#also really hate some of the current trends of 'pop up events' that run for maybe a month and then never again

[kittykatinabag]

While I greatly enjoy the subject of place making in urban design, I utterly hate the amount of pandering to capital holders a lot (if not most) of current "place making professionals" do in their work.

[thanksjro]

More Than Meets the Eye #31 - Ammo and the Anti-Glowup

So, the Lost Light disappeared, stranding all the crew in space in their little escape pods. 200-some robots just lost their homes and worldly possessions. That’s absolutely horrible. What a devastating thing to happen.

Anyway, here’s Drift with a flashback sequence.

No hips, fingers all the exact same length, hockey pucks embedded in his forearms- Rojo, this is a crime you’ve committed. When will the long arm of the law stop your sinful, pancake-shaped hands?

About two years prior to current events, Drift, Riptide, and Pipes- yes, Pipes!- were wandering around trying to find a ship for the space yacht trip. The gang’s here to see who owns the big honkin’ ship outside. Problem is, Drift is unintentionally terrifying because he has a great deal of swords.

Now, you may say to yourself “isn’t it a bit odd that the species that has members who literally turn into guns would be nervous around a guy with swords?” This is a valid critique, until you remember that at least some of the folks who turn into guns were born that way, and Drift was very much NOT born bladed the fuck out. There’s an entire miniseries devoted to explaining this, it’s called Drift. The swords are a choice, one that he makes every day.

Drift is willing to pay an honestly absurd amount of money for the ship, if he can just find the dude with the paperwork- don’t ask where he got the money. Pipes isn’t being terribly helpful in finding them, so Riptide decides that now is the time to start practicing being proactive and pulls a Coyote Ugly.

No, no, he doesn’t.

He does climb up on a table and start yelling for the ship’s owners to reveal themselves, though. Which they do.

Now it’s time for the world-building portion of our comic issue. Let’s learn about chirolinguistics.

Drift, staying true to his Mary Sue nature, uses his near-perfect Hand skills to strike up a deal with the owners of the ship. This would be impressive, if it didn’t just look like the most convoluted hand-holding session in the friggin’ universe.

Still, Drift is rich enough to make Jeff Bezos weep with envy, so the arrangements are made and the lads go on their way, talking some mad shit about the original name of the ship as they do.

So it is revealed to us that the Lost Light is named after a festival for honoring the dead and disappeared, which makes the fact that Rewind and Chromedome were there all the more sad.

Back in the present, Megatron tells Riptide to shut up so they can figure out what the hell they’re going to do about this whole “our home and also ride has ceased to exist” situation. He’s putting an awful lot of distance between himself and the rest of the Autobots as he does it, something that isn’t lost on the more bitter people of the crowd.

But why were we even talking about the Lost Light in the first place? Not to reminisce, believe it or not. See, it’s time for Nautica to get a little panel time, and she’s going to use it to be a massive fucking nerd and explain how the quantum engines work. As she does, Ratchet notes that his hands feel funny. Must be the weight of his hand-stealing sins manifesting itself in his joints.

Nautica explains that the engines run off of improbability- it is highly unlikely, but not impossible, that the ship can reach light speed, and riding the fine line between what can happen and what can’t, results in the creation of power for the engines. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Brainstorm gave us a watered down version of this explanation back in issue #2. If it sounds familiar for a different reason, it’s because this is how the Heart of Gold runs in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Again, I’m not sure why it is that the British love this concept so much, but there you are.

Oh, it appears someone has a question. Let’s see what they want to know about, shall we?

…Rojo, what the fuck is this.

Our muppety friend here isn’t too keen on how much of a smarmy asshole Nightbeat is being right now, though I’d assume it actually has something to do with the fact that Nightbeat got smacked around with the pretty-boy stick while Getaway very much did not. While the two bicker- there’s a lot of bickering in Season Two- Nautica presents a theory on what happened to the ship; it went too far in the direction of “can’t” and made itself cease to be.

Megatron gives not a shit about quantum improbability, though. He only cares about how they’re going to get out of this mess. Which, y’know. Valid.

Blaster picks up a radio from Rodimus, who tells the gang that they’re to meet up on a nearby planet to regroup and figure out their next move. The call drops before he can get more than a couple Megatron-directed insults in, however. Megatron, in response, tries to be the bigger person, and almost immediately fails. We do get a headcount though, which is good, logistically speaking. This information is communicated to us by way of a splash page full of character head shots. We’ve got 20 ‘bots on board this ship.

Yep. 20. No more, no less.

As our friends approach the planet, we’re informed that it’s actually a Lectureworld- a planet devoted to the study of a single field. Except it’s actually a Smartplanet now, and it’s been privatized by the Galactic Council, so you’ve got to pay to go there. Cyclonus thinks that that’s bullshit, and I can’t help but agree. Crosscut tries to network with they guy about his play, probably because word got around that Cyclonus is rich as hell, when the lights cut out. When they come back on, Crosscut is nowhere to be found.

It’s time for a Whodunnit.

Tailgate immediately pegs Megatron as the culprit in this disappearance, and breaks out a gun over the matter. Megatron thinks that this is absolutely adorable, which only serves to further infuriate our marshmallow friend. I guess he’s still mad about the whole “I was a Decepticon for five minutes and got brainwashed over it” thing, and wants someone to pin the anger on who’s socially acceptable to hate.

Cyclonus and Ratchet both think that Tailgate’s not going about this the right way, but the guy is simply too het up to listen to them. Tailgate suggests that they lock Megatron in the engine room for the time being and-

OKAY WHO LET HIM HAVE THAT

Riptide breaks out his gun, and soon we’ve got a standoff going between the three of them. Cyclonus tries to deescalate, which makes Gears and Huffer break out their guns. Then Hound breaks out his gun, though he seems to be doing his own thing, by pointing it in Nautica’s direction.

Broski, I think that might be animal cruelty.

Megatron manages to shoot Ravage “unconscious” and catches him by the friggin’ throat, stating that he has zero idea how this guy got here. With the heat off the two of them for a moment, Megatron communicates to Ravage to play ‘possum for the time being. Ravage responds, and I wonder exactly how he’s doing that, considering I don’t think he has enough fingers to effectively utilize Hand as a language. Or fingers at all, really.

While this is going on, Cyclonus snatches the gun out of Tailgate’s hand, admonishing him for being reckless about picking his fights. Generally speaking, you don’t want to try to go toe-to-toe with a guy who’s responsible for the deaths of literal billions. Getaway swoops in to comfort Tailgate, calling him gutsy. I wonder if this will become a trend.

Swerve says a thing, as he is wont to do, and it’s made known that multiple folks have disappeared during this incredibly brief standoff.

Wow, Chromedome just fucked off, huh? He wasn’t even in that sequence, just left.

Everyone’s positively baffled by the current happenings. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who’s being taken. I guess we’ve got a mystery on our hands.

And who better to solve a mystery than a detective?

Nightbeat wrangles all the leftover folks into a corner of the room, so they can figure out what the common denominator is with all the disappearees. He starts with the easy stuff.

And by “easy”, I mean the super-special racism Tyrest subscribed to.

If you’ve read Eugenesis, you know that Nightbeat was also part of the first wave of cold-constructed bodies there. However, the general populace wasn’t nearly as chill about it as they were in IDW. Also, Wheeljack was his dad. No word on if that particular tidbit made it into IDW lore.

It’s at this point that we learn about M.T.O.s- made to order soldiers. They were cold-constructed ‘bots created en masse during the war in order to keep up with the demands for troops. Pretty fucked up, if you think about it, being born to die like that.

Now where have we heard that name before…

Chromedome, can your love life not be part of the plot for five minutes, my guy?

Nautica makes the honestly horrific claim that a lot of folks owe their existence to Megatron being a warmongering fuck, and even Megatron himself seems rather uncomfortable with the idea. Some thoughts we keep to ourselves, Nautica, even if they might be technically true. And even if Ammo wants to tack on his two cents on the matter.

What did they DO to you, Ammo? You’re supposed to be hot! Where are my three-paragraphs of description as Hound stares slack jawed the entire time? I miss Polyhex Wars.

Anyway, it’s Megatron’s turn to get poked with the questioning stick, and he’s not having it. He claims that by revealing his mode of creation, he’s risking a repeat of Functionist ideology. This would be valid, if people weren’t literally disappearing without any sort of explanation as to why. As it is, he’s being a stubborn asshole, but I guess he didn’t get his reputation by being a decent person who knew when to back down, now did he?

It’s at this point that Ratchet remembers he knows all the info Nightbeat’s looking for, and the conversation on Megatron’s birth is shelved for another day. I’m sure it won’t be a major plot point later, not in the slightest.

As it turns out, Nightbeat’s theory doesn’t hold water, and folks are still popping out of existence. We get another splash page, this time with everyone’s mode of creation listed under their names, and we move on to other theories about what the fuck is going on. While Nightbeat has a minor crisis over what the answer could possibly be, the MTOs in the group reminisce on the Ten-Step Program, a series of tests they were put through to make sure they worked well enough to get handed a gun and shoved out the door. Riptide wasn’t a fan.

Riptide has more wood panelling than a 70’s-style ranch house, and I think that’s very brave of him.

It’s at this point that Ratchet remembers it’s been quite a bit since he last shat on religion, and takes the time to do so while informing the reader about Information Creep. This is a concept we’ve seen mentioned previously, during Chromedome’s runaround in Overlord’s brain, but it’s here where we get the juicy implications.

Because memories can become corrupted in the brain due to extreme age, what ought to be objective fact has to be reinterpreted due to missing pieces. This is why nobody knows what the Knights of Cybertron got up to, or if they’re even actually real at all.

The lights go out again, and when they cut back on, Cyclonus is missing, leaving only his sword behind. Tailgate is extremely distraught by this, but Nightbeat gives not a fuck about Tailgate’s impending breakdown. He only cares about the truth!

And then a giant eyeball shows up.

It’s Ultra Magnus, coming to us live from his shuttle, via holomatter avatar! He shrinks down to a far more reasonable size, in a panel reminiscent of the first time IDW readers saw Megatron.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a neat parallel, I’m just… not terribly sure why it’s happening. One could say it reflects a reversal in power dynamics, but that theory gets tossed out the window when you remember that this isn’t actually Verity. I suppose it’s just a cool little thing.

Because the comms aren’t working, Ultra Magnus has been forced to use this avatar to communicate with the folks in the Rod Pod. Megatron asks just what the hell is going on, but unfortunately Magnus isn’t sure either. Then his shuttle disappears, and it’s bye-bye grunge girl Magnus.

It’s at this point that Nightbeat decides it’s time to stop pussyfooting around and get serious. He tells Ratchet to throw HIPPA directly in the garbage and write down everything he knows about the Autobots who crewed the Lost Light. And he does mean everything, as we get the splash page again, this time with lots of neat info on our friends, including spark type.

Spark types will become plot-relevant in the storyline after this, but for now let’s focus on some weird gender essentialism that got slapped into the first print of this issue.

As we know very well by this point, Transformers as a franchise has a tumultuous relationship with the idea of women existing. You would think that the awkward introduction of other genders we got in “Dark Cybertron” would have been the end of things being weird in IDW. However, you would be wrong.

In an effort to explain why genders exist, Roberts had the idea to make it spark-based. Nautica, in the solo print of this issue, has an estriol-positive spark. Estriol is a type of estrogen, which is the hormone that develops and maintains feminine secondary sex characteristics, when present in certain levels, in conjunction with other hormones. Biology

This “spark = gender” idea is, generally speaking, not a great idea to be presenting us with, especially when the writer is a cishet male, because it implies biological essentialism- the idea that a personality trait/quality of a person is innate and predetermined by their biology, as opposed to social, cultural, or individual experiences. Because this story doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s irresponsible to reduce the experience of being a woman to a single, physical, unchangable asset, especially when all other assets of the same class have zero effect on one’s gender identity. You don’t exactly see many nonbinary robots running around, now do you? And there are definitely more than two spark types, despite the Transformers as a species being... very binary.

It also makes female Transformers into an “other”, which is a problem that has existed from the very start of the franchise, in some form or fashion, and really doesn’t need to be perpetrated anymore than it already is.

The estriol spark type was removed in the trade edition, and Roberts has expressed regrets over its inclusion, having realized that it was potentially offensive.

Getting back to the story, Swerve, Tailgate, and Ratchet have disappeared, though Ratchet seems to have left his hands behind. His stolen, Pharma-original hands.

That’s still fucked up to me. I don’t think it’ll ever not be fucked up.

Riptide reveals the reason that he wasn’t in Season One of MTMTE was because when he went back to grab a receipt for the ship two years prior, he’d discovered that the original owners were worshipers of Mortilus, Cybertronian god of death, and knew about the nasty little problem that was the sparkeater from the first storyline. When Riptide went to confront them about it, they beat him up so bad he was unconscious for two solid days.

Which is a long-ass time to be unconscious. That might have been a coma, Riptide. Jesus, I hope someone got him to a hospital after this beatdown happened, or at least scraped him off the floor.

With this last piece of the puzzle, we finally have the common denominator in this big ol’ mystery. Everyone who disappeared was on the Lost Light when it took off from Cybertron in issue #1, and everyone left behind- Skids, Getaway, Nightbeat, Nautica, Megatron, and Ravage- didn’t join until afterwords.

Of course, having the answer doesn’t do us much good when everyone is still missing, and Megatron seems to agree with me, because he’s about to throw hands, when Nautica lets them know that they’ve arrived at the rendezvous. Problem is, so has something else.

...

I’m sure it’s fiiiiiiiiiiiiine!

[luidilovins]

You should turn your post on the Uncanny Valley into a book or something. I am not even kidding, it's brilliant and sorely needed information. Thank you for it.

Tbh its just speculative that the uncanny valley is an inherent biological trait and not cultural or a learned behavior at the moment. A good example would be the cultural phenomenon of colorophobia where in the US we have a longer history of using clowns in our horror pop culture genres than countries like Japan.

Clown entertainment has been around since the Egytian times and maybe some people have always been freaked out by them it honestly just takes one director or author to have an disproportionately irrational fear and good cinematography skills to convince people that they SHOULD hate clowns just as much, (I could say the same about the movie Jaws but thats a bit of a tangent,) or a memorable event that damages the public's trust in something that SHOULD be innocent or harmless. (A good examples being the John Wayne Gacy trials.)

Clowns are also thought to be in the uncanney valley so ita a fairly good argument on cultural phenomenon versus genetic traits. Up until aroud the 60s-70s clowns were actually fairly well liked by the US general public and a lot of older generation still find a fondness in it that would scare the living shit out of their grandchildren.

As far as evidence that I may be right about the "uncanney valley might be because of rabies" theory, there has been a small case study suggesting that the movements of a non-human robot that trigger the effect in us, is also present in people with parkinsons but the sample size is too small for me to be thoroughly convinced.

And don't be mistaken I also dislike this concept because saying that ableism is an inherent human trait is just as bad as saying racism is an inherent human trait. There is little to gain from distrust in the disabled and little historical evidence to suggest it was common or beneficial to discard disabled people. Disabled people's remains have been found time and time again to live to incredibly long livea and be cared for, and participate in their communities. I'm highly critical of this particular case study and I take it with a grain of salt because its on cosmo, but evidence of human disabilities and compassion can be sourced by actual bones and it's been placed on VERY credible sources. NPR, NBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, NY Times, literally the clostest you can get to creme of the crop news articles on DOZENS of accounts and if you have a goddam problem then pay for a tour to the Smithsonian, find an archeologist and coherse them into showing you the bones and then explain phorensics to you because you probably wouldn't understand unless you too were a phorensic archeologist yourself.

What I DO BELIEVE tho is that if the uncanny valley is a legitimate inherent trait, that like most evolutionary traits, it made it this far for this long because it somehow served us benificially. And the biggest benifit I can think of is identifying neuro-infectious diseases because they can spread agressivley, many of them lead to death or lasting effects and are fucking MISERABLE to catch. We're talking brain swelling, fevers, uncontrollable vomiting, tremors, hallucinations, motor and vocal tics, difficulty swallowing, seizures. This could all happen because they eat infected deer meat or because of one bad fox bite. It's miserable if you survive and horrifying if you dont. Rabies can survive in your muscle tissue for years before infecting your brain and once it does usually you only live for about 5-10 days in and out of concious knowledge that you're going to die painfully, and disease aggrivated psychosis. It would be hard to pinpoint the causation because the amout of time before full blown infection would vary too much to assosiate for a long time. So your only option is to hone in on telltale signs.

The disabled people who would suffer from herdeditary or developmental neurological disorders run the risk of prejudice from mistaken identity, but if a human is part of a community, and doesn't die within a week from having a wobbly head, it would sooner or later become apparent that they're not dangerous. I think nowadays culturally people don't press to learn more about disabled people due to social and political prejudice and never fucking grow up past that. Mistaken identity or not. You learn about people from the patterns of their behaviors so even ones that seem abnormal to you become a normal recognizable pattern for them. Fancy that.

We don't get grossed out by chimps or gorillas, who are even more distant cousins, and the proof that we don't have a search and destroy button for anything immediatly related to us is a bunch of bullshit can be found in almost every human's blood on earth. And not just neanderthals, but denisovans as well. And that's not even accounting for genetic backtracking the crossbreeding of other sapiens species before we were whittled down to just the three. What makes the tweet even stupider is that when neandertals still roamed the earth humans were shorter, hardier, and overall more rough looking so we looked even indistinguished then. We Also Chewed On Bones and neandertals handled cold climates better than us based on a study on chest cavity density and, skull nasal intake and heat circulation, providing genetic diversity and the upper hand in survival in the tundras or mountainous regions spanning over Eurasia. If it wasn't for humans fucking neandertals we might not have been able to spread over the contient or diversify the way we did.

So my full hypothesis is that if the uncanny valley is a genetic inherent human trait it was used to benifit people from catching agressive diseases in a time where the benifit of fearing a group member with rabies outweighed the cost of fearing a group member with a disability like parkinsons.

WHAT PISSED ME OFF was the idea that we are DESIGNED to be unwary of our evolutionary cousins could easily be used for white supremacist spaces to justify racism BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS

So that one tweet that might seem like a quirky thinkpiece in my eyes is just fuel for eugenics trend round whatever number we're on. It's like we don't fucking learn. It would be REALLY easy to retool the concept that it's natural for people to be fearful of whatever the bullshit definition of sub-humans are. Claiming that black people were sub-human thus deserving of mistrust and submission to white ownership worked like a fucking charm.

Maybe if I go to college and major in psyche/socio/civics it'll be my college thesis. Right now I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, but what I DO know is that anyone can make an untested hypothesis to combat another untested hypothesis and it should hold just as much goddamn value. I combatted the idea that the idea that human othering was funneled into an unconfirmed effect that causes disgust and terror based on non-human sapiens is in fact racist and gave what is in my opinion a more evoluntionary practical approach to the uncanney valley.

The generalized links that I used APARENTLY weren't good enough for some people but aparently a single tweet that says "hur dur heedle dee uncanney valley exists because of human cousins" was taken at face value even tho it was probably tapped out in five seconds without regards to the reproccussions. I find a huge discomfort that less than studious links about the evolution of monkey social behaviors that I used as a guideline to explaining my concerns became the focal point for people to nitpick without even having the gall to "well actually" on the subject. That absolute ravaging NEED to rip apart at it and devolve into name calling because I MENTIONED racism is fucking suspicious and I don't trust it. I had to stop looking at the responses because some people were only reblogging and arguing with barely half of my argument and i was getting nowhere fast.

There were a few people that made actual points with cited sources that made their own rebuttle arguments. That I respect. It's just as valid an argument as mine and I'm ALWAYS willing to take on more credible sources to strengthen my stance or gain perspective.

But it's the utter dismissal of a concerning concept that just seeped into the subtext that gnawed at my gut. Some people on top of hating the linked sources I provided, admitted they didn't read it, refused to read between the lines to purposfully misinterpret or derail my main points, and detract that my claim that the tweet was a result of systemic white supremacy saturated into modern science was a bunch of bullshit because I claimed that 1500s anglos invented racism.

The thing is we did invent the racism that we fucking currently subscribe to.

We practice the science that we formulated based on our own social prejudice. Real people die from this.

We remain uncritical of our own theorums that we postulate then pat ourselves on the back like we're philosophical geniuses even though racism is a family heirloom with a new paint job.

We preach the eugenics ideals that we pulled out of our asses to benifit from fearmongering, promises of national security and unpaied labor.

White supremacists create subtext with the intention of it being consumed by accident or in ways that seem palatable.

Fuck.

That.

I don't hate the person who wrote the tweet. Chances are that they gave the tweet as much thought as they took the time to write it and went on their day as a fun little thinkpiece. Everyone on the internet does it. But its that kind of thinking error that needs to be adressed as a progression of historic and scientific prejudice that gets rehashed, recycled and untouched and continually damages and is weaponized against marginalized people. I am not wrong for taking it seriously especially when a bunch of people were sitting around nodding their heads just as effortlessly.

I don't owe the internet any more sources than the tweet. I don't owe anyone on the internet a full scientific ananysis. And the people's reaction to what I had to say was actually what further convinced me I might have hit the nail on the head.

[gaknar]

Review: The Claremont Crossovers

Geez, I haven’t written a review for this blog since my Secret Wars review from like 17 years ago. How can that be? Well, I guess I used to work on this blog a lot more often and now I’ve gotten way more into Super Nintendo games and BDSM. Like a lot of people. But now that I finally finished reading Inferno, it is time once again to bookend my experience with an overly wordy wall of text filled with the worst kind of oblivious meninist butt humor jokes and pretentious sounding run-on sentences that are trying to sound smart but are always improperly ended with prepositions of. And lots of ridiculous comic book panels.

These are only the silliest panels from this reading that I could find after looking for about 25 seconds.

Bookeeping. This review covers everything that I have read since X-Factor #1. This includes Uncanny X-Men #204-243, X-Factor #1-39, New Mutants #38-73, along with a smattering of annuals, Daredevil, Power Pack, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Excalibur, and X-Terminators comics that were all part of the Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants, and Inferno crossovers. There were a lot of developments over the course of the 4 years these comics were published. Jean Grey was resurrected and the original members of the X-Men reformed under the moniker X-Factor.

Mr. Sinister formed his band of evil mutants, the Marauders, who would become the X-Men’s main antagonists, and their most devious act would include committing mutant genocide against the Morlocks in the New York City sewers while dealing critical wounds to main X-Men team members Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, and Colossus during the fight.

Later, the X-Men were seemingly killed in a struggle with the mystical being known as the Adversary, but in reality they went into hiding in their new Australian outback base.

Illyana Rasputin lost control of the hell dimension Limbo which led to a demon invasion of Manhattan.

And finally, perhaps most prominently, Cyclops left his wife Madelyne Pryor and their son to get back together with Jean Grey, an act that led Madelyne to become corrupted with Pheoenix Force power and to turn into the Goblin Queen.

This era of X-Men comics contains the first major crossovers between the main X-Men comic book and its spinoffs. These events would become common as Marvel found ways to use its more strongly published works to carry the weaker ones, and the ploy still works apparently since here I am 30 years later reading 500 page omnibus collections just because there are 4 or 5 absolutely killer X-Men comic books in them. I love the X-Men so much that I’m willing to wade through the unending buildup to get the most out of the climaxes.

Seriously this artwork.

However, I find that this style of editing leads to a peculiar trend in pacing that can be tough to recover from in-between the major storylines. As Mutant Massacre leads into Fall of the Mutants, which then leads into Inferno, the characters are faced with consistently increasing stakes. With each passing story line, casualties grow and become more grave, and the consequences are more lasting. Mutant Massacre starts with the genocide of a mutant community, and several main characters are critically wounded as the X-Men face the worst defeat they’ve ever experienced. Then a year later in Fall of the Mutants, just as the team is starting to recover, the entire team of X-Men is killed during their battle against the Adversary. They would immediately be resurrected as a reward for sacrificing themselves to save the world, but it is still a defeat that claims the lives of every member of the team, if only for a moment. By the time we get to Inferno, the world is literally ending. Demons are raining from the sky and regular people are straight up getting slaughtered in the streets and elevators as the X-Men are more or less helpless to stop the destruction.

Inferno is an amazing storyline, if only for all the scenes of inanimate objects coming to life and straight up eviscerating common folk who are just minding their own business. Look at this shit!!! How did the comics code of conduct ever approve this. A mob of people just packed themselves into a demon FOOD PROCESSOR and every inch of them was liquefied except their bones. Chilling. (And let’s just forget about how the writers retconned all this blood orgy stuff in the Inferno Epilogue).

This all works in a capitalistic sense. Constantly raise the stakes and don’t let up for a second because if you do, the reader will take their eyes off the page and you will lose money. But the problem is, you can’t do this forever. And if you try, eventually you are going to write yourself into a corner where you’ve raised the stakes so many times, and you’ve re-manufactured the drama so often, people will stop caring. I call this the Dragon Ball effect.

How many times have these characters become gods at this point? Like three movies ago, the most recent movie was literally called “Battle of Gods.” I’m not even watching Super. Once your characters get so far away from humanistic stories people can relate to, you are no longer creating art. You’re manufacturing sensationalism. And it gets boring. These guys are starting to look like different flavors of freezie pops.

Maybe this is why the X-Men comics that come after this, the comics that make up the last leg of writer Chris Claremont’s 17 year run on the series, become so weird. Because perhaps there was no way to continue to raise the stakes any higher. After this point, we don’t get any more big crossovers until X-Tinction Agenda, but even that story is small and quaint when compared to what is presented here. Wolverine completely disappears from the series, all our other favorite characters disappear into the Seige Perilous to be transformed into completely different versions of themselves, and we get a lot of surreal stories that don’t have any sort of climax in the way that we’ve been conditioned to expect. The series becomes murky and ambiguous, without a solid narrative arc, and I think that’s why people regard the end of Chris Claremont’s writing on the series to be the weakest part of his run.

I can’t wait to read the X-Men comics that are coming up next. Because I didn’t know what in the FUCK was going on in these comics when I was a kid and I’m hoping they make more sense now.

Anyway, I’ll be the judge of all that, once I get there. (I may even indulge in the Infinity Gauntlet omnibus because, you know, there’s a couple X-Men involved in that). But regardless of what comes after this, I think it’s also true that the crossovers presented in this reading are generally regarded with less respect than Chris Claremont’s earlier work on the series, such as the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. This I don’t agree with. While the stories in this reading do range in quality, with Fall of the Mutants definitely being the weakest of the three big crossovers, and even though the Uncanny X-Men portion of Inferno isn’t even the central story of that crossover (the critical story elements take place in the far inferior issues of New Mutants and <ugh> X-Terminators written by Louise Simonson), Claremont’s writing is still much stronger, more layered, and more elegant than anything else that is presented in these collections. These crossovers may not be as timeless or original as the most famous X-Men stories, but the writing here is still really darn good and engaging (at least in Uncanny X-Men), and in my opinion, does not represent a decline in aptitude on the part of the writer. It’s clear that Claremont’s writing has continued to mature and become more nuanced, so much so that when you compare it to the first issues he wrote for the series, it seems like he’s a completely different writer.

KALIDASCOPICALLY. Again, these were just the silliest panels I could find after looking for about 25 seconds.

Personally, I love this period of X-Men comics. Under Claremont’s executive control, no plot thread gets dropped. No minor detail goes disregarded. Characters continue to grow and develop at such a natural pace, sometimes it feels like my own life is developing right alongside theirs. This adds depth to these readings and I can’t describe how it feels to be a part of them, and I think it’s this element that is missing from so many other comic books written by so many other comic book writers, including nearly every X-Men story written after Chris Claremont left the series.

Case in point, there are so many minor recurring characters that appear in these stories, like Franklin Richards. (I seriously tear up every time I see these panels). This little guy bounces around the Power Pack, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four like a ping pong ball. He’s a key character in the story line where Kitty Pryde finally recovers from the wounds she suffered during Mutant Massacre. And even though Kitty and Franklin have only met each other a few times, those meetings have meaning and they are remembered and called upon in the telling of the current story. All of the efforts made by the writers and editors to keep the narrative linked make these characters seem like real life people with weight and substance, rather than a thin layer of ink on a piece of paper. And it totally works.

Ugh, this review turned into another circle jerk about the writers of these comics, and especially about Chris Claremont. But what can I say. It’s because of the writers that we are here. Love or hate these comics, and I know Claremont’s wordy scripts are not everyone’s cup of tea, but these are the stories that make the X-Men what they are. It’s tough to be aware of these things when you’re in the middle of reading them, but I’m having the absolute best time writing this blog right now, and it is primarily because these are the comics that resonate with me the most. And when I’m finished with Claremont’s material and I’m slogging through some crap written by Chuck Austen, I bet I’m going to look back on these days with envy.

[acockius]

you make me live.

i am back, and i am rusty. but in times like these, you’ve gotta give love! so i participated in @dtfrogertaylor​‘s level of concern writing event to bring some joy to @la-vie-en-rosuh​, who i spent a borderline creepy amount stalking as her ask box hates my guts. this piece has a lot of what i think she may be like, so i hope it doesn’t disappoint her. this is also my first even deaky piece ever, so i’m sorry if it’s awful! 

john deacon x you ; 1,345 words ; sweet and fluffy, but with some level of concern surrounding current events

At first, the idea of being quarantined wasn’t all that bad. You were a homebody to begin with, so staying in would be the easy part. There was always something running through your brain: thoughts about an article that you read, the new album you just finished listening to, what your weekend would have in store for you.  So, you tried to treat it like fun at first.

But it quickly proved to be not fun; it became old very quickly, and the reality of why you were doing this in the first place was constantly hung over your head like a raincloud. It made it difficult to act like this was an extended vacation or something when there were larger consequences attached to the situation.

You’d consider yourself to be a mostly self-sufficient person that normally didn’t have difficulty getting herself through the day. The loss of some semblance of a routine changed all of that; it was a complete free-for-all, allowing you to do things like stay awake until the sun rose and eat cereal for breakfast. You were an adult, and you had the freedom to do those things. But you didn’t want to.

Thankfully, John had agreed to stay with you for however long this would last - and it’d already been several weeks at this point. You were doing your best to hide your neuroses in relation to the pandemic from him, but he knew you better than you’d give him credit for. The best thing about dating John was that you were the perfect balance for each other. You fed off of each other’s energy with ease and it made for a wonderful relationship.

John Deacon was the most passionate and caring individual you’ve ever met. At first appearance, John seems mostly quiet and reserved. Once he’s surrounded by those he’s comfortable with, he becomes absolutely exhilarating. His witty sense of humor and bright soul stole your heart from the moment you met him. You found yourself very lucky to call him yours.

A large part of your coping with being cooped up in the house was completely detaching yourself from John after the first few weeks. It wasn’t something that you were proud of but it was how you dealt with things sometimes. Life had been good ever since you started seeing John so he’d never had the fortunate experience of working through your most problematic coping mechanism.

Once John picked up on the idea of you needing your space, he was more than happy to oblige. He would do anything he could in order to make you comfortable. That’s why he didn’t directly address you about what was going on. You guys were in the long haul together and the last thing he wanted to do was upset you and have you resent him while he stayed with him. Still, he could tell you were hurting and he wracked hims brain trying to figure out how to bring you out of this funk.

If you were the one who preoccupied the living area, John lingered in the bedroom. He’d close the door, as to not disturb you, and pluck out a tune on his bass. It was beginning to sound like he was working on a song when he stole these private moments. When you’d sleep in or take a nap, John would take to cleaning - which he was surprisingly incredibly good at. He also enjoyed doing laundry, but there was never much to do because you were living in your pajamas. Lately, you’d begun to steal some of John’s sweatshirts to wear. It was like being in his arms 24/7. You knew that if you wanted him in that way, you could have him; it was just a little difficult for you to ask for at the moment.

The one hobby that you’d found that helped you stay somewhat sane was baking. You were a lean, mean baking machine and John was reaping the benefits. Whether it was cookies, cupcakes, muffins, or pastries, he’d devour every morsel and praise you for all of your hard work. John was your biggest fan, and you were his. You couldn’t begin to explain how comforting his encouragement was. And that’s why you kept baking. His praise is what kept you going.

You were flung over the couch, watching The Force Awakens for the umpteenth time while throwing popcorn in the air and trying to catch the popped kernels in your mouth. John had been in the bedroom for a considerable amount of time, strumming out chords. You’d barely noticed when the sound stopped and he entered the living room.

“Again?” He asked with a cocked eyebrow.

With a dramatic sigh, you sat up, ready to give a clear explanation.

“Deaky, we’ve been through this already! You have to accept that Poe Dameron is the other man in my life. He’s around a lot.” You teased before chucking a piece of popcorn John’s way.

He grinned that ethereal smile before nodding.

“Fair enough.” He accepted, sitting at the opposite end of the couch.. “I am normally very territorial but if it makes you happy, I’m willing to share with the commander.”

You blushed and shook your head, shifting to cross your legs underneath you. You habitually snuck your nose under the neck of the sweater you were wearing and inhaled, calming yourself with John’s scent.

“I like whatever you’ve been playing in there.” You nodded towards your bedroom. “It’s catchy.”

John shrugged, fidgeting with a stray string from the chair of the sofa.

“It’s coming together. I’m working through the lyrics. I want to make sure that it’s just right.”

“I’m sure it will be. It always is.” You reassured, tapping your toe against John’s knee.

He nodded graciously and shifted to turn to you.

“Have you been working on any treats for me to try today or has the rebellion taken up most of your time?” John teased.

“Actually, I have started something but it’s not something that I will have ready straight away.”

John tilted his head and raised his eyebrow.

“The newest trend is sourdough bread. It’s a very particular and tricky process and I want to be sure to get it just right.” You explained.

John hummed happily and put his hands on his stomach.

“I can’t wait to make cheese toast with it. Christ, I can nearly taste it.” John quipped. “Or maybe a nice butter and preserves spread.”

“Well, I can’t take part in the cheese toast tasting, even though it is your favorite.” You frowned.

“But you can take part in the sweet tasting - just as long as it isn’t strawberry!”

You face lit up and you bit your lip.

“I love that you remember my food allergies and sensitivities.”

“Yeah, well, that’s because I love you.”

Your head whipped around so fast in John’s direction that you weren’t sure if you’d heard him correctly. He’d never said those three words before since you’ve been together. It wasn’t like you didn’t love him, because you did. Emotions were complicated and you were constantly scared of doing or saying the wrong thing to make him think that you didn’t feel the same.

“You do?” Your voice was timid when you asked.

John laughed airily and nodded.

“I do. I really love you.”

You crawled over to John and tilted your head up to him for a kiss. He smirked coyly, and hiked his thumb towards the tv.

“Are you sure you want to do that with your other man watching?” John inquired.

You rolled your eyes and pulled John by the collar to press your lips together in a deep kiss. John cradled your face in his strong hands and kissed you with as much fervor as he could muster.

It seemed like the world around you was in shambles, and that weighed on you heavily. You’d lost sight on the fact that you could still thrive inside your little apartment with John by your side. You could be happy at home.

[ofsage]

is that [MATTHEW DADDARIO]? no, that’s just [SAGE SLATER]. [HE/HIM] is [TWENTY-EIGHT] years old and is a [PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR]. rumor has it they’ve been in town for [ALMOST HIS ENTIRE LIFE]. on a good day, they’re [ASTUTE & JOCUND]. but watch out! they can also be [RECKLESS & UNRULY]. [LOWLIFE BY NECK DEEP] plays in my head whenever i think of them. can’t wait to see them around springhill! [sam, 23, est, she/her]

hey there demons! it’s me...sam, and i was here briefly once but i decided it might be time to retire the muse i had brought in, so i’m back with a brand new muse that’s still a lot like the last one so please message me if you would like to plot!

i. stats

𝕗𝕦𝕝𝕝 𝕟𝕒𝕞𝕖: sage silvestre slater

𝕙𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕠𝕨𝕟: springhill, new jersey

𝕕𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕠𝕗 𝕓𝕚𝕣𝕥𝕙: june 1st, 1991

𝕫𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕔: gemini

𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟: bisexual

𝕠𝕔𝕔𝕦𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟: private investigator

𝕚𝕞𝕞𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕒𝕞𝕚𝕝𝕪: dr. rosemary slater good ( mother ), professor of psychology at ucla & corwin slater ( father ), retired detective of the springhill police department.

𝕡𝕠𝕤. 𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕚𝕥𝕤: astute, jocund, ebullient, well-meaning.

𝕟𝕖𝕘. 𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕚𝕥𝕤: reckless, unruly, flippant, puerile.

ii. history

sage silvestre slater was born and raised in springhill, new jersey. at the time, his mother had a small practice in town while his father was an officer rising quickly through the ranks at the local police department.

he was a precocious kid, but more often than not his natural intelligence was overshadowed by an ostensible inability to sit still and constant antics. ( a diagnosis of adhd later on would explain some of this behavior. ) his teachers were nonplussed and unsure of what to do with him, but his father had a plan.

sage’s father saw potential in him and decided that he would train his son, honing his raw skills and molding him into the perfect detective. five years old when the lessons and lectures began, sage was too young to question his entire life being planned out for him, which often led to feelings of confusion and dejection when he was scolded for spending his time on the things he had a genuine interest in : games, movies, television, spending time with his friends. typical kid stuff that he wasn’t allowed to enjoying.

he was eleven years old when his parents officially divorced, an event he could have handled well by itself, but it led to his mother accepting a job offer all the way in california. he felt abandoned and his father floundered. he was never the parent who dealt with emotions. he eventually decided that his solution was to simply ignore it. he didn’t even try to talk to sage about the divorce or his mother leaving or any of his problems ever.

fishing trips ( something he’s always hated ), rides in the passenger seat of his cruiser ( dampened by lectures on police procedures that he had no interest in ), regular visits to the shooting range ( where it was quickly discovered that he’s a crack shot but he hated it after trying it once ). his father tried everything except talking and listening.

sage was so frustrated and angry that he started acting out. he was getting constant detentions at school and his perpetually middling grades plummeted. he argued with his father every day and broke curfew every night. he bought a motorcycle at sixteen and at seventeen, he dropped out of school and left town in the middle of the night.

it was the first time in his life that he had ever felt freedom. no teachers, no arguments, no controlling father breathing down his neck. he spent a couple months simply wandering around the country, picking up random odd jobs just for the fun of it ( and for the cash ). he had no permanent residence, no responsibilities and no attachments. it was practically paradise for him except for one thing : he can’t turn it off.

he was working as a cashier at some convenience store in the middle of nowhere when it was robbed by several figures in masks that completely covered their faces. sage solved the case with minutes to spare before the police arrived and he immediately told them who to go arrest. the story generated headlines that went viral, and for once in his life he hated the attention he was receiving...until the offers started pouring in.

he found out that people were willing to pay him to solve their mysteries : everything from people asking him to locate their missing keys to assisting police departments around the country with cases, often ones that were labeled unsolvable until he came along.

maybe he wasn’t a police officer at heart...but he was certainly a detective.

by the time he returned to his hometown, sage felt like he was gone for several lifetimes when it had only been a few months. he started renting a cheap apartment and avoided his dad for as long as possible. ( he found out through the local rumor mill that the man had finally retired while he was gone. ) a steady stream of cases kept him busy until one in particular left him stumped and he didn’t know where else to go for advice, except the person who taught him everything he knows about solving a puzzle.

his father disapproved of the business ( which didn’t surprise sage at all ), but would ultimately begin to offer advice whenever his son approached him with a difficult case. the two are currently working on improving their relationship, but often fall back on their old habit of petty squabbling.

PERSONALITY : the textbook definition of man - child. spends his free time playing video games, watching movies and eating snacks. has a joke or sarcastic remark prepared for every single occasion and he takes almost NOTHING seriously. constant obscure pop culture references mixed with eerily accurate statements about a complete stranger can make him difficult to hold a conversation with, but he’s also affable and witty. he’s an extremely loyal friend who’s always there when it counts, but not the best person to trust with the little things because he will fuck up somehow. does ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING purely for the fun of it. a literal genius who’s borderline ashamed of his intelligence.

iii. extras

sage is hyper - observant and highly skilled at deductive reasoning. he can look at something for all of five seconds and then hours later he’s describing it perfectly, right down to even the tiniest detail. he often learns things about people through his observations rather than through conversation, which he sometimes forgets and so he slips up and says weird things to people about themselves.

he loves movies and television. there’s always something on in the background when he’s working on a case, and most of the time it’s something obscure and / or 80s.

takes adderall for his adhd, but he’s really irresponsible about it so from day to day whether or not he’s on his medication is honestly a toss up.

HUGE COMMITMENTPHOBE. it’s likely part of his abandonment issues. he tries to avoid relationships altogether, but if he gets into one then he’s a total disaster and usually resorts to self - sabotaging when things are going well so that he isn’t abandoned again.

in high school he was captain of the baseball team and he played football and basketball. he had his letters and probably would’ve gotten noticed by scouts if he hadn’t dropped out and run away from home.

he has a sweet tooth, which is obvious due to his diet of nothing but candy, snacks, and junk food. he’s always hungry and usually always eating because he somehow always has food on him.

he was probably born late and has continued the trend by never ever being on time even once in his life.

wears mismatched converse high top sneakers : one green, one blue. a decision made because one day he just could not find either of the other shoe has turned into a fashion statement and is now one of his most distinctive quirks.

drives a norton motorcycle that he basically built from scratch himself and it’s his child. he loves it and he drives it everywhere to the point where’s racked up A LOT of unpaid parking tickets in town.

he’s well known for sticking his nose into the local police department’s cases. he might occasionally provide useful information, but for the most part he’s probably viewed as a nuisance who gets by on his father’s goodwill.

iv. wanted connections

lifelong best friend / watson to his sherlock *wc on the main

cousins ( maternal and paternal, don’t necessarily have to be from springhill so almost anything goes for this )

friends

clients AND people he’s investigated

enemies / people who find him annoying

high school friends

exes / flings / one night stands

( these are just a few base ideas, so please don’t feel limited by what’s listed here! )

[more-than-a-princess]

( it's been a while since we properly talked but know that you're still a valued friend of mine, like it's been so nice chatting with you on and off. esp about cats cuz they are fluffy babies.

I will also add it's very neato to see/read whenever you work on your cosplays? like the effort you put into it is visible n grand and it's always a treat to see. And in terms of writing Sonia it's just so detailed, with the thoughts regarding her country, family and traditions it's always neato to read n my mind just keeps popping up with memories of the posts so they've stuck with me. I also find it cool that it seems that you always seem to know what you want to write, but that could just be my impression of things. I do hope things are going well for you and we can write again soon uwu )

Unprompted OOC asks - Accepting (as long as you aren't trolling)!

Seventh, thank you so much for your very kind and heartfelt thoughts in this message. They are so wonderful to read! You too are a valued friend of mine and even though our fandoms are diverging and we can't always thread together, I still love what you are writing and sharing about your muses. I also have new photos of my hairy baby, Princess Molly: she's pacing around my desk as I write this.

To be honest, I've been concerned for awhile as to if this blog, and my muse, are just...I don't know, boring? Or if someone has written with me for awhile they're just less interested because I want to keep writing a single muse blog instead of a multimuse? It doesn't help that, while I never post them (I block/delete, always), I do receive plenty of anonymous hate about my portrayal. That I focus too much on Sonia's talent mostly, or that I don't want to write some of the more popular fandom romantic ships for her (mostly Sonia/Chiaki. I love their friendship but I don't see them as a romantic couple). What I think is that a lot of the fandom really wants and/or appreciates Sonia's 'dumb' moments, such as her sheltered past and inability to understand current trends and colloquialisms equates to her being stupid, a bimbo, etc. That's never the stance I wanted to take with her: instead, I wanted to give her what a contemporary royal family, education, lifestyle, and background might look like (though it's composed of both fictitious royal stories and real life history and current events).

That said, it really means a lot that you enjoy what I write here for Sonia, both in threads and headcanons. Between feeling like I'm boring my mutuals or that I create friction in the RPC due to my headcanons and writing style (multi para/novella isn't for everyone, but it's how I like to write and what I enjoy reading from my writing partners), there's been several instances when I've contemplated just quitting tumblr, or picking up another muse I may or may not want. I'll never run a multimuse blog for several reasons, but in general I tend to write one muse and their universe until I'm completely exhausted of plotlines and/or writing partners and then move on.

And speaking of ideas and plots...Seventh, most of the time I have zero idea what I want to write or am going to write. Having a good friendship and communication with my writing partners OOC helps a lot with this (especially when we can send each other random stuff and not expect an immediate reply: work + life + other hobbies often prevents me from doing this), but memes and specific prompts are ideal besides pre-plotted threads. Sometimes I'm feeling a certain theme or mood, or a series of quotes just resonates with me, and that helps guide what I want to do. I'm the worst person for unexpected/unprompted IC starters and headcanons, both sending and answering. I usually have to get inspired by something on the dash or some sort of media. I'm glad it looks like I know what I'm doing (because I'm usually flying by the seat of my pants!).

Finally, thank you so much for your feedback regarding my costumes! It's been hard to see myself in some of them recently due to weight gain and aging, so I'm trying to take better care of myself. I actually have costumes for and/or will be dressing as muses from at least three different mutuals' blogs this year (and rewearing some of my Sonia outfits. Talk me out of doing the anniversary/prom gown, please), though I haven't really shared most of them. Maybe I should?

My next big event is debuting one of my Penelope Featherington costumes for the upcoming Queen's Ball: A Bridgerton Experience this month! I'll probably do one more new Penelope gown before switching my Bridgerton costuming focus to Francesca Bridgerton: they're my two favorite heroines in the Bridgerton series and star in my favorite books from the series, so I'd love to do them justice. After that, it'll be time for fall cosplay events and conventions (and Halloween). I really enjoy historical-based costuming and fancy dresses, probably far too much.

This got a bit long-winded but, tl;dr, thank you so, so much. Your words mean so much to me and I will save this to reread whenever I've feeling down about my writing, interactions, and/or portrayal.

[margot-bargot]

Listen, fam. I'm coming out.

Look, I've been working on the best way to do this for a while. I had a whole long thing typed up & I kept re-writing it for months. But I think I'm just gonna get to the point. I'm coming out. I identify as pansexual. What is pansexuality, you ask? Well, it basically means that I feel attraction to anyone, regardless of their gender. Cis men & women, trans men & women, agender folks, demigender folks, etc. If you've never heard of pansexuality before, lemme hit you with that Wikipedia link real quick to help you out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansexuality . Pansexuality is pretty adjacent to bisexuality & often gets confused for it. However, the two are slightly different in that bisexuality is attraction to two or more genders & pansexuality is attraction to anyone of any gender. A couple things to note real quick before we continue: 1. Pansexuality doesn't mean that you're attracted to EVERYONE you see. It simply means that your capacity to feel attraction isn't primarily based on gender. 2. If you make any jokes about having sex with pans, you're officially a cornball. I'm just giving you a heads up, is all. Sorry but I don't make the rules. So the thing you might be wondering is how I figured this out. To be honest, I'm still trying to figure out how I could go 29 years without knowing this about myself. But every time I think back, there is one element of my past that explains why it took so long. Growing up in a predominantly conservative christian home, the idea of being gay or anything close to it was a non-starter. It was a sin & a heavily condemned one, at that. As a result, any time a "gay thought" would pop up in my head, I tried to get it out of there as quick as possible. It became an instant reflex to keep that kind of thought out of my head. But I still would feel guilt for the thought, as well as guilt from "lusting" for women. My teens were a confusion time where I was discouraged from even considering an attraction for another gender while also being told I was TOO attracted to the "right" gender. Not a great situation, emotionally. Unfortunately, I suspect it's not an uncommon occurrence for kids growing up in strict christian homes. That said, I felt more comfortable exploring attraction & affection towards cisgendered women (even if it led to "sin" or whatever ugh) mainly because it was instilled in me by conservative christian culture that being gay was worse in the eyes of both God & the church congregation than sleeping with a woman before marriage. If you did that, the church congregation would murmur about you for a bit & engage in some form of slut-shaming hidden under the guise of "asking god for forgiveness." If you were gay? That was a disease. A sinful disease. You'd be quarantined, or ostracized, from that community unless they had the "grace" to help you get therapy to pray the gay away. So, being a massively horny but perpetually nervous teen, I chose to guiltily explore attraction to cis women & push everything else out. In college, my views on both religion & sexuality became more liberal. I no longer thought of being gay as a sin disease (although Sin Disease is a good name for a metal band, now that I think about it). This trend continued after college & beyond, to the point of total acceptance & support for the LGBTQIA community. Folks were gay (including several friends of mine) & that's cool. But I never thought about it for myself. I never allowed myself to really consider the possibility that I could be attracted to anyone else because I always struck the thought down when it popped up in my head. Even though I was no longer religious, I still carried that reflex I learned as a child years ago. The reflex that conservative Christianity taught & encouraged within me. I guess what I'm saying is that religious suppression is a powerful thing. And that only started to unravel for me late last year. I can't point to one thing that started the unraveling process because it really was a culmination of a bunch of different things (such as talking with some cool queer folks about their experiences & finally allowing myself to let in/process non-heteronormative thoughts). It was in late January where I first admitted out loud to one of my roommates that I was beginning to think that I wasn't actually straight. It was really hard for me to find the words for how I felt. None of the established labels (gay, bi, etc) felt 100 percent accurate for me. She actually helped point me toward the idea of pansexuality, which seemed closer to how I felt (I would later talk to some cool queer folks who helped verify some information about pansexuality, where it fit in the rainbow, etc). And a weird thing happened that night. I felt a weight lift off of me. It happened almost instantly. It was like a weight that I never knew was there. And I started crying. Was this what I was carrying with me for 29 years? Was that reflex to kick the idea of anything queer out of my head keeping this weight on me? Even now, with the large amounts of stress/worry that I feel on a day-to-day basis, I think about all of this & it feels like a bright spot in an otherwise dark world for me. Like, the world is going to shit, but I finally figured out this important truth about myself. Anyway, that's a lot of words up there. And I'm not done! I still need to tell you why I'm saying all of this! But I know this has been a long read, so feel free to run to the bathroom if you need to. It occurred to me that I might not be the only one in this situation. If conservative christian culture was able to burrow that repressive reflex that deep into me (so deep that it lasted years after I left the church), it had to do the same to other folks. Maybe there's someone reading this that hasn't even allowed themselves to consider their sexual identity. Maybe someone's reading that's just starting to ask some questions about their identity. If so, I want to tell you that it's okay to question & explore that side of yourself, even if you don't really have a name for it yet. I certainly didn't know what to call myself at first, other than "not straight". You're 100% not alone in this. I'm out here with you, grasping at bits of truth, filling in the gaps, & trying to find answers but feeling so much more free in the journey than I ever did in the comfort of what I knew. If you are in that situation, there are a lot of good resources to help you fill in the gaps & answer some of those lingering questions. If you have a friend in the LGBTQIA community, don't be afraid to ask them about their own experience. Talking with folks who had an experience coming to grips with their own queerness helped me quite a bit, even when our experiences were different. It's just nice to know you're not some unsolvable mystery & that this this thing (whatever you end up calling it) is a very positive thing. If you live in a big enough city, you probably have an equality center that provides resources, access to affordable counseling, support groups, & social events (where you can meet other folks within the community). If your city doesn't have something like that, there are online resources that can help as well. Here's a link for the GLBT National Help Center, in case you're in that situation: http://glbtnationalhelpcenter.org . Hopefully that ends up being helpful to anyone who needs it. It's 2018 & while there have been massive strides in LGBTQIA rights/visibility, there are still many ways in which members of the community are harmed & discriminated against (spearheaded largely by our current administration). We're not in a time where everyone everywhere can feel 100% safe openly exploring their sexual and/or gender identity. I'm a huge dummy in many respects, but if some of the information in this post helps someone feel less alone or points them in the right direction, then it'll be worth it. I realize that there are folks I know who hold more conservative views. They'll probably read all of this (or like, just the first two paragraphs lol) & decide I'm heading straight to hell. If they're being generous, they'll say that they're "praying for me" & pity me as another lost soul. Which, whatever. I'll be fine. If anything, I feel more free than I ever did repressing such a big part of myself. Plus, these are people who voted for Trump (& if they didn't, they are still largely okay with the gay-hating coward Mike Pence). So we're not gonna see eye-to-eye on this no matter what. 🤷‍♂️ Also they can fuck off. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ I guess that's all I have to say. If you stuck around & read all of this, I appreciate you indulging me as I tried to fumble around explaining myself. It's been about 5 months since I first came out to my roommate & I'm happy to finally share the good news with y'all. I'm going to my first ever Pride parade soon. It'll be my first time around a large gathering of queer folk. I normally don't really like being out in large groups (nor do I love highly corporate-sponsored events, which this surely will be). That being said, I'm really excited! I seriously can't wait for this. Probably because it feels like finally being united with a group you never knew you were a part of. It's an event specifically celebrating the idea that it's cool & good to be queer, to be part of this rainbow. For the first time in a long time, it feels like I'm moving in the right direction.

[michaelandy101-blog]

79 Marketing Tools and Software for Every Business & Budget

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/79-marketing-tools-and-software-for-every-business-budget/

79 Marketing Tools and Software for Every Business & Budget

In the world of marketing, it seems like there are always new tools, tips, tricks, and trends to discover and incorporate into your marketing strategy. How is it possible to keep up with them all?

As a marketer myself, I often wish I had a better sense of all of the tools available to me — and what sets each of them apart — so I can make more informed decisions on how to create and optimize content.

Luckily, I have the privilege of working on a team of 150+ other marketers who specialize in different functions than I do. And because of that, I was able to curate this list of the top tools every marketer should know about and use.

The list of recommended tools below is sorted into different sections so you can get a better sense of what tools are available for different functions of the job. 

Above lists the different types of tools for every part of your job. Below is our roundup of the best marketing tools in each category. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

You and your sales team want to sell your product or service — not fight with messy spreadsheets, cluttered inboxes, or clunky tools that slow you down. That’s why using a Customer Relationship Management System — also known as a CRM — is essential. Not only will it help your sales team manage relationships, but a CRM will also give you a place to deliver those leads you generated to your sales team.

CRMs are such an essential part of any good marketing and sales team that we think everyone should have one. That’s why the HubSpot CRM is completely free.

Featured CRM Tool:

1. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM automates the tasks salespeople hate and takes minutes to learn — not months. That means doing more deals and less data entry.

Other CRM Tools:

2. Zoho CRM

3. Zendesk

4. Pipedrive

Online Advertising Tools

If your team is making investments into PPC ad campaigns on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, it’s probably a bit of a hassle to manage all the different ad campaigns you’re running across each different network. Besides just managing them, you then have to try and report on the results of all of them. What a struggle. Luckily, there’s tools for that.

Featured Online Advertising Tool: 

5. AdStage

AdStage takes the hassle out reporting on all of the PPC campaigns you’re running and puts it all in one place. AdStage helps you automate, create, and manage your campaigns across all of the major PPC platforms, then allows you to report on your results. With visual features and powerful automation tools, AdStage is a must for PPC experts and newbies alike.

Other Online Advertising Tools:

6. HubSpot Ads Tracking Software

7. Perfect Audience

8. Google Keyword Planner

9. AdRoll

10. WordStream

Social Media Tools

Social media managers know the pain of posting that perfect social media post only to have a follower find a typo a minute later and call you out. For marketers, using a social media tool to schedule all of your posts (so you catch those typos beforehand) is a must. But it also helps to get the right analytics from your social posts, especially on channels where it can be hard to get that information.

Featured Social Media Tool: 

11. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is the perfect tool for marketers to grow their brand on Instagram with easy-to-use analytics. It’s not always easy to know what’s working and what’s not on Instagram. But, as the second most popular social channel and one that’s quickly approaching first most popular among some age groups, it’s a channel that marketers can’t afford to miss out on. Try Iconosquare now to maximize your Instagram analytics and optimize your brand Instagram channel for success.

Other Social Media Tools:

12. Buffer

13. Hootsuite

14. BuzzSumo

15. HubSpot Social Inbox

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

Whether its keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page rankings, every marketer needs a go-to tool for planning what content to create and how to optimize it for SEO. 

Featured SEO Tool:

16. Ryte

Marketers need tools to plan which keywords to rank for and making sure the content they create actually meets their goal once created. Ryte is the ideal tool marketers can use to make sure their SEO efforts are having a real impact on their marketing strategy.

Other SEO Tools:

17. Ahrefs

18. SEMrush

19. Moz

20. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension

21. HubSpot Content Strategy Tool

Content Creation and Design Tools

In the world of content creation, there are admittedly tons of different tools you could use to create various types of content. Whether it’s social images, logos, blog posts, or ebooks — the options and tools are endless.

That said, a newcomer among the Adobe Suite of tools is winning the hearts of many marketers, including this one, for its ease of use to create stunning webpages, awesome videos, and eye-catching graphics. The best part? It’s completely free and impossibly easy.

Featured Content Creation Resource:

22. Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is a suite of three web or mobile apps — Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video — that allows marketers to easily create graphics, webpages, and videos in a variety of themes in minutes.

You can completely avoid the hassle of page layout, video editing knowledge, or a CMS and start creating content that looks remarkable immediately. For example, we use Spark Page at HubSpot to create some of our online guides and promote them with Spark Videos and Posts. You can too!

Other Content Creation and Design Tools:

23. Venngage

24. Piktochart

25. Canva

26. Recordit

27. Kap

28. Adobe Color CC

Video Marketing Tools

Haven’t you heard? Video is the thing everyone is talking about. But how do you actually implement it into your marketing?

Maybe your strategy is just to put a YouTube video embed on one of your blog posts or landing pages. But then what happens? Someone else’s ad plays on your landing page before your video even begins. That’s bad for your conversion rates, brand, and your user. Luckily, there’s a solution.

Featured Video Marketing Resource:

29. Wistia

Wistia is a powerful video hosting platform that allows you to host your videos on your website — ad free — with a guaranteed smooth playback and responsive player. Wistia also helps you prove the ROI of your video efforts by offering you video analytics and key metrics to fine-tune your video marketing efforts over time. Ready to take your video marketing to the next level?

Other Video Marketing Tools:

30. Vidyard

31. Vimeo

32. Loom

Event Marketing Tools

Whether your team holds monthly customer and prospect events, yearly conferences, or just occasional community outreach parties and events, it’s important to have the best event marketing tool up your sleeve when the time comes to use it. After all, in-person events are some of the best ways to interact with potential customers and create a brand experience that prospects, customers, and your community will remember.

Featured Event Marketing Resource:

33. Eventbrite

Eventbrite is an efficient, easy-to-use tool tons of marketers rely on not only to manage the logistics (like ticketing) of events but also to promote their events. Eventbrite lets you create an event landing page and allows you to set up your ticketing and payment for the event all within the same platform. The best part? Eventbrite is always free if you’re hosting a free event!

Other Event Marketing Tools:

34. Facebook Events

35. AddEvent

Lead Capture and Conversion Tools

When it comes to your bottom-line goals, you probably want a few tools for not only attracting prospects to dedicated marketing campaigns, but just as importantly, converting those visitors into leads and customers.

Featured Lead Capture and Conversion Resource:

36. HubSpot’s Free Marketing Tools

HubSpot’s free marketing tools can help do just that. The moment a lead shares their email, you’ll know who they are, where they work, and what pages they visited — all in real time. When they view an offer or check your pricing, you’ll be ready to follow up right away.

And with simple but powerful analytics, you’ll learn more about what’s working and what’s not — like which traffic sources or pieces of content are driving the most conversions. It’s a risk-free way to find out what inbound marketing can do for you. No budget necessary.

Other Lead Capture and Conversion Tools:

37. HubSpot’s Free Pop-up Forms Tool

38. Typeform

39. OptinMonster

40. Sumo

41. Convertflow

Lead Generation Tools

If you’re in the mood for demand generation, you probably have your eyes on the prize: converting anonymous website visitors into contacts with email addresses that you can successfully nurture. Landing pages are a must for capturing lead information on important offers and opt-ins.

Featured Lead Generation Resource: 

42. Unbounce

Thanks to a drag and drop interface, Unbounce lets you quickly build mobile responsive landing pages without developer assistance. The tool also integrates with a number of different CMS platforms and software.

With Unbounce Convertables, you can also launch targeted overlays on top of any web page, each with a dedicated call to action. Customizable triggers and targeting rules give you control over who sees your offers and when so you can serve the most relevant offers to the right audience.

Other Lead Generation Tools:

43. Leadpages

44. Instapage

45. HubSpot’s Landing Page Builder

Website Optimization and CRO Tools

As marketers, sometimes it feels like we’re constantly making educated guesses about how our site visitors are going to interact with our content. While we might design a page to draw our user’s eye to a spot on a page, how do we ever really know where their focus is so that we can improve that experience?

Featured CRO Resource:

46. Hotjar

Hotjar is a new and easy way to truly understand what your web and mobile site visitors are looking at when they interact with your site. With its visual heatmap tools, you can understand what users want, care about, and interact with on your site. Hotjar visually represents visitors’ clicks, taps and scrolling behavior, giving you the ability to find hot areas for growth and conversion rate optimization.

Other CRO Tools:

47. Optimizely

48. Lucky Orange

49. Google Optimize

50. Clicky

Lead Nurturing and Email Marketing Tools

It’s not enough to drive traffic to your website and then convert them. Many of your website visitors may not be ready to buy, and that’s where lead nurturing comes in. Email marketing is a great way to nurture contacts toward a purchasing decision. 

Featured Lead Nurturing Resource: 

51. HubSpot’s Email Marketing Software

HubSpot offers robust email marketing software from free to enterprise. You’ll be able to create emails in a simple drag-and-drop interface, personalize emails for better experience and performance, and see email activity in your free CRM. HubSpot also offers automation solutions in their paid plans. 

Other Lead Nurturing and Email Marketing Tools:

52. Constant Contact

53. Campaign Monitor

54. MailChimp

55. AWeber

56. ActiveCampaign

Marketing Automation Tools

Automation is nothing new to marketers. Whether you want to save time doing marketing tasks or simply cut time wasted doing those daily tasks like saving emails and files to spreadsheets, having a tool that makes your life easier and saves you time is ideal.

Featured Marketing Automation Resource: 

57. HubSpot Marketing Automation

As previously mentioned, HubSpot has a powerful automation tool included in its paid marketing tiers. It doesn’t just send drip sequences. You can also use it to trigger specific actions such as updating a contact record or adding a contact to a list when certain criteria is met. 

Other Marketing Automation Tools: 

58. Drip

59. Marketo

60. Omnisend

Data Reporting and Analytics Tools

Most tools that automate some of your marketing strategy will also provide reports that allow you to see and present your campaigns’ performance to other employees in your company. What if you want a more holistic look at the health of your marketing?

Featured Data Reporting and Analytics Resource: 

61. Digital Marketing Tuner

From the efficiency of your content calendar to the effectiveness of your lead-generation methods, Digital Marketing Tuner offers a helpful overview of all of your latest marketing activities.

Developed by OverGo Studio, an inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Agency Partner, Digital Marketing Tuner guides you through a brief survey where you can submit basic information about your company’s content volume, email open rates, website traffic, and more. The tool then sends you a detailed report in which you can better visualize your team’s strengths and weaknesses so you can make even better decisions for your company moving forward.

Other Data Reporting and Analytics Tools: 

62. Google Analytics

63. Google Search Console

64. Databox

65. RavenTools

Digital Asset Management Tools

In any marketing team, the inevitable happens: there’s a million files and pieces of content between everyone on your team without one place to keep it all. Organization on any team — let alone a marketing team — is essential. That’s why it’s important to have a collaborative organization tool to keep you sane.

Featured Digital Asset Management Tool:

66. Dropbox

Dropbox is the perfect tool to keep your team organized and your files under control. With cloud-based software to keep your files accessible anywhere at anytime, Dropbox helps your team store all of its files in a central location. Dropbox makes it easy to collaborate, too. With tools like Dropbox Paper, which allows you to write and collaborate in real time on the same doc — and sharing tools for shared folders and files, you’ll be organized and ready for any project that comes your way.

Other Digital Asset Management Tools:

67. Google Drive

68. Box

69. Shift

70. Brandfolder

Team Communication and Collaboration Tools

Where would your work day be without accessibility and communication between you and your colleagues? Probably pretty frustrating. Marketers can’t shy away from communication when it comes to aligning with team members and across the company, so having the right team communication tools is necessary every single day.

Featured Communication and Collaboration Resource:

71. Slack

I wouldn’t be given any slack if I didn’t make the world aware of this tool.

Slack is a powerful messaging app that allows you and your teammates to quickly message back and forth without the hassle of email. But it’s not just AOL instant messenger 2.0. Slack has powerful features and integrations that make it possible for you to integrate all of your other daily tools — like Trello, Gmail, Giphy, and so many more — right where you’re already communicating. You can start channels between different teams or just chat with specific colleagues. Slack makes remote and in-person work possible and easier than ever.

Other Communication and Collaboration Tools:

72. Join.Me

73. Zoom

74. Skype

Project Management Tools

File management and organization is one thing, but how do you manage all of the moving pieces of a marketing campaign or project? There are many different tools you can use for project management, but only one sticks out when it comes to the number of integrations and features at the price of — oh yeah — free!

Featured Project Management Resource: 

75. Trello

Trello is a great project management tool for small teams and individuals. With it’s Kanban-style setup and fun user interface, Trello lets you set up to-do lists and tag individual cards with due dates, members, labels, and more. You can attach files, links, images, and more to your cards and easily get a full-view of any project that you’re working on. At HubSpot, we use Trello daily to manage our team campaigns and individual to-do lists. Want an example of how we do this? Check out our guide to managing marketing campaigns in Trello.

Other Project Management Tools:

76. HubSpot Projects

77. Asana

78. Airtable

79. Wrike

You’ve got all the tools you need, but are you looking for a place to start putting them all together? Check out our free marketing plan. It’ll walk you through creating your own marketing plan and teach you how to use all of these tools together.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Source link

[wineanddinosaur]

For Millions of Americans, TikTok Is Offering a Wild, Uncut Introduction to ’80s-Style Flair Bartending

Wearing a flowered top, her long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, Shay Court juggles a pink shaker tin while tossing a bottle of Tito’s behind her back, all in motions so fast it’s hard to keep up. In the 15-second video, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” plays and, when the diminutive crooner yells “Stop!,” Court immediately halts her bottle-tossing perfectly on the beat (“Wait a minute…”), the Tito’s held upside down near her head, enabling her to long-pour the vodka into a pint glass below.

“Drinks during quarantine be like…🤪,” writes Court, better known as the @flairbartendress to her 27,000 followers on TikTok.

While Instagram is rife with very serious amateur bartenders doing very serious things, TikTok is where all the fun is going on these days — mostly in the form of flair bartending, a much-maligned art form you probably haven’t thought about in a while. In fact, the majority of the most followed #cocktail and #bartending accounts on TikTok are for flair bartenders. The #flairbartending hashtag itself has a stunning 36 million views.

@flairbartendressDrinks during quarantine be like.. 🤪 ##flairbartending ##fyp ##foryou ##new ##bartender ##flair ##drinks♬ Stop! Wait a Minute – Bruno Mars, Tik Tok

It all kind of makes sense — flipping bottles behind your back and juggling shakers in the air is a perfect fit for TikTok’s short-form video platform typically employed by teenagers for improvised dances and lip-sync videos. (Isn’t flair bartending just dancing with bottles?) With most all flair bartenders out of work these days, they’ve gravitated to this hippest and youngest of social media platforms.

Court says she got introduced to TikTok by her 8-year-old daughter. A Canadian, she learned her craft working in Las Vegas bars like Bally’s and Kahunaville. Today, Court is a private events bartender in northern Kentucky, but with few private events at the moment, she began fooling around on TikTok. There were already some flair bartenders on TikTok doing their thing, but Court thought she could really lean into the platform’s full capabilities.

“I wanted to do — not just flair — but thought maybe I could take those TikTok trends and put my own spin on them,” she explains. In TikTok parlance, Court is referring to the site’s most viral sounds of the moment, usually snippets from songs but sometimes mere audio clips, often bolstered by a hashtag like, say, #savage. That’s why if you venture into the wild world of TikTok, you’ll notice many kids doing similar dance moves all to the exact same clip from the exact same song. Like Court, who took viral audio from the bbno$ rap “Nursery,” which many TikTokers had been syncing to funny videos of themselves going from stumbling to strutting, and instead matched it to her flair. That TikTik alone has racked up 1.2 million views so far. “That’s not something a lot of people have seen with flair bartending,” she says.

If flair bartending emerged across America in the 1980s, reaching its pinnacle in the 1988 Tom Cruise movie “Cocktail,” nowadays, it mainly exists in competition form, often in Eastern Europe, with very few American localities having much of a flair community. And, during a pandemic, if “normal” bars are able to offer takeaway cocktails and sidewalk and patio service, you’re not exactly going to see someone flipping bottles on Fifth Avenue. That’s why most of these furloughed flair masters are left performing tricks from their kitchens, backyards, and living rooms.

“The videos must be more impressive because the [bar] scene is not there,” says John Faller (@cocktailsgarnishes) who is stuck doing flair tricks on a rug in front of his TV or in the foyer by an umbrella rack for his 60,000 followers. “It brings more challenges and pushes the limits of imagination away,” he adds.

@cocktailsgarnishes##chaussettes ##costume ##flip ##jonglage ##somelier ##viral ##style ##barman ##bartender ##cocktails ##wine ##foryou ##pourtoi♬ PYRO – Chester Young & Castion

The Frenchman works at an upscale hotel bar in non-pandemic times and he’s been incorporating flair into his professional bartending for nearly a decade. He started using Instagram in early 2019, mostly to post his beautiful and baroque garnishes. They were getting some attention, but not a ton. After noticing that TikTok was booming, he pivoted to posting flair videos there in late February of this year. He now has 10 times the followers on TikTok compared to Instagram, despite posting nearly the exact same videos. Other flair bartenders have noticed the same thing.

There’s three-time world flair champion Luca Valentin, who doesn’t just juggle bottles but three separate accounts on TikTok, most notably for flair purposes @valentinluca and @cocktailswithluca. The Romanian man started posting to the latter in mid-May, building an Ecuador cocktail by flipping a wine glass and his bottles of rum in the air, tossing some lemon juice behind his back, flipping ice from a shovel into the glass, and flicking the cap off a tonic bottle. In the two months since, he’s made over 40 more videos, quickly amassing 85,000 followers and over half a million likes. (He has less than half the amount of followers on his Instagram page, which he has been using for over seven years.)

The thing is, many of these young TikToker users — some 69 percent, are between ages 13 and 24; almost none are older than 40 — have surely never seen a flair bartender in person so they have no preconceived notions. Hell, many high school- and college-aged TikTokers have perhaps never legally even been inside a bar. So flair bartending in any form is an exotic new world to them. Which makes me wonder if TikTok could be completely reviving this often-ignored niche of mixology.

“I think with the younger kids, they get excited when they see it — it’s a show for them,” says Zach Prohaska, who posts as @cdbartending. He finds the same is true in the real world, quite frankly; he works plenty of bar mitzvahs where the tweens are wowed when he teaches them tricks with a soda can.

@cdbartendingA Blue Lagoon 🌊⛱🍹 ##bartender ##blue ##fyp ##cocktail ##learnfromme ##learnfromhome ##SummerProject ##foryou♬ Jus’ Know – BlackMayo

“Yes, I do have followers that are underage,” admits Kevin Gibbons. As his @elitebartendingfl is a “pro” TikTok account, he can monitor his viewership analytics more closely. “They say, ‘You’ve made me want to be a bartender when I’m older’ — and that’s kind of what I want!”

Gibbons, an Englishman, currently lives in Orlando and owns and runs several Elite Bartending schools, all of which are associated with actual bars like The Attic. When those bars were forced to close due to the pandemic, and he could no longer teach his students in person, he took four pieces of wood, spent 20 minutes building a makeshift bar in front of his home, and began demonstrating flair tricks and cocktail making on TikTok. Next thing he knew he had over 300,000 followers and 4 million likes (compared to just 15,000 followers on his Instagram).

“I wasn’t really prepared for that—I certainly didn’t start out to become an influencer,” he jokes. He’s now getting sent products, merchandise, and sponsorship opportunities.

Unlike Court, Faller, and Valentin, Gibbons’ TikTok flair is less based on the music-backed, “how-did-he-do- that?!” razzle dazzle and is instead more of a tutorial. I particularly enjoyed one TikTok where he teaches you to juggle bottles by envisioning an upside-down triangle above your head. Gibbons claims this method has taught people flair juggling in as quick as two minutes.

“With TikTok, it’s so visually pleasing to the eye — you’re getting cocktails and a show,” says Gibbons. But he doesn’t think it’s pure frivolity and, in fact, preaches to his students (and viewers) that it can help them increase their nightly tips. “I’ve always felt like it gives the image of a bartender being next-level.”

Prohaska, for one, agrees. He also runs a bartending school and events companies in Toronto. He joined TikTok late last year after seeing a Gary Vaynerchuk video explaining how it’s now the fastest growing social media platform. Though Prohaska claims he was immediately overwhelmed by the rapid-fire, fresh-faced platform — “I’ll be honest, I felt like I was 100 years old” — he nevertheless started posting some videos and immediately began getting exposure, especially for his garnish and knife tricks (and, yes, blue cocktails).

“Let’s be honest: Flair is a pretty cool thing. And it’s new to this younger crowd,” says Prohaska, who has been bartending for 20 years and incorporating flair for 16. Like Gibbons, he, too, believes in more practical flair; not wasting 20 minutes tossing bottles around, but instead using each movement to work toward getting a drink ultimately made.

“I get it. I used to hate flair, too,” he’s quick to add. “Now I hate how everyone will talk smack about flair, but I understand — I was that bartender. Once you learn it effectively, though, the people you’re serving love to see it.”

As Prohaska alludes to, the cocktail cognoscenti have always maligned flair, thinking it cheesy and an impediment to serious drinks-making. If it appears in pop culture nowadays, it’s mostly to show the hubris of a non-bartender put under the limelight, like, say, “King of Queens”’ oafish Kevin James dropping bottles upon trying a trick beyond his skill level. So, if flair bartending has mostly been a punchline for the last two decades, these TikTokers seem to be bringing back it’s, uh, respectability.

“I’ve never been this viral,” says Court, who amazingly has garnered her following with a mere 20 TikToks posted so far. “And it’s a lot of people that I’ve never met who suddenly have an interest in flair. Ninety-nine percent of the comments are positive. ‘Oh, that’s really cool, I’d like to try that.’”

I’ve wondered if there are people on TikTok now trying out flair tricks who have nothing to do with the bartending industry. The answer would seem to be yes. In fact, The Rock recently reposted one of Prohaska’s videos to his 190 million followers; Prohaska quickly added 45,000 new followers that night alone. But it’s not just celebrities, of course, who are into TikTok flair. It’s mostly regular users.

“I get ‘dueted’ everyday,” says Gibbons referring to TikTok’s method of allowing users to create side-by-side videos with people they follow, trying to synchronize their moves to the person they dueted. These duets are mostly being created by flair neophytes, young TikTokers seeing this crazy form of bartending as simply another meme, another viral dance move to put their own spin on. It’s really not a surprise to me — these TikTok users are the same generation that made water bottle flipping a thing in the summer of 2016.

Court thinks this newfound attention to flair might not just be because of the pandemic, but thanks to it, as flair bartenders are no longer working in their bars. She thinks there’s a certain charm to her doing tricks in regular clothes, in her living room or backyard; the casual setting is more likely to inspire her followers to try it out themselves.

“It allows the everyday person to relate because I’m not in a totally professional setting,” she says. “‘Wow, look what you can do!’”

But, just like most people don’t watch TikTok dance videos because they want to learn to The Renegade, most people don’t seem to watch these flair bartending videos because they want to start juggling bottles of Tito’s and working on four-foot-long pours. As Prohaska says: “A lot of my followers just miss the social part of the bar scene. They leave me comments: ‘I miss going to bars. But if the bars were open, I’d be at yours!’”

The article For Millions of Americans, TikTok Is Offering a Wild, Uncut Introduction to ’80s-Style Flair Bartending appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/tiktok-flair-bartending/

[johnboothus]

For Millions of Americans TikTok Is Offering a Wild Uncut Introduction to 80s-Style Flair Bartending

Wearing a flowered top, her long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, Shay Court juggles a pink shaker tin while tossing a bottle of Tito’s behind her back, all in motions so fast it’s hard to keep up. In the 15-second video, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” plays and, when the diminutive crooner yells “Stop!,” Court immediately halts her bottle-tossing perfectly on the beat (“Wait a minute…”), the Tito’s held upside down near her head, enabling her to long-pour the vodka into a pint glass below.

“Drinks during quarantine be like…?,” writes Court, better known as the @flairbartendress to her 27,000 followers on TikTok.

While Instagram is rife with very serious amateur bartenders doing very serious things, TikTok is where all the fun is going on these days — mostly in the form of flair bartending, a much-maligned art form you probably haven’t thought about in a while. In fact, the majority of the most followed #cocktail and #bartending accounts on TikTok are for flair bartenders. The #flairbartending hashtag itself has a stunning 36 million views.

@flairbartendressDrinks during quarantine be like.. ? ##flairbartending ##fyp ##foryou ##new ##bartender ##flair ##drinks♬ Stop! Wait a Minute – Bruno Mars, Tik Tok

It all kind of makes sense — flipping bottles behind your back and juggling shakers in the air is a perfect fit for TikTok’s short-form video platform typically employed by teenagers for improvised dances and lip-sync videos. (Isn’t flair bartending just dancing with bottles?) With most all flair bartenders out of work these days, they’ve gravitated to this hippest and youngest of social media platforms.

Court says she got introduced to TikTok by her 8-year-old daughter. A Canadian, she learned her craft working in Las Vegas bars like Bally’s and Kahunaville. Today, Court is a private events bartender in northern Kentucky, but with few private events at the moment, she began fooling around on TikTok. There were already some flair bartenders on TikTok doing their thing, but Court thought she could really lean into the platform’s full capabilities.

“I wanted to do — not just flair — but thought maybe I could take those TikTok trends and put my own spin on them,” she explains. In TikTok parlance, Court is referring to the site’s most viral sounds of the moment, usually snippets from songs but sometimes mere audio clips, often bolstered by a hashtag like, say, #savage. That’s why if you venture into the wild world of TikTok, you’ll notice many kids doing similar dance moves all to the exact same clip from the exact same song. Like Court, who took viral audio from the bbno$ rap “Nursery,” which many TikTokers had been syncing to funny videos of themselves going from stumbling to strutting, and instead matched it to her flair. That TikTik alone has racked up 1.2 million views so far. “That’s not something a lot of people have seen with flair bartending,” she says.

If flair bartending emerged across America in the 1980s, reaching its pinnacle in the 1988 Tom Cruise movie “Cocktail,” nowadays, it mainly exists in competition form, often in Eastern Europe, with very few American localities having much of a flair community. And, during a pandemic, if “normal” bars are able to offer takeaway cocktails and sidewalk and patio service, you’re not exactly going to see someone flipping bottles on Fifth Avenue. That’s why most of these furloughed flair masters are left performing tricks from their kitchens, backyards, and living rooms.

“The videos must be more impressive because the [bar] scene is not there,” says John Faller (@cocktailsgarnishes) who is stuck doing flair tricks on a rug in front of his TV or in the foyer by an umbrella rack for his 60,000 followers. “It brings more challenges and pushes the limits of imagination away,” he adds.

@cocktailsgarnishes##chaussettes ##costume ##flip ##jonglage ##somelier ##viral ##style ##barman ##bartender ##cocktails ##wine ##foryou ##pourtoi♬ PYRO – Chester Young & Castion

The Frenchman works at an upscale hotel bar in non-pandemic times and he’s been incorporating flair into his professional bartending for nearly a decade. He started using Instagram in early 2019, mostly to post his beautiful and baroque garnishes. They were getting some attention, but not a ton. After noticing that TikTok was booming, he pivoted to posting flair videos there in late February of this year. He now has 10 times the followers on TikTok compared to Instagram, despite posting nearly the exact same videos. Other flair bartenders have noticed the same thing.

There’s three-time world flair champion Luca Valentin, who doesn’t just juggle bottles but three separate accounts on TikTok, most notably for flair purposes @valentinluca and @cocktailswithluca. The Romanian man started posting to the latter in mid-May, building an Ecuador cocktail by flipping a wine glass and his bottles of rum in the air, tossing some lemon juice behind his back, flipping ice from a shovel into the glass, and flicking the cap off a tonic bottle. In the two months since, he’s made over 40 more videos, quickly amassing 85,000 followers and over half a million likes. (He has less than half the amount of followers on his Instagram page, which he has been using for over seven years.)

The thing is, many of these young TikToker users — some 69 percent, are between ages 13 and 24; almost none are older than 40 — have surely never seen a flair bartender in person so they have no preconceived notions. Hell, many high school- and college-aged TikTokers have perhaps never legally even been inside a bar. So flair bartending in any form is an exotic new world to them. Which makes me wonder if TikTok could be completely reviving this often-ignored niche of mixology.

“I think with the younger kids, they get excited when they see it — it’s a show for them,” says Zach Prohaska, who posts as @cdbartending. He finds the same is true in the real world, quite frankly; he works plenty of bar mitzvahs where the tweens are wowed when he teaches them tricks with a soda can.

@cdbartendingA Blue Lagoon ?⛱? ##bartender ##blue ##fyp ##cocktail ##learnfromme ##learnfromhome ##SummerProject ##foryou♬ Jus’ Know – BlackMayo

“Yes, I do have followers that are underage,” admits Kevin Gibbons. As his @elitebartendingfl is a “pro” TikTok account, he can monitor his viewership analytics more closely. “They say, ‘You’ve made me want to be a bartender when I’m older’ — and that’s kind of what I want!”

Gibbons, an Englishman, currently lives in Orlando and owns and runs several Elite Bartending schools, all of which are associated with actual bars like The Attic. When those bars were forced to close due to the pandemic, and he could no longer teach his students in person, he took four pieces of wood, spent 20 minutes building a makeshift bar in front of his home, and began demonstrating flair tricks and cocktail making on TikTok. Next thing he knew he had over 300,000 followers and 4 million likes (compared to just 15,000 followers on his Instagram).

“I wasn’t really prepared for that—I certainly didn’t start out to become an influencer,” he jokes. He’s now getting sent products, merchandise, and sponsorship opportunities.

Unlike Court, Faller, and Valentin, Gibbons’ TikTok flair is less based on the music-backed, “how-did-he-do- that?!” razzle dazzle and is instead more of a tutorial. I particularly enjoyed one TikTok where he teaches you to juggle bottles by envisioning an upside-down triangle above your head. Gibbons claims this method has taught people flair juggling in as quick as two minutes.

“With TikTok, it’s so visually pleasing to the eye — you’re getting cocktails and a show,” says Gibbons. But he doesn’t think it’s pure frivolity and, in fact, preaches to his students (and viewers) that it can help them increase their nightly tips. “I’ve always felt like it gives the image of a bartender being next-level.”

Prohaska, for one, agrees. He also runs a bartending school and events companies in Toronto. He joined TikTok late last year after seeing a Gary Vaynerchuk video explaining how it’s now the fastest growing social media platform. Though Prohaska claims he was immediately overwhelmed by the rapid-fire, fresh-faced platform — “I’ll be honest, I felt like I was 100 years old” — he nevertheless started posting some videos and immediately began getting exposure, especially for his garnish and knife tricks (and, yes, blue cocktails).

“Let’s be honest: Flair is a pretty cool thing. And it’s new to this younger crowd,” says Prohaska, who has been bartending for 20 years and incorporating flair for 16. Like Gibbons, he, too, believes in more practical flair; not wasting 20 minutes tossing bottles around, but instead using each movement to work toward getting a drink ultimately made.

“I get it. I used to hate flair, too,” he’s quick to add. “Now I hate how everyone will talk smack about flair, but I understand — I was that bartender. Once you learn it effectively, though, the people you’re serving love to see it.”

As Prohaska alludes to, the cocktail cognoscenti have always maligned flair, thinking it cheesy and an impediment to serious drinks-making. If it appears in pop culture nowadays, it’s mostly to show the hubris of a non-bartender put under the limelight, like, say, “King of Queens”’ oafish Kevin James dropping bottles upon trying a trick beyond his skill level. So, if flair bartending has mostly been a punchline for the last two decades, these TikTokers seem to be bringing back it’s, uh, respectability.

“I’ve never been this viral,” says Court, who amazingly has garnered her following with a mere 20 TikToks posted so far. “And it’s a lot of people that I’ve never met who suddenly have an interest in flair. Ninety-nine percent of the comments are positive. ‘Oh, that’s really cool, I’d like to try that.’”

I’ve wondered if there are people on TikTok now trying out flair tricks who have nothing to do with the bartending industry. The answer would seem to be yes. In fact, The Rock recently reposted one of Prohaska’s videos to his 190 million followers; Prohaska quickly added 45,000 new followers that night alone. But it’s not just celebrities, of course, who are into TikTok flair. It’s mostly regular users.

“I get ‘dueted’ everyday,” says Gibbons referring to TikTok’s method of allowing users to create side-by-side videos with people they follow, trying to synchronize their moves to the person they dueted. These duets are mostly being created by flair neophytes, young TikTokers seeing this crazy form of bartending as simply another meme, another viral dance move to put their own spin on. It’s really not a surprise to me — these TikTok users are the same generation that made water bottle flipping a thing in the summer of 2016.

Court thinks this newfound attention to flair might not just be because of the pandemic, but thanks to it, as flair bartenders are no longer working in their bars. She thinks there’s a certain charm to her doing tricks in regular clothes, in her living room or backyard; the casual setting is more likely to inspire her followers to try it out themselves.

“It allows the everyday person to relate because I’m not in a totally professional setting,” she says. “‘Wow, look what you can do!’”

But, just like most people don’t watch TikTok dance videos because they want to learn to The Renegade, most people don’t seem to watch these flair bartending videos because they want to start juggling bottles of Tito’s and working on four-foot-long pours. As Prohaska says: “A lot of my followers just miss the social part of the bar scene. They leave me comments: ‘I miss going to bars. But if the bars were open, I’d be at yours!’”

The article For Millions of Americans, TikTok Is Offering a Wild, Uncut Introduction to ’80s-Style Flair Bartending appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/tiktok-flair-bartending/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/for-millions-of-americans-tiktok-is-offering-a-wild-uncut-introduction-to-80s-style-flair-bartending

[isaiahrippinus]

For Millions of Americans, TikTok Is Offering a Wild, Uncut Introduction to ’80s-Style Flair Bartending

Wearing a flowered top, her long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, Shay Court juggles a pink shaker tin while tossing a bottle of Tito’s behind her back, all in motions so fast it’s hard to keep up. In the 15-second video, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” plays and, when the diminutive crooner yells “Stop!,” Court immediately halts her bottle-tossing perfectly on the beat (“Wait a minute…”), the Tito’s held upside down near her head, enabling her to long-pour the vodka into a pint glass below.

“Drinks during quarantine be like…🤪,” writes Court, better known as the @flairbartendress to her 27,000 followers on TikTok.

While Instagram is rife with very serious amateur bartenders doing very serious things, TikTok is where all the fun is going on these days — mostly in the form of flair bartending, a much-maligned art form you probably haven’t thought about in a while. In fact, the majority of the most followed #cocktail and #bartending accounts on TikTok are for flair bartenders. The #flairbartending hashtag itself has a stunning 36 million views.

@flairbartendressDrinks during quarantine be like.. 🤪 ##flairbartending ##fyp ##foryou ##new ##bartender ##flair ##drinks♬ Stop! Wait a Minute – Bruno Mars, Tik Tok

It all kind of makes sense — flipping bottles behind your back and juggling shakers in the air is a perfect fit for TikTok’s short-form video platform typically employed by teenagers for improvised dances and lip-sync videos. (Isn’t flair bartending just dancing with bottles?) With most all flair bartenders out of work these days, they’ve gravitated to this hippest and youngest of social media platforms.

Court says she got introduced to TikTok by her 8-year-old daughter. A Canadian, she learned her craft working in Las Vegas bars like Bally’s and Kahunaville. Today, Court is a private events bartender in northern Kentucky, but with few private events at the moment, she began fooling around on TikTok. There were already some flair bartenders on TikTok doing their thing, but Court thought she could really lean into the platform’s full capabilities.

“I wanted to do — not just flair — but thought maybe I could take those TikTok trends and put my own spin on them,” she explains. In TikTok parlance, Court is referring to the site’s most viral sounds of the moment, usually snippets from songs but sometimes mere audio clips, often bolstered by a hashtag like, say, #savage. That’s why if you venture into the wild world of TikTok, you’ll notice many kids doing similar dance moves all to the exact same clip from the exact same song. Like Court, who took viral audio from the bbno$ rap “Nursery,” which many TikTokers had been syncing to funny videos of themselves going from stumbling to strutting, and instead matched it to her flair. That TikTik alone has racked up 1.2 million views so far. “That’s not something a lot of people have seen with flair bartending,” she says.

If flair bartending emerged across America in the 1980s, reaching its pinnacle in the 1988 Tom Cruise movie “Cocktail,” nowadays, it mainly exists in competition form, often in Eastern Europe, with very few American localities having much of a flair community. And, during a pandemic, if “normal” bars are able to offer takeaway cocktails and sidewalk and patio service, you’re not exactly going to see someone flipping bottles on Fifth Avenue. That’s why most of these furloughed flair masters are left performing tricks from their kitchens, backyards, and living rooms.

“The videos must be more impressive because the [bar] scene is not there,” says John Faller (@cocktailsgarnishes) who is stuck doing flair tricks on a rug in front of his TV or in the foyer by an umbrella rack for his 60,000 followers. “It brings more challenges and pushes the limits of imagination away,” he adds.

@cocktailsgarnishes##chaussettes ##costume ##flip ##jonglage ##somelier ##viral ##style ##barman ##bartender ##cocktails ##wine ##foryou ##pourtoi♬ PYRO – Chester Young & Castion

The Frenchman works at an upscale hotel bar in non-pandemic times and he’s been incorporating flair into his professional bartending for nearly a decade. He started using Instagram in early 2019, mostly to post his beautiful and baroque garnishes. They were getting some attention, but not a ton. After noticing that TikTok was booming, he pivoted to posting flair videos there in late February of this year. He now has 10 times the followers on TikTok compared to Instagram, despite posting nearly the exact same videos. Other flair bartenders have noticed the same thing.

There’s three-time world flair champion Luca Valentin, who doesn’t just juggle bottles but three separate accounts on TikTok, most notably for flair purposes @valentinluca and @cocktailswithluca. The Romanian man started posting to the latter in mid-May, building an Ecuador cocktail by flipping a wine glass and his bottles of rum in the air, tossing some lemon juice behind his back, flipping ice from a shovel into the glass, and flicking the cap off a tonic bottle. In the two months since, he’s made over 40 more videos, quickly amassing 85,000 followers and over half a million likes. (He has less than half the amount of followers on his Instagram page, which he has been using for over seven years.)

The thing is, many of these young TikToker users — some 69 percent, are between ages 13 and 24; almost none are older than 40 — have surely never seen a flair bartender in person so they have no preconceived notions. Hell, many high school- and college-aged TikTokers have perhaps never legally even been inside a bar. So flair bartending in any form is an exotic new world to them. Which makes me wonder if TikTok could be completely reviving this often-ignored niche of mixology.

“I think with the younger kids, they get excited when they see it — it’s a show for them,” says Zach Prohaska, who posts as @cdbartending. He finds the same is true in the real world, quite frankly; he works plenty of bar mitzvahs where the tweens are wowed when he teaches them tricks with a soda can.

@cdbartendingA Blue Lagoon 🌊⛱🍹 ##bartender ##blue ##fyp ##cocktail ##learnfromme ##learnfromhome ##SummerProject ##foryou♬ Jus’ Know – BlackMayo

“Yes, I do have followers that are underage,” admits Kevin Gibbons. As his @elitebartendingfl is a “pro” TikTok account, he can monitor his viewership analytics more closely. “They say, ‘You’ve made me want to be a bartender when I’m older’ — and that’s kind of what I want!”

Gibbons, an Englishman, currently lives in Orlando and owns and runs several Elite Bartending schools, all of which are associated with actual bars like The Attic. When those bars were forced to close due to the pandemic, and he could no longer teach his students in person, he took four pieces of wood, spent 20 minutes building a makeshift bar in front of his home, and began demonstrating flair tricks and cocktail making on TikTok. Next thing he knew he had over 300,000 followers and 4 million likes (compared to just 15,000 followers on his Instagram).

“I wasn’t really prepared for that—I certainly didn’t start out to become an influencer,” he jokes. He’s now getting sent products, merchandise, and sponsorship opportunities.

Unlike Court, Faller, and Valentin, Gibbons’ TikTok flair is less based on the music-backed, “how-did-he-do- that?!” razzle dazzle and is instead more of a tutorial. I particularly enjoyed one TikTok where he teaches you to juggle bottles by envisioning an upside-down triangle above your head. Gibbons claims this method has taught people flair juggling in as quick as two minutes.

“With TikTok, it’s so visually pleasing to the eye — you’re getting cocktails and a show,” says Gibbons. But he doesn’t think it’s pure frivolity and, in fact, preaches to his students (and viewers) that it can help them increase their nightly tips. “I’ve always felt like it gives the image of a bartender being next-level.”

Prohaska, for one, agrees. He also runs a bartending school and events companies in Toronto. He joined TikTok late last year after seeing a Gary Vaynerchuk video explaining how it’s now the fastest growing social media platform. Though Prohaska claims he was immediately overwhelmed by the rapid-fire, fresh-faced platform — “I’ll be honest, I felt like I was 100 years old” — he nevertheless started posting some videos and immediately began getting exposure, especially for his garnish and knife tricks (and, yes, blue cocktails).

“Let’s be honest: Flair is a pretty cool thing. And it’s new to this younger crowd,” says Prohaska, who has been bartending for 20 years and incorporating flair for 16. Like Gibbons, he, too, believes in more practical flair; not wasting 20 minutes tossing bottles around, but instead using each movement to work toward getting a drink ultimately made.

“I get it. I used to hate flair, too,” he’s quick to add. “Now I hate how everyone will talk smack about flair, but I understand — I was that bartender. Once you learn it effectively, though, the people you’re serving love to see it.”

As Prohaska alludes to, the cocktail cognoscenti have always maligned flair, thinking it cheesy and an impediment to serious drinks-making. If it appears in pop culture nowadays, it’s mostly to show the hubris of a non-bartender put under the limelight, like, say, “King of Queens”’ oafish Kevin James dropping bottles upon trying a trick beyond his skill level. So, if flair bartending has mostly been a punchline for the last two decades, these TikTokers seem to be bringing back it’s, uh, respectability.

“I’ve never been this viral,” says Court, who amazingly has garnered her following with a mere 20 TikToks posted so far. “And it’s a lot of people that I’ve never met who suddenly have an interest in flair. Ninety-nine percent of the comments are positive. ‘Oh, that’s really cool, I’d like to try that.’”

I’ve wondered if there are people on TikTok now trying out flair tricks who have nothing to do with the bartending industry. The answer would seem to be yes. In fact, The Rock recently reposted one of Prohaska’s videos to his 190 million followers; Prohaska quickly added 45,000 new followers that night alone. But it’s not just celebrities, of course, who are into TikTok flair. It’s mostly regular users.

“I get ‘dueted’ everyday,” says Gibbons referring to TikTok’s method of allowing users to create side-by-side videos with people they follow, trying to synchronize their moves to the person they dueted. These duets are mostly being created by flair neophytes, young TikTokers seeing this crazy form of bartending as simply another meme, another viral dance move to put their own spin on. It’s really not a surprise to me — these TikTok users are the same generation that made water bottle flipping a thing in the summer of 2016.

Court thinks this newfound attention to flair might not just be because of the pandemic, but thanks to it, as flair bartenders are no longer working in their bars. She thinks there’s a certain charm to her doing tricks in regular clothes, in her living room or backyard; the casual setting is more likely to inspire her followers to try it out themselves.

“It allows the everyday person to relate because I’m not in a totally professional setting,” she says. “‘Wow, look what you can do!’”

But, just like most people don’t watch TikTok dance videos because they want to learn to The Renegade, most people don’t seem to watch these flair bartending videos because they want to start juggling bottles of Tito’s and working on four-foot-long pours. As Prohaska says: “A lot of my followers just miss the social part of the bar scene. They leave me comments: ‘I miss going to bars. But if the bars were open, I’d be at yours!’”

The article For Millions of Americans, TikTok Is Offering a Wild, Uncut Introduction to ’80s-Style Flair Bartending appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/tiktok-flair-bartending/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/626613969391632384

[one-lucky-clover]

Character Info

NOTE: Characters that are available for roleplay will have an icon below their info. The Girls Clover "Lady Luck" Finley

"Clover is a kindhearted, and charitable individual by nature who uses her lucky streak to give away to others. Though there's a fiery kick to her, one that craves adventure. For this reason she often goes out by night to partake in "un-lady-like" activities such as drinking, dancing, gambling, and driving automobiles."

Age-wise she's in her mid 20's

Her father is the Mayor.

An only child, sees Ruby as like the sister she never had.

Her parasol doubles as a physical weapon. That spike on the top is that long and sharp for a reason. It is almost always on her somewhere, even when she's in her flapper attire.

Her parasol also allows brief flight (ala Mary Poppins)

Loves to eat, especially sweets.

Never expect pound cake or cookies to last long with her around.

Favorite Beverage is Apple Cider (And Hard Cider).

Also a big fan of finger foods.

Extremely protective of those she cares about.

Especially Bonnie, Odette, Ruby, and Buster.

100% not afraid to fight anyone to protect them.

Works running "Good Fortune Daycare" during the day, and acts as the Bouncer/Entertainment at Ruby's at night

Sings up on stage. 

A Novice Dancer. Bonnie is helping her become a better dancer. 

Usually Bonnie performs with her.

She and Blaise were once childhood friends. Though a large gap between morals has caused them to drift apart.

Clover HATES him.

Doesn't know who her mother is. Her father doesn't like to talk about it.

While she enjoys recreational gambling, her lucky streak has caused her to get banned from a few casinos.

Do not gamble with her, that is a mistake.

Is currently dating Buster.

BATIM Fanon Wiki Page

Roleplay Icon(s):

Ruby Rabbit

"Ruby is a motherly, yet blunt bunny who is the bartender and runner of 'Ruby's.' She loves to listen to the stories of others and offer a supportive, sympathetic shoulder to lean on. During the day she assists Clover in running 'Good Fortune Daycare'."

A fabulous cook and drink mixer. She makes everything served at her bar.

Considered to be the “Mother” of the group.

Clover may be the brawn of the group, but Ruby is someone not to be trifled with either.

Clover is her dearest friend and she would do anything to protect her.

Protective in general.

Bold, Soulful singer. You’ll be surprised how big of a singer she is for how petite she is in size.

Bright and Cunning.

Roses are her favorite flower.

BATIM Fanon Wiki Page

Roleplay Icon(s):

Odette the Cat

"Odette was once Clover's beloved pet cat, turned toon by the Wicked Witch Wilda. She is affectionate, clingy, mischievous, and childish usually sticking close to Clover. She loves asking questions and letting her curiosity get the better of her."

Though her age as a toon is unknown she's considered a child.

Loves to play with the children at the daycare.

Not the best when it comes to "nap-time"

Doesn't usually help with the speakeasy, usually stays home. Tends to make a mess of things otherwise.

Enjoys Tuna and Burgers.

Hates Lemons and Cucumbers.

Clingy with Clover, will sometimes cling to her if she doesn't like someone. 

Has super sharp claws under her claws she can use as a tool or weapon.

Since she was originally a non-toon cat, she has the ability to speak with other non-toon cats.

not known at this time if this extends to other animals.

Purrs very, VERY loudly when she's happy.

Love giving people things she finds. Sometimes they're nice things. Sometimes not.

Has a very naive, optimistic view of the world.

But much, much more intelligent than she lets on.

Bonnie The Angel

"Bonnie is a sweet, compassionate, animal-adoring angel who loves to sing. The poor angel has a bad habit of falling into plights of peril and needing to be rescued. She was originally hired to be the female counterpart to Bendy before being replaced by Alice Angel. While Bonnie tries to stay optimistic, she often worries she will be forgotten about."

Can use her singing to attract animal helpers (ala a disney princess.)

Her singing also has the ability to calm others, including Clover.

Her singing is just magically potent in general.

Literally the most pure character in the group.

Naive and can be easily mislead.

The other members of the group are extremely protective of her because of this.

Is in charge of the Nursery at the daycare.

Great with animals and children.

Sweetheart, easily touched by others stories and extremely compassionate.

Somewhat of a crybaby

Very Thoughtful and often surprises others with gifts.

Honestly only the heartless beings could ever get angry at an angel like Bonnie.

Very gentle and passive, probably the only member of the group who doesn’t have any capacity to fight.

Loves baking, cooking, and cleaning.

Sometimes assists Ruby Rabbit with whatever she’s making.

Nickname is "Bon-Bon," mostly used by Clover.

Roleplay Icon(s):

The Guys

Buster the Demon

“Buster is the Older Brother of Bendy. Like his brother, he’s quite mischievous and often happens into trouble. However he’s usually not the one causing it, and often relies on his own cunning to outwit whatever situation he’s in. In fact he’s quite cocky and boastful about the things he can do. Despite this, he’s a well-intentioned goofball who loves nothing more than making others laugh.”

Is essentially the Oswald to Bendy’s Mickey

He is big on slapstick and quite hardy.

Sometimes works at the Bar as entertainment

Loves to tease and mess with his little brother, but still loves him dearly

Won’t tolerate anyone trying to pick on him.

Buster is a bruiser, his trademark weapon is a wooden mallet that he pulls out of hammerspace.

Despite this he tries to solve most of his problems by outsmarting his foes.

Definitely a mastermind when it comes to coming up with plans.

Is dating Clover.

Will happily tell you how much he loves his girlfriend.

BATIM Fanon Wiki Page

Roleplay Icon(s):

Secondary Characters

Blaise

"A Charming, Charismatic, Wealthy, Successful, and Princely guy with the voice of an... well, you know. However with his fame and fortune has come an air of superiority and privilege. There's more to this fella than his angelic looks."

Clover and he were childhood friends.

Clover absolutely hates him now. However Blaise still persists to pursue her as a suitor.

A rival to Bendy and to Buster.

He acts very “Higher than Thou.”

Mayor Finley

"Ernest Finley is the cheerful, sociable mayor of town and Clover's father. He loves keeping a presence, knowing what's best for his citizens and offering all he can to better the town he runs. Though the mayor's giving nature makes him to be a target of advantage-taking causing Clover to worry about him constantly."

Clover's Father

Clover refers to him as "Papa,""Father," or "Pops"

Loves his daughter with all his heart.

Can be cowardly in some cases, but absolutely will not tolerate anyone trying to threaten his daughter.

Loves to give rousing speeches.

Can play the piano, loves the sound of the instrument.

Approved and helped to Fund the Daycare. Is semi-aware of the speakeasy and chooses to stay out of it.

Grim Skeleton

"Grim is a foil to bendy. Whereas while bendy is a Cheerful troublemaker, Grim is simply a happy-go-lucky chap who happens upon trouble wherever he goes. Often his cartoons involve him in plights of peril, even ones where he’s completely oblivious to the dangers around him as he goes about his merry way. Oblivious is certainly one word for him, the other being a trifle spineless... despite being a literal skeleton."

Is the Donald Duck to Bendy’s Mickey in the sense that he is his Foil, and opposite.

Has a tendency to be forgetful.

And Oblivious.

Drives Bella crazy

Loves Sandwiches.

A pure gentlemen.

Absolutely in love with his darling Bella.

Bella Skeleton

"Bella is a darling. She’s always up to date on the latest trends and fashions, and loves to lavish in the splendor of the finer things in life. She likes to organize and plan things out, often being the one to help grim keep track of his daily tasks. Though at times she can be a bit prissy and picky. As well as fussy towards Grim, though he doesn’t mind. He absolutely adores her and would do anything to keep a smile on her face."

A fashionista.

Loves gossip, and advice.

Often visits the girls at the day care or even the bar just to chat about current events.

Bella is great for Intel, somehow she just finds out everything. Even before someone knows it.

Perhaps it’s really good intuition.

Hates getting dirty, always carries extra makeup and backup clothing.

Quite charmed by Grim.

Wilda Witch (Also sometimes called "Wicked Witch Wilda")

"Wilda is a cruel, bitter old witch who loves torment just about anyone. She rides around on her broom where she casts strange spells on unsuspecting victims. No one knows why she loves being so cruel, though rumors say she genuinely gets a kick out of being a pain."

Despises Clover for her lucky streak. Once used magic to steal it away from her, but after a long string of shenanigans Clover managed to get her luck back.

Also once used her magic to steal Alice’s Voice.

A rotten apple to her core.

Loves to show up at the worst times.

Responsible for essentially any "Magical Anons" This blog receives. 

Cupid the Angel

"Cupid is... well, Cupid! The angel of Love who brings peace and harmony to everyone! The chip, optimistic guys is actually Bonnie’s older brother, and a surprisingly close friend of Bendy’s as well. Mindful, experienced, and clever in his own right. Cupid is the (Almost) perfect Matchmaker!”

Canon Characters

(Note: This section is for already-existing BATIM/BINR characters from the games that are characterized or developed in ways that may go outside of what actually happens in canon. Usually are secondary characters.)

Dewey Inkwell

“Dewey is a big, quiet, and kind of imposing guy whose in charge of the Library in town. He once tried to bury Bendy in ink when he caused a ruckus at his establishment. Though after being confronted by Clover, and seeing the level of destruction caused to the Library by his outburst, he’s begun trying to managing his anger. The Inkwell might be a grumpy guy in general, but he’s hoping to get a second chance to prove he’s more than a monster.”

Very quiet by nature. It can make him seem a lot more imposing and intimidating as he’s already a big guy.

Only really gets loud when he’s angry.

Is currently seeing an Anger Management Counselor to deal with his temper after the events of “Dewey Decimated.”

Grumpy seems to be his default mood either way. 

Is secretly a big softy, he hides a lot off his feelings under a very intimidating-looking shell.

Not very good about managing his feelings. 

Not the most social guy. Spends most of his time at the Library where he feels most himself

Very passionate about reading a book preservation, as well as reading and phonetic education.

Lets Ruby and Clover bring the kids to the library to read on Wednesday for that reason.

His Tommy Ink Gun shoots both ink and feather quills.

No one knows how he even acquired something like that. Most of them assume the source wasn’t good. 

Minor Characters

Kids at the Daycare

[onlinemarketinghelp]

How to Make Money Online: 26 Real Ways to Earn Money Online https://ift.tt/328NbrK

From online poker to selling your collection of Beanie Babies, there are lots of popular get-rich-quick, money-making ideas that always pop up. Do they work? Not really. Will you make money doing it? Maaaybe. But you’d probably make more money from your 9 to 5 job. At least then it’s a guaranteed paycheck. The truth is there are real ways to make money online – millions of people are doing it each day. From freelance digital nomads to savvy marketers to rising entrepreneurs, there are plenty of business ideas you can try at home using your laptop and a solid internet connection. So let’s break down how to make money online… the real way.

How to Make Money Online: 26 Real Ways

1. Start Dropshipping

Since we’re a dropshipping blog, we might as well start our list off with one of the most popular ways to make money online. According to Google Trends, dropshipping’s popularity is rapidly growing, highlighting its viability as a way to make money online. With success stories about how an entrepreneur made $6,667 in eight weeks or how a store owner made six figures selling just one product, there’s plenty of proof that dropshipping is a real way to make money online.

In case you don’t know what dropshipping is: dropshipping is a business model where you sell a product to a customer, but the supplier stores, packages, and ships the product to your customers on your behalf. With Oberlo, you have access to millions of products that you can add to your store. Oberlo also allows you to send suppliers the customer details in only a couple clicks instead of doing the work yourself.

The best way to make money online dropshipping? Most entrepreneurs have been focusing on a few marketing strategies: running Facebook ads, having influencers promote your products, and sending Direct Messages (DMs) to potential customers on social media.

2. Try Print on Demand

Print on demand is proving to be a popular option too. Graphic designers are turning to the business model to sell their designs on clothing and other products to better monetize their art. With their unique designs, they can create a consistent and established brand for their business.

Print on demand is similar to dropshipping in the sense that you don’t need to carry inventory or ship out products to customers yourself. There are two slight differences though. First, you can add branded labels on packages. Second, shipping costs are exorbitant, making it difficult to create a sustainable business unless you charge higher prices or sell higher quantities.

The best way to make money with your print on demand business? Free marketing channels. Your best bet would be to promote your products for free on Instagram, Pinterest, or with affordable influencers who convert their audiences well. This will help you make money online instead of breaking even with paid marketing channels like Facebook Ads.

3. Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. Throughout the years its popularity has gone up and down but it continues to prove to be a stable way to make money online. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you can be an affiliate for nearly any company, from Shopify to Amazon to Uber to FabFitFun.

Affiliate marketing allows you to earn a living by promoting other brands. If you’re a savvy marketer, you can earn a commission from sales by promoting retail products, software, apps, and more. While earning a commission may seem small, keep in mind that you can be an affiliate for several brands and include several affiliate links on a single blog post.

If you really want to make money online doing affiliate marketing, your best bet is to focus on content marketing. By building out a blog with several pages of content you essentially create an asset you can call your own. The best part about focusing on content marketing is that if an affiliate program shuts down, you can switch the affiliate link to a competitor without negatively impacting your side hustle income.

4. Start a YouTube Channel

The highest-paid YouTuber is 7-year-old Ryan, who reviews toys on his YouTube channel which made him $22 million in 2018. In the number 5 spot is Jeffree Star, who made $18 million on YouTube and has a cosmetics brand that sells about $100 million in products annually. His YouTube (and Myspace) fame helped him use his influence to make money online beyond his YouTube earnings.

Your YouTube channel should focus on a single niche so you can build a strong, loyal audience. For example, you can create makeup tutorials, stream video games, review products, teach skills, create prank videos, or anything else you think there’d be an audience for.

The secret to making money on YouTube is to create content people want that either educates or entertains. You can use a headline that’s clickbait to entice people to watch or you can use keywords that are optimized for YouTube search. Once you’ve reached the 1,000 subscriber milestone, you can officially monetize your channel with YouTube ads.

5. Become an Influencer

Building a personal brand can help you make money online. Did you know in 2018, Kylie Jenner made $1 million for every sponsored Instagram post, making her the highest-paid influencer? While it may seem like reality stars, singers, and athletes are the biggest influencers, keep in mind that even smaller-scale influencers can make more money today than they did a year ago.

To become an influencer you need to build a massive following. The easiest platforms to do that: YouTube and Instagram. Some of the biggest non-celebrity influencers often gained their first taste of exposure on these platforms. You might want to check out how to get more Instagram followers if you want to build a big Instagram audience.

To make money as an influencer, you can charge for sponsored posts, speaking gigs, create your own online store and sell products, add affiliate links in your bio, sell your photos, sell ads on your own podcast, get paid as a brand ambassador, create a book, get paid to appear at events, and more.

6. Create an Online Course

Sharing knowledge is one of the best ways to make money online. If you’re an expert on a subject you can monetize your knowledge by creating courses online. You can sell your course on Udemy or, if you already have your own audience, on your own website.

To create a popular and successful course, your best bet is to watch other courses on your topic. Then, look at the reviews. What are the aspects that people praise and what are the things people hate? How can you create something better than what’s already been created? Focus on creating content that solves the biggest complaints while emulating the positive aspects people rave about.

The platform you sell your course on will determine how to best make money. If you sell your course on Udemy, you don’t have to do much to promote it. You can almost set it and forget it. Maybe promote it to some blogs or on your own website. However, if the course is hosted on your own website you might want to run ads to promote the course. You can also build an email list so you can continue to promote future courses to that same audience.

7. Publish an Ebook

With Amazon KDP, it’s never been easier to publish an ebook. All you need to do is write the ebook, format it, create an ebook cover, publish, and promote it. Back in 2013, I created several ebooks on Amazon (took all but one down) and even though it didn’t make me rich, I still make some money from it.

You can choose to hire a writer for your ebook, a graphic designer to design the cover, or a freelancer to format the ebook for you to help minimize the work you need to put into it. It’s best if you focus on keywords based on popular searches on Amazon. I often used Keyword Tool, which allows you to find the words people use while searching so you can craft your title around it.

To make money online selling ebooks, you can market it a number of ways. You can give away your ebook for free for a few days. This helps you rank high in search results for a few days and get some reviews which helps you rank better for paid listings. Plus, I like to create custom graphics on Pinterest that match the “Pinterest style” rather than just placing the ebook cover as a pin. This has helped me get some clicks to my ebook from Pinterest.

8. Start a Blog

Blogging is one of the oldest methods for making money online. People who love writing tend to start blogs with a niche focus. For example, a blog about procrastination, cars, dropshipping, toys, etc., is often a narrow enough focus so you can build a loyal following, but big enough that you can cover a lot of ground.

You can start a blog on a number of platforms, from Shopify (remove the checkout feature so you don’t have to pay a subscription as you build it out) to WordPress. When you start your blog, focus on very specific keywords on a tight focus and continue to expand into other but relevant categories as you grow and dominate new spaces. This will allow you to build a massive blog over time.

There are several ways to make money blogging. You can add affiliate links in your posts (don’t forget a disclaimer). You can monetize with AdSense by placing ads strategically on your website. Sponsored posts can help you make money from specific brands – this is popular among review bloggers. Bloggers can also sell digital or physical products on their website either (hint: you can add Oberlo products to your website). You can also use it to build authority so that you can eventually get speaking gigs, television deals, or big contracts from clients.

9. Consider Freelancing

The easiest way to make money online is to take your current job at your 9 to 5 job and do it online instead. For example, if you’re a writer, administrative assistant, graphic designer, teacher, developer, etc., you can take those same skills and find clients online who are looking for it.

There’s a never-ending list of websites for each sector of freelance jobs too. For example, freelance writers can apply for jobs on specific online writing job boards, but also general freelance websites like Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork, and all the others.

If you find that your job doesn’t have a direct online money-making stream of income, you can look for other transferable skills you may have. To make money online as a freelancer, you need to start by building out a strong portfolio. That may mean doing some free work with some reputable mid-tier brands to start. Once you gain a strong portfolio, you can start reaching out to potential big clients to earn more money online. Remember, freelancing is a numbers game: the more personalized emails and applications you fill out, the more likely you are to get a response back.

10. Create an App

If you’re not a developer, you’re probably looking at this money-making idea and feeling a bit stuck. Fortunately, there is a way to have an app made that doesn’t involve any programming skills.

These days, marketers are using freelance platforms to find affordable developers to create apps for them.

When it comes to making money on your app, your best bet will be to add it to Google Play and the App Store. And while it may seem counterintuitive, having a free app can help you make more than a paid app. With a free app, you can add ads or premium features to help you make money. Since the free app will attract a higher volume of people, it’ll be easier for you to upsell them.

11. Become a Writer

With a growing interest in content marketing, more brands are looking for great writers to create content. The secret to succeeding as a writer is to be an expert in a niche. A lot of writers try to be generalists, writing for a wide range of categories from food to tech. However, having a niche focus as a writer allows you to write better content. When you have experience in the niche, you can offer a different perspective to a piece of content. That means you’re not just saying the same thing as every other article online. And that’s what brands really want to pay for. Your thoughts, experiences and inside information into their niche.

If someone asks for a marketing writing sample, send them marketing writing samples. Don’t send a finance article. Or a fitness one. It’s hard for a hiring manager to know how well you understand the niche’s industry if they can’t see a relevant writing sample. Apply to opportunities suited to your skillset and experience. Also, if your pitch doesn’t have a list of links to writing samples, it’s going to get ignored.

You can make money online on sites like these:

Problogger

Craigslist

Blogging Pro

Freelance Writing

Media Bistro

Flex Jobs

Be a Freelance Blogger

12. Create Side Gigs

Side gigs can help you make money online while you keep your full-time job. If you’re unemployed, side gigs may not be enough to hold you over. If you’re only looking to make an extra couple hundred dollars per month, this is a great idea. The work doesn’t always last long-term but it can.

Use platforms like Fiverr to create gigs. When you’re new to Fiverr, you’ll want to focus on offering a low price so you could get your first review. I’d recommend getting a friend to buy your gig to leave your first review so you can get started faster. Treat the friend like a client and actually deliver a finished product that you can feature on the platform on your portfolio. The thing with Fiverr is that it’s also a numbers game. If you look at top Fiverr users, you’ll see that they have multiple gigs available. The more gigs you have the more likely you are to be found.

If you don’t want to get paid Fiverr prices, you can turn to platforms like Craigslist to find side gigs. Under their jobs section, you can search for contract or telecommute opportunities. The great thing about the telecommute opportunities on Craigslist is that you can apply for them for any city in the world. Craigslist has a variety of side gigs from writing, business, design, accounting and more. So if your talents don’t match up with anything else on this list of money-making ideas, you might want to try a side gig from Craigslist, and start making money online. Apply to multiple opportunities to land a few small side gigs.

13. Do Translation Work

If you need to make money now, translation work is a fairly underserved niche. You’ll need to be fluent in at least two languages to do this successfully. So if you’re bilingual or majored in a popular language in school, this may be a great money-making idea for you to try out.

You will need to show proof of your ability to translate so if you have a language degree or experience translating text, you should show samples of your portfolio. Most companies will require a translation test. Keep in mind that you need to be fluent in the languages you’re applying to be a translator for. So you can’t use translation tools.

Sites where you can make money online include:

Upwork

People Per Hour

SDL

Gengo

Pro Translating

Translators Base

14. Sell Your Stuff

When you’re desperate to make money now, sometimes the only option is to sell your stuff. If you’re unemployed and struggling to find a job, selling your possessions is a great way to make money fast. You can earn money online using the links below or you can head to a pawn shop. Keep in mind the shipping costs associated with selling online. Be sure to charge the buyer for it if you’re shipping products internationally. 

Most people immediately think of selling their junk like books, DVDs, and CDs. But most people don’t want to buy those things. It’s 2019 – are you really going to buy a CD? Probably not. So don’t waste your time trying to sell it. When you’re thinking about how to make money fast, focus on items of value like laptops, TVs, phones, furniture, designer handbags or clothing. Try selling the same items on multiple platforms. For example, you might try selling your product on Facebook groups and Craigslist instead of just one of them. If you sell your stuff everywhere there’s a chance of someone finding it.

Be sure to take amazing photos and edit them. An online retailer doesn’t upload images as is. They hire a photographer to take great photos. Images are enhanced. The background is often removed. Approach your product post like an online retailer. Avoid taking pictures of products on tables. If a product is on a table, remove the background to make it white. After you’ve run out of stuff to sell online, start your own online store using Oberlo. You’ve proven that you’ve got what it takes to be an online retailer. So, now you can start making money from home.

15. Become an Online Tutor

You can make a lot of money online, and choose your own hours, by being an online tutor. According to Studenomics, Bohdan made $2100 from tutoring. In the article, you’ll learn how he made built up his clients through word of mouth, visibility, and great group rates. While sciences and maths often have a high demand for tutoring positions, you’ll also find English to be popular among international audiences. If you’re an expert on a topic, tutoring may be the right platform for you to make money fast.

Having a degree or experience in a language is essential this type of job so showcase your degree, high-grade average in a course or other proof that you’re qualified to tutor that topic. If you have a teaching degree, you may be more likely to land a tutoring position. If you’ve spoken at a conference or event about the topic, you might also be considered for an online tutoring, teaching or mentoring position. Focus on tutoring in your field of expertise. If you’re not the best, you probably shouldn’t be tutoring in that specific topic.

You can find online tutoring jobs on platforms like these:

Tutor Me

Chegg Tutors

Tutor.com

Yup

Cambly

16. Drive Your Car

If you own a car, you can make some spare cash as an Uber driver or delivery person. If you don’t own a car, you can still be a delivery person using your bicycle or moped. Uber drivers looking to make even more money off their car can turn their car into an advertisement using Free Car Media. Your car will be wrapped with a removable vinyl decal. There have also been cases of Uber drivers selling products in their car. As a driver, you’ll often times start talking about what you and your passenger do for a living.

Want to know how to make money fast driving Uber? If you own your own side business, you can showcase your products to your passengers if they’re interested. Not all will be though. However, if one expresses interest in your products, you can have products for sale under the driver’s seat for a passenger to sift through. If customers don’t have the cash, you can ask them to pay for the cost of it with Uber’s tip function. 

17. Become a Virtual Assistant

With so many entrepreneurs building businesses, virtual assistants are becoming an important part of running a business. As a virtual assistant, you’ll do a variety of tasks. Writing, order processing, bookkeeping, social media, and customer support are just a few of the tasks you might be asked to do as a virtual assistant. 

You can earn money online on websites like Virtual Assistant Jobs, Indeed, or Upwork. Many virtual assistants have also found ways to make money online by reaching out to brands and entrepreneurs asking if they’re interested in hiring a virtual assistant. Using a combination of job posting applications and outreach, you’ll be more likely to make money fast. Build an active social media presence on Twitter and LinkedIn to help you find new clients.

18. Become a Twitch Streamer

Twitch streaming is becoming increasingly popular. While it started out as a gaming platform, it’s quickly evolving to include other types of content. To make money fast on Twitch, you’ll need to grow your following. If you’re unemployed, spending your entire day streaming on Twitch can help you build a sizeable audience fast. You’ll need to find a popular game or channel that isn’t overly competitive so that people can easily find your content. In order to make money online from streaming, you’ll need to have a consistent style to your channel: is it going to be funny, educational or entertaining? Engaging on the chat feature on Twitch is another way to grow your following. You’ll want to communicate in popular chats. However, you’ll also want to engage with those chatting on your streams as well.

There are five ways to monetize your Twitch channel: selling products, brand sponsorships, fan donations, subscriptions and Twitch ads. As a Twitch streamer, you’ll want to focus on tapping into all five monetization methods to ensure the highest financial gains. You could potentially make more on Twitch than YouTube, making it one of the best money making ideas for video creators.

19. Invest in Stocks

You can also make money fast by investing in stocks. If you aren’t an expert in picking stock you might want to skip this money making idea. While it can have one of the highest fast rewards, it can also result in money loss if you’re inexperienced. If you currently hold a 9 to 5 job, look into your company’s financial programs. Do they allow you to invest in company stocks? If so, sign up for it. At least with a company stock program you have some influence in the company’s success as an employee. If your company has an RRSP matching program, you can also sign up for that if your goal is to save up for retirement or a down payment on your first home.

20. Sell Your Photography

Whether you’re a professional photographer or just love snapping great pictures, you can monetize your photography a number of ways. You can make money fast by posting your photography services in local Facebook groups for your community. 

If you’re looking for more photography clients, you can use a site like Scoopshot. However, if you’re looking to monetize your phone photography you can use Foap. Learn more product photography tips to help you start making money with photography.

21. Sell Your Clothes Online

Most people have more clothes in their closet than they ever wear. You likely have items you haven’t worn in the past year that you never have any intention of wearing ever again. Whether you sell your clothes, handbags, or shoes there are quite a few websites that allow you to sell your used fashion items. Poshmark, Refashioner, TheRealReal, ThredUp and Tradesy are a few of the online sites where you can sell your used apparel. 

You could make money online by selling on several different platforms. If you’re looking to sell items in person, you can use Facebook buy and sell groups in your community to find people online and sell the items in person. I’ve personally sold in these groups before and know they work.

22. Become an Extreme Couponer

When money is tight, using coupons can help save you a few bucks. However, with Coupon Chief it can also help you make money online. They offer a Pays to Share program where you’ll receive 2% of sales from the coupons you share on their platform. You’ll need to add coupons that haven’t already been shared. In return, you’ll make a 2% commission. The company has already paid out over $1.4 million in commissions.

23. Sell Domains

If you regularly buy domain names but fail to use them, you can always try to sell them for a profit. Selling domains is ultra competitive though. If you own an one word .com domain you’ll have a better chance of selling. Words that have high search volume sell well too. Also, domains that are on trend at that moment have a better chance of selling. For example, a year ago fidget spinner domains were an easier sell than they are now. You can sell your domains on Go Daddy’s Domain Auction. Look through the domains with the highest bids to see what type of domains sell well. It’ll help you know whether or not the domains you have are worth selling and how much money you can make selling them.

24. Sell Your Designs Online

Graphic design is an amazing skill that works with several money making ideas. You can go the print on demand route and sell your designs on your own custom products. Or you can pitch your designs on a crowdsource platform like 99 Designs. You can create your own graphics, templates and more and sell them on marketplaces like Graphic River or Creative Market. Or you can pick up some clients and work as a freelance graphic artist.

25. Review Websites, Apps, and Software

If you’re passionate about user experience, User Testing pays reviewers $10 to give other entrepreneurs feedback on their websites and apps. That’s one fast way to make money online. You’ll be given a set of questions that you need to answer as you browse through their website. Through a video, you’ll communicate your ideas and feedback to the entrepreneur while navigating their website or app. Your video is only 20 minutes in length so if you do 3 videos per hour you’ll make $30. It can be pretty competitive so you have to act fast when a new website or app is added to be reviewed. Those who want to earn money online by reviewing software can use a tool called Software Judge.

26. Get a Part-Time Job

When you’ve done whatever it takes to make money fast but struggle to make an impact, sometimes you’re left with no choice but to get a part-time job. A lot of the money-making ideas on this list are great for building up to. They can be really successful over the long-term too. But if you’re struggling to make money fast enough, you might need to apply to a part-time job in your field. You can browse part-time jobs on job bank websites like Indeed, Monster or a job website for your industry.

Whether you’re looking to make an extra couple hundred a month or grow a successful six-figure brand, I hope these money making ideas have inspired you to take action. Learning how to make money fast or how to make money from home is an important part of success, but the execution is what helps you make money now.

Conclusion

Making money online can help you earn some extra side hustle money but it can also help you escape your 9 to 5 job so you can become a full-time entrepreneur. By making more money, you gain more financial freedom, improve your financial security, and inch closer to living life on your terms. It really is possible to earn a living online if you work hard and stick with it. So, which side hustle will you try out first?

26 Business Ideas to Make Money Online

Start Dropshipping

Try Print on Demand

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Start a YouTube Channel

Become an Influencer

Create an Online Course

Publish an Ebook

Start a Blog

Consider Freelancing

Create an App

Become a Writer

Create Side Gigs

Do Translation Work

Sell Your Stuff

Become an Online Tutor

Drive Your Car

Become a Virtual Assistant

Become a Twitch Streamer

Invest in Stocks

Sell Your Photography

Sell Your Clothes Online

Become an Extreme Couponer

Sell Domains

Sell Your Designs Online

Review Websites, Apps, and Software

Get a Part-Time Job

Want to Learn More?

The Ultimate List of The Most Popular Online Business Ideas

16 Reasons to Start a Business

What Is Email Marketing and Why Is It Important?

Here Are the Biggest Dropshipping Niches in the Biggest Markets

The post How to Make Money Online: 26 Real Ways to Earn Money Online appeared first on Oberlo.

from Oberlo

From online poker to selling your collection of Beanie Babies, there are lots of popular get-rich-quick, money-making ideas that always pop up. Do they work? Not really. Will you make money doing it? Maaaybe. But you’d probably make more money from your 9 to 5 job. At least then it’s a guaranteed paycheck. The truth is there are real ways to make money online – millions of people are doing it each day. From freelance digital nomads to savvy marketers to rising entrepreneurs, there are plenty of business ideas you can try at home using your laptop and a solid internet connection. So let’s break down how to make money online… the real way.

How to Make Money Online: 26 Real Ways

1. Start Dropshipping

Since we’re a dropshipping blog, we might as well start our list off with one of the most popular ways to make money online. According to Google Trends, dropshipping’s popularity is rapidly growing, highlighting its viability as a way to make money online. With success stories about how an entrepreneur made $6,667 in eight weeks or how a store owner made six figures selling just one product, there’s plenty of proof that dropshipping is a real way to make money online.

In case you don’t know what dropshipping is: dropshipping is a business model where you sell a product to a customer, but the supplier stores, packages, and ships the product to your customers on your behalf. With Oberlo, you have access to millions of products that you can add to your store. Oberlo also allows you to send suppliers the customer details in only a couple clicks instead of doing the work yourself.

The best way to make money online dropshipping? Most entrepreneurs have been focusing on a few marketing strategies: running Facebook ads, having influencers promote your products, and sending Direct Messages (DMs) to potential customers on social media.

2. Try Print on Demand

Print on demand is proving to be a popular option too. Graphic designers are turning to the business model to sell their designs on clothing and other products to better monetize their art. With their unique designs, they can create a consistent and established brand for their business.

Print on demand is similar to dropshipping in the sense that you don’t need to carry inventory or ship out products to customers yourself. There are two slight differences though. First, you can add branded labels on packages. Second, shipping costs are exorbitant, making it difficult to create a sustainable business unless you charge higher prices or sell higher quantities.

The best way to make money with your print on demand business? Free marketing channels. Your best bet would be to promote your products for free on Instagram, Pinterest, or with affordable influencers who convert their audiences well. This will help you make money online instead of breaking even with paid marketing channels like Facebook Ads.

3. Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. Throughout the years its popularity has gone up and down but it continues to prove to be a stable way to make money online. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you can be an affiliate for nearly any company, from Shopify to Amazon to Uber to FabFitFun.

Affiliate marketing allows you to earn a living by promoting other brands. If you’re a savvy marketer, you can earn a commission from sales by promoting retail products, software, apps, and more. While earning a commission may seem small, keep in mind that you can be an affiliate for several brands and include several affiliate links on a single blog post.

If you really want to make money online doing affiliate marketing, your best bet is to focus on content marketing. By building out a blog with several pages of content you essentially create an asset you can call your own. The best part about focusing on content marketing is that if an affiliate program shuts down, you can switch the affiliate link to a competitor without negatively impacting your side hustle income.

4. Start a YouTube Channel

The highest-paid YouTuber is 7-year-old Ryan, who reviews toys on his YouTube channel which made him $22 million in 2018. In the number 5 spot is Jeffree Star, who made $18 million on YouTube and has a cosmetics brand that sells about $100 million in products annually. His YouTube (and Myspace) fame helped him use his influence to make money online beyond his YouTube earnings.

Your YouTube channel should focus on a single niche so you can build a strong, loyal audience. For example, you can create makeup tutorials, stream video games, review products, teach skills, create prank videos, or anything else you think there’d be an audience for.

The secret to making money on YouTube is to create content people want that either educates or entertains. You can use a headline that’s clickbait to entice people to watch or you can use keywords that are optimized for YouTube search. Once you’ve reached the 1,000 subscriber milestone, you can officially monetize your channel with YouTube ads.

5. Become an Influencer

Building a personal brand can help you make money online. Did you know in 2018, Kylie Jenner made $1 million for every sponsored Instagram post, making her the highest-paid influencer? While it may seem like reality stars, singers, and athletes are the biggest influencers, keep in mind that even smaller-scale influencers can make more money today than they did a year ago.

To become an influencer you need to build a massive following. The easiest platforms to do that: YouTube and Instagram. Some of the biggest non-celebrity influencers often gained their first taste of exposure on these platforms. You might want to check out how to get more Instagram followers if you want to build a big Instagram audience.

To make money as an influencer, you can charge for sponsored posts, speaking gigs, create your own online store and sell products, add affiliate links in your bio, sell your photos, sell ads on your own podcast, get paid as a brand ambassador, create a book, get paid to appear at events, and more.

6. Create an Online Course

Sharing knowledge is one of the best ways to make money online. If you’re an expert on a subject you can monetize your knowledge by creating courses online. You can sell your course on Udemy or, if you already have your own audience, on your own website.

To create a popular and successful course, your best bet is to watch other courses on your topic. Then, look at the reviews. What are the aspects that people praise and what are the things people hate? How can you create something better than what’s already been created? Focus on creating content that solves the biggest complaints while emulating the positive aspects people rave about.

The platform you sell your course on will determine how to best make money. If you sell your course on Udemy, you don’t have to do much to promote it. You can almost set it and forget it. Maybe promote it to some blogs or on your own website. However, if the course is hosted on your own website you might want to run ads to promote the course. You can also build an email list so you can continue to promote future courses to that same audience.

7. Publish an Ebook

With Amazon KDP, it’s never been easier to publish an ebook. All you need to do is write the ebook, format it, create an ebook cover, publish, and promote it. Back in 2013, I created several ebooks on Amazon (took all but one down) and even though it didn’t make me rich, I still make some money from it.

You can choose to hire a writer for your ebook, a graphic designer to design the cover, or a freelancer to format the ebook for you to help minimize the work you need to put into it. It’s best if you focus on keywords based on popular searches on Amazon. I often used Keyword Tool, which allows you to find the words people use while searching so you can craft your title around it.

To make money online selling ebooks, you can market it a number of ways. You can give away your ebook for free for a few days. This helps you rank high in search results for a few days and get some reviews which helps you rank better for paid listings. Plus, I like to create custom graphics on Pinterest that match the “Pinterest style” rather than just placing the ebook cover as a pin. This has helped me get some clicks to my ebook from Pinterest.

8. Start a Blog

Blogging is one of the oldest methods for making money online. People who love writing tend to start blogs with a niche focus. For example, a blog about procrastination, cars, dropshipping, toys, etc., is often a narrow enough focus so you can build a loyal following, but big enough that you can cover a lot of ground.

You can start a blog on a number of platforms, from Shopify (remove the checkout feature so you don’t have to pay a subscription as you build it out) to WordPress. When you start your blog, focus on very specific keywords on a tight focus and continue to expand into other but relevant categories as you grow and dominate new spaces. This will allow you to build a massive blog over time.

There are several ways to make money blogging. You can add affiliate links in your posts (don’t forget a disclaimer). You can monetize with AdSense by placing ads strategically on your website. Sponsored posts can help you make money from specific brands – this is popular among review bloggers. Bloggers can also sell digital or physical products on their website either (hint: you can add Oberlo products to your website). You can also use it to build authority so that you can eventually get speaking gigs, television deals, or big contracts from clients.

9. Consider Freelancing

The easiest way to make money online is to take your current job at your 9 to 5 job and do it online instead. For example, if you’re a writer, administrative assistant, graphic designer, teacher, developer, etc., you can take those same skills and find clients online who are looking for it.

There’s a never-ending list of websites for each sector of freelance jobs too. For example, freelance writers can apply for jobs on specific online writing job boards, but also general freelance websites like Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork, and all the others.

If you find that your job doesn’t have a direct online money-making stream of income, you can look for other transferable skills you may have. To make money online as a freelancer, you need to start by building out a strong portfolio. That may mean doing some free work with some reputable mid-tier brands to start. Once you gain a strong portfolio, you can start reaching out to potential big clients to earn more money online. Remember, freelancing is a numbers game: the more personalized emails and applications you fill out, the more likely you are to get a response back.

10. Create an App

If you’re not a developer, you’re probably looking at this money-making idea and feeling a bit stuck. Fortunately, there is a way to have an app made that doesn’t involve any programming skills.

These days, marketers are using freelance platforms to find affordable developers to create apps for them.

When it comes to making money on your app, your best bet will be to add it to Google Play and the App Store. And while it may seem counterintuitive, having a free app can help you make more than a paid app. With a free app, you can add ads or premium features to help you make money. Since the free app will attract a higher volume of people, it’ll be easier for you to upsell them.

11. Become a Writer

With a growing interest in content marketing, more brands are looking for great writers to create content. The secret to succeeding as a writer is to be an expert in a niche. A lot of writers try to be generalists, writing for a wide range of categories from food to tech. However, having a niche focus as a writer allows you to write better content. When you have experience in the niche, you can offer a different perspective to a piece of content. That means you’re not just saying the same thing as every other article online. And that’s what brands really want to pay for. Your thoughts, experiences and inside information into their niche.

If someone asks for a marketing writing sample, send them marketing writing samples. Don’t send a finance article. Or a fitness one. It’s hard for a hiring manager to know how well you understand the niche’s industry if they can’t see a relevant writing sample. Apply to opportunities suited to your skillset and experience. Also, if your pitch doesn’t have a list of links to writing samples, it’s going to get ignored.

You can make money online on sites like these:

Problogger

Craigslist

Blogging Pro

Freelance Writing

Media Bistro

Flex Jobs

Be a Freelance Blogger

12. Create Side Gigs

Side gigs can help you make money online while you keep your full-time job. If you’re unemployed, side gigs may not be enough to hold you over. If you’re only looking to make an extra couple hundred dollars per month, this is a great idea. The work doesn’t always last long-term but it can.

Use platforms like Fiverr to create gigs. When you’re new to Fiverr, you’ll want to focus on offering a low price so you could get your first review. I’d recommend getting a friend to buy your gig to leave your first review so you can get started faster. Treat the friend like a client and actually deliver a finished product that you can feature on the platform on your portfolio. The thing with Fiverr is that it’s also a numbers game. If you look at top Fiverr users, you’ll see that they have multiple gigs available. The more gigs you have the more likely you are to be found.

If you don’t want to get paid Fiverr prices, you can turn to platforms like Craigslist to find side gigs. Under their jobs section, you can search for contract or telecommute opportunities. The great thing about the telecommute opportunities on Craigslist is that you can apply for them for any city in the world. Craigslist has a variety of side gigs from writing, business, design, accounting and more. So if your talents don’t match up with anything else on this list of money-making ideas, you might want to try a side gig from Craigslist, and start making money online. Apply to multiple opportunities to land a few small side gigs.

13. Do Translation Work

If you need to make money now, translation work is a fairly underserved niche. You’ll need to be fluent in at least two languages to do this successfully. So if you’re bilingual or majored in a popular language in school, this may be a great money-making idea for you to try out.

You will need to show proof of your ability to translate so if you have a language degree or experience translating text, you should show samples of your portfolio. Most companies will require a translation test. Keep in mind that you need to be fluent in the languages you’re applying to be a translator for. So you can’t use translation tools.

Sites where you can make money online include:

Upwork

People Per Hour

SDL

Gengo

Pro Translating

Translators Base

14. Sell Your Stuff

When you’re desperate to make money now, sometimes the only option is to sell your stuff. If you’re unemployed and struggling to find a job, selling your possessions is a great way to make money fast. You can earn money online using the links below or you can head to a pawn shop. Keep in mind the shipping costs associated with selling online. Be sure to charge the buyer for it if you’re shipping products internationally. 

Most people immediately think of selling their junk like books, DVDs, and CDs. But most people don’t want to buy those things. It’s 2019 – are you really going to buy a CD? Probably not. So don’t waste your time trying to sell it. When you’re thinking about how to make money fast, focus on items of value like laptops, TVs, phones, furniture, designer handbags or clothing. Try selling the same items on multiple platforms. For example, you might try selling your product on Facebook groups and Craigslist instead of just one of them. If you sell your stuff everywhere there’s a chance of someone finding it.

Be sure to take amazing photos and edit them. An online retailer doesn’t upload images as is. They hire a photographer to take great photos. Images are enhanced. The background is often removed. Approach your product post like an online retailer. Avoid taking pictures of products on tables. If a product is on a table, remove the background to make it white. After you’ve run out of stuff to sell online, start your own online store using Oberlo. You’ve proven that you’ve got what it takes to be an online retailer. So, now you can start making money from home.

15. Become an Online Tutor

You can make a lot of money online, and choose your own hours, by being an online tutor. According to Studenomics, Bohdan made $2100 from tutoring. In the article, you’ll learn how he made built up his clients through word of mouth, visibility, and great group rates. While sciences and maths often have a high demand for tutoring positions, you’ll also find English to be popular among international audiences. If you’re an expert on a topic, tutoring may be the right platform for you to make money fast.

Having a degree or experience in a language is essential this type of job so showcase your degree, high-grade average in a course or other proof that you’re qualified to tutor that topic. If you have a teaching degree, you may be more likely to land a tutoring position. If you’ve spoken at a conference or event about the topic, you might also be considered for an online tutoring, teaching or mentoring position. Focus on tutoring in your field of expertise. If you’re not the best, you probably shouldn’t be tutoring in that specific topic.

You can find online tutoring jobs on platforms like these:

Tutor Me

Chegg Tutors

Tutor.com

Yup

Cambly

16. Drive Your Car

If you own a car, you can make some spare cash as an Uber driver or delivery person. If you don’t own a car, you can still be a delivery person using your bicycle or moped. Uber drivers looking to make even more money off their car can turn their car into an advertisement using Free Car Media. Your car will be wrapped with a removable vinyl decal. There have also been cases of Uber drivers selling products in their car. As a driver, you’ll often times start talking about what you and your passenger do for a living.

Want to know how to make money fast driving Uber? If you own your own side business, you can showcase your products to your passengers if they’re interested. Not all will be though. However, if one expresses interest in your products, you can have products for sale under the driver’s seat for a passenger to sift through. If customers don’t have the cash, you can ask them to pay for the cost of it with Uber’s tip function. 

17. Become a Virtual Assistant

With so many entrepreneurs building businesses, virtual assistants are becoming an important part of running a business. As a virtual assistant, you’ll do a variety of tasks. Writing, order processing, bookkeeping, social media, and customer support are just a few of the tasks you might be asked to do as a virtual assistant. 

You can earn money online on websites like Virtual Assistant Jobs, Indeed, or Upwork. Many virtual assistants have also found ways to make money online by reaching out to brands and entrepreneurs asking if they’re interested in hiring a virtual assistant. Using a combination of job posting applications and outreach, you’ll be more likely to make money fast. Build an active social media presence on Twitter and LinkedIn to help you find new clients.

18. Become a Twitch Streamer

Twitch streaming is becoming increasingly popular. While it started out as a gaming platform, it’s quickly evolving to include other types of content. To make money fast on Twitch, you’ll need to grow your following. If you’re unemployed, spending your entire day streaming on Twitch can help you build a sizeable audience fast. You’ll need to find a popular game or channel that isn’t overly competitive so that people can easily find your content. In order to make money online from streaming, you’ll need to have a consistent style to your channel: is it going to be funny, educational or entertaining? Engaging on the chat feature on Twitch is another way to grow your following. You’ll want to communicate in popular chats. However, you’ll also want to engage with those chatting on your streams as well.

There are five ways to monetize your Twitch channel: selling products, brand sponsorships, fan donations, subscriptions and Twitch ads. As a Twitch streamer, you’ll want to focus on tapping into all five monetization methods to ensure the highest financial gains. You could potentially make more on Twitch than YouTube, making it one of the best money making ideas for video creators.

19. Invest in Stocks

You can also make money fast by investing in stocks. If you aren’t an expert in picking stock you might want to skip this money making idea. While it can have one of the highest fast rewards, it can also result in money loss if you’re inexperienced. If you currently hold a 9 to 5 job, look into your company’s financial programs. Do they allow you to invest in company stocks? If so, sign up for it. At least with a company stock program you have some influence in the company’s success as an employee. If your company has an RRSP matching program, you can also sign up for that if your goal is to save up for retirement or a down payment on your first home.

20. Sell Your Photography

Whether you’re a professional photographer or just love snapping great pictures, you can monetize your photography a number of ways. You can make money fast by posting your photography services in local Facebook groups for your community. 

If you’re looking for more photography clients, you can use a site like Scoopshot. However, if you’re looking to monetize your phone photography you can use Foap. Learn more product photography tips to help you start making money with photography.

21. Sell Your Clothes Online

Most people have more clothes in their closet than they ever wear. You likely have items you haven’t worn in the past year that you never have any intention of wearing ever again. Whether you sell your clothes, handbags, or shoes there are quite a few websites that allow you to sell your used fashion items. Poshmark, Refashioner, TheRealReal, ThredUp and Tradesy are a few of the online sites where you can sell your used apparel. 

You could make money online by selling on several different platforms. If you’re looking to sell items in person, you can use Facebook buy and sell groups in your community to find people online and sell the items in person. I’ve personally sold in these groups before and know they work.

22. Become an Extreme Couponer

When money is tight, using coupons can help save you a few bucks. However, with Coupon Chief it can also help you make money online. They offer a Pays to Share program where you’ll receive 2% of sales from the coupons you share on their platform. You’ll need to add coupons that haven’t already been shared. In return, you’ll make a 2% commission. The company has already paid out over $1.4 million in commissions.

23. Sell Domains

If you regularly buy domain names but fail to use them, you can always try to sell them for a profit. Selling domains is ultra competitive though. If you own an one word .com domain you’ll have a better chance of selling. Words that have high search volume sell well too. Also, domains that are on trend at that moment have a better chance of selling. For example, a year ago fidget spinner domains were an easier sell than they are now. You can sell your domains on Go Daddy’s Domain Auction. Look through the domains with the highest bids to see what type of domains sell well. It’ll help you know whether or not the domains you have are worth selling and how much money you can make selling them.

24. Sell Your Designs Online

Graphic design is an amazing skill that works with several money making ideas. You can go the print on demand route and sell your designs on your own custom products. Or you can pitch your designs on a crowdsource platform like 99 Designs. You can create your own graphics, templates and more and sell them on marketplaces like Graphic River or Creative Market. Or you can pick up some clients and work as a freelance graphic artist.

25. Review Websites, Apps, and Software

If you’re passionate about user experience, User Testing pays reviewers $10 to give other entrepreneurs feedback on their websites and apps. That’s one fast way to make money online. You’ll be given a set of questions that you need to answer as you browse through their website. Through a video, you’ll communicate your ideas and feedback to the entrepreneur while navigating their website or app. Your video is only 20 minutes in length so if you do 3 videos per hour you’ll make $30. It can be pretty competitive so you have to act fast when a new website or app is added to be reviewed. Those who want to earn money online by reviewing software can use a tool called Software Judge.

26. Get a Part-Time Job

When you’ve done whatever it takes to make money fast but struggle to make an impact, sometimes you’re left with no choice but to get a part-time job. A lot of the money-making ideas on this list are great for building up to. They can be really successful over the long-term too. But if you’re struggling to make money fast enough, you might need to apply to a part-time job in your field. You can browse part-time jobs on job bank websites like Indeed, Monster or a job website for your industry.

Whether you’re looking to make an extra couple hundred a month or grow a successful six-figure brand, I hope these money making ideas have inspired you to take action. Learning how to make money fast or how to make money from home is an important part of success, but the execution is what helps you make money now.

Conclusion

Making money online can help you earn some extra side hustle money but it can also help you escape your 9 to 5 job so you can become a full-time entrepreneur. By making more money, you gain more financial freedom, improve your financial security, and inch closer to living life on your terms. It really is possible to earn a living online if you work hard and stick with it. So, which side hustle will you try out first?

26 Business Ideas to Make Money Online

Start Dropshipping

Try Print on Demand

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Start a YouTube Channel

Become an Influencer

Create an Online Course

Publish an Ebook

Start a Blog

Consider Freelancing

Create an App

Become a Writer

Create Side Gigs

Do Translation Work

Sell Your Stuff

Become an Online Tutor

Drive Your Car

Become a Virtual Assistant

Become a Twitch Streamer

Invest in Stocks

Sell Your Photography

Sell Your Clothes Online

Become an Extreme Couponer

Sell Domains

Sell Your Designs Online

Review Websites, Apps, and Software

Get a Part-Time Job

Want to Learn More?

The Ultimate List of The Most Popular Online Business Ideas

16 Reasons to Start a Business

What Is Email Marketing and Why Is It Important?

Here Are the Biggest Dropshipping Niches in the Biggest Markets

The post How to Make Money Online: 26 Real Ways to Earn Money Online appeared first on Oberlo.

https://ift.tt/2Zckmwu August 27, 2019 at 04:00AM https://ift.tt/30EA699

[arriyire]

Learn to Fly - A Fairy Tail Fic Ch. 6

Summary: The world is split into two realms - the mortal and the spirit. In this world, demons attack humans and the winged protect them. When Levy gets shoved headfirst into the spirit realm, she will have to adjust her whole way of living and learn to deal with a moody dragon winged Gajeel. AU vaguely based on the manga plot.

Rated: T

Chapter 6

Levy hadn’t slept at all; she constantly tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable or to stop her brain churning. How she loathed these nights where all she could do was get to know the inner workings of her brain on a way too personal level. She checked her clock for the millionth time in the last half hour and decided she might as well get herself ready for the day. Manoeuvring her way through her book-maze she found her bathroom and promptly locked herself in – at least one advantage of getting ready early is she got to have a long relaxing bath.

Day was just about to break when Gajeel woke up, feeling stiff as he stood from his slouched sleeping position. He worked the kinks out of his shoulders and spine before doing the same with his wings; folding them back from his body and out to the sides before allowing them to fold in naturally.

Nearby Panther Lilly had woken with him and was also doing some stretches in both of his forms. He pulled his arms and twisted from side to side; the only noise between the two of them was the clicking and popping of joints. Still without a word they simultaneously took off from the roof to the open sky, further exercising their stiff muscles. Once they had climbed to a good height above the flat block Lilly spoke, deciding it was time to get some answers about his partner’s behaviour. “I get you can’t go into details, but I’m certain more happened when I left last night.” The statement was held between the two men, between anyone else the silence might be uncomfortable, but Lilly knew this was the most effective way to talk to the iron dragon slayer.

Gajeel just grunted in response, earning a mildly irritated sigh from Lilly. He waited patiently for the man to reply, watching as Gajeel scanned the area quite intensely. Once he was convinced he could not see/hear/smell anyone nearby he responded properly. “They came like I said; I persuaded them to fuck off for now but…” His voice trailed off as he tried to think of a way to explain the events that followed.

Lilly kept quiet; there was no use in pushing the dragon slayer into talking, he was made of metal after all and could be cold and stubborn like it. Gajeel waited a few more moments before finishing his sentence. “Basically we have some time, but let’s just say there is some shit comin’ our way.”

Lilly considered the man in front of him for a while, Gajeel was avoiding eye contact which was odd for a man who normally charged head first into anything. Something had him on edge, and you don’t push a man on the edge. Dropping the topic for now Lilly continued the conversation “Well in any case, it’ll be a few days before we can head back. Master wants us to stay put.” Lilly explained how he had managed to get in contact with Freed to begin a rune trap across the city. But such a large task required time; they would need to defend the targets until it was complete.

“Fan-fucking-tastic.” Gajeel understood, but hated it none the less. Now they had to trail some shrimp around and protect her from something she couldn’t even see all while trying to prevent Sol from figuring out what really was going on, lucky him. As if on cue they saw the unmistakable mop of blue exited the building dressed in bright orange and begin walking down the street.

“At least she’s easy to spot” Lilly grinned, trying to lift the man’s dull spirits.

“What is she, half a rainbow or somethin’?” Gajeel just looked confused by the clash of colours, never before had he seen someone so bright. And he had been around Natsu who was practically on fire all the time!

“Says Mr ‘dark and stormy.’” Lilly was wearing a true shit eating grin now, as he motioned up and down Gajeel’s scowling form.

Gajeel considered his own outfit for a while. So what? He only had black hair, black shoes, black top and cloak, a black cat… OK. Gajeel saw his point. Least his pants were a light colour though!

“C’mon before the demons take her dumbass from under our noses” Gajeel dove down ignoring a cackling Lilly who was way too amused for his liking.

Levy turned down her work’s street and checked behind her one more time; she really couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following her. But just like every morning when she left home, the streets were quiet and no-one was in sight par a few shop owners setting up for trading. She decided her brain must still be buzzing from all the caffeine she’d had, clearing the doubt from her mind she walked into a grand building and up to the fourth floor.

“Good morning Levy!” Levy was greeted by a rather portly fellow, who happened to be Levy’s boss Mr Kodo. Levy offered a wide grin in reply as she unloaded her bag at her desk, Mr Kodo was now lent against a nearby wall with a cup of coffee in hand. “You’re here early. Late night reading session?” He winked knowingly, causing Levy to look increasingly embarrassed.

“I got a new book, you know how it is.” She sheepishly replied, Mr Kodo just laughed in response before making his way back to his own office.

“Well I hope you’re not too tired, we got that book contract last night! The author made their decision to translate it into four addition languages. He gave us six months to get the job done. We’re going to need everyone on it!” He called just as he entered his office; Levy couldn’t help but perk up at such a job. She loved seeing an author’s new work; this one was a fantasy novel which piqued Levy’s interest, unfortunately it was riding on the back of the current supernatural trend stories were going through; she remained hopeful that with such a big translation job it wouldn’t be a writer looking for a cash-grab and be worthy addition to her growing collection. This was one of the big perks of the job; seeing new books and translating them to other languages so it could be shared across the world gave Levy a great sense of achievement.

As her fellow co-workers trickled in to the building, Levy set about reading her chapter of the book to translate. It was hard work, constant rewrites where she checked the grammar and spelling of each translated sentence making sure the meaning of the story was never lost. By the time it was midday she had put a decent dent in her first few pages. Fortunately Levy was given the beginning chapter of the book; the story had intrigued her and Levy had jotted down the book title deciding to see if she could find a full copy in town after work.

The day was now in full swing and the office was becoming quite stuffy; deciding to take advantage of the summer air Levy took a long break, walking to a small bakery down the road for her lunch. The fresh air did wonders for her sleep deprived body. Upon arriving at the bakery and nearly drooling on the floor at the sight of the fresh cakes on display; the bluenette picked out her food before walking back towards her building. The atmosphere made her feel so full of energy she was practically skipping down the street swinging her bag of treats; looking like little red riding hood off to visit her grandmother. Levy just couldn’t help herself, she was so entranced by the world around her, that she wasn’t paying attention to what was right in front of her.

It honestly happened so quickly, if you had blinked you’d have missed it; but to Levy it was like someone put her life in slow motion. She didn’t remember stepping out into the road or hearing a car nearby. She definitely saw it now though, and if the screeching brakes where anything to go by; she was about wish she’d noticed it much earlier. Caught like a deer in the headlights, she watched as the speeding car tried desperately to stop in time. She couldn’t get out of the way; her feet were rooted to the pavement refusing to move. Her mind screamed to run but her body just wouldn’t respond.

Levy had closed her eyes on instinct when she felt the impact, except it didn’t hit her front like she was expecting. It came from her back, like she had been grabbed and thrown back to the safety of the curb. The vomit inducing throb in the back of her head, suggested her head had taken a good bashing along the way. Levy tried to open her eyes to find her vision was blurred. She also heard voices but her ears were full of cotton wool and they sounded like disjointed mumbles, all she could do was blink wildly trying to get her wits about her.

“Miss? Miss?! Oh my God! Are you ok?” A clearly distressed woman was hovering over Levy trying to get any kind of response out of the small woman. A crowd had quickly formed, with people trying to find out what the commotion was. Levy finally was able focus enough to get a clear view of now the many faces surround her all of them expressing their concern for her health. Except there was only one face Levy couldn’t look away from.

The man was huge (probably appearing more so, seeing as she was on the floor) both in height and muscular bulk. In the shining sun he appeared to sparkle, until Levy noticed his face was coated in metal studs arranged symmetrically along his nose and eye-brows. None of that mattered though because Levy was captivated by two ruby red eyes, boring into her own with an expression of ‘what the fuck are you looking at?’. Levy wanted to give the man a piece of her mind, defend herself against such a judgmental glare. But once again she was dumbstruck when she noticed the enormous black wings sprouting from the man’s back. Her mind couldn’t process it, her face turned to one of panic and the crowd around her followed – looking for the source of the woman’s distress.

One person had called an ambulance and soon the sound of sirens filled the street, along with a dozen voices trying to calm an increasingly hysteric Levy. She started hyperventilating pointing and demanding why no-one was alarmed by the studded man with the freakin’ wings! Trying to convey to somebody; anybody, that this man was here. No-one even took notice though, when they turned to see what she was pointing at they looked through the man and back to her with a worried look. “She must have a concussion. Poor dear, she did take a nasty fall.” One voice concluded as they continued to try and relax Levy, fearing she may go into shock.

Levy just couldn’t grasp the situation; so many sights and sounds were engulfing her eyes and ears she felt like she couldn’t trust anything in the world around her. Still, she continued to look at the studded man looming above her; his face had now turned to one of mild shock as his studded brows were raised and his mouth slightly agape. It was the last sight of the man she saw before the paramedics were on her asking her a multitude of questions and trying to coax her into the ambulance and to hospital. Levy tried to explain about the winged man again, except when she turned to point at where he was, she saw nothing but an empty space. The paramedics were now severely concerned and all but dragged Levy off the ground and into the ambulance. Once secure, Levy’s mind was so overwhelmed by the impact and what she had seem that she quickly succumbed to sleep.

Full fic here - I own nothing except a vague plot, feel free to review/ask/be inspired and share with me anything you find :)

[heatherrdavis1]

BITCOIN FLASHES SUPER BUY SIGNAL!!! $10450 NEXT!? BTC OVER $20k THIS YEAR!!!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on, guys, it’s Kate up here with another episode of Crypto Zombie. Welcome back to the Channel. Hope you’re having a great day today. Bitcoin is still having a little bit of a struggle under the nine thousand dollar level. We sort of dipped down to the midday thousands. You could see we actually got up to like nine thousand two hundred dollars almost two times in the past 24 hours. I do personally still believe we could potentially be in this bull flag formation with a ten thousand four hundred dollar breakout possible within the next 24 to 48 hours. Of course, we do need to talk about the CMT futures gap. But even more exciting than that, we have a Bitcoin indicator that the last six times this happened, Bitcoin went on a massive tear or at least put in some significant bullish gains in the short term. And lo and behold, we just put in the first dot on the indicator again today. So I want to talk about that. I also want to discuss exactly what we could potentially expect with the next Bitcoin having and the potential new all time high. And would we even have a new all time high this year? I want to discuss that. And of course, some people are a little bit bearish. The fact that CNBC is now bullish again on the price of Bitcoin and crypto currencies. And guys, before we get in to the main video, I have two quick announcements. Please stick around for these before you skip ahead in the video. No one is being that yesterday YouTube did some really crazy shadow banking on a bunch of crypto videos. Some of them are starting to show up again. One of them was my video from yesterday. Now, let me just show you, for example, this is what an average video looks like, right? You put the video out and, you know, over time it starts to sort of decrease and eventually people stop watching it. This is what happened to my video yesterday. Look, crazy amount of use. The video was taking off. We were having lots of people click it and then all of a sudden it stopped showing up in the feed and boom literally killed all of the engagement for my video. So it wasn’t like the video got deleted, but it did start to lose its viewership. So if you were one of the people that didn’t get to see my video yesterday because it didn’t show up, I just want to ask you one favor. Can you please just turn on the bell notification for this channel? Just go right below me right now. You can see right next to the subscribe button, there’s a bell icon. Just click it and then you have an option for notifications and just click all that way. At least if for some reason the video does not show up in the search results, you’ll actually still get the notification. OK, so that is number one. And number two, I wanted to say thank you so much, guys. The Block Chain Influencer Awards were last night and I actually tied Anthony Pop liano for the 2020 winner of the year. So I just want to say thank you so much for that. They’re giving me apparently a real physical Beltz OK, with my thing on it, with my my logo on it. So I want to say thank you. And if you guys want to check out the awards, I will drop a link to that below. But thank you so much. You guys rock and. Yeah, so that’s basically it for me. And without further ado, let’s officially dive directly in to the charts. OK. So talking about and thank you. If you stuck stuck around for those really important updates, I just hate when YouTube does this to krypto you as YouTube’s in general. Anyway, having a look right here. So we did actually have a breakout of this original flag. It looks like we got stopped out again, like I said, around the nine thousand two hundred dollar level. So basically this is just sort of extending the potential bull flag out a little bit farther. You could see this morning we dipped right down exactly to the bottom of it. So we are actually sitting at the bottom right now at the time of making this video. So right now, this is sort of confirming to me that we are holding these levels and we are still in this formation. And even if we were to have a breakout from the bottom, you could see that that would be around the ten thousand four hundred ten thousand five hundred dollar level. And like I said, if I zoom out here one more time in case you watch my video from yesterday, the significance of that level is because of the fact that Bitcoin has had some major resistance at around that level back here in the China pump back here before the descent. And if we were to break out again, that would send Bitcoin back to those levels. And like I said, that creates a giant W pattern, which we know that’s the double border. Bottom pattern in Bitcoin is literally one of the greatest plays that you can play in Bitcoin. It usually signals a massive reversal, double tops as well. If you had two points at the top, you tend to have that reversal actually, if we go back here. That’s actually very similar to what we had sort of with the double top here. So you can take that either way with Bitcoin. One thing I want to point out is we have a seemy futures gap at eight thousand eight hundred and forty dollars. So even if Bitcoin does try to pump within the next 24 hours, we may have a little bit of resistance and try to pull back down to the eight thousand eight hundred dollar level. Or maybe we won’t have a move until Monday morning after we have the seeming futures open. Right. So do kind of expect that there might be some crazy volatility. We could see a really low price, really high price, and it could be all choppy within the next 24. Hours. But what I want to point out is the parabolic stop and reversal. And this has basically flipped bullish. There’s been six other similar occurrences which led to substantial upside. And you can see they’re all pointed out right here from none of your business, which I do want to give a shout out over on Twitter. So he says, can this be interpreted anything other than bullish? Well, having a look right here. First, we need to actually look up what is a parabolic stop and reverse indicator? Well, you can see it says right here that a dot below the price means that the price is moving upward. A dot above the price means that the price is moving downwards overall. Dots below the price always rise. And dots above the price always fall. This way. The dots tracked the price and we’ll capture price reversals when they occur. Now, let’s go back and have a look at basically all the times that we had Major Flip’s here. I’m not going to sit here and do all of the percentage gains. But essentially, look, we had a major flip right here. And from bottom to top, we had a 78 percent Bitcoin pump. Look at some of these major ones up here, OK? We had one flip back here in July. OK. And basically, once we flip from bottomed all the way to the top, that that actually called the all time high pump. Those are nine hundred and thirty eight percent pump. Look at this. It actually called an excellent opportunity for the bottom right here. So when it flipped right here back in February of twenty nineteen, essentially, had you actually bought in on the day that that flipped. Well that basically we had a rally of two hundred and ninety three percent up to, you know, the fourteen thousand bitcoin top even here in our descent right here. Right. We had this coming in over here January six to 2020 from bottom to top. That was a forty two percent gain. And right now we literally had it just flip green again. And this is the first time that it showed below the chart. So this could actually show us that Bitcoin is about to gear up for a major, major parabolic run. Not to say that we won’t have a little bit of pullbacks, OK, if we actually zoom in right here and have a look at the overall trend. You actually can notice that, you know, Bitcoin is actually one thing I want to point out is that we’ve been supported by this major trend line. Look at this back here. It’s supported us right here back in 2013. Then it became resistance. All right. Once it became resistance. Bitcoin fell under it for a very long time. However, look at this. Once we broke back above it in May of twenty seventeen. Look at this. It came down and it acted again as support. And look at this. It was support during the entire bottom of the bear market when Bitcoin hit its three thousand two hundred dollar lows. And guess what happened again when we fell during the Crazy Black Thursday event? Look at this. We did Wyk below it, but we found support above it. So currently, I do believe even if Bitcoin was to get stomped out right here, because we are sitting at the top of the trend, even if we had a major crash to the bottom right now, I still believe that we would get supported. And that is still at around the five thousand five hundred dollar level, which, listen, I know nobody wants to see Bitcoin fall to five thousand five hundred dollars, but it would still be putting in a massive uptrend now on the off chance that we do flip to the bullish side and have a breakout up here if we can get above this sort of previous resistance. You know, that Bitcoin head, I mean, you’re talking a massive parabolic run to the all time high. And by the way, in case you’re wondering, this purple line is the Bitcoin having, which is coming up in about eight days at the time of making this video. Are you bullish? Are you bearish? Comment below. Let me know what you think. But having a look right here, getting back to what none of your business actually pointed out, he is Platt is out over on Twitter. You can see basically having a look at what the Bitcoin having is deadly. Actually zoom in here so you guys can see a little bit better essentially in 2012. It took three months to get back to the all time high in 2016. It took six months to get back to the all time high. So does this mean that this time it’s going to take nine months? Well, essentially, you could see in 2016, nine months had the final close above the all time high. So basically, he says that a repeat would place the new all time high for Bitcoin somewhere between July 20, 20 this year. OK. Very soon or before January or by January of next year. So essentially, this is calling for a new all time high for Bitcoin, essentially, either sometime this year or within the first month of next year. Can you Hoddle until then, if Bitcoin dumps lower, are you willing to sit through maybe one more potential big dip before the massive blast off? Because you and I both know that as soon as Bitcoin gets to twenty thousand, that’s it. It’s over. All the news outlets are gonna be talking about it, reaching the all time high again, breaking the all time high. All your friends are gonna be calling you up again. And we’re gonna be seeing a massive those my chart, a massive take off potentially like this. So let me know what you think of. That moving forward, guys. Yes. But also we have had Brian Kelly recently talking on CNBC and he was pretty bullish about it, although he was realistic and did say that maybe the price will take a little bit of a hit. However, we do know that whenever CNBC tends to talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, people say, that’s it. Sell it. It’s back in the news. Sell the news. Right. So I just wanted to play that clip super quick and then we’ll talk about it. Check out Bitcoin surging more than 15 percent this week. Our very own crypto baller says another big breakout could be coming. So, B.K., how many days is it till they having? It’s about 11 days to the happen. And so that that what that means, what people should know is that your as the whole world is quantitative easing, Bitcoin is about to be quantitative art. So they’re going to cut the daily supply of the software is going to cut the daily supply. It doesn’t mean that the price of Bitcoin is being cut in half. It just means that the daily supply is being cut in half. But want to think about it like oil, where all of a sudden eleven days have to be oil rigs are turned off. And so therefore that supply gets reduced. In the past, this has been a catalyst for very big, very, very big run ups. We’ve had a tremendous run up coming into this. Got some wood to chop around 9000. But I think in the medium to long term, you now have an asset that is going to be more scarce than gold based on the stock, the flow ratio. In an environment where the entire world is printing money, why isn’t this a sell the news event? It very well may be. I mean, you look back at the last two, we’ve had quite a run up. You look back at the last two. It took about 30 to 60 days for this really to filter through the market. So you could have after this, remember, this is how the miners make their money is by those Bitcoin rewards. So some of the weaker miners might actually opt to sell out. But 30 to 60 days from now, we could see a nice run up, totally over at fun stright is also pretty damn bullish on Bitcoin. He says that Bitcoin has acted extremely well year to date. It is outperforming equities by a sizable margin. So proving itself both as a solid risk on asset. Look at today. And as a hedge versus calamity, we are also positive on the supply demand impact of the upcoming having as well. And listen, regardless of whether or not we do have a potential sell off after the having or not, I just want to remind you about this clip. When Mark Youso was on CNBC and he was talking about how the price doesn’t matter. And Melissa. She was like, what if what if Bitcoin falls to five? He was like, buy it. I don’t care. I just want to play that clip again super quick, just to kind of remind you guys that ultimately this is a long term play. And if you’re in it right now and you’re accumulating while you’re definitely still very early to the game quickly. Here we go. Bitcoin was under eight thousand or eight thousand earlier today. Buy it regardless. Me, if I sent you Bitcoin, it dropped to 5000, you’d say buy it. But because here’s the thing. The daily price of Bitcoin doesn’t matter. It’s been alive for 10 years and every year until the 15th. It’s made it higher, low. The market cap has grown every single year. Every fundamental indicator of Bitcoin usage wallets, block size, transaction size, number of transactions, every single one hash rate making new highs. All of the indicators of the network and the network value are rising. The price of any asset fluctuates. Let’s take Amazon. Amazon has been a public company for 20 years and every year, including this year, that in double digit draw down. The average peak to trough minus 31 percent, twice minus 90 percent. What was the right time to sell? Never. Who’s owned it since the IPO today? Jeff, in a moment. That’s all right. We’re going online today also to put things into a crazy perspective. Pop Anthony Pop Liano, who I just mentioned earlier in the video. He says Warren Buffett has one hundred and thirty seven billion dollars in cash. That is almost enough to buy every Bitcoin in the circulating supply. And C.C. actually chimes in and says that is where the math is deceiving. It’s only true if every Hodler is willing to sell at the current price, which is obviously not true as there is no 21 million Bitcoin cell wall. Alas, Mr. Buffett will only be able to buy a small portion of bitcoins and at a very high price at that. So that is the thing. There are a lot of hodler is out there. Supply is getting cut in half. There’s like an estimated four million Bitcoin lost forever. Satoshi has his bitcoin, which is probably never going to get moved at this point. So only when people realize just how scarce Bitcoin is. Well, that’s when the problems are really going to arise. Also today, guys, I wanted to mention the fact that there has been a lot of controversy over Teather, obviously in the news. This is nothing new about Teather printing and propping up the price of Bitcoin. But a lot of traders do, in fact, use Teather as a way to quickly arbitrage in and out of, you know, potential Bitcoin buys and sells. And now over here. So you’ve seen it on Omni, which is not that, Poppy. Obviously, it’s USDOT on a theorem. We have it on Tron, and now it’s coming over at Al Gore and you could see the Al Gore Brand Foundation says they’re excited to share tethers announcement of their integration with the Al Gore brand protocol. Now, whether or not you like it, you can see over here on Mazari. You know, the real volume for Bitcoin today, for example, this is a real updated stat is one point four billion. Look at Teather. It’s pretty much also one point four. And in some cases, you even see Teather higher than Bitcoin. So I do understand that it is one of those topics that you don’t really want to. There’s a lot of speculation whether or not they’re actually backed by a dollar. But regardless of that, a lot of people use it. And coming over to Algren, they do have down here, it says, speeds in excess of a thousand transactions per second and a block completion in under five seconds per block. So I’m not recommending you to keep your money in Teather. I wouldn’t keep your money in Teather, but having the ability to send Teather Peg to the U.S. dollar. So it’s not going to fluctuate in five seconds. That could be a game changer potentially, guys. So let me know what you think about that. And also, one other piece of news I couldn’t make I couldn’t make I mentioned, not in this video, is the fact that according to a report, it says that the growth among female users in the crypto space has grown by forty three point two four percent in 2020 alone. So I don’t know if that’s because, you know, females are becoming interested in crypto or maybe quarantine’s. Has everybody bored? If there’s any new ladies out there, let me know. Why are you. What what? Why you’re interested in crypto. But apparently the average is a sixty five percent rise between girls 18 to 24 years with the continents of America and Europe experiencing more than 50 percent growth. The research highlights an average of more than 80 percent in growth within some countries throughout Latin America, Europe and Asia. So I think that’s really cool. I’m glad to see that diversification. You know, it has been a primarily male driven space. If we really want cryptocurrency is to have the adoption that we all hope that it will have in the future, we kind of do also need, you know, men and women to also be interested in crypto as well. So let me know what you think about that. But essentially, guys, that is it for me today. I’m out of here. Today is the last day for the legend. Asked if you’re interested. Make sure you drop a comment below. And also, if you haven’t checked out my tutorial on how to trade on FedEx, you can trade Bitcoin, Chainlink, Tasos and even gold futures if you want. So I will have that link popping up above. Also link below in the description you do get one hundred and fifty dollar bonus if you use my link. So that’s it for me today. Hopefully this video doesn’t get shadow banned because I use the word bitcoin in the title. That’s it for me today. Thank you so much for coming back to the channel you guys rock. The reason that I do this every single day. My name is Kataib. This is Crypto Zombie. Until next time, stay crypto and of course, peace out.

Via https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-flashes-super-buy-signal-this-year/

source https://cryptosharks.weebly.com/blog/bitcoin-flashes-super-buy-signal-10450-next-btc-over-20k-this-year