. 

This could be because he believes you’d be excited to know. Maybe he thinks you’d be happy for him, and you’d celebrate the fact that he’s found his greatest person. Maybe it’s simply him acknowledging that he’s told you about the concept of a greatest person, and thus, you’d be the only one with the knowledge to care whether or not he’s found someone who fits that bill. 

It might even be him saying you’re just the first person on his mind beyond his greatest person. That when he has important news, the first thing he wants to do is tell you. 

But it’s also, I think, a hint. 

You could read it as dismissive; “I’ve not yet found someone better than Barbatos, but when I do, I’ll tell you.” It’s certainly one interpretation of the line, and what the above covers. Another, however, would be, “I’m not ready yet to confirm my feelings/I’ve lost my confidence since you mistakenly assumed it to be someone it’s not. When I’m ready, I’ll tell you - and you’ll know I meant you.”

It’s a perfectly valid reading to believe he already suspects his greatest person is you. That he’s implying you’ll know who his greatest person is before anyone else because he’ll be saying to you, directly, it’s you. 

It’s a sweet moment, either way. Whether he’s being coy about who his greatest person is or he genuinely doesn’t know yet, the fact remins that you’re important enough to him - that he believes you care enough about him and his happiness to want to know - that he’ll tell you before anyone else. 

You’re his priority, regardless.  

Another fact, one you might have thought I’d cover first, is the surprise of his prior comment: “the greatest person in my life would overshadow even him”. 

Barbatos isn’t Diavolo’s greatest person. From the previous scene - that alternate timeline where he’s more obvious about who his greatest person is - it’s clear that Barbatos doesn’t fill a lot of the requirements. He supports Diavolo, yes; he’s by his side, always, and he can’t leave - but he’s not there for him. Not the same way you are. 

Emotionally, mentally, physically, Barbatos doesn’t click with Diavolo the way he needs his greatest person to. Barbatos doesn’t spend time with him happily and freely; doesn’t let him get close and affectionate. Diavolo can’t be his true self around Barbatos and feel wholly, perfectly accepted. The butler-master divide makes that an impossibility, as does the origin of their friendship. 

Barbatos is still important to him, of course; there’s no denying that. After all, the greatest person in his life at the moment is Barbatos. That’s who Diavolo is using to gauge his greatest person against; whether or not they mean more to him than Barbatos, and he connects with them better than with his closest companion.

Diavolo’s just not fooling himself into thinking Barbatos is that person.

There is, however, something... a little more amazing to think about, knowing Diavolo’s requirements for his greatest person. 

They have to be better than Barbatos.   

Barbatos, the demon who helped raise him in the absence of his mother. 

Barbatos, the demon who’s been by his side since youth, patiently feeding him stories of the Realms he never got to see. 

Barbatos, the only demon who ever stayed, who wasn’t directly related to him.

Barbatos, the demon Diavolo knows best, the demon he’s known the longest. 

And in the timeline he confirms, openly, overtly, that you’re his greatest person, 

You exceed that. 

+++

And thus concludes part 6. I hope this has been enjoyable to read, because in parts, it was not enjoyable to write- I got a bit too picky and ended up editing this twice to add in more because I didn’t like how I’d worded it before, so guess how much time that’s eaten up OTL 

Still, with this post done, we’ve only got one more! Finally. It’s the concluding part, so it’s mostly going to be bitty details that didn’t perfectly fit elsewhere, as well as a better focus on another facet of the reading route - because, yes, not only do you get to decide whether or not you eat fruit or read, you also get to decide whether Diavolo reads to you or you read to him.

I really wasn’t joking when I said this Devilgram was spoilt for choice, before. I’m absolutely not used to these stories containing anything more than a “good reaction”/”bad reaction” response, or maybe a “platonic route”/”romantic route” divide. This Devilgram, though - damn. You end up replaying it like ten times just to see everything. And it’s all voice acted, too - it’s kind of amazing. 

So, if you’d like, please continue on to part 7! And thank you so much for making it through all this wordy babbling. 

[mercadosadaf]

The Value of Swimming In Uncertain Times

Hi Swimmers

Firstly, apologies for the radio silence over the last few weeks on the blog - we've had the whole Swim Smooth team busily engaged in a complete revamp of the entire www.swimsmooth.com website and coaching interface, and whilst we are not quite done, we are getting very close and hope to resume the blog and our usual community engagement very soon. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Today, Head Coach Paul Newsome, has prepared a reflective piece for you on the value of swimming and what it means to us all, especially in these uncertain times. We hope it allows you to pause over a cup of tea or coffee and think a little bit about your own swimming and how your relationship with the water might have changed somewhat in the last 12 months.

Paul features three brief stories of some inspiring swimmers he has had the pleasure to work with and how their swimming journeys have been significantly altered by the coronavirus, mostly for the better. Paul summarises with some of his own take-home points on how this period has changed his own thinking on swimming somewhat and how his ordinarily extrinsic competitive goalposts have shifted to a place of intrinsic challenge and finding a new calm with that. So please, relax, put your feet up and let’s get a little zen for a moment.

The Value of Swimming in Uncertain Times

I was recently invited as a guest on the new An Open Water Swimmer's Podcast with host Will Ellis (release date: 28th February here) to discuss my love and passion for swimming - an easy topic for me! Will is a great host and someone I'd taken for a Swim Smooth analysis session as part of a group over a decade ago in the UK. Given my area of technical interest in swimming, many podcasts that we've done with other hosts have always centered on these elements, but Will took a very different slant, one which focused very much on the "why" of swimming.

Why do I swim? Why do I enjoy the water? Why swimming and not another sport? I came away with a headful of thoughts that I'd either never given due consideration to before, or maybe some that crystallized a growing appreciation I've started to foster of late?

Given the current state of play with COVID-19 restrictions on our sport over the last 12 months, I feel my own relationship with water has not necessarily changed per se but it's definitely evolved. Perhaps though, it's me who's changed and it's this period of intrinsic reflection that has heightened the "why" behind what we all love to do? For many of you, could the absence of being able to do the thing you love or the thing that perhaps challenges you the most (as a triathlete maybe?) be the necessary catalyst to kick your swimming to new heights of appreciation (however you measure that) when we do all come through this? I'm certainly seeing that in myself and my squad of very lucky swimmers over here in Perth, Australia.

Lady Luck

Over the last 12 months, Perth has been heralded as one of the best places on the planet with respect to the relatively few restrictions and impact of the coronavirus - many of us scarcely realizing how lucky we are. Next week will see 3,500 people start one of the largest open water swims on the planet, the Rottnest Channel Swim, in which I will be competing with a good friend over the 20km distance. We have, however, just come out of a heavily publicized (albeit very short) 5-day lockdown here in Perth which restricted access to the pools and saw us only being able to swim solo in the open water or with one other family member. This incident garnered international press on account of the very rapid and focused response to a single case in the community transferred between a quarantined hotel guest and a security guard. The whole state came to a grinding halt for just one case - everything ceased and panic was high. Despite extensive testing (myself included) of those who may have been in the vicinity of this one person, fortunately, no other community transmission has occurred. Consequently, life is returning to some form of normality again. 

One of the hardest things I've personally struggled with over the last 12 months though is being able to fully appreciate and empathize with just how brutal this period must have been - and continues to be - for many of you from the perspective of being able to simply enjoy the pleasures of a nice swim. Lady Luck has shone down on me, and for why, I do not know? I feel a toiling mixed sense of guilt, of pure luck, and of umbrage at myself for the seemingly petty feeling of missing the ability to travel overseas and share my love of swimming with you all, wherever you might be. I miss it so much and yet feel I have no right to do so given where I have the good fortune to be right now. 

I had a frank conversation before Christmas with my Mum about this. Many of you know Linda as "Mother Smooth" and if you've ever ordered anything from us, she'd have sent it to you. True to the adage that "Mum always knows best", I finally managed to pluck up the courage and expand on how excited I was to be taking my wife and two kids camping over the Christmas holidays to a beautiful town called Albany in the South West which we'd all visited together as a family a few years earlier. Mother Smooth couldn't understand why I'd not told her sooner, to which I responded that I didn't want to make her feel bad. "Feel bad?" she quizzed, "I am at my happiest when I know you are happy". Profound stuff - good old Mum!

The Changing Tide

So, what has this all really got to do with swimming? If you are in the northern hemisphere, chances are you are sick to the back teeth of hearing about the coronavirus and maybe even more so the thought that other pockets of the world are experiencing far fewer restrictions than yourself currently. Last week's swift lockdown gave me a rapid reminder though just how uncertain these times can be - the tide can change on a dime so easily. What has been remarkable for me has been watching how those of you who still continue in enforced lockdowns have survived this last 12 months and I'd like to recognize some of the cool - and crazy - things you've been doing, obviously simply for the joy of needing to get your swim in! Perhaps you can tell us more about how you've weathered this storm so far?

Helen Webster, UK

I met Helen in March 2014 at the 220 Triathlon Show in London. As the editor of the 220 Triathlon Magazine, Helen had taken it upon herself to learn to swim freestyle properly for an upcoming triathlon and I was tasked with assisting her with that goal in an Endless Pool and in front of hundreds of people. For someone with very little swimming experience at that point, Helen did amazingly well in front of such a crowd and it’s a testament to her bubbly “can do” spirit that she took on this challenge!

We spent a good hour or so filming her stroke, analyzing it (in front of everyone!), and then getting back into the pool to correct her issues which mainly centred around developing confidence in the water and improving the timing of her stroke, specifically her breathing. Back then, Helen was what we’d have described as a classic Bambino - someone very new to swimming with a relatively high level of anxiety in the water - so to see the following images circulating on Helen’s Facebook page in the last couple of weeks simply blew my mind! Helen’s gone all Bear Grylls on us and now is not happy unless she has to break the ice in her backyard pool just to ensure she gets her swim in! I’m so proud of her as a mate!

Here's Helen on what the last 12 months have meant for her swimming:

"Open-water swimming has been a key part of my training week ever since taking those first steps with Paul all those years ago! Lockdown had made me realise just how important swimming is to me though and in so many ways. Not living near the coast and with managed venues nearby forced to close I've realised how much I rely on swimming for lifting my mood, giving me a pause from a busy world and fully immersing myself in nature. I'm a pool swimmer too and with centres all closed I'm even missing the tang of chlorine and having to do kick drills!!

It sounds melodramatic but a tearful moment on the phone with a friend prompted her to gift me a garden pool and swimming tethered has given me a route back to the water (thanks to Swim Smooth Coach Jason Tait for the tethered swim sets!). It's also led me to a new swim community who are making the most of what they have and finding humour in sitting in ice baths and under hosepipes, or sharing tips for how to stop your garden pool freezing!

I can't wait to have my 'proper' swimming back and believe me, will never take it for granted again. I'm planning a swim challenge for September and keeping fingers crossed it goes ahead!"

Sue Allingham, Denmark

Sue attended one of our 3-day Swim Smooth Coach Education Courses in Mallorca, Spain back in May 2019 and was clearly a super-passionate swimmer and coach. We’ve remained in close contact via Messenger since and she frequently sends me crazy pictures of where she’s been swimming, however, nothing could quite prepare me for this one - her frozen Margarita experience (as she calls it)!

When I asked Sue about what the last 12 months have meant for her swimming, she said this:

"A year ago I entered the World Ice Swimming Championships in Bled Slovenia for a laugh. 2 weeks later I broke both my wrists and then Lockdown! By April I was going stir crazy and the day I had my casts removed, I got back into the sea, as the pools were shut. Little did I know that I would continue going in every day since! As my wrists got stronger, I could swim longer but the thought of trying to pull on a wetsuit was hanging over my head. By the time I probably could get one on I no longer felt the need. I continued to swim throughout the year and ended up becoming the Danish age-group champion in 25m & 100m Freestyle - Ice swimming and 5k Openwater. 

A year on from Covid and we are still in the sea and simply just grabbing any opportunity to jump in the water, to try new beaches or temperatures. As you can see from the picture, we’ve started making our own frozen Margaritas! 

What will I do when the pools open again? Dive in and just keep swimming! Never thought I’d miss the black line so much. Swimming as always is such a social thing & drinking coffee with friends after each swim has really made Lockdown actually enjoyable. Already looking at SwimRuns in Sweden, hopefully as it’s close by we may be allowed to travel. Otherwise lots of pre-paid events carried over from last year. I live in hope. 

One thing is for sure, the sea is always open!"

Mark Turner, Switzerland

Mark also attended one of our other 3-day Swim Smooth Coach Education Courses in Mallorca, Spain (the week after Sue) and had just a few months prior completed the Rottnest Channel Swim here in Perth. Mark set up the world’s most prestigious multi-day cycling event for amateurs, the Haute Route, which is a brutally tough challenge in a breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Mark was also the man behind Ellen MacArthur’s sailing career (who set the world record in 2005 for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe), the Offshore Challenges/OC Sport business, and the Extreme Sailing Series, and is widely seen as a visionary in the sport of sailing. And, if all that wasn't enough, Mark led the Volvo Ocean Race series as CEO in 2016/17. Needless to say, Mark is not someone to do things by half and is always up for a (big) challenge! 

Mark now lives in Switzerland on the banks of Lake Geneva and is fastidious about his swimming, especially a weekly completion of the infamous 10 x 400m Red Mist Endurance session! Like with many parts of the world, Mark has had unreliable access to his local pool over the last 12 months and so has turned to the great outdoors instead…even during the middle of winter! Hooking up regularly with like-minded souls in these freezing temperatures has been what has kept Mark going and will stand him in good stead when the world finally comes back to some sense of normality.

It Is What It Is

I think one of the most obvious things with each of these three swimmers - and yourself hopefully too - is that they’ve simply rolled with the punches that 2020 and beyond has brought their way. They’ve got on with it, adapted, pivoted, and thrived in a new environment and in doing so sought out other goals to keep them motivated and in the game. Resilience personified. We always talk so virtuously in training and racing about “control the controllable”, and clearly, none of this is in any of our control right now. Way back in April 2020 when we were still in lockdown and I was personally unable to coach, a very close friend and one of my athletes, Nolan McDonnell told me to “stop trying to save us all - we can look after ourselves!” in response to me frantically trying to work out how to keep everyone fit and engaged when I couldn’t be with them face-to-face. It really struck a chord with me, and whilst it didn’t happen overnight, I did begin to accept the situation. 

Knowing I wouldn’t be able to travel and spread the Swim Smooth word - as has been my life over the last 16 or so years - was a real blow, but ever so gradually I started to move beyond this and to focus on what I could do, not what I couldn’t. For me personally, that’s meant plenty more time at home with the family, and as we are seeing on the pool deck at the moment, plenty of opportunities to be super consistent with our respective training schedules too. The squad here in Perth has never swum so quickly before, ever! Why? Everyone has their groundhog day schedule dialled in and they’re sticking to it because there’s nowhere else to go, and there’s something very centring about that, zen even. 

Fancying a challenge myself - and recognizing the collective benefit of encouraging others to follow suit - I have even got myself back into doing a few triathlons, marathon swims, and even the odd SwimRun event too! Taking on a range of varied challenges was in an effort to not put all our eggs into one basket in case events got canceled or postponed. 

Again, I’m super privileged to be able to do these things right now, and part of that appreciation brings a whole new angle on why we do what we do. For me, it’s all been about my shared experience of training up with one of my best mates Chris to do the Rottnest Channel Swim together as a Duo next week. With last week’s unprecedented lockdown it looked certain to be canceled but you know what, I wasn’t bothered in the slightest! The religiously attended Sunday morning swim with Chris in the river is what it’s all about - not the event itself. Swimming + Best Mate = Win. 

Sure, the race will be a nice finale, but the old adage of “the journey is better than the destination” is what this whole crazy period has really taught me. We egg each other on even in the middle of winter and for me, this has seen a major step away from the profound sense of training for competition’s sake, to training for training’s sake, and for the social camaraderie that this has brought. I wouldn’t change that for the world.

Even if you haven’t had the opportunity (yet) to be quite so free in your activities, that time will come again, hopefully very soon, and in the meantime, just set yourself some little consistency of routine benchmarks to tick off. Get creative like our friends above (just maybe not quite so crazy!). How many swims in the river can you consistently do every Sunday? Can you always ensure you meet up with Bob for your Friday lunchtime jog in the park? Make sure you commit to that group ride on Zwift you booked in for on the Companion app etc. It’s the little things, done often that will keep you going and when the world opens up again, you’ll be ready! 

Thanks for reading. Swim on!

Paul

from Sports http://www.feelforthewater.com/2021/02/the-value-of-swimming-in-uncertain-times.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[alley-cat-sunflower]

…It occurs to me that my doing a complete 180 on Ravus Nox Fleuret, from genuine dislike to sincere sympathy (albeit critical), can legitimately be traced back to hearing his musical themes.

Now, you may know that one of the three things I can talk about forever is video game music, and this is definitely no exception. Today, I intend to read too far into his boss theme, “Ravus Aeterna”, and explain why I consider it one of the best battle themes I’ve ever heard.

Flash back to around 60 hours ago, give or take a few. I’d done some cursory research on Ravus and his backstory some time beforehand and was thus aware that he’s a tragic character, but I’d only met him the one time in-game, and he was kind of an asshole. As mentioned in a previous essay of mine, I both understand the reasoning behind his behavior and cannot entirely forgive him for how he handles himself, and in fact, that much remains true even now. The difference is that in the beginning, my in-universe perspective won out over my meta analysis, and I thought of him primarily as your standard entitled jerk. To be fair, I did think of him as a jerk who didn’t deserve to die (I hadn’t paid too much attention to how that came to pass, so the extent of my initial takeaway was just ‘another casualty’), but in my eyes, he was just another jerk nonetheless.

Except then, on an only somewhat related note, I hit Luna’s death. I knew it was coming, but it still shook me and my fixed opinions. In that moment, it seemed to me that nothing was sacred anymore. Anything could change at any time; why not my interpretation of the characters? After that twist, I temporarily lost the will to keep playing, but I still wanted to keep up my interest and do my writerly research from a safe distance, so I ended up absorbing myself in the soundtrack. And I soon discovered that “Ravus Aeterna”, in addition to being a kickass theme any way you look at it, specifically softened me toward him to such an extent that I started loving him instead of disliking him.

Initially, I didn’t question why that was. I just assumed that a number of factors must have aligned subconsciously, which is still probably true. But it’s always so difficult for me to just let things be. I have to know the context. So I started interrogating the reason why a simple boss theme (which, by some standards, probably isn’t even that great) could possibly be the leading factor in changing my mind about a character to this extent. The conclusion at which I arrived is difficult to articulate, since it’s such a subtle concept, but I have to try.

Now, this is a subjective statement, but I believe boss themes are usually filtered through the protagonists’ view. That is, while they are obviously supposed to fit the boss, and are often considered one of the bosses’ personal themes (often containing the their character leitmotif, if they have one), the music itself is more like… how the protagonists see that boss. If the music is dramatic, it’s because this is a pivotal battle for the protagonists. If it’s intense, it’s because the protagonists feel the pressure. If it’s slow and emotional, it’s because the protagonists are weighed down by sadness or inner turmoil.

Take the rightly renowned “One-Winged Angel”, for instance. It contains elements of “Those Chosen by the Planet” (Sephiroth’s character theme) and similarities to “Who… Are You?” (related to Jenova). There’s no denying it suits [Safer] Sephiroth as a result, and the lyrics definitely refer to his own feelings and motivation, but the emotion seems at a distance from me as a listener. Sephiroth’s wrath comes across well, but my response is more akin to fear and awe and determination, in reaction to his anger, as though I am facing him myself. This naturally aligns me with the protagonists and invests me in their side of the battle. “One-Winged Angel” does pertain to Sephiroth, and fits him well, but it primarily encompasses how the protagonists experience the final battle. It’s the dramatic culmination of a long journey to save the Planet. They know what motivates him—which comes across in the lyrics—but they’re fighting back against it with everything they have. And, by extension, so am I.

Now, “Ravus Aeterna” isn’t half as impressive as “One-Winged Angel” in terms of scale. But it doesn’t have to be, and I’d argue it’s not supposed to be. It serves an entirely different purpose, because it’s not presented from the protagonists’ perspective as usual. It’s from Ravus’s, as it is his bitterness, his resentment, and his anguish that come across most clearly. Therefore, “Ravus Aeterna” is more closely related to Ravus himself than the protagonists’ experience of him, as he is ultimately a minor character in their story.

While the theme is intense and intimidating, like a supercharged version of “The Aggressors” with a similar beat to “Daemons” (reflecting his transformation), its pacing and instrumentation evokes a kind of desperation, more applicable to Ravus himself than to the party. The theme additionally includes both “The Niflheim Empire” and “Song of the Stars” as leitmotifs, the first a direct reference to his former position as High Commander—now meaningless—and the second alluding to his primary motivation throughout the story, which likewise came to nothing: saving Luna. Both are inherently more relevant to his backstory and character than those of the protagonists, but most meaningful of all is the decision to juxtapose the Empire’s theme with that of the circumstances that led to his desertion. This reflects the contradictory nature of his character as a whole, unable to decide where he stands not only due to internal strife, but also to external opposition. Both themes additionally reflect a sense of helplessness, as the Empire was also a conquering force in Ravus’s own land, and he was unable to prevent Luna from sacrificing herself. This is not the theme of a party opposing a threat, but the theme of a man driven to madness by forces beyond his control. He is not serving Ardyn any more willingly than he ever served the Empire, and he is not able to save either himself or Noctis any more than he could save Luna.

Basically, “Ravus Aeterna” made me feel what Ravus must feel, and for that reason, I was able to grasp exactly how tragic his story really is. (Add to that the contrast with the gentler kind of wistfulness in his character theme from Episode Ignis, and Gladio’s observation that “he was a man with hopes and dreams” hits home all the harder, but that’s another story entirely.) That was the moment when my sympathy and understanding started outweighing my firsthand experience of Ravus’s attitude alongside the protagonists. It’s one of the first times, if not the first time, I’ve ever come to identify with a boss through the sheer charge of emotion conveyed in his theme. And, while I’ll be the first to admit that Ravus has more complexes than I can count and is far from blameless in the events of both his story and the party’s, I can earnestly say that he has won me over through the strength of raw feeling that comes across, and convinced me that he did not receive his just deserts.

[blogsureshus]

Language Translation Service

Our ancestors were very good at wandering places and searching for new things. Since man found how to make pictures with color or ink on any surface, he has conveyed himself with unique patterns and pictures, etc. As our ancestors who drew with different things like charcoal on stone or cut in wood. Later when languages were made, we started communicating with short messages printed by hand or by an instrument. But still, there are so many languages now that you can’t count on your fingers. Therefore the invention of the language translation service comes in our rescue. Language Translator is a job for people who are comfortable speaking up in a foreign environment, who can understand people very easily and correctly. Because of the main responsibility of the

Back then they had many sign languages but not many verbal languages which made it easier for them to work and live all around. but now is the time when people do not stop themselves from going out from their native places just because they don’t know foreign languages.

Numerous individuals new to interpretation and limitation are in some cases confounded by the language. This blog entry will assist clear with increasing the perplexity with the frequently tradable terms “interpretation” and “limitation” just as other phrasing related to the interpretation business.

Language Translation Service is also a part of marketing. It can be looked at as an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, delivering and communicating value to customers, and managing customer relationships in ways that also benefit the organization and its shareholders. Marketing is the science of choosing target markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding consumer buying behavior and providing superior customer value.

I will not talk much about marketing as I already have a fully focused article on it if you wish to read it Click Here.

We are talking so much about Language Translation Service you must be wondering…..

What is Language Translation Service?

Interpretation is a type of limitation. It includes the interpretation of names, manuals, preparing recordings, advertisements, and sites into nearby dialects. To spare costs, a few organizations build up their manuals and preparing materials in different dialects, including English, Mandarin, Hindi, French, Spanish and Arabic. Corporate sites must be interpreted, particularly the oftentimes utilized web-based business and help areas. Moving administrators ought to figure out how to impart in the neighborhood language or possibly see a portion of the subtleties of nonverbal correspondence. Senior administration ought to think about the utilization of synchronous interpreters in gatherings with their worldwide accomplices, particularly if some of them are not open to convey in English.

“Language Service Providers” or “LSP’s” have been around for quite a long time. All the more normally in the US, LSP’s are known as Translation Agencies. The term LSP is increasingly regular in Europe yet is presently being heard here in the US all the more frequently.

Types of Language Translation Services:-

Language Service Providers (LSP) are organizations that offer to change degrees of interpretation, elucidation, limitation, language and social training arrangements. LSP’s commonly offer the accompanying administrations:

Interpretation “spoken”-

Language translation is the helping of verbal or communication through signing collaboration, either simultaneously or over and again, between individuals talking in various ‘dialects’. There are a few different ways of translation including back to back and concurrent. Back to back Interpretation – This is the point at which the speaker (for instance an educator, teacher or a court judge) represents a couple of moments and afterward breaks, enabling the translator to interpret the information exchanged into the other language. At the point when the mediator is done translating the speaker proceeds with where he/she left off.

Localization-

Localization is the adjustment of item configuration, bundling and showcasing capacities to suit nearby markets. Item changes might be important to represent social contrasts and neighborhood guidelines. For instance, a café franchiser may need to change its menu for a nation that limits the clearance of particular sorts of meat. Notwithstanding interpretation from English to the neighborhood language on item names, organizations may need to change the substance or the size of their items to agree to nearby guidelines. Advertising efforts may require changes to regard social contrasts. For instance, specific sorts of outfits or open presentations of love may not be proper in certain nations, albeit a business highlighting polar bears skiing down mountain slants with refreshments in their grasp would work anyplace.

Telephonic Translation-

Telephone translation is the communication between individuals through a telephone who don’t communicate in a similar language. The translator encourages the two gatherings to speak with one another.

Simultaneous Translation-

Understanding is the point at which the speaker/moderator doesn’t stop, however, he continues talking at a characteristic speed. Regularly this kind of deciphering happens during gatherings or enormous gatherings. During gatherings, the translators (of different dialects) as a rule are altogether situated in a deciphering stall. The mediator hears what the speaker is stating through a headset and afterward deciphers into an amplifier. The target group of the understanding hears what the translator is stating through their earphones.

It is most basic when your home office needs to prop the discussion up with branch workplaces in different nations. TrueLanguage can combine you with local speakers in whatever target markets you have to reach over the worldwide commercial center. We can deal with interpreters for occasions went to by gatherings of any size or multi-day meetings for many members.

Localization and interpretation administrations ought to appreciate solid interest outside of their borders. Organizations may confront rivalry for qualified interpreters who are capable of different dialects. Agency should begin with a website design that can deal with various languages and character sets from day one.

3 Ways Translation Service can Benefit your Business?

Helps your Business to connect Emotionally- Clients who are sincerely associated with an item are progressively gainful. What’s more, if you need to associate with your clients on a passionate level, you should know their first language.

It helps you to rank on SEO- Website optimization, which is great to work together on the web. Ensuring that your site arrives at the highest point of web search. Powerful correspondence is improved when clients can peruse your site in their language; helpful data is accessible to a more extensive crowd; having a bigger site (another page for every language).

Makes your Business accessible with Transcription- Numerous online advertising efforts incorporate the utilization of online recordings. Sound digital broadcasts ought to have a translation accessible for the hard of hearing. However, it additionally enlarges your group of spectator’s reach, improves brand dependability, and lifts SEO. There are products motivation to remember interpretation for any sound or video content your business produces.

6 Methods to accelerate your Business through Language Translation Service

So your business is doing incredible and you wish to grow it further internationally? Worldwide presentation is conceivable just on the off chance that you prepare it for it. Business correspondence with numerous nations requests skill and accuracy. Regardless of whether you have a place with open or private division, you need proficient language interpretation administrations for reasons multiple. Peruse on.

Better correspondence with clients:

If your business calls for discussing straightforwardly with your clients then you must’ve confronted many individuals who don’t communicate in English. You can showcase your items to a lot more extensive range of a group of spectators if you could address them in their language.

Upgrade brand permeability: An organization’s image potential is tried based on a ton of capacities. Connecting with an ever-increasing number of individuals is one of them. You have to cross the boundary of language to fabricate a picture in the worldwide market and that is conceivable just with proficient interpretation administrations.

Maintain a strategic distance from terrible notoriety:

You will be stunned to gain proficiency with a portion of the significant showcasing slip-offs of enormous undertakings. KFC got their celebrated slogan “Finger-Lickin’ Good” interpreted in China and it signified “We’ll eat your finger off”. Pepsi got its slogan “Wake up with Pepsi” meant “Pepsi can bring progenitors resurrected!” in China. The American Dairy Association’s unique slogan “Got milk?” was mocked in Mexico as the interpretation signified “Are you lactating?” Numerous such comparative cases welcomed a great deal of fire from individuals over the globe. You can avoid the projectile and upkeep your image notoriety by getting your promoting procedures checked or composed by the experts before it’s past the point of no return.

The social insurance industry is tremendously profited:

Healthcare units need to manage plenty of patients originating from different nations. Likewise, there are a ton of specialists over the globe occupied with inquiring about. Language ought to never be a hindrance to medicinal research or a patient’s treatment. Proficient restorative mediators and interpreters play their aces in deciphering the medicinal reports that will help the specialists who are progressively agreeable in contemplating in the language they pick.

More opportunities for work:

many individuals are enthusiastic about learning various dialects. Nothing can be better if they can learn and gain simultaneously. Any industry, little or large, procures interpreters and mediators to not just facilitate their business correspondence with different nations yet in addition to advertising and venture coordination.

Drafting authoritative documents:

Understanding authoritative reports itself is a tough assignment and on the off chance that it’s in an alternate language, at that point it gets even more convoluted. One sneak off and the importance of the sentence changes totally. Proficient interpreters guarantee precise and simple translation of authoritative records adjusted to the expert needs of legal counselors, court stenographers, lawyers, judges, and other legitimate experts.

Why Language Translation Service is important to your Business?

Interpretation is fundamentally critical to any association needing to catch universal markets.

Proficient interpreters with experience and training will help you with speaking with individuals from different nations. They will work in their first language to create writings that will precisely repeat your image’s message and style of the first content, while simultaneously perusing fluidly in the goal language.

With the best possible instruments, interpretation can surrender you a leg against your rivals, help make purchasers progressively OK with your image, and eventually construct solid notoriety in another market, all of which will guarantee long haul achievement.

Is Language Translation Service is for you?

If you are familiar with more than one language and can productively make an interpretation of starting with one language then onto the next, a speaker giving interpretation administrations could be the ideal independent company for you. Here is the thing that you have to know before you choose if this business thought is an ideal choice for you.

The Pros of Starting a Translation Services BusinessA portion of the advantages you may be understanding on the off chance that you start an interpretation administration include:

Startup costs are low.

It’s an extraordinary locally established business, particularly because you can work utilizing the Internet.

Overhead expenses are low, and you can make critical benefits.

You have an extremely wide target advertise, including legitimate, business, restorative, specialized altering, translation and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

There is a developing interest in interpreters in our worldwide network.

You can work solo, or deal with a gathering of interpreters, regardless of whether you are not an interpreter yourself.

The Cons of Starting a Translation Services BusinessA portion of the potential difficulties of beginning an interpretation business include:

You should have total and exhaustive order of whatever dialects you intend to offer interpretation administrations for.

Among your opposition might be modernized interpretation projects and voice acknowledgment innovation.

It can require some investment to build up the business, contingent upon your area.

You might need to get guaranteed before offering your administrations.

You need standard office hardware, incorporating a PC with an Internet association and conceivably interpretation gear if you will do sound interpretation from tapes.

Step-by-Step Guide to Become a Language Translator?1. Concentrate your source language widely.

To begin with, you should choose a language and study it widely.

There’s interpretation work accessible for almost any living language, and there’s a contention to be made for adapting essentially any language you can name. Normally, there are additionally interpreting work accessible for the most widely recognized dialects. In any case, since more individuals know these dialects, there’s additionally more challenge for work. While there might be fewer occupations for less regular dialects, realizing one could make you stand apart from the group and give you access to employments that fewer individuals can perform.

To pick a language, you should think about exploring what occupations are out there.

2. Get particular preparing.

The truth of the matter is that regardless of whether you’re familiar with a language, it doesn’t mean you have what it takes to decipher.

Having the option to give clear, effective interpretation frequently requires specific preparing notwithstanding language study. Here are a few alternatives to consider:

3. Get ensured.

the most effective method to turn into an interpreter

An affirmation in interpretation is a simple method to show you have what it takes important to take the necessary steps.

Something else to consider is getting non-language-related accreditations in a field in which you’re keen on interpreting. For example, turning into a guaranteed paralegal could assist you with getting deciphering work in the legitimate field by indicating that you comprehend the business. Thus, being an affirmed attendant may assist you with getting restorative interpretation work.

4. Focus on a particular industry and learn industry-explicit terms.

When you’re familiar with a language, you’ll additionally need to target industry-explicit terms for anything that field you’re keen on working in.

Only being familiar doesn’t generally give the pertinent wording you’ll have to interpret, so you’ll have to place some extra concentration into industry-explicit phrasing.

For example, you should think about considering words that are especially vital in medication, business, government or training. There are a few different ways to do this.

5. Sharpen your Computer aptitudes.

A great deal of deciphering requires utilizing explicit computer programs. This is intended to make the interpretation procedure faster and increasingly productive. Normal projects utilized by proficient interpreters that you should acquaint yourself with include:

6. Get some understanding.

One of the unfeeling incongruities of deciphering and most other professional fields is that to land most positions, you as of now need work involvement with the field, leaving you with a problem—how would you get that involvement with the primary spot?

the most effective method to turn into an interpreter

The appropriate response is more straightforward than you may suspect. Agreement or independent work is a simple method to get some understanding to add to your resume. Your initial barely any gigs probably won’t pay just as you’d like, however, once you get more understanding added to your repertoire, you can typically get increasingly more pay for your administrations.

7. To additionally develop your profession, adapt more dialects.

If you need to make yourself significantly progressively attractive, you should procure more dialects that you can interpret between to grow your scope of contributions.

For example, suppose you’re completely conversant in Chinese and can interpret among Chinese and English. Nonetheless, consider the possibility that you likewise figured out how to add Spanish to your scope of contributions. Presently, you could interpret from Spanish to English or Chinese to English. In the end, it’s conceivable that you may even have the option to convert into Chinese or potentially Spanish, in this way increasing your potential interpretation choices and making yourself progressively employable. How’s that for vocation development?

Following is all that you have to think about a vocation as a mediator and interpreter with heaps of subtleties. As an initial step, investigate a portion of the accompanying occupations, which are genuine occupations with genuine bosses. You will have the option to see the genuine activity vocation necessities for bosses who are effectively enlisting.

Go live your dream of connecting people by giving them the words

Do tell us in the comment section below what’s the surprising part about the Language Translation Service in this blog?

More than 19 Years of experience in Designing, Printing and Advertising sector. I own an Enterprises named “Shivani Enterprises”. It’s a commercial Designing, Printing and Advertising Company. Deals in complete designing, printing, advertising, corporate gifting, business collateral material services solutions (designing, offset, digital, screen printing, signage printing, corporate gifting material, event material printing, etc.). We are an exporter of printing and publishing materials. Write a blog on printing tech, tricks and strategy is my passion. We are suited at 249/2, opposite Vasant Vihar Bus Depot, Munirka New Delhi -110067, near Indira Gandhi International Airport, India. We provide our services in Pan India and all major countries in the World.

[sol1056]

Do u think the bad writing in VLD has been rife since the 1st episode? Or is this a new devt in S3? I've always thought the writing has always been oversimple since the start. I fucking hated that finger counting bit just about as things were getting serious and that was the pilot. And things always got resolved in like 1 episode. Like hello? They were able to bond and form Voltron in 1 episode? (1/2)

I dont get ppls expectations abt the show which for me has always been unsophisticated and juvenile albeit still entertaining. Maybe its just a case of BNFs headcanons being mistaken for canon by fandom bc of the long periods bw seasons. (2/2)

I feel like this is actually two questions, so I’m going to answer the shorter one (ahaha yes this is a short answer!) here, and get into the measure of writing quality in a separate post. 

When it comes to BNFs, I’ve gotten reasonably good at identifying their personal agendas masquerading as analysis. That said, yes, the long gap definitely gives time for head canons to percolate, and I’m not entirely convinced that this works for this kind of story. (Or alternately, that this crew of EPs/writers realize the extent to which one-season drops radically alter the viewing experience, and how storytelling methods need to adjust.) 

Truth is, I had zero expectations for VLD. I remember the original and let’s just say, I’ve moved on. On the other hand, my exposure to AtLA’s tonal shifts (from serious to ham-fisted comedic in nothing flat) meant I was used to gritting my teeth through tin-eared comedy-attempts like meat thermometers or finger-counting. 

And then there’s issue of unsophisticated or juvenile storytelling.  

I am probably not the only person here who’s been spoiled by Japanese storytelling, since most anime from a decent-enough production house will integrate levity and gravity pretty seamlessly. I think American productions’ humor isn’t an issue of skill, but symptomatic of deeper problems. 

The first, and biggest, is that American animation struggles to be seen (and by extension, seeing itself) as a valid form of storytelling. Animation is treated as a soap bubble (no lasting impact on the popular culture landscape) and cotton candy (inconsequential, mindless consumption). I can almost guarantee you that any writer or VA involved with VLD is probably asked semi-regularly, “when are you going to write/act/work on a real story?’ 

With that dismissal in mind, those radical tonal shifts (from serious to juvenile) can sometimes be a sign that creators are too-aware of this mindset, and too-afraid of being mocked for treating this like it’s a ‘real’ story. So humor is used as a wink at the audience: don’t worry, we’re not getting carried away and thinking we’re doing shakespeare, we totally get this isn’t worth taking seriously. 

[I hate that, by the way. Respect your goddamn story or find another job.] 

When humor is used organically, it works. Lance trying to create a cheer and Keith not getting the point is both awkward and kind of adorable, as a way to characterize how out-of-sync they are. But humor like meat thermometers signal not-taking-this-seriously, and you can tell, and that’s what makes it so jarring. 

And the reason you can tell is because the writers’ contortion is right there in the script. Hell, you can even see it in the way the VAs handle it, too. 

Allura: And it’s a good thing it wasn’t because it took you… Coran? Coran: Seventy-five degrees. Oh, sorry. No, this is a meat thermometer.Allura: However long it was, it was too long.

You could simply remove Coran’s entire line without changing the scene. It’s an aside, with no integration. And if you listen to the VA delivery, there’s a half-beat and the next line carries on as if Coran never said anything. There’s no reaction. It’s literally wasted breath, wasted animation.

To me, that’s a sign the writers were trying to juggle that tension between ‘this is for kids, it means nothing’ and ‘this is a crucial scene to establish stakes’. So they throw in silliness to satisfy the first, but integrating that humor would elevate it out of that wink-to-audience mode. Done right, comedy is as much serious business as drama, and both require seeing the story as more than insubstantial, forgettable cotton candy. 

The most important thing to remember is probably this: even if these writers believe in their story and want to do right by it, they’re still up against a powerful corporate structure that sees cartoons as nothing more than an elaborate way to sell merchandise. To that corporate overlord, a writer’s measure of success – people showing up at writer panels at cons, a vibrant community of fanfic and fanart and fanlore, fan questions on podcasts, basically so many people embracing the story, the characters, the world – means absolutely nothing to the corporate overlords if no one buys the merchandise. 

Let me reiterate that, in bold, so the bottom line is clear:

A stupid story with flat characters and cheap animation that sells a bajillion lunchboxes or gunpla or whatever will always be judged ‘more successful’ by the corporate overlords than any story that doesn’t move merchandise, no matter how well-told or beloved by the fans. 

To a good writer, the story is an end in itself. To the corporate overlords, the story is wrapping paper around the check they get every month: watched once, torn away to get the good stuff, and quickly forgotten. When you combine American popular perception of cartoons with corporate overlord agendas, it’s damn near a miracle we’ve gotten even scraps of any good from VLD, and that’s an entirely separate issue from whether the EPs/writers can create a good story in the first place.

(Meanwhile fandom collects every bit of the wrapping paper, saves it, cuts it up, tapes it back together in a completely new shape, and then gets into flamewars over whose reconstruction was the best.) 

One last note: I am, at the very least, pleased that the VLD casting director chose seasoned VAs with substantial chops. AtLA gave itself extra trouble by choosing VAs for their age rather than skill (oh god that was painful until they leveled up). VLD hasn’t made that mistake; even when the script stays serious, a bad VA can still ruin it with a wink at the audience and undermine a scene’s emotional heft. The VLD VAs have done a fairly good job of not dropping to that level, and in a few places I do think that’s what’s kept me watching even when other elements are substantially under-par. 

[larbyamiroucheblog]

Best Free Alternatives to Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media managing website that allows users to manage a long list of social media sites with one tool. Larby Amirouche is very experienced in social media marketing and knows how critical a tool like this is.

This can be insanely useful especially if you have multiple accounts on each social media platform.

However, Hootsuite is a premium application that requires you to purchase a plan before you get to use it. In this list, we’ll tackle several platforms that allow you to manage the same things, but for free.

Fully “Free” Options

Outfy:

Outfy.com is a social media managing platform that manages the following:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Pinterest

WeHeartIt

Fancy

Juxtapost and

Tumblr

While it doesn’t have LinkedIn as one of the platforms it manages, Outfy makes up for this for having permanent free access.

Outfy offers to:

post on 9 social media networks

Share posts in real time or schedule your promotions days / weeks / months in advance

Set your store on Autopilot mode — you set the criteria once, and Outfy tool will auto-select your products for promotions

Attach multiple shops to your single Outfy account, and set all promotions from one single login

NO monthly commitment. Outfy has the unique “pay for use” pricing concept. Just purchase credits to refill your account, and use them in the time frame you are comfortable with

Design “Post templates” for each network once, and then all your posts are done within those settings

Make use of our Preset templates for your sale / promotion announcements

Create Collage, Animated GIFs and Videos to blow your own trumpet — share or even schedule your promotion campaigns / deals / link to your latest blog across chosen networks.

The only catch is that in order to make use of all of these, you will have to top up credits onto your account. This means that while you have access to these features, you can only use them through the purchase of their site credits.

The good thing about this is that you only really pay for what you need. If you don’t need it, you won’t have to pay for it, therefore you wouldn’t feel the need to “maximize” your payment.

Juicer:

Juicer manages the following social media accounts:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Youtube

Tumblr

Pinterest

Soundcloud

Spotify

LinkedIn

Flickr

Vimeo

Slack

Giphy and

Yelp

The only downside to availing the free plan from Juicer is that you get highly limited access. You get:

One embeddable social media post

2 Source accounts and hashtags per feed

Posts pulled in every 24 hours

Juicer branding on your posts; and

No analytics, analysis, moderation, and filtering tools

Compared to Outfly’s free permanent access and access to all tools, Juicer makes money by making you feel the difference between paid and unpaid access.

The best thing about Juicer is that if you’re starting up and you don’t have too many accounts to manage yet, you’ll have an easy tool to manage them. The worst, however, is the juicer branding on all of your managed posts through the website.

ViralPep:

ViralPep only has access to three social media platforms:

Facebook

Twitter and

LinkedIn

This is easily the most limited option out of those mentioned. However, in regards to comparison between its paid and unpaid plans, all features are available to the latter (except for support).

Posting Schedule

Profile & Post Timezones

GIF Support

URL Shortener

Video Share

Link Preview

Options that offer 30-day Trials

Hipsocial:

Hipsocial is a social media manager powered by 500apps. It manages the following social media platforms:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

LinkedIn

WordPress

Yelp

It has the following features available for free for 30 days:

Advanced scheduling

Native editing software

Post approval

Media library

Quick response menus and notifications

In-depth analytics and reports

Audience insights

URL tracking

Bulk engagement systems and

A dedicated Google Chrome extension

After your 30 days have passed, you’ll have the option to purchase a plan at $7.50 per month per account. This features unlimited access to all of the features mentioned above, albeit only limited to one account.

Oneup:

Oneup is a site that wants to do it all. It has multiple features, with social media management only being one of them. So far, the social media platforms you can manage though OneUp are:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google My Business

As a social media management app, it can:

Post on multiple platforms at the same time

Access Canva due to integration

Schedule repeating posts at an interval

RSS feed automation

A dedicated Google Chrome extension

Customizable UTM parameters

Link shortening, and

Scheduled Twitter threads.

Aside from these, however, it can do a whole lot more for your business like accounting and invoicing. Plans start from $9 to $169, only differing in the number of users that can access the accounts at any given time. Larby Amirouche (since he has a team) would have to opt for the more pricy packages they offer.

Conclusion

If you’ve been looking long and hard for a replacement for HootSuite, there are plenty of social media management tools online ready to cater to your every need. There are also plenty of free options out there. However, just remember that if you’re going for free options, you will have to accept the limitations. These websites exist in order for them to make money as well.

If you want the perfect service, then you will have to sell out some resources for it. If you’re only starting up though, you won’t need the increasingly complex services that some of these tools offer.

You can always settle for the free ones if you don’t need certain features. In other words, manage your expectations and keep them grounded to your budget. You will thank Larby Amirouche in the end!

Originally Posted: https://larbyamirouche.com/2020/08/27/best-free-alternatives-to-hootsuite-social-media-management/

[billion-heartbeats]

The fight in the war against corona should be more people driven!

Currently it is govt driven! There is no wholehearted participation from the public- be it social distancing or universal masking.  For the govt - “Find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

       India situation as on21 June 2020

Total no of cases—440,000

Active cases 1,78014 cases

Recovered 248,000

Deaths 14011

Daily infections—14933 with death of 312 deaths

 Karnataka situation

Total number of cases 9150

Recovered-5730

Daily cases around 150 to 200

Deaths - 142

Bangalore has recorded-1398 cases, 919 are active cases, Deaths- 64

440 containment zones- 14 zones have more than 5 corona cases each. Padarayanapura has 67 cases.

Recovery rate is 51%

Death rate is 3.95% Highest in the state- state average is 1.15%

   The virus is about 8 months old. Today I feel we know less about it than what we thought we knew a month ago! We are seeing the multidimensional presentation of the corona as never before!

 India's fight against Coronavirus is govt driven! People are complacent at best or at odds. The country is in the middle of a War with an invisible enemy that has caused disastrous consequences. If the coronavirus has not yet reached your city, village, street or your office it might, anytime soon! As the world wrestles with the unprecedented implications of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, we are facing an unprecedented human crisis.

To many people, the coronavirus seemed like a disease that was in another country. People are now seeing it in their communities. People are being reactive rather than proactive, wanting it to just disappear, wanting things to be OK. They have been reckless. Masks have become Silver Lining in Times of Coronavirus. Only 36% are known to wear the mask in public, 32% on and off and 36% never did!

Political leaders do not care about social distancing. Their followers care less. They do not wear masks. They conduct mass gatherings for one reason or the other.

 Denial can be adaptive in the face of unavoidable, uncontrollable threats to one’s existence. However, denial also comes with obvious shortcomings. If you believe that you’re impervious to COVID-19 and you go out and join the mass gatherings, you’re going to actively contribute to the spread of infection. You may get infected yourself! It can have catastrophic consequences. That is why the fight should be more people driven and not just by government and officials. Humans aren’t very good at predicting or assessing risk.

 Who is scared of Corona virus? Dam it!

  Bangalore under lockdown 5.0

     Total numbers may cross 12 crores! Don’t Panic! Let me explain!

 India has seen 4 lakh cases of covid as of now. Daily we are seeing around 14000 cases. On a given day on an average there are 300 deaths. The infection mortality is, say 1 %. For every case that has died there are 100 cases. For 300 deaths there are 30,000 cases. This is on a given day! 14,000 cases have been captured. That means 16,000 are not captured in a day. Only a third of the infections are captured. By mid-November the numbers may be in the region of 200,000 a day!The increase will be geometrical – Data modelling - From Prof JHA of Harvard university.

In a High scenario trajectory with current lockdowns but insufficient physical distancing or compliance and no universal masking, the total number of cases- asymptomatic, hospitalized and symptomatic, can even touch a massive figure of 12 crores. The ICMR study has said that the peak will be in Mid-November. They withdrew their statement. But the results appear to be true! Corona is a long haul and we may have to deal with it for over a year or a year and half in some form or the other!

  There is community transmission!

The govt has been repeatedly telling that there is no community transmission. No big deal! Community transmission is only transmission from one to another in the community, Village, taluk etc without any travel history from abroad. We are capturing 14,000 cases a day and there are 16,000 uncaptured cases a day. So, 30,000 cases a day. These are not coming from abroad. All are local community transmissions. Migrant workers have taken the infection to rural parts where there are no testing facility or treatment facility! We are in an awkward situation! On an average One infected person infects 3 persons. We have not reached the stage of R-0

The human race is locked in a battle against something five million times smaller than us. Sophisticated computer modelling is being used to track and predict its transmission. while virologists are attempting to engineer a vaccine, Others are seeking drug treatments that can help those who fall ill with the infection.

There can be great variation in the number of people a patient might infect. One patient with the new coronavirus, for example, infected 14 health care workers. These individuals are classed as “super spreaders”, and are responsible for a disproportionate share of the spread of the disease.

Due to the unavailability of a vaccine and a specific treatment and the high degree of contagiousness of the virus,  social distancing is perhaps the only way left to fight the virus. Universal masking is another major tool in halting the spread!

Amidst reports of people in various parts of India not taking coronavirus lockdown seriously, the Microbiologists Society of India has warned in April that such casual attitude may leave the hospitals flooded with patients by June-end and situation will be unmanageable. This is precisely what is happening! Millions of people have to change their behaviour now and today.

 It hasn’t been perfect, but India has done a reasonably good job on most counts: airport screening, quarantining, public awareness, and even contact tracing in most places. Yet the community transmission of coronavirus is upon us, a mass explosion of cases that India is not well-equipped to handle.

Mass testing is key to containing the virus

Not testing for the virus is the mistake that every country which is now witnessing a mass explosion of cases has made. Countries and regions that have so far been able to contain, mitigate or delay the spread of coronavirus have all done so by scaling up testing. These include South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. Of course, they were also ready with the infrastructure to deal with those who tested positive, such as quarantining them and protecting health workers and doctors.

India is refusing to test those without symptoms. It is not doing random sampling and even pool sampling on a regular basis! It is like a race between humanity and a virus. Humanity is far behind, and we can play catch up only through testing. The silver bullet — vaccination — is more than a year away.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the coronavirus outbreak is that fewer people would have died now had we taken the pandemic seriously a few months ago. We didn’t really begin to socially isolate until the coronavirus had already killed a few hundreds. Even now people are not serious about wearing masks.

Is India's public healthcare system prepared to fight the COVID-19 menace? Short answer is NO

You don’t need an epidemic, however predictable, for the public health system to collapse. It stays collapsed as a matter of routine!

Main Challenges Confronting a Public Hospital

In my opinion, the main challenges confronting the public hospitals today are as follows:

·       deficient infrastructure,

·       deficient manpower,

·       unmanageable patient load

·       Unbearable ambience

·       Lack of medicines

·       Political patronage and unaccountability

  The electronic media has been flashing the reality in major public hospitals in Bangalore- No beds, No ICU beds, No Ventilators. Where are the 2000 new beds, where are the 1500 new ventilators- the govt has announced?

Yes, it comes at a cost! India’s health care costs are among the lowest in the world!

There should be a meaningful public private participation. We are fighting an invisible enemy that has destroyed the economy and the lives of too many!

 Access to quality care for the vast majority holds the key. Here is a chance to redesign the system keeping both affordability and quality in mind! where there is no will, there are alibis and subterfuge, albeit in the form of elaborate schemes on paper. the public healthcare system in the country stands at crossroads where there is little in the present system that gives confidence of taking on the pandemic!

 That India's healthcare system is grossly inadequate to provide quality infrastructure and manpower to millions of its citizens is well known. What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is to bring a sense of urgency to fix it. If the virus can wreak havoc in developed countries with far superior healthcare, India is surely sitting on a time bomb.

 public and private hospitals should set aside beds, prepare isolation facilities, procure sufficient ventilators, high-flow oxygen masks and mobilise additional manpower to step up combat readiness to fight COVID19. We cannot import equipment. We are facing a pandemic. There are shortages even in other countries! So, manufacture them here in India, is the only solution!

 Immediate steps

 ·       Protect the front-line warriors

·       Convert all public exhibition centres into makeshift hospitals to handle cases of the coronavirus. Provide disposable toiles. Maintain social distance even in the hospital. It can be done! Fight the disease and not the patient!

·       Convert all marriage halls into make shift hospitals. It can be done!

·       Involve all medical and para medical staff and train them intensively

·       Involve Aayush doctors

·       Provide all the doctors an intense short-term training in ICU management

·       Provide intense training to the nurses to manage the ICU equipment including ventilators and Blood gas analysis.

·       Use Tele medicine extensively to impart the training

The above measures are not perfect. But they are implementable and sustainable. Yes, we can win and win we will!

   Dr N Prabhudev

Former Director Sri Jayadeva institute of Cardiology

Former VC of Bangalore university

Former Chairman Karnataka state Health Commission

nprabhudev@gmail.com

[sanoiro]

anonymous asked: When did Lucifer start fall in love with Chloe not just lust for her? (Part B)

Find Part A Here

Moving on from the first post, the second kind of love is Agape. Agape is the actual term of love. It actually means love in Greek and is still used to say things like I love you between friends and couples.

Agape is a selfless kind of love. It’s the love you have for your friends, your family, your pet. On an extent you would do anything for them or almost anything. Lucifer has lost this even with Maze he cannot form this Agape connection but he does it with Chloe. Lucifer in episode 1x08 (Et Tu Doctor), shows signs of jealousy and when he asks Chloe if he was similar to the Doctor she replies that no she was not and for that moment in time this was correct.

From episodes, 1x02-1x08 Lucifer feels love in the form of Agape. It all begins in 1x02 when Chloe tells the paparazzi that it doesn’t matter where you get but the fact that you try to change and he agrees. It is this belief that she might actually appreciate that he has tried that moves him forward onto changing. In 1x08 he experiences jealousy because he is not the main feature in her life. When a friend of yours is starting a committed relationship they tend to disappear and you try to be understanding but it stings a bit. That’s what  Lucifer is experiencing throughout the episode until Chloe hugs Dan and meets Lucifer’s eyes. At that moment the sting becomes something even more and yet Lucifer does not act on it.

The importance of Agape is that Lucifer for the first time loves outside his family. He connects in a way he hasn’t done in millennia and that’s life-altering for him. That also affects Chloe as well. My original theory on Lucifer’s vulnerability is that the more deeply Chloe cares for Lucifer the more vulnerable he becomes but someone once noted that it may be going both ways. Meaning that as their feelings deepen he becomes more vulnerable and for a longer distance than before. An interesting fact is that the origin of the word comes from an original meaning of two words merged into what we call agape and it meant “to protect a lot”. Fitting huh?

Third in our list is Philia. There is a saying that friendship and being in love are close and the greatest gift is to find both in the same person. Philia is valued more than any kind of other love because it’s an extension of Agape but with a twist. You will sacrifice yourself when you feel philia. The term also carries another word inside which we (Greeks) call storgi. Storgi means in a sense tenderness with the need to take care of someone. You will find that kind of love aka storgi in relationships between very old friends, really good friends, siblings and parents-children. Lucifer, as we can see, take cares Chloe in Pops and in an extension he almost sacrifices himself in 1x10 when he gets her out of the blazing restaurant. This is also the big turn for Lucifer. He reaches the point where he is really close to being in love.  Also, the etymology of the word is “the one who is found close by” followed by a conceptional etymology later on used as “the one who kisses” yet not in the making out kind of way.

Fourth which appears throughout the series although rarely after 2x13 is Ludus. That’s the playful affection. Lucifer flirting, his relationship with Trixie and as English speakers would know it’s basically called foreplay when you feel an attraction to the person Ludus is manifesting. It’s the teasing, the small moments and these moments slowly bring and maintain the romantic love. It’s what we know as the Deckerstar moments of small but adorable importance. Like Chloe giving Lucifer paperwork or Lucifer making improper jokes with her laughing. Even the Good Devil, Stay Lucifer was a form of Ludus.

Fifth… Eros. Eros is associated with sex but it goes beyond that. English speakers may not really realize that the verb which gives us the word means in a sense to spill… Yes, you got that it is based on not only the desire to copulate but also entails the result of the said action. Yet when in Greek you say eros you also mean something that goes beyond love. There was even the term of erotic philia or erotic love. It is a term which encompasses the following: You love with a burning and yes in many instances with a burning desire, with devotion. Eros also includes what you may have heard as unconditional love. That’s a gravitational point for a person and it can be manifest as a physical or an emotional way or if you are lucky enough (or unlucky it depends) both.

Lucifer in 1x13 was aware of the danger but he did not die willingly for Chloe. That happened in 2x13. For Lucifer to ask from Dad to protect her was the first spark of real and fully embracing from him Agape with a borderline growing Eros. In 2x01 the writers talk about the joke I need the eggs. I have an analysis about that but let’s just say that’s the point where Eros begins for both of them. The slow burn if you like. In 2x05 Lucifer kills his brother because he is in love. He experiences all the kinds of love mentioned before and that’s the most heartbreaking part. Was he falling in love when he stated to Maze that he wasn’t going anywhere in season one? Yes, but he was still taking that trip. He reached that destination when he was willing albeit as a last resort to kill Uriel.

Yet why didn’t he realize that? In a sense he did that is why he was a mess. Deep down I believe that he knew that for a foreign emotion he killed a member of his family. That would have happened only if he had passed the threshold of Agape and had his foot ready to step into Eros’.

So he is in love with Chloe in 2x05 and he realises it in 2x09. Why? Because he never had any similar experience. He is a being that was never loved that way and the little he remembers from his parents was not them being in love at lost in a way he experiences love. Selflessly with a humble and tentative touch over everything Chloe is.

So what about the sixth? The sixth kind is the mature love called pragma (object). It is basically what happens to couples usually married or in a committed relationship which are together for years and know how to maintain the essence of all the aforementioned loves in their relationship.

Now isn’t it that grand? Yet love entails also so much more than that… Stenberg tried to explain that as you can see in the following graph but the thing is that has experienced at least five out of six with Chloe and I can see the sparks of the sixth even if we cannot really see it. Yes, we need a stable relationship for that but at the moment Lucifer is doing the best he can according to the information he has. So that’s my answer. He experienced Eros the moment he begged Dad for a favour. Acted on it when he killed Uriel in 2x05 and realized it in 2x09 and admitted it to himself and her partly in 2x11.

[cryptoquicknews-blog]

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/y522s5

The Strange Case of CCN and the Google June 2019 Core Update

This post was originally published here

Here at Cointelegraph, we were as shocked as everyone else in and around the crypto-sphere when we learned about the abrupt closure of stalwart crypto media outlet CCN. Established at around the same time as Cointelegraph and CoinDesk, CCN spent years competing for the crypto audience.

However, just a couple days later, as many others, we were relieved to hear that CCN was back — although we couldn’t help but feel sceptical regarding several aspects of the story and puzzled by so many questions swirling around it.

How come a key player in our own industry could go down overnight — and then come back so conveniently after a few days? How could a three-letter-dot-com domain commanding millions of monthly visits be so hooked on Google-fed traffic that a single adjustment in the search algorithm, albeit a major one, cost it 90% of ad revenue momentarily?

What was it, really? A targeted, politically motivated character assassination on behalf of the tech giant (as CCN’s founder claimed)? An unfortunate alignment of circumstances with no one in particular to blame? Possibly a PR stunt, or something else? We felt we owed it to the entire industry to take a sober look into this case to find out whether something similar could happen to any of us at any point in the future.

What happened to CCN?

CCN Markets, established in 2013 by the Norwegian entrepreneur Jonas Borchgrevink as CryptoCoinsNews.com, is currently part of the media company Hawkfish AS, which also operates Hacked, a publication that provides analysis on “future assets” like cryptocurrencies and tech stocks; MoneyMakers, a self-identified “tabloid that produces news with a special focus on money”; and HVY.com, a news platform that is designed to promote journalists rather than news stories. One of the largest global crypto-related news outlets, the majority of traffic to ccn.com comes from the U.S. As of early June 2019, the publication reportedly employed more than 60 full-time, part-time and freelance contributors.

On June 10, CCN founder Jonas Borchgrevink addressed the readers with an extensive post, declaring that the website took a massive blow from Google’s June 2019 Core Update and saw mobile traffic from Google searches drop by 71% overnight, as measured by Sistrix’s Visibility Index (the same graph also showed a 53% decline in desktop traffic). This, Borchgrevink claimed, resulted in an immediate 90% decrease in ad revenue. He added that, although CCN had reached even lower visibility scores on a few occasions throughout the past year, the latest dip proved the most devastating because of the recent expansion of its team.

Borchgrevink suspected a possible “general crypto crackdown by Google,” citing smaller but substantial losses on the same metric allegedly sustained by CNN’s competitors — i.e., CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. However, regarding Cointelegraph, the data Borchgrevink cites is inaccurate, based on conversations with Cointelegraph’s SEO team and public data that shows no reversal or even a slowdown around June 10. On the contrary, it reveals a steady upward trend in Cointelegraph’s Alexa Rank dynamics that is visible since mid-May. According to a Forbes article, other prominent publications in the crypto space, such as Coindesk and The Block, also reported insignificant effects from Google’s update.

CCN’s director went on to discuss other potential reasons for the website’s visibility collapse, including Google’s guidelines for additional scrutiny applied to “Your Money, Your Life” websites — in other words, outlets that provide information related to either health or personal finance and are therefore subject to more stringent content quality requirements. Borchgrevink then ruled out the possibility of having been taken down on the grounds of quality, listing all CCN’s well-deserved awards, quality seals, and editorial and business practices that speak in favor of the publication’s blue-ribbon status.

Finally, CCN’s boss turned to politics as an explanation for Google’s allegedly unfavorable treatment of his website. He noted that, despite being pro-free speech and providing a floor for opinions from all over the ideological spectrum, CCN has recently featured a lot of specifically “Pro-Trump” op-eds, which, he implied, was in line with the publication’s “anti-elite, anti-centralization” stance, which Google, according to him, allegedly opposed. He also pointed out that, as a result of the recent update, some right-leaning British newspapers saw their Google traffic decline, while some of their left-leaning counterparts enjoyed gains.

While there are no direct accusations of Google being politically biased in the text, in the accompanying video, rather fierce language is abundant: For one, Borchgrevink calls it a “fascist corporation” that is trying to censor anyone who “remotely dips its toe out of the left-leaning bubble.” This was followed by calls for everyone who cares about free speech to wake up and rally against the “Googlémocracy” and disrupt the overwhelming corrosive corporate power, along with a list of demands for Google.

The meltdown concluded, rather unexpectedly, with a statement of CCN shutting down in the wake of revenue losses incurred thanks to Google. Reluctant to downsize the team, Borchgrevink announced redeploying everyone to HVY.com.

What is a Google Core Update?

As Google’s numerous products and services, from Gmail to Chrome, have come to dominate their respective market segments, the company’s fundamental value proposition lies in fast and relevant search output. In response to a query, the search engine uses a complex system of proprietary algorithms and filters to furnish the user with lists of web pages ranked by relevance, also called search engine results pages (SERPs).

In order to improve the quality of this output, Google introduces hundreds of subtle tweaks to this system every year — of which, most are barely noticeable — and sometimes rolls out major updates that affect the core algorithm’s functionality. The latter often become milestones for entire businesses reliant on Google-generated traffic, severely affecting their bottom line for better or worse.

The Google June 2019 Core Update is the second large-scale adjustment so far this year, and also the first one ever to be announced by the company in advance. The previous update in March focused on areas where the so-called EAT factors (i.e., Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) are deemed the most important, resulting, for example, in massive fluctuations in health care-related websites’ search visibility.

In the wake of that update, Google specifically pointed out that, while improvements are focused on website content, its quality is not a primary criterion, and there is nothing “wrong” with websites that took a dip in visibility rankings. At the same time, there is nothing that could be done to “fix” such websites. With regard to the June update, the precise focus of the adjustment remains unclear, as websites from a variety of regions and subject fields found themselves affected.

As Glen Allsopp, founder of SEO firm Detailed.com, noted to Cointelegraph:

“Past Google updates could certainly be described as targeting certain industries, with an August 2018 update being dubbed ‘Medic’ due to how many health sites were impacted. Health and finance sites appear to have seen big swings once again, as have quite a lot of news sites. That said, this one feels broader to me.”

There are numerous criteria at play when the algorithm determines the rank of a particular web page in search output. Perhaps most prominent in the last few major updates are the aforementioned YMYL and EAT guidelines that prescribe varying quality standards for different categories of websites. In addition, Google routinely locates and takes down various schemes, which shrewd webmasters employ in order to boost traffic and ad revenues.

This Medium post, for instance, describes one such mechanism that large trusted portals use to game the algorithm and profit from the additional unrelated content on their domains. Cointelegraph’s SEO specialists observed that many financial media who took a hit from the June update saw their coupon schemes cut.

Webmaster forum development and CCN’s resurrection

In response to an inquiry from Forbes’ Benjamin Prius, a Google representative reiterated a statement from March 2018 that some websites may experience traffic fluctuations due to a core update. Moreover, the boost for the pages that come to perform better might stem from the fact that they have been undervalued previously. They also pointed to Google webmaster forums as a place to seek advice on issues that arise in the wake of algorithm adjustments.

Indeed, in the original post, CCN’s director reported seeking guidance from the webmaster community but said that their theories explaining the CCN situation did not “appear to be entirely accurate.” Meanwhile, one of the considerations that emerged in that thread around the time of the closure announcement could well be the key to understanding what happened to CCN’s search visibility. Some of the community members noticed that pages from the old domain, cryptocoinsnews.com, resurfaced in search output, redirecting to the current CCN home page — a behavior that one of the webmasters called “a sure fire way to confuse search engines.”

Two days after the closure announcement, Borchgrevink followed up with yet another statement in which he acknowledged the glitch of the old domain showing up in search results — even in search results for recent CCN articles. He also sounded less convinced that the core update was the root of the evil:

“Whether or not the Google June 2019 Core Update is to blame, we are fixing it. […] There’s still a good chance that this won’t correct our visibility on Google overnight, but I’m hopeful we are on the right path to figuring it out.”

And then, even more abruptly than the announcement of CCN shutting down, the announcement of CCN coming back arrived:

“Enough said. CCN.com is back.”

Versions and reactions

Granted, CCN’s own core readership was deeply saddened by the news of CCN’s demise and rejoiced when it was reversed. Some crypto blogs subscribed to the “evil Google” narrative unconditionally; others tried to test their own hypotheses as to what the search engine update could mean for the industry. One of them, Inside Trade, ran an experiment to assess whether the improved algorithm favored websites on Google’s own Adsense network, which yielded mixed results obtained from a tiny sample.

Some of the crypto industry’s experts, though, did not find Borchgrevink’s account of the events all that compelling. “What Bitcoin Did” podcast host Peter McCormack tweeted:

I suspect the closure of CCN is more than just down to a change in the Google algorithm. If the rollout was June 3rd and the decision was a week later, I assume they had bigger problems.

— Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) June 10, 2019

Elad Mor, CEO of MarketAcross and co-founder at InboundJunction — a content marketing, SEO & PR agency for startups — told Cointelegraph that the Google search algorithm might indeed be a headache for publishers, but in this case, it was likely not the only factor:

“Google updates can be vicious. We’ve seen businesses go from hero to zero after massive Google algorithm updates. ‘Notorious’ updates such as Google ‘Panda’ or ‘Penguin’ have left scorched territories behind them and were real game-changers for SEOs and publishers relying on organic traffic.

“We’ve been working with CCN’s news department for a while, their attitude of straight shooting investigative journalism and compromised quality makes me think that this “penalty” is a very technical one and could be sorted by working closely with Google support and adhering to their strict guidelines. There might also be more to the story, since a big website like CCN doesn’t close overnight or changes its decision the day after.”

Trey Ditto, CEO of Ditto PR, a full-service communications firm with crypto and blockchain practice, suspects that more systemic determinants could be at play:

“The media landscape in crypto is shrinking. Either media outlets need to step up to fill the void, or crypto and blockchain projects need to recognize that getting media coverage is a tactic and not a strategy. Most people I’ve talked to don’t seem to be buying the narrative that Google is at fault for CCN’s shutdown. A more logical explanation is that a lot of crypto media outlets are struggling to adapt and mature with the market. If you have a high burn rate or lack a way to monetize outside of ads, you won’t last through the remainder of crypto winter. The same goes for crypto projects: Evolve quickly or die off.”

So, it may appear that at least one of the immediate reasons behind the CCN’s search visibility nosedive was in fact not triggered by the Google June 2019 Core Update, but merely coincided with it. From conversations with Cointelegraph’s SEO team, it emerged that the old domain’s sudden comeback was likely prompted by its 301 redirect — a tool used to establish a permanent redirect from one URL to another — breaking down, which resulted in old pages appearing in the search index again. As two sets of pages with identical content surfaced, Google’s algorithm identified them as a dishonest attempt at gaining visibility and began lowering their ranking accordingly.

Not all SEO professionals subscribe to this view. Glen Allsopp observed to Cointelegraph that the redirect seems to be in place still:

“This is not common, unless the old domain is resurrected in some form, which doesn’t appear to have been the case for CCN and their previous domain, cryptocoinsnews.com. You can check Archive.org and all June mentions show their domain redirect still in place. I saw the comments regarding their old domain now ranking in search results but two premium third-party analysis tools I use – Ahrefs and Sistrix – both fail to show any search visibility at all for their old domain name. They may have missed it, but I would be very surprised by that”

The confusion around what has really happened to CCN’s traffic, of course, does not mean that Google’s enormous and unchecked power over online search, advertising and publishing industries is not a pressing issue — or that online journalism’s dominant ad-based business model is not flawed.

Acquisition attempt

Shortly after the news of CCN’s shutdown hit the press, unverified claims of the publication’s attempted acquisition began to circulate online. The alleged benefactor was also specified: Stankevicius MGM, a global PR and advertising firm headquartered in the UAE. If the validity of these talks is not unfounded, the timing of the events would be crucial to understand whether the attempted deal had any influence on the general plot line.

Roma Stankeviciene, Stankevicius MGM’s executive vice president, confirmed that the negotiations did indeed take place. In fact, it turns out that CCN received more than one offer in between shutting down and coming back:

“CCN CEO’s message was quite convincing, so yes, our CEO approached them to discuss whether a sale or an M&A. We were willing to offer 7 digits net for the media site. We didn’t keep this as a secret, and told colleagues and business contacts about our interest in CCN, and so the talks spread.

“We noticed once our story hit the news, another media company decided to make an offer as well, and it was kind of a copycat move in a way because we actually approached the CCN first right after their announcement and we were serious about it, and having another company drop into the deal with a new offer only make things complicated.

“However, later we heard that CCN was not selling anymore as they got their traffic back from Google. It’s unfortunate, we would have done something great with the site.”

The statement therefore suggests that the acquisition negotiations did not prompt the shutdown. If anything, they could only trigger CCN’s decision to go back up defiantly. Meanwhile, Stankevicius MGM executives remained unconvinced by the publication’s own version of the story:

“They claimed that they lost traffic, still even if they lost it, they had more than enough traffic and brand awareness to keep the business going. […] We still think internally that their announcement was not true.”

Amid all the uncertainty, InboundJunction’s Mor aptly summarized:

“Whatever the reason is, we’re happy they are still in the game.”

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/y522s5

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/breaking-news/placing-the-usa-on-a-collapse/

Placing the USA on a collapse continuum with Dmitry Orlov

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

The West is rotting! Yes, maybe, but what a nice smell… Old Soviet joke

The word ‘catastrophe‘ has several meanings, but in its original meaning in Greek the word means a “sudden downturn” (in Greek katastrophē ‘overturning, sudden turn,’ from kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning’).  As for the word “superpower” it also has several possible definitions, but my preferred one is this one “Superpower is a term used to describe a state with a dominant position, which is characterized by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined-means of economic, military, technological and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence. Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers” this one, “an extremely powerful nation, especially one capable of influencing international events and the acts and policies of less powerful nations” or this one “an international governing body able to enforce its will upon the most powerful states“.

I have mentioned the very visible decline of the USA and its associated Empire in many of my articles already, so I won’t repeat it here other than to say that the “ability to exert influence and impose its will” is probably the best criteria to measure the magnitude of the fall of the USA since Trump came to power (the process was already started by Dubya and Obama, but it sure accelerated with The Donald).  But I do want to use a metaphor to revisit the concept of catastrophe.

If you place an object in the middle of a table and then push it right to the edge, you will exert some amount of energy we can call “E1”.  Then, if the edge of the table is smooth and you just push the object over the edge, you exercise a much smaller amount of energy we can call “E2”.  And, in most cases (if the table is big enough), you will also find that E1 is much bigger than E2 yet E2, coming after E1 took place, triggered a much more dramatic event: instead of smoothly gliding over the table top, the object suddenly falls down and shatters.  That sudden fall can also be called a “catastrophe”.  This is also something which happens in history, take the example of the Soviet Union.

The fate of all empires…

Some readers might recall how Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly declared in the 1980s that he was sure that the Soviet regime would collapse and that he would return to Russia.  He was, of course, vitriolically ridiculed by all the “specialists” and “experts”.  After all, why would anybody want to listen to some weird Russian exile with politically suspicious ideas (there were rumors of “monarchism” and “anti-Semitism”) when the Soviet Union was an immense superpower, armed to the teeth with weapons, with an immense security service, with political allies and supporters worldwide?  Not only that, but all the “respectable” specialists and experts were unanimous that, while the Soviet regime had various problems, it was very far from collapse.  The notion that NATO would soon replace the Soviet military not only in eastern Europe, but even in part of the Soviet Union was absolutely unthinkable.  And yet it all happened, very, very fast.  I would argue that the Soviet union completely collapsed in the span of less than 4 short years: 1990-1993.  How and why this happened is beyond the scope of this article, but what is undeniable is that in 1989 the Soviet Union was still an apparently powerful entity, while by the end of 1993, it was gone (smashed into pieces by the very nomenklatura which used to rule over it).  How did almost everybody miss that?

Because ideologically-poisoned analysis leads to intellectual complacence, a failure of imagination and, generally, an almost total inability to even hypothetically look at possible outcomes.  This is how almost all the “Soviet specialists” got it wrong (the KGB, by the way, had predicted this outcome and warned the Politburo, but the Soviet gerontocrats were ideologically paralyzed and were both unable, and often unwilling, to take any preventative action).  The Kerensky masonic regime in 1917 Russia, the monarchy in Iran or the Apartheid regime in South Africa also collapsed very fast once the self-destruction mechanism was in place and launched.

You can think of that “regime self-destruction mechanism” as our E1 phase in our metaphor above.  As for E2, you can think of it as whatever small-push like event which precipitates the quick and final collapse, apparently with great ease and minimum energy spent.

At this point it is important to explain what exactly a “final collapse” looks like.  Some people are under the very mistaken assumption that a collapsed society or country looks like a Mad Max world. This is not so.  The Ukraine has been a failed state for several years already, but it still exists on the map. People live there, work, most people still have electricity (albeit not 24/7), a government exists, and, at least officially, law and order is maintained.  This kind of collapsed society can go on for years, maybe decades, but it is in a state of collapse nonetheless, as it has reached all the 5 Stages of Collapse as defined by Dmitry Orlov in his seminal book “The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit” where he mentions the following 5 stages of collapse:

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.

Having personally visited Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, and seen the Russia of the early 1990s, I can attest that a society can completely collapse while maintaining a lot of the external appearances of a normal still functioning society.  Unlike the Titanic, most collapsed regimes don’t fully sink. They remain about half under water, and half above, possibly with an orchestra still playing joyful music.  And in the most expensive top deck cabins, a pretty luxurious lifestyle can be maintained by the elites.  But for most of the passengers such a collapse results in poverty, insecurity, political instability and a huge loss in welfare.  Furthermore,  in terms of motion, a half-sunk ship is no ship at all.

Here is the crucial thing: as long as the ship’s PA systems keep announcing great weather and buffet brunches, and as long as most of the passengers remain in their cabins and watch TV instead of looking out of the window, the illusion of normalcy can be maintained for a fairly long while, even after a collapse.  During the E1 phase outlined above, most passengers will be kept in total ignorance (lest they riot or protest) and only when E2 strikes (totally unexpectedly for most passengers) does reality eventually destroy the ignorance and illusions of the brainwashed passengers.

Obama was truly the beginning of the end

I have lived in the USA from 1986-1991 and from 2002 to today and there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the country has undergone a *huge* decline over the past decades.  In fact, I would argue that the USA has been living under E1 condition since at least Dubya and that this process dramatically accelerated under Obama and Trump.  I believe that we reached the  E2 “edge of the table” moment in 2018 and that from now on even a relatively minor incident can result in a sudden downturn (i.e. a “catastrophe”).  Still, I decided to check with the undisputed specialist of this issue and so I emailed Dmitry Orlov and asked him the following question:

In your recent article “The Year the Planet Flipped Over” you paint a devastating picture of the state of the Empire:

It is already safe to declare Trump’s plan to Make America Great Again (MAGA) a failure. Beneath the rosy statistics of US economic growth hides the hideous fact that it is the result of a tax holiday granted to transnational corporations to entice them to repatriate their profits. While this hasn’t helped them (their stocks are currently cratering) it has been a disaster for the US government as well as for the economic system as whole.  Tax receipts have shrunk. The budget deficit for 2018 exceeds $779 billion. Meanwhile, the trade wars which Trump initiated have caused the trade deficit to increase by 17% from the year before. Plans to repatriate industrial production from low-cost countries remain vaporous because the three key elements which China had as it industrialized (cheap energy, cheap labor and low cost of doing business) are altogether missing.  Government debt is already beyond reasonable and its expansion is still accelerating, with just the interest payments set to exceed half a trillion a year within a decade. This trajectory does not bode well for the continued existence of the United States as a going concern. Nobody, either in the United States or beyond, has the power to significantly alter this trajectory. Trump’s thrashing about may have moved things along faster than they otherwise would have, at least in the sense of helping convince the entire world that the US is selfish, feckless, ultimately self-destructive and generally unreliable as a partner. In the end it won’t matter who was president of the US—it never has.  Among those the US president has succeeded in hurting most are his European allies. His attacks on Russian energy exports to Europe, on European car manufacturers and on Europe’s trade with Iran have caused a fair amount of damage, both political and economic, without compensating for it with any perceived or actual benefits. Meanwhile, as the globalist world order, which much of Europe’s population appears ready to declare a failure, begins to unravel, the European Union is rapidly becoming ungovernable, with established political parties unable to form coalitions with ever-more-numerous populist upstarts.  It is too early to say that the EU has already failed altogether, but it already seems safe to predict that within a decade it will no longer remain as a serious international factor. Although the disastrous quality and the ruinous mistakes of Europe’s own leadership deserve a lot of the blame, some of it should rest with the erratic, destructive behavior of their transoceanic Big Brother. The EU has already morphed into a strictly regional affair, unable to project power or entertain any global geopolitical ambitions.  Same goes for Washington, which is going to either depart voluntarily (due to lack of funds) or get chased out from much of the world. The departure from Syria is inevitable whether Trump, under relentless pressure from his bipartisan warmongers, backtracks on this commitment or not. Now that Syria has been armed with Russia’s up-to-date air defense weapons the US no longer maintains air superiority there, and without air superiority the US military is unable to do anything.  Afghanistan is next; there, it seems outlandish to think that the Washingtonians will be able to achieve any sort of reasonable accommodation with the Taliban. Their departure will spell the end of Kabul as a center of corruption where foreigners steal humanitarian aid and other resources. Somewhere along the way the remaining US troops will also be pulled out of Iraq, where the parliament, angered by Trump’s impromptu visit to a US base, recently voted to expel them. And that will put paid to the entire US adventure in the Middle East since 9/11: $4,704,439,588,308 has been squandered, to be precise, or $14,444 for every man, woman and child in the US.  The biggest winners in all of this are, obviously, the people of the entire region, because they will no longer be subjected to indiscriminate US harassment and bombardment, followed by Russia, China and Iran, with Russia solidifying its position as the ultimate arbiter of international security arrangements thanks to its unmatched military capabilities and demonstrated knowhow for coercion to peace. Syria’s fate will be decided by Russia, Iran and Turkey, with the US not even invited to the talks. Afghanistan will fall into the sphere of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.  And the biggest losers will be former US regional allies, first and foremost Israel, followed by Saudi Arabia.

My question for you is this: where would you place the USA (or the Empire) on your 5 stages of decline and do you believe that the USA (or the Empire) can reverse that trend?

Here is Dmitry’s reply:

Collapse, at each stage, is a historical process that takes time to run its course as the system adapts to changing circumstances, compensates for its weaknesses and finds ways to continue functioning at some level. But what changes rather suddenly is faith or, to put it in more businesslike terms, sentiment. A large segment of the population or an entire political class within a country or the entire world can function based on a certain set of assumptions for much longer than the situation warrants but then over a very short period of time switch to a different set of assumptions. All that sustains the status quo beyond that point is institutional inertia. It imposes limits on how fast systems can change without collapsing entirely. Beyond that point, people will tolerate the older practices only until replacements for them can be found.

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.

Internationally, the major change in sentiment in the world has to do with the role of the US dollar (and, to a lesser extent, the Euro and the Yen—the other two reserve currencies of the three-legged globalist central banker stool). The world is transitioning to the use of local currencies, currency swaps and commodities markets backed by gold. The catalyst for this change of sentiment was provided by the US administration itself which sawed through its own perch by its use of unilateral sanctions. By using its control over dollar-based transactions to block international transactions it doesn’t happen to like it forced other countries to start looking for alternatives. Now a growing list of countries sees throwing off the shackles of the US dollar as a strategic goal. Russia and China use the ruble and the yuan for their expanding trade; Iran sells oil to India for rupees. Saudi Arabia has started to accept the yuan for its oil.

This change has many knock-on effects. If the dollar is no longer needed to conduct international trade, other nations no longer have hold large quantities of it in reserve. Consequently, there is no longer a need to buy up large quantities of US Treasury notes. Therefore, it becomes unnecessary to run large trade surpluses with the US, essentially conducting trade at a loss. Further, the attractiveness of the US as an export market drops and the cost of imports to the US rises, thereby driving up cost inflation. A vicious spiral ensues in which the ability of the US government to borrow internationally to finance the gaping chasm of its various deficits becomes impaired. Sovereign default of the US government and national bankruptcy then follow.

The US may still look mighty, but its dire fiscal predicament coupled with its denial of the inevitability of bankruptcy, makes it into something of a Blanche DuBois from the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She was “always dependent on the kindness of strangers” but was tragically unable to tell the difference between kindness and desire. In this case, the desire is for national advantage and security, and to minimize risk by getting rid of an unreliable trading partner.

How quickly or slowly this comes to pass is difficult to guess at and impossible to calculate. It is possible to think of the financial system in terms of a physical analogue, with masses of funds traveling at some velocity having a certain inertia (p = mv) and with forces acting on that mass to accelerate it along a different trajectory (F = ma). It is also possible to think of it in terms of hordes of stampeding animals who can change course abruptly when panicked. The recent abrupt moves in the financial markets, where trillions of dollars of notional, purely speculative value have been wiped out within weeks, are more in line with the latter model.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.

Within the US there is really no other alternative than the market. There are a few rustic enclaves, mostly religious communities, that can feed themselves, but that’s a rarity. For everyone else there is no choice but to be a consumer. Consumers who are broke are called “bums,” but they are still consumers. To the extent that the US has a culture, it is a commercial culture in which the goodness of a person is based on the goodly sums of money in their possession. Such a culture can die by becoming irrelevant (when everyone is dead broke) but by then most of the carriers of this culture are likely to be dead too. Alternatively, it can be replaced by a more humane culture that isn’t entirely based on the cult of Mammon—perhaps, dare I think, through a return to a pre-Protestant, pre-Catholic Christian ethic that values people’s souls above objects of value?

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.

All is very murky at the moment, but I would venture to guess that most people in the US are too distracted, too stressed and too preoccupied with their own vices and obsessions to pay much attention to the political realm. Of the ones they do pay attention, a fair number of them seem clued in to the fact that the US is not a democracy at all but an elites-only sandbox in which transnational corporate and oligarchic interests build and knock down each others’ sandcastles.

The extreme political polarization, where two virtually identical pro-capitalist, pro-war parties pretend to wage battle by virtue-signaling may be a symptom of the extremely decrepit state of the entire political arrangement: people are made to watch the billowing smoke and to listen to the deafening noise in the hopes that they won’t notice that the wheels are no longer turning.

The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue—the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish grand inquisitor named Mueller—has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump, like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Jillettes Jaunes movement (just as an example) are definitely not.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.

I have been saying for some years now that within the US social collapse has largely run its course, although whether people actually believe that is an entire matter entirely. Defining “your people” is rather difficult. The symbols are still there—the flag, the Statue of Liberty and a predilection for iced drinks and heaping plates of greasy fried foods—but the melting pot seems to have suffered a meltdown and melted all the way to China. At present half the households within the US speak a language other than English at home, and a fair share of the rest speak dialects of English that are not mutually intelligible with the standard North American English dialect of broadcast television and university lecturers.

Throughout its history as a British colony and as a nation the US has been dominated by the Anglo ethnos. The designation “ethnos” is not an ethnic label. It is not strictly based on genealogy, language, culture, habitat, form of government or any other single factor or group of factors. These may all be important to one extent or another, but the viability of an ethnos is based solely on its cohesion and the mutual inclusivity and common purpose of its members. The Anglo ethnos reached its zenith in the wake of World War II, during which many social groups were intermixed in the military and their more intelligent members.

Fantastic potential was unleashed when privilege—the curse of the Anglo ethnos since its inception—was temporarily replaced with merit and the more talented demobilized men, of whatever extraction, were given a chance at education and social advancement by the GI Bill. Speaking a new sort of American English based on the Ohio dialect as a Lingua Franca, these Yanks—male, racist, sexist and chauvinistic and, at least in their own minds, victorious—were ready to remake the entire world in their own image.

They proceeded to flood the entire world with oil (US oil production was in full flush then) and with machines that burned it. Such passionate acts of ethnogenesis are rare but not unusual: the Romans who conquered the entire Mediterranean basin, the barbarians who then sacked Rome, the Mongols who later conquered most of Eurasia and the Germans who for a very brief moment possessed an outsized Lebensraum are other examples.

And now it is time to ask: what remains of this proud conquering Anglo ethnos today? We hear shrill feminist cries about “toxic masculinity” and minorities of every stripe railing against “whitesplaining” and in response we hear a few whimpers but mostly silence. Those proud, conquering, virile Yanks who met and fraternized with the Red Army at the River Elbe on April 25, 1945—where are they? Haven’t they devolved into a sad little subethnos of effeminate, porn-addicted overgrown boys who shave their pubic hair and need written permission to have sex without fear of being charged with rape?

Will the Anglo ethnos persist as a relict, similar to how the English have managed to hold onto their royals (who are technically no longer even aristocrats since they now practice exogamy with commoners)? Or will it get wiped out in a wave of depression, mental illness and opiate abuse, its glorious history of rapine, plunder and genocide erased and the statues of its war heros/criminals knocked down? Only time will tell.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.

The term “culture” means many things to many people, but it is more productive to observe cultures than to argue about them. Cultures are expressed through people’s stereotypical behaviors that are readily observable in public. These are not the negative stereotypes often used to identify and reject outsiders but the positive stereotypes—cultural standards of behavior, really—that serve as requirements for social adequacy and inclusion. We can readily assess the viability of a culture by observing the stereotypical behaviors of its members.

Do people exist as a single continuous, inclusive sovereign realm or as a set of exclusive, potentially warring enclaves segregated by income, ethnicity, education level, political affiliation and so on? Do you see a lot of walls, gates, checkpoints, security cameras and “no trespassing” signs? Is the law of the land enforced uniformly or are there good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods and no-go zones where even the police fear to tread?

Do random people thrown together in public spontaneously enter into conversation with each other and are comfortable with being crowded together, or are they aloof and fearful, and prefer to hide their face in the little glowing rectangle of their smartphone, jealously guarding their personal space and ready to regard any encroachment on it as an assault?

Do people remain good-natured and tolerant toward each other even when hard-pressed or do they hide behind a façade of tense, superficial politeness and fly into a rage at the slightest provocation? Is conversation soft in tone, gracious and respectful or is it loud, shrill, rude and polluted with foul language? Do people dress well out of respect for each other, or to show off, or are they all just déclassé slobs—even the ones with money?

Observe how their children behave: are they fearful of strangers and trapped in a tiny world of their own or are they open to the world and ready to treat any stranger as a surrogate brother or sister, aunt or uncle, grandmother or grandfather without requiring any special introduction? Do the adults studiously ignore each others’ children or do they spontaneously act as a single family?

If there is a wreck on the road, do they spontaneously rush to each others’ rescue and pull people out before the wreck explodes, or do they, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, “get on the phone and call up some flakes” who “rush on over and wreck it some more”?

If there is a flood or a fire, do the neighbors take in the people who are rendered homeless, or do they allow them to wait for the authorities to show up and bus them to some makeshift government shelter?

It is possible to quote statistics or to provide anecdotal evidence to assess the state and the viability of a culture, but your own eyes and other senses can provide all the evidence you need to make that determination for yourself and to decide how much faith to put in “the goodness of humanity” that is evident in the people around you.

Dmity concluded his reply by summarizing his view like this:

Cultural and social collapse are very far along. Financial collapse is waiting for a trigger. Commercial collapse will happen in stages some of which—food deserts, for instance—have already happened in many places. Political collapse will only become visible once the political class gives up. It’s not as simple as saying which stage we are at. They are all happening in parallel, to one extent or another.

My own (totally subjective) opinion is that the USA has already reached stages 1 through 4, and that there are signs that stage 5 has begun; mainly in big cities as US small towns and rural areas (Trump’s power base, by the way) are still struggling to maintain the norms and behaviors one could observe in the USA of the 1980s.  When I have visitors from Europe they always comment how friendly and welcoming US Americans are (true, I live in small-town in East-Central Florida, not in Miami…).  These are the communities which voted for Trump because they said “we want our country back”.  Alas, instead of giving them their country back, Trump gifted it to the Neocons…

Conclusion: connecting the dots; or not

Frankly, the dots are all over the place; it is really hard to miss them.  However, for the doubleplusgoodthinking“ideological drone” they remain largely invisible, and this is not due to any eyesight problem, but due to that drone’s total inability to connect the dots.  These are the kind of folks who danced on the deck of the Titanic while it was sinking.  For them, when the inevitable catastrophe comes, it will be a total, mind-blowing, surprise.  But, until that moment, they will keep on denying the obvious, no matter how obvious that obvious has become.

Don’t expect these two losers to fix anything, they will only make things worse…

In the meantime, the US ruling elites are locked into an ugly internal struggle which only further weakens the USA.  What is so telling is that the Democrats are still stuck with their same clueless, incompetent and infinitely arrogant leadership, in spite of the fact that everybody knows that the Democratic Party is in deep crisis and that new faces are desperately needed.  But no, they are still completely stuck in their old ways and the same gang of gerontocrats continues to rule the party apparatus.

That is another surefire sign of degeneracy: when a regime can only produce incompetent, often old, leaders who are completely out of touch with reality and who blame their own failures on internal (“deplorables”) and external (“the Russians”) factors.  Again, think of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, the Apartheid regime in South Africa under F. W. de Klerk, or the Kerensky regime in 1917 Russia.  It is quite telling that the political leader whom the AngloZionists try to scare the most simply thinks of them as “first-rate idiots“, it is not?

As for the Republicans, they are basically a subsidiary of the Israeli Likud Party. Just take a look at the long list of losers the Likud produced at home, and you will get a sense of what they can do in its US colony.

Eventually the USA will rebound; I have no doubts about that at all.  This is a big country with millions of immensely talented people, immense natural resources and no credible threat to it’s territory.  But that can only happen after a real *regime* change (as opposed to a change in Presidential Administration) which, itself, is only going to happen after an “E2 catastrophe” collapse.

Until then, we will all be waiting for Godot.

The Saker

[maskmanhk]

Of course, there are no keys to success in trading. Otherwise, everyone will be trading online, working from home and making millions without sweating.

We don’t live in such world.

There is no secret formula or absolute strategies to predict financial market moves and make money.  There is not a single set of steps you can follow to achieve success with trading and with binary options.

Nevertheless, there are a number of rules and personal disciplines you can work on to maximize your chances of success. If you follow these rules, you may not become a millionaire overnight but you will avoid many of the mistakes made by binary option traders that end up broke in no time.

The road to success is long and difficult. You will have to keep learning about binary options and financial markets while applying the guidelines and risk management tips explained below. It takes time and mistakes to become good at something. It is not linear. You will have periods of euphoria and periods of depression but if you stick to it, you will become a successful trader.

1. Take time to Learn the Ins and Outs of Binary Trading

When you don’t know anything about financial markets and binary options, it’s rather difficult to know where to look for advice and tips. But if you really want to learn about binary options trading, there are plenty of freely available resources you can use out there on broker websites.

We believe that the most efficient way to learn something is to get your hands dirty: learning by doing. Of course you will need to learn the theory about financial markets, in order to understand how financial asset prices are fixed and which kind of factors may impact a specific asset class.

But when you are done with the basic theory, you will need to learn by trading. Most binary options brokers propose demo accounts once you’ve made your first deposit. That way, you can try different strategies on different assets with different option types without any risk on your capital and you can get a better understanding of each product and each feature. Moreover, all our recommended brokers propose different educational tools to help you start with binary options trading, such as:

Ebooks / manuals

Educational videos

Seminars or webinars

Risk-free demo accounts

One-on-one training with a trading advisor (this king of privileges may only be available for VIP accounts that require higher initial deposits)

As we mentioned above, most of these educational tools are freely available and we highly recommend you to have a look at them before you trade with any broker. These tools may help you avoid the typical mistakes made by binary option beginners but also provide you with some useful tips regarding the implementation of basic trading strategies. In our article “Binary options definition – explanation and example”, we already presented you with the key things to know about this financial instrument. Some of the educational tools listed above and detailed below may go further into details and be more appropriate for those that already have a good understanding of financial markets and binary options.

Learn with binary option ebooks

An ebook is a downloadable manual that will present you the most important characteristics and features of binary options. Each broker proposes its own ebook and may also introduce the different functionalities of its trading platform in the manual. We will learn about binary options characteristics, order management, risk management, trading functionalities (early closure, rollover, double-up…), trading strategies… Anyoption and Topoption both offer 5 ebooks for free, you just have to login with our name and mail details to access them. 24option also proposes a 25 page ebook and many FAQs to help you better understand the specificities of binary options as well as an interactive ebook that makes reading about binary options a more fun and exciting experience. You don’t even need to login to access the 24options’ educational center.

Learn with educational videos

Videos are by far the most popular method for traders to learn about binary options and for brokers to present the different functionalities of their platforms. These videos typically include simplified diagrams that simply explain how binary options work as well as order styles and platform tutorials. Videos are extremely popular among beginners that get to visualize certain concepts that are difficult to understand without illustrations and examples. All our recommended brokers propose an extensive library of interactive and educational videos to help you learn while using real examples of trades and strategies. OptionTime proposes more than 20 different videos ranked in 3 different categories (trading basics, options trading and advanced courses) available for free that will enable you to learn things that are appropriate to your level.

Learn with seminars and webinars

Not all brokers are able to offer such advanced learning tools. A webinar is an online event that is hosted by a broker and broadcast live to a select group of individuals via the Internet. It means that a professional trader will host the event live and will be able to answer your questions.

It is not a simple video that everybody can watch, it is a tailor-made event that is broadcast live via video software. You can see it as an interactive workshop where you will be able to follow the instructions of the professional trader hosting the event. You will definitely have to login with the broker to access the webinars but you may not be required to deposit anything. 24option and Anyoption are the best in this field with weekly webinars on diversified themes (introduction to binary options, fundamental analysis, trading strategies…)

Learn with risk-free demo accounts

As we mentioned it in our introduction, we believe that a demo account is the most efficient method to learn about binary options. You can try and implement different strategies and learn to use the broker’s platform and its specific features without any risk on your capital.

Don’t hesitate to have a look at our detailed reviews of each of our recommended binary options brokers and use our secured links for additional benefits.

2. Ensure Proper Money Management

So what is money management? Money management represents a set of investment rules or discipline. And it is absolutely essential that money management becomes an important aspect of any of your binary options trading strategies.

Advanced money management skills allow you to properly decide on the level of conviction and amount you are ready to allocate to a trade. If you don’t follow strict money management rules, chances are that you will lose all the funds in your trading account without learning anything.

Money management is a trading discipline

As we repeated it multiple times on the website, you cannot win on every trade. Even the best traders on the planet don’t make money on every trade. They just have a bulletproof money management discipline. It means that they will likely lose a little amount of money on many trades but compensate with huge profits on few trades.

Inexperienced traders are always tempted to let their losing position worsen in the hope that the market will bounce, and to cut their winning position too early to cash in the achieved (albeit lower) profit made. This is because trading involves both money and emotions.

The financial markets world is a stressful environment and money management rules are designed to deter you from following your emotions blindly. It is the discipline that will prevent you from trying to go all in to make up for your losses after a string of losing trades.

Practical rules of Money Management for Successful binary options Trading

There exist no fixed Money Management rules. These rules will depend on your trading profile, your risk aversion, your available capital, the financial instrument you use… Nevertheless, it is possible to draw general guidelines to improve your money management when trading binary options.

For example, you should have a fixed number of trades a day you are willing to execute. Be it 1, 2, 5 or ten, you need to have a number in mind that you must not exceed. Most of the time, traders are tempted to reopen a new trade after a loss. A fixed number of trades can help you avoid bigger losses through trades that are only driven by emotions.

Number of trades and trade sizes

As explained below, you should set yourself a limit of trades per day to avoid over-trading. You also need to set yourself a maximum amount per trade that you should not exceed. This maximum trade size can be determined nominally ($10, $25…) or as a percentage of your capital (10% of your capital, 15% of your capital…).

We personally prefer to determine it terms of your available capital as the limit remains proportionally the same whatever the amount you have on your trading account.

Another risk with trading is to disproportionately increase your maximum trade size if you start to make money. A fixed percentage of your capital will help you keep the same risk exposure compared to your available capital. You should thus look for the binary options brokers that are proposing the lowest minimum trade size to be able to split your transactions if you only have as small available capital.

Another technique a binary option trader can use is to alter the bet size based on the payout and volatility.  For example, short term binary options (30 or 60 seconds) would require a smaller bet size as the payout is smaller and the volatility is greater than a longer term option.

Combined money management rules

Once you have determined your money management rules, you can combine them to follow your own discipline. You will then be able to focus on other important aspects of trading such as asset specific trends or advanced strategies. Your money management only determines the path you should follow and help you keep a cold hearted relationship with your trading. Find below two examples of combined money management rules:

Example rule 1: Risk 5% per trade – $200 account, risk $10 per trade Only 2 trades per day

Example rule 2: Risk 2% of account per trade – $1000 account, risk $20 per trade Stop trading once 5 losses made on same day (10% loss) Stop trading once 3 wins made on the same day

Eventually, don’t worry too much about the losses you incur, especially in the beginning. That’s when you’re still learning the ropes and making mistakes. Remember, you don’t need to be correct with your price predictions to be a profitable trader. The key is to learn from your mistakes. This is how you will build your own money management discipline.

3. Practice Proper Risk Management

Risk management is the most important aspect of trading. Especially when trading binary options that are highly speculative financial instruments. Most traders and members of the website team believe risk management is a more important aspect of trading then the actual strategy you implement.

It is a common mistake for traders to overlook the risk they take in their pursuit of high and quick profit. Most of the successful binary option traders lose on 80% of their trades, but they manage their risk to lose little on these trades and make sure they more than offset their losses with high profits on their 20% winning trades. Here, we look at 3 important rules to help you become a better trader and manage your risk.

Asset diversification is the key to risk management

You should never see trading as the sole pursuit of high profits. You should always see this activity as a trade-off between risk and reward. As such, a simple way to manage the risk of your portfolio is to diversify it. Binary option is a good instrument to diversify your risk as most brokers offer you the possibility to invest in different asset classes and different underlying assets within each class.

Strategy diversification can help you improve your risk management

It is always a good thing to concentrate on one strategy type and improve it until you master every factors of it. Nevertheless, binary options types cover large range of strategy and scenarios (uptrend trading, range trading, one touch trading…). You should always try to use as much different binary option types as you can in order to hedge your portfolio against multiple market scenarios.

Build a trading plan and stick to it

Most traders who lose money never follow their trading plan and try to make up their losses by adapting their strategy to the market. For every transaction you open, you should have a strong conviction about your market scenario and stick to it whatever the evolution of the market. Discipline is the most important skill a trader can possess. You should never open a position when you are not confident about your view and when risk is too high. The ability to stay out of the market and wait for the optimal opportunity is another extremely important skill for successful traders.

4. Work on Your Trading Psychology

Psychology represents a key aspect of trading. The best traders are the ones who are able to let their emotions aside and trade with discipline whatever the market conditions and whatever the mark-to-market of their positions.

The psychology of trading intends to analyze and rationalize the trader’s emotional responses to the events in the market and in their holdings. The three most commonly spread emotions amid investors during the trading process are the followings: Fear, panic and greed.

Fear and panic are the most dangerous emotions of the trader psychology

Fear and panic are responsible for more than 90% of inexperienced traders’ losses. They are mostly experienced when a trader makes a series of unsuccessful trades and is anxious to make up for lost ground immediately. This is the worst reaction a trader can have and this reaction is closely linked to the investment psychology.

Remember, if you want to be a successful trader, you need to have a trading plan and stick to it. Binary options traders are less impacted by fear and panic. With binary options, you cannot lose more than your invested capital. That is a great advantage of binary options compared to most financial instruments (forex, CFD, warrants…). Nevertheless, fear and panic can still happen when the market is going against one of your open positions or after a series of losing trades.

To avoid these emotions, you need to have clear levels in mind (entry level, take profit level and stoploss level) and stick to them. Another way to resist these parasitic emotions is to think in terms of acceptable losses rather than targeted profit. Whenever you reach you loss threshold, you should stop trading for the day and let these emotions express elsewhere than on the trading floor. Always improve your trading risk management by not risking more than 20-30% of your account capital as maximum exposure. This is why you should always look for brokers that proposes the lowest minimum investment /trade size levels.

Greed is good but greed can wipe an investment portfolio

Greed is emotion that makes trader cut their winning positions to early in order to cash in a certain (albeit smaller) profit and that makes trader let their losing positions open for too long hoping that the market will finally adjust in their direction.

Greed is responsible for a fair share of missed profits and unexpected losses. Greed will fuel the temptation to cover up ground using the Double up or the Roll over functions provided by binary options broker platforms. These functions should not be used to cover up a series of losses but should only be implemented when they fit your initial trading plan.

Once again, there is an advantage to use binary options compared to most other financial instruments, binary options have short maturities. Your trading plan can thus be quickly confirmed or infirmed.

Psychology plays a major role in all forms of investment activity, causing a consistent need to keep emotions in check. This can be a tough task when money is involved, but it can be accomplished by establishing and sticking to a set plan of action. Those who precisely plan out their trades in advance, based on both fundamental analysis and technical indicators, and who stick to them tend to earn more than those who do not on average.

5. Keep Your Trading Strategy Simple

This is one of the most used quotes in financial markets. It is posted on every specialized website, forum and we might even have used it before here on prior articles.

The key to make money on financial markets would be to Keep Your Trading Simple. But what does this really means and how to efficiently follow this rule? This is what we will try to cover here.

We hope that it will help you on your daily trading activities, that it will improve your performances and that it will teach you how to Keep Your Trading Simple. When someone says “Keep Your Trading Simple” we each tend to think of something slightly different because we all have different trading experiences, we all have different favourite indicators… Nevertheless, there exist general rules that anyone can follow to keep its trading simple and improve its risk-reward ratio.

Simple means that you first need to follow simple steps

Each trade must involve a set of steps that you need to follow methodically. The transaction must be triggered by a strict number of rules that you need to define yourself. It can involve the coordination of different indicators meeting certain conditions (RSI lower than 30 and MACD cross from below triggering a BUY order for instance), or the underlying asset crossing a specific level (a specific moving average or a specific resistance).

Once this set of steps is met, you need to trade whatever the external conditions. So keeping your trading simple means you have defined a set-up. Something that you have previously determined needs to occur in order to trigger the opening of a trading position.

If you want to keep it simple, define a basic setup as well as a trigger level and stick to them. It may take some time and work to find a setup and a strategy that generates profit, but it must be done. This is the only way to be able to build simple and reliable trading strategies.

Determine a time horizon, a target and a maximum loss level

Now that you have setup that identifies simple trading opportunities and a trigger level to open the position, you need exit levels in terms of profits and losses as well as a time horizon. If your setup has been built to identify short-term trends, use short maturities and vice-versa. Binary options with longer maturities are mainly used by fundamental traders that try to speculate on longer trends. By definition, traders tend to use far price targets and close maximum loss levels. When the setup identifies a trade opportunity, it is always better to benefit from a large upside until the next price resistance and risk a small downside until the next support. If a setup looks like it could form, you need to begin to consider what type of expiry you would choose if this setup turns into a trade. Confirm your decision so that if the price hits your trigger you can act without hesitation.

Stick to this setup and adjust it until it works – Make your trading simple

Keeping once trading simple also means that you need to resist the temptation of constantly switching strategies, assets or targets. Trading is an experimental process. You need to test your strategy and your setup, improve it constantly and learn from your mistakes and losses. Only through this process will you be able to isolate the wrong parameters and build both an efficient trading setup and profit generating trading strategies. Focus on a single trade setup, isolate a trigger and establish guidelines for how you will exit.

So this is how you keep it simple. Keep your trade set-up limited to a couple criteria. Then define what your trade trigger is. Set up a target price and a maximum loss level. Do it over and over while adjusting the parameters until it becomes efficient.

All our recommend binary option brokers will propose you advanced tools to manage your risk and keep your trading simple. From binary option builders to post-trading functionalities, all these tools will allow you to improve your trading strategies and generate higher profits. Don’t hesitate to have a look at our reviews of the best binary option brokers in Europe and benefit from our special binary option bonus offers with multiple brokers.

6. Avoid the Most Common Binary Trading Mistakes

Being a successful trader requires a lot of different skills (patience, curiosity, discipline…) and years of experience. Even thought it is difficult to identify the precise characteristics that make you a successful trader, it is quite easy to identify the main mistakes that unsuccessful traders repeat over and over.

We have been trading all sorts of instruments on all asset class over the last ten years and there exist common mistakes that you should definitely try to avoid if you want to make money with binary options.

There is no magic formula that you can follow to become a successful trader. It all depend on your strategies on the specific assets you decide to trade and on the self-discipline you will apply to your trading plans.

Mistake 1: Don’t try to trade all assets and implement different strategies

You should try to focus on one asset and one strategy and improve it the best you can while taking into account the mistakes you do along the way and learning from them. It is important to be flexible when trading binary options, however, you should try to gain experience in one specific area to be able to accurately understand the relevant factors and opportunities. Successful traders are able to show patience and perseverance and stick with their trading plan. If you constantly jump from one strategy to another as soon as you start to generate loss, you will never be able to fully understand your mistakes.

Mistake 2: Don’t try to make trends happen but follow them

No trader is able to sell the top and buy the bottom of a trend. Successful traders try to identify trends with fundamental and technical analysis. Once their scenario is confirmed, they simply enter the trend while it has already started and just follow it. Timing is the single most important factor for binary options trading. There exists a thigh line between entering too early and hesitating for too long. Try to choose one asset available with binary options and follow it until you are able to understand and identify trend confirmations. This is the only way to effectively improve your timing.

Mistake 3: Perform your due-diligence and wait for strong conviction

Successful traders are able to show their true skills after a sting of losses rather than a string of profits. Successive losses can quickly dent a trader’s nerve and motivate him to open positions without convictions. You should definitely try to resist this matter of fact. You always need to show strong conviction in your trading plan and perform the require due-diligence before implementing any strategy. Never let stress dictate your trading behaviour and always keep a cold-hearted attitude regarding your binary options trading strategy.

via Kenya Forex Firm

[paradoxicalca]

r/hockey NHL Power Rankings Week 6: Tropical Depression Edition

/r/Hockey NHL Power Rankings Week Nov 4, 2019 - Nov 10, 2019Thank YouThank you to all of the volunteers doing the power rankings. Each ranker has their own system and have their own reasonings and analyis. It truly is a lot of work.RankersSpoilerOrganizersSpoilerVisualizationThe visualization contains historical data, so you can see how your team has done over time. Hopefully, we can run this for many years in hopes that we can see the rise and fall of teams by /r/hockey opinion.It automatically updates so feel free to bookmark. You can find it hereProcessHow does this work? Throughout the course of the week rankers are able to access an app that will allow them to rank teams. At the end of the period we calculate the average ranking for every team and collate all of the analysis provided by rankers.The app then generates a post that is first proofread and then posted to /r/hockey!Rankings (27/31 Rankers Reporting)Ranking (avg)TeamDeltaOverall RecordRecord This WeekComments1 (1.59)Washington Capitals113-2-32-0-0The boys are buzzin. The top line isn't slowing down and our shiny new second line of Vrana - Kuznetsov - Wilson is tearing up the weaker competition. MacLellan's new look bottom six is still giving teams fits with their mix of speed and size. The defense is the best it's been since Mike Green ran the PP. Samsonov is the prince that was promised. Aside from a surprise mid-season extension for Backstrom there really isn't anything more a humble Caps fan could hope for.2 (3.03)Boston Bruins-111-3-31-2-1Well, this is a slump. Nothing but sloppy, uninspired hockey this week from the Bruins. The fact that we beat the Penguins is a shocker. Lost a close game to the Habs, stunk against the Red Wings, and played 40 minutes of bad hockey against the Flyers after having 10 shots through 40 minutes. Bruins showed signs of life in the 3rd period against them but ultimately fell in the shootout. PS: Pasta, get good at penalty shots.3 (3.68)New York Islanders-12-3-12-0-1Despite the rough loss to the Penguins the point streak is still alive. All throughout the goal-tending has been fantastic by both Greiss and Varly. With Eberle now back we will have to see if he can recapture the magic he has with Barzal, which was missing at the start of this season. Even without Matt Martin, Cizikas and Clutterbuck combined to have an outstanding week. On defense, Adam Pelech is playing like a top d-man. Other teams and fans will hear more about him if he keeps it up, but for now he is one of the most underrated players around.4 (4.76)St. Louis Blues412-3-33-0-0The bad news is that the Blues really aren't playing the best hockey they're capable of. The good news is that we're still winning. Many close games but the duo of DP57 and ROR is dragging us to some wins, our D is stabalizing, and our goaltending is proving good enough to compete. Would like to see some depth pieces begin to contribute more, and the loss of Tarasenko is just beginning to set in, but at the end of the day we're leading the Western Conference and we can still definitely get better from here. There also might not be a more trusted ownership/GM combo in the League than Army and Stillman. It's a fun time to be a Blues fan.5 (6.74)Edmonton Oilers-12-5-22-1-16 (6.76)Colorado Avalanche110-5-22-1-0The Avs have awoken. It took about two weeks, but the Avs finally figured out chemistry against Nashville & Columbus. Bad News two new injuries this week, now with 6 players out with Grubauer the only one set to return soon. Sakic looks smart for acquiring all the depth this offseason. The new top line is fun, not as skilled, but no players work harder than Donskoi and Calvert and Mackinnon benefits from the chaos they create and they benefit from the chaos he creates. Francouz has been sufficient in Grubauer's absence but isn't really playing himself into a potential 1B role. Avs start a Western Canadian Road trip this week and look to keep the momentum from the last couple games. First up a big 4 point game in Winnipeg on Tuesday. Calder Watch: Makar had an insane week, with points in all three games a 3 point night and a 2 goal game with his first GWG. He is now at 17 points in 17 games which ties him for third in scoring amoung NHL dmen, Crazy!7 (9.82)Nashville Predators39-5-31-1-1I'm away from my computer this week so I'll keep this one to a single point: /u/dabz14, I'm a true believer after the Red Wings game this past week. That second period was brutal, and the Preds made sure I understood that by being on the other side of the brutality against the Avalanche.8 (10.26)Pittsburgh Penguins610-6-12-1-0Almost as soon as we got Malkin back, Crosby gets knocked out. Please start wrapping these players up in bubble wrap.9 (10.5)Carolina Hurricanes-59-7-10-3-0The lack of top tier star power is starting to show. Each of the last 4 games should have been winnable but they ended up not even being close.10 (11.53)Buffalo Sabres-49-6-20-2-0Three more games until we hit .500.11 (12.59)Vegas Golden Knights19-7-31-2-1Tough week for the Golden Knights going 1-2-1 on the road trip. Blown leads in the 3rd period has plagued the team lately and really needs to change.12 (12.91)Vancouver Canucks-39-6-30-3-1Ever since rushing to jump on the ill-conceived and somewhat forced "Team Like That marketing campaign, the Canucks have indeed become a team like that. The team like that has since lost 5 of their last 6, with their only win coming against a floundering Sharks team. Over this period the powerplay has lost some the luster shown earlier in the year, and Canucks fans must face the tough reality that a team (like that) might not win 70% of its games this year. The club remains competitive, but this string of losses should slide them down to the middle of the pack in our power rankings - the "playoff bubble" position most anticipated the team would inhabit at the start of the season.13 (13.41)Toronto Maple Leafs29-6-42-1-1The Leafs are a confusing team. The week started with a sloppy 3-1 win against the Kings on Tuesday which made it a two game winning streak, which was extended on a 2-1 OT win against the Golden Knights (Did you see Ceci's beautiful setup for Pacioretty!?), which was won by captain Tavares himself. Unfortunately that streak ended Saturday night, after the Flyers got shootout revenge, highlighted by Marner taking an awkward tumble. After trying to take another shift, he was sent to the dressing room and shut down for the game, and after an MRI, for four weeks. Looks like leaf fans are still gonna annoy r/hockey by saying this team still isn't fully healthy yet :). Is that an excuse for letting up 4 goals in the first against the Blackhawks? Oh it's the second half of a back-to-back. That excuse. Made the game close, but not close enough. Overall, another confusing week for leafs fans14 (13.5)Arizona Coyotes-19-6-21-2-115 (14.18)Calgary Flames110-7-32-0-1The Flames had a good week, getting 5 out of a possible 6 points. The team appears to have a completely different effort level when they are down in the third period, having multiple late goals to tie both Arizona and St. Louis, forcing overtime. If only they could play with the same sense of urgency at all times. Johnny Gaudreau continues a large slump. While he's still getting points, he doesn't look like himself and his turnovers and defensive game make him feel like a liability at times. The Flames have already played 20 games this year, so hopefully their schedule slowing down a bit will give them some time to solve a few issues.16 (15.18)Anaheim Ducks-59-8-10-2-0This season feels like a rerun. Looks like a losing home stand came 1 month earlier than last year. A poor effort against the oilers after 4 days off. Similarly poor effort against the wild. I don’t see the fight. I don’t see the ducks ready to start any game lately. Song of the week: Free fallin’ - Tom Petty and the heartbreakers17 (15.35)Tampa Bay Lightning28-5-22-0-0Hard to take a ton away from just a back to back against the same team, but I did like what I saw from the team. Got some depth scoring, so that was nice. 3/7 on the PP isn't too shabby, and killing off all 4 penalties is quite nice too. Very happy only seeing 4 PP's given up, seems Tampa decided they were just having no fun sitting in the box.18 (15.76)Montreal Canadiens-19-5-32-0-1This week the team made big strides in improving their penalty kill (albeit in large part to Price in the net). Victor Mete is making up for all the goals he didn’t score to start his career and it helping beat the Bruins makes it all the better. Ryan Poehling finally has first few games of the season but if all Julien is going to do is play him for 9 minutes a game I would rather see him getting more time in the AHL.19 (15.97)Philadelphia Flyers210-5-24-0-0Its been a very Fly week this week, not a Die week. Myers has been on fire since scoring his first of the season, Coots, Lindblom, and TK line is actual sex on ice, our goaltending is stabilizing, and we are making teams regret starting their backup against us. 3 games in 4 nights against teams in playoff spots, and having pulled a majority of the points from it means we are doing a good hockey. Giroux with an absolute slapper in the SO, Moose and Hart are being the tandem we need them to be, and the team responding well under AV means things are well. We may never go pointless in a game again. Also PROVY PLEASE JUST KEEP YOUR GAME SIMPLE YOU ARE TOO GOOD TO BE PLAYING AS POORLY AS YOU HAVE BEEN RECENTLY. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk pt.2. Praise Gritty20 (17.68)Winnipeg Jets-10-7-12-0-121 (19.47)Florida Panthers-38-4-51-1-1Panthers' games are absolutely crazy. 4th in GF/game and 4th most GA/game. Half their game have been to overtime...it's not good for my heart. Recap; decent game against the Caps. Good game against the Islanders, should have won but Greiss was fantastic. Good game against the Rangers, Monty was bad, but the team rallied to with it. The Panthers don't give up and that's great.22 (20.74)Dallas Stars-8-8-21-0-1Only two weeks this game. Big win over the Avalanche and a OT loss to the Jets. Standouts? Faksa, Bishop. Takeaways? We played great against the Avalanche, and the Jets loss was hard-fought A 1-1 record doesn't always spell improvement - and it's sure not as good as last week - but we're playing better than our first 10 games. That's what matters.23 (23.56)New York Rangers-7-6-22-1-1Just another week at the office for the New York Rangers. We opened the week by losing 6-2 to the Ottawa Senators. This one was tough and really showed how young this team is, but a game like this was necessary. Next, we bounced back against the Wings by winning solidly 5-1. The next day, we got to see vintage Hank against the Canes. Even though we got outshot 47-19, we somehow walked out with a 4-2 win. To cap off the week, we had a shooting gallery of a game against the Panthers, falling 6-5 in the shootout. Some positives to come out of the week were that the kids are finally catching their stride and really developing. Kakko, Chytil, and Fox have looked great the past few games. Lindgren also deserves a shoutout for his play lately. Strome continues to put up points as well. Here's to another successful and entertaining week (also hopefully Lias gets more minutes).24 (24.41)San Jose Sharks37-10-13-0-0Much better week for the Sharks, but there's still a lot of work to be done. They were able to squeeze out 3 wins, but almost blew late leads against the Hawks and Wild. If the Sharks want to be back in the playoff picture they'll have to clean it up and play consistently tight defence for the next two weeks, with the upcoming divisional games against good teams like the Oilers and Vegas. The forwards are looking better and they've had some periods with really good defence, but they can't have those 10 minute stretches where they almost blow the entire thing, because good divisional teams will pounce on those opportunities.25 (24.47)Columbus Blue Jackets-16-8-31-2-0Bemstrom got his first and his second career goals this week. The two games we were pretty close, which is an improvement over our 5 game skid, but we're still 1-6-1 in our last 8. Things are looking grim if we don't improve by American Thanksgiving.26 (26.5)Chicago Blackhawks-6-7-42-1-1After a disconcerting California road trip, the Blackhawks managed to go 2-0-1 against the Canucks, Penguins, and Leafs. Kane has 5G, 6A and points in each of our last 6 games. Keith has been playing well, and is averaging over 25 min in ATOI, which is around his career average, but is significantly higher than the past 2 seasons. Lehner has been fantastic, and is 2nd to only Greiss in SV%.27 (27.21)Minnesota Wild26-10-12-1-0Wild fans are in this weird spot right now where they want the youngsters to show signs of development but the collective team is being cheered on to tank. Kevin Fiala has shown, to quote the GM-who-shall-not-be-named, "gamebreaker" qualities in the past few games. Jordan Greenway and Joel Eriksson Ek have finally looked in the mirror and realized they have big bodies meant for a physical brand of hockey. Ryan Donato...well, he's still looking pretty lost. Can't win them all I suppose. As much as this franchise needs a number one pick, it did feel good to see four pucks go past Mr. Darcy on Saturday night.28 (28.03)Ottawa Senators36-9-13-1-0With the Sens recording 5 wins in their last 8 games, I'm suddenly feeling a sense of...what's the opposite of "shame"? Less shame. That's it. Make no mistakes folks - even though they've had a good week thanks to the heroic efforts of guys like Pageau and Nilsson playing absurdly well, this team is going to finish in the bottom 5. They NEED to finish in the bottom 3 in any case, so as to have the best chance of picking up a generational forward talent at this stacked draft. This means not winning against other bottom tier teams like the Kings and Rangers, which we unfortunately were unable to do this week. Good games for team morale but certainly not for draft position!!29 (28.26)New Jersey Devils-15-7-42-2-02-2-0 This week, nothing too out of the ordinary. Back in Sept. r/devils did a straw poll about Hynes' leash and most said he had until Halloween to turn it around. A week after the devils are 5-7-4 and severely under-performing for the talent level of the roster. This roster shouldn't be 5-11. Shero should already have a list in his mind at this point to replace Hynes. The Good: Blackwood seems to have rebounded from his rocky start and has taken the starter reins from Cory. Hughes is still playing great. He isnt always scoring, but seeing him play with hustle every shift is amazing to see. The Bad: Hall is cursed. He has 2 goals on 59 shots, only 3%, while his career shooting percent is over 10%. The Ugly: We're still barely 0.500 hockey week to week and sitting at the bottom of the metro, only 1 point above the Sens ins the same 16 games. The talk has already started on Hall's fetching price come trade deadline time.30 (28.56)Los Angeles Kings-55-11-10-2-1I was fortunate enough to watch the Kings play the Leafs in Toronto this past week. We look slower than molasses right now and its a pretty boring brand of hockey almost worse than the ‘wear you down’ of Sutter’s time as coach. Some of the young guys are doing well but its crazy to think that this core won 2 cups.31 (29.59)Detroit Red Wings-16-12-12-2-0Robbie Fabbri and Jonathan Bernier stole the week for the Red Wings. With a jam packed schedule of four games the Wings continued their walk of shame with piss poor effort against the Preds and breakdowns against the Rangers. Jimmy Howard gets the start and the hook in both games. Then the trade for Fabbri happens and Bernier gets the start in both games against Boston and Vegas and now the parade planning begins. In reality, the Bruins were at the tail-end of a 11-2-1 stretch and Vegas was back to back after getting beaten up by the Capitals. However, this is what we should expect from the Wings. The plan is to stay competitive and transition to the next phase of the rebuild. Detroit needs to be in these games against top teams who are struggling and limiting their chances. Boston and Vegas combined for 30 shots against the Wings at 5v5(47 All Situations) which is an incredible defensive performance considering the power those offenses have. r/hockey NHL Power Rankings Week 6: Tropical Depression Edition Source

[mercadosadaf]

The Value of Swimming In Uncertain Times

Hi Swimmers

Firstly, apologies for the radio silence over the last few weeks on the blog - we've had the whole Swim Smooth team busily engaged in a complete revamp of the entire www.swimsmooth.com website and coaching interface, and whilst we are not quite done, we are getting very close and hope to resume the blog and our usual community engagement very soon. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Today, Head Coach Paul Newsome, has prepared a reflective piece for you on the value of swimming and what it means to us all, especially in these uncertain times. We hope it allows you to pause over a cup of tea or coffee and think a little bit about your own swimming and how your relationship with the water might have changed somewhat in the last 12 months.

Paul features three brief stories of some inspiring swimmers he has had the pleasure to work with and how their swimming journeys have been significantly altered by the coronavirus, mostly for the better. Paul summarises with some of his own take-home points on how this period has changed his own thinking on swimming somewhat and how his ordinarily extrinsic competitive goalposts have shifted to a place of intrinsic challenge and finding a new calm with that. So please, relax, put your feet up and let’s get a little zen for a moment.

The Value of Swimming in Uncertain Times

I was recently invited as a guest on the new An Open Water Swimmer's Podcast with host Will Ellis (release date: 28th February here) to discuss my love and passion for swimming - an easy topic for me! Will is a great host and someone I'd taken for a Swim Smooth analysis session as part of a group over a decade ago in the UK. Given my area of technical interest in swimming, many podcasts that we've done with other hosts have always centered on these elements, but Will took a very different slant, one which focused very much on the "why" of swimming.

Why do I swim? Why do I enjoy the water? Why swimming and not another sport? I came away with a headful of thoughts that I'd either never given due consideration to before, or maybe some that crystallized a growing appreciation I've started to foster of late?

Given the current state of play with COVID-19 restrictions on our sport over the last 12 months, I feel my own relationship with water has not necessarily changed per se but it's definitely evolved. Perhaps though, it's me who's changed and it's this period of intrinsic reflection that has heightened the "why" behind what we all love to do? For many of you, could the absence of being able to do the thing you love or the thing that perhaps challenges you the most (as a triathlete maybe?) be the necessary catalyst to kick your swimming to new heights of appreciation (however you measure that) when we do all come through this? I'm certainly seeing that in myself and my squad of very lucky swimmers over here in Perth, Australia.

Lady Luck

Over the last 12 months, Perth has been heralded as one of the best places on the planet with respect to the relatively few restrictions and impact of the coronavirus - many of us scarcely realizing how lucky we are. Next week will see 3,500 people start one of the largest open water swims on the planet, the Rottnest Channel Swim, in which I will be competing with a good friend over the 20km distance. We have, however, just come out of a heavily publicized (albeit very short) 5-day lockdown here in Perth which restricted access to the pools and saw us only being able to swim solo in the open water or with one other family member. This incident garnered international press on account of the very rapid and focused response to a single case in the community transferred between a quarantined hotel guest and a security guard. The whole state came to a grinding halt for just one case - everything ceased and panic was high. Despite extensive testing (myself included) of those who may have been in the vicinity of this one person, fortunately, no other community transmission has occurred. Consequently, life is returning to some form of normality again. 

One of the hardest things I've personally struggled with over the last 12 months though is being able to fully appreciate and empathize with just how brutal this period must have been - and continues to be - for many of you from the perspective of being able to simply enjoy the pleasures of a nice swim. Lady Luck has shone down on me, and for why, I do not know? I feel a toiling mixed sense of guilt, of pure luck, and of umbrage at myself for the seemingly petty feeling of missing the ability to travel overseas and share my love of swimming with you all, wherever you might be. I miss it so much and yet feel I have no right to do so given where I have the good fortune to be right now. 

I had a frank conversation before Christmas with my Mum about this. Many of you know Linda as "Mother Smooth" and if you've ever ordered anything from us, she'd have sent it to you. True to the adage that "Mum always knows best", I finally managed to pluck up the courage and expand on how excited I was to be taking my wife and two kids camping over the Christmas holidays to a beautiful town called Albany in the South West which we'd all visited together as a family a few years earlier. Mother Smooth couldn't understand why I'd not told her sooner, to which I responded that I didn't want to make her feel bad. "Feel bad?" she quizzed, "I am at my happiest when I know you are happy". Profound stuff - good old Mum!

The Changing Tide

So, what has this all really got to do with swimming? If you are in the northern hemisphere, chances are you are sick to the back teeth of hearing about the coronavirus and maybe even more so the thought that other pockets of the world are experiencing far fewer restrictions than yourself currently. Last week's swift lockdown gave me a rapid reminder though just how uncertain these times can be - the tide can change on a dime so easily. What has been remarkable for me has been watching how those of you who still continue in enforced lockdowns have survived this last 12 months and I'd like to recognize some of the cool - and crazy - things you've been doing, obviously simply for the joy of needing to get your swim in! Perhaps you can tell us more about how you've weathered this storm so far?

Helen Webster, UK

I met Helen in March 2014 at the 220 Triathlon Show in London. As the editor of the 220 Triathlon Magazine, Helen had taken it upon herself to learn to swim freestyle properly for an upcoming triathlon and I was tasked with assisting her with that goal in an Endless Pool and in front of hundreds of people. For someone with very little swimming experience at that point, Helen did amazingly well in front of such a crowd and it’s a testament to her bubbly “can do” spirit that she took on this challenge!

We spent a good hour or so filming her stroke, analyzing it (in front of everyone!), and then getting back into the pool to correct her issues which mainly centred around developing confidence in the water and improving the timing of her stroke, specifically her breathing. Back then, Helen was what we’d have described as a classic Bambino - someone very new to swimming with a relatively high level of anxiety in the water - so to see the following images circulating on Helen’s Facebook page in the last couple of weeks simply blew my mind! Helen’s gone all Bear Grylls on us and now is not happy unless she has to break the ice in her backyard pool just to ensure she gets her swim in! I’m so proud of her as a mate!

Here's Helen on what the last 12 months have meant for her swimming:

"Open-water swimming has been a key part of my training week ever since taking those first steps with Paul all those years ago! Lockdown had made me realise just how important swimming is to me though and in so many ways. Not living near the coast and with managed venues nearby forced to close I've realised how much I rely on swimming for lifting my mood, giving me a pause from a busy world and fully immersing myself in nature. I'm a pool swimmer too and with centres all closed I'm even missing the tang of chlorine and having to do kick drills!!

It sounds melodramatic but a tearful moment on the phone with a friend prompted her to gift me a garden pool and swimming tethered has given me a route back to the water (thanks to Swim Smooth Coach Jason Tait for the tethered swim sets!). It's also led me to a new swim community who are making the most of what they have and finding humour in sitting in ice baths and under hosepipes, or sharing tips for how to stop your garden pool freezing!

I can't wait to have my 'proper' swimming back and believe me, will never take it for granted again. I'm planning a swim challenge for September and keeping fingers crossed it goes ahead!"

Sue Allingham, Denmark

Sue attended one of our 3-day Swim Smooth Coach Education Courses in Mallorca, Spain back in May 2019 and was clearly a super-passionate swimmer and coach. We’ve remained in close contact via Messenger since and she frequently sends me crazy pictures of where she’s been swimming, however, nothing could quite prepare me for this one - her frozen Margarita experience (as she calls it)!

When I asked Sue about what the last 12 months have meant for her swimming, she said this:

"A year ago I entered the World Ice Swimming Championships in Bled Slovenia for a laugh. 2 weeks later I broke both my wrists and then Lockdown! By April I was going stir crazy and the day I had my casts removed, I got back into the sea, as the pools were shut. Little did I know that I would continue going in every day since! As my wrists got stronger, I could swim longer but the thought of trying to pull on a wetsuit was hanging over my head. By the time I probably could get one on I no longer felt the need. I continued to swim throughout the year and ended up becoming the Danish age-group champion in 25m & 100m Freestyle - Ice swimming and 5k Openwater. 

A year on from Covid and we are still in the sea and simply just grabbing any opportunity to jump in the water, to try new beaches or temperatures. As you can see from the picture, we’ve started making our own frozen Margaritas! 

What will I do when the pools open again? Dive in and just keep swimming! Never thought I’d miss the black line so much. Swimming as always is such a social thing & drinking coffee with friends after each swim has really made Lockdown actually enjoyable. Already looking at SwimRuns in Sweden, hopefully as it’s close by we may be allowed to travel. Otherwise lots of pre-paid events carried over from last year. I live in hope. 

One thing is for sure, the sea is always open!"

Mark Turner, Switzerland

Mark also attended one of our other 3-day Swim Smooth Coach Education Courses in Mallorca, Spain (the week after Sue) and had just a few months prior completed the Rottnest Channel Swim here in Perth. Mark set up the world’s most prestigious multi-day cycling event for amateurs, the Haute Route, which is a brutally tough challenge in a breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Mark was also the man behind Ellen MacArthur’s sailing career (who set the world record in 2005 for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe), the Offshore Challenges/OC Sport business, and the Extreme Sailing Series, and is widely seen as a visionary in the sport of sailing. And, if all that wasn't enough, Mark led the Volvo Ocean Race series as CEO in 2016/17. Needless to say, Mark is not someone to do things by half and is always up for a (big) challenge! 

Mark now lives in Switzerland on the banks of Lake Geneva and is fastidious about his swimming, especially a weekly completion of the infamous 10 x 400m Red Mist Endurance session! Like with many parts of the world, Mark has had unreliable access to his local pool over the last 12 months and so has turned to the great outdoors instead…even during the middle of winter! Hooking up regularly with like-minded souls in these freezing temperatures has been what has kept Mark going and will stand him in good stead when the world finally comes back to some sense of normality.

It Is What It Is

I think one of the most obvious things with each of these three swimmers - and yourself hopefully too - is that they’ve simply rolled with the punches that 2020 and beyond has brought their way. They’ve got on with it, adapted, pivoted, and thrived in a new environment and in doing so sought out other goals to keep them motivated and in the game. Resilience personified. We always talk so virtuously in training and racing about “control the controllable”, and clearly, none of this is in any of our control right now. Way back in April 2020 when we were still in lockdown and I was personally unable to coach, a very close friend and one of my athletes, Nolan McDonnell told me to “stop trying to save us all - we can look after ourselves!” in response to me frantically trying to work out how to keep everyone fit and engaged when I couldn’t be with them face-to-face. It really struck a chord with me, and whilst it didn’t happen overnight, I did begin to accept the situation. 

Knowing I wouldn’t be able to travel and spread the Swim Smooth word - as has been my life over the last 16 or so years - was a real blow, but ever so gradually I started to move beyond this and to focus on what I could do, not what I couldn’t. For me personally, that’s meant plenty more time at home with the family, and as we are seeing on the pool deck at the moment, plenty of opportunities to be super consistent with our respective training schedules too. The squad here in Perth has never swum so quickly before, ever! Why? Everyone has their groundhog day schedule dialled in and they’re sticking to it because there’s nowhere else to go, and there’s something very centring about that, zen even. 

Fancying a challenge myself - and recognizing the collective benefit of encouraging others to follow suit - I have even got myself back into doing a few triathlons, marathon swims, and even the odd SwimRun event too! Taking on a range of varied challenges was in an effort to not put all our eggs into one basket in case events got canceled or postponed. 

Again, I’m super privileged to be able to do these things right now, and part of that appreciation brings a whole new angle on why we do what we do. For me, it’s all been about my shared experience of training up with one of my best mates Chris to do the Rottnest Channel Swim together as a Duo next week. With last week’s unprecedented lockdown it looked certain to be canceled but you know what, I wasn’t bothered in the slightest! The religiously attended Sunday morning swim with Chris in the river is what it’s all about - not the event itself. Swimming + Best Mate = Win. 

Sure, the race will be a nice finale, but the old adage of “the journey is better than the destination” is what this whole crazy period has really taught me. We egg each other on even in the middle of winter and for me, this has seen a major step away from the profound sense of training for competition’s sake, to training for training’s sake, and for the social camaraderie that this has brought. I wouldn’t change that for the world.

Even if you haven’t had the opportunity (yet) to be quite so free in your activities, that time will come again, hopefully very soon, and in the meantime, just set yourself some little consistency of routine benchmarks to tick off. Get creative like our friends above (just maybe not quite so crazy!). How many swims in the river can you consistently do every Sunday? Can you always ensure you meet up with Bob for your Friday lunchtime jog in the park? Make sure you commit to that group ride on Zwift you booked in for on the Companion app etc. It’s the little things, done often that will keep you going and when the world opens up again, you’ll be ready! 

Thanks for reading. Swim on!

Paul

from Sports http://www.feelforthewater.com/2021/02/the-value-of-swimming-in-uncertain-times.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[weightlos6]

An Inside Look at My Health Using InsideTracker

An Inside Look at My Health Using InsideTracker:

While needle pricks and blood draws can be highly intimating to many people, because of my hospitalization as a kid, I’m rather immune to getting pricked and prodded; so it doesn’t phase me much when I’m due for lab work. In fact, I find it pretty fascinating how much information we can gather from a simple, nearly pain-free test. I spend much of my energy focused on my wellbeing (albeit sometimes too much energy), so I enjoy being able to see how my efforts are playing out internally.

It’s been a solid year since I’ve had any sort of lab work done, so was I was excited to collaborate with InsideTracker to get a comprehensive blood and analysis as a way to check in on my health.

What is InsideTracker?

InsideTracker is a blood testing service that uses science to analyze your results with personal recommendations for nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle. The InsideTracker team is made up of experts in aging, genetics and biometric data, from Harvard, MIT and Tufts. Whether you are an elite athlete, stressed-out professional, or bust parent, InsideTracker optimizes your health by analyzing your blood, lifestyle and nutrition habits to help you achieve your personal goals — whether that’s increasing energy to chase your kids or going after a gold medal.

Curious to learn more about the biomarkers they measure and how it’s different from visiting your doctor? Get all that info and more here.

How does it work?

You simply schedule an appointment at your local lab, print off the lab slip from InsideTracker, and get your blood drawn at the lab. Your results are automatically sent to InsideTracker and are uploaded to your personal dashboard (mine only took a few days). You also answer a set of questions about your lifestyle, such as sleep, activity level and diet, in order to get the best personalized recommendations.

Once your results are uploaded and analyzed, you get an email with a link to your personal dashboard that’s chockfull of information. Even if you aren’t savvy with blood tests, they do a great job breaking it down and making it super easy to digest and comprehend.

My Results

I did the Ultimate Test, which includes 43 biomarkers. InsideTracker breaks your results down by At Risk (out of range), Needs Improvement (in range, but not optimal) and Optimal.

I had 4 At Risk, 8 Needs Improvement, and 31 Optimal.

My 4 At Risk markers were:

LDL (“bad” cholesterol)

Eosinophils (white blood cells)

SHBG (Sex Hormone Binding Globulin)

TIBC (Total Iron-Binding Capacity)

The 8 that “needs improvement” included: Vitamin D, HDL, TS (transferrin saturation), and magnesium — all on the low end. Again, all of these items are technically in the normal range, but not optimal according to InsideTracker.

When you review your results, you’re given nutrition, supplement, and lifestyle recommendations for each biomarker that is not optimal. They also include an explanation of what each biomarker is/why it’s important, and some even include an informational video clip.

The personalized recommendations are based not only on your results, but from the information you provide about your activity, diet, sleep, stress, etc.

TIBC (red) – At Risk

Vitamin D (yellow) – Needs Improvement

Cortisol (green): Optimal

So, am I changing anything?

After going through my personalized recommendations, I am definitely going to be more diligent with my Vitamin D supplementation (already knew my Vitamin D was low – like most Americans), and I plan to increase my fish/wild salmon intake for not only Vitamin D, but protein as well.

Of my 4 At Risk biomarkers, the only recommendation given was for LDL which was to decrease consumption of coconut oil (a.k.a. saturated fat). I found it interesting that InsideTracker didn’t provide personalized recommendations for the other 3 biomarkers that were out of range.

I honestly didn’t know how to interpret my SHBG and TIBC, but after consulting with my naturopath, these aren’t critical values that need priority attention. And while my TIBC was high and my TS was low (confusing, right?), I do have sufficient iron and am not anemic.

My 116 LDL is out of range (>100), but it’s not a huge concern to neither me nor my doctor. High cholesterol is hereditary in my family and is mostly likely not due to lifestyle. Plus, my total cholesterol is normal.

InsideTracker recommended I switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet, but this doesn’t fit into my current health goals (oppositely, I’m trying to add a bit more meat for protein).

As for the high eosinophils, it’s not an alarming value considering I have a history of higher eosinophils.

How much does it cost?

There are different plans ranging from $49 to $589. You can see all of them here. I did the Ultimate test, complimentary of InsideTracker.

General Thoughts

Overall, I’m impressed with the service. It was super user friendly! Not only is the website with your personal dashboard easy to navigate, but they make the information understandable, even for someone who doesn’t have a background in nutrition.

Downsides?

While you don’t need a doctor to order the blood test/use the service (a huge perk!), I personally think it’s advisable to consult your health care provider before making any major changes — especially in terms of supplementation. You are able to print and/or email your results to your doctor. I chose to send them to my naturopth for a follow up appointment.

Would I do it again and/or recommend it?

Absolutely! You can even schedule to have a follow-up date in your profile so you’ll get a reminder to get your labs re-tested. If getting lab work done ever feels like a chore to you, this service makes the process headache-free. I think the information is highly valuable; however, I wouldn’t suggest replacing it for seeing your doctor.

With my holistic view, this comprehensive test of 43 biomarkers was largely helpful in adding beneficial information to the larger picture of my health, but it wasn’t the full picture. I have an extensive health history, and current chronic GI issues, so the few markers that are out of range are only small pieces of the puzzle. Again, I think this is why it’s important you use this service in conjunction with your health care providers (InsideTracker does encourage follow-ups with your doctor and to use your results as part of your overall medical/health plan).

Thanks, InsideTracker, for the inside look. While I’m happy it was a rather clean bill of health, my gut health is another story for another time…

Lab work: fascinating or terrifying?

Do you get routine lab work?

  Disclosure: I received a complimentary test from InsideTracker in exchange for this post. The information provided is my personal health information, and the review and opinions of the service are my own. 

from https://www.nutritionnutontherun.com/2019/08/02/inside-tracker/ from https://myfunweightloss.tumblr.com/post/186726010672