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bloojayoolie · 5 years ago

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A Dream, Bad, and Bruh: ACTUALLY, IT'S A HEY, LOOK, GREG HAS A PURSE! E. EMBROIDERED BOOKBAG. Hehehehe, Frank Griffin here! I am here to explain this funny may-may I found while browsing through the site "r/Loded Diper", place where fellow may-may experts like me share their best funny jokes about Diary of a by Wimpy Kid, a cartoon novel written hohe other than Jeff Kinney. Now, what do have here? If youre familiar with the book, youll recognize that there is Greg Heffley the middle, the protagonist of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. In the original image, Greg stitched a purse, but called it an embroidered handbag" so he won't lose his dignity. However, it doesn't work and he gets called a girl for it. this image Now that the background has been cleared up, let's look It has been posted by u/ThatSippyChicken the 18th 2019 oh may (by UTC time). This means it's very recent, compared to the even funnier Minion memes I share with my grandkids. Greg is surrounded by two unknown teenagers. The short-haired kid the left is pointinga finger having a speech bubble over him (This implies he's saying something.). to the right (probably at Greg) and The text on the speech bubble says "HEY, LOOK, GREG HAS A", and then "EMBROIDERED BOOKBAG" below, but distorted. Greg reacts with saying "ACTUALLY, ITS ONLY A PURSE!" followed by blank space ow. The last kid with acne has a nearly empty speech bubble, only saying "E". Diary of a Wimpy Kid artstyle. Oh, Greg is holding the purse I talked about previously in the image!If you look closely, you at the end. Everything is drawn in the typical thing I forgot to mention: ohe can even see that the word "Grea" is stitched on it- IS Okay, the description of the image is over. Now, let's get the analysing part. I examined every part of the image and compared it with other maymays from around the same time and site. But then, I couldn't believe what I found out! This maymay on r/LodedDiper falls under the category of modern internet memes. You may have heard of the word from your kids, maybe grandkids, and that's because it's a Millennial (yes, the Avocado eveh toast generation. / Generation Z movement. The concept of Memes itself is too complex, Ill explain it on a seperate page, but, to be short, Memes are funny internet maymays that require Some sort of insider knowdlege to be understandable. Memes are very special of humour, because, unlike other funny maymays, the humour of Memes ih terms always based on either relatability or absurdity. This can be shown is this image too: The incosistency of logic and font size makes the oh absurdity of this maymay visible. The "E" has a very complex background, but it can be said that it's referencing another modern Meme. This absurd humour combined with what used to be a page from a normal cartoon hovel is what makes this maymay funny. When I realized this, I had to LOLWHMWADCC (Laughing Out Loud While Hitting Manny With A Diet Coke Condom)! explain why I chose exactly this maymay symbolizes the change in youth humour. At last, I need to for explanation. That's because it new generation doesn't laugh though they based on either relatability or absurdity. While this change The at Minioh maymays anymore (even very funny., they laugh at modern memes that are dre to more complex humour can be considered a cultural step forwards, it can also be unhealthy for the kids. For example, Memes about depression and suicide, which are very popular, can make someone relating to it even depressed (The argument of these being a coping technique falls Alat here, that has been disproven). But, good or not, it's definetily more an important change in Internet, even the entirety of western culture. This Meme symbolizes the new age of humour, Meme humour. Besthany. And now, I finally explained to you what Memes are, Frank Griffin PS: If read this on r/LodedDiper, go check out the subreddit you r/ExplainItPeter! And the other way around, of course. PPS: is br ald Hehehehehehe, someone's here! No, it's not Frank Griffin (Right now he's busy explaining a Minion meme), it's not Sans Undertale (Off fighting Lugi), it's me: Peter Heffley! Who am I, you may ask? Well, I am the colleague and best buddy of the world famous Frank Griffin. Ah, now that I'm mentioning him, all the memories are flooding back. Whenever there was a cringe nae nae meme, a darn millennial or even a bruh moment, we stuck together. And after decades of friendship he eventually offered me a dream come true: A job in the Meme Explaining Laboratory! So, now I'm here explaining a few memes here and there (Frank does the over- whelming majority of them, though) and, more importantly, critically analysing his very own explanations, because nothing is perfect! (Except for stepping on a crunchy leaf.) Unlike him, I will use Arial instead of the official Wimpy Kid font, simply because this is more readable. Otherwise, my critique is pretty much the same. So, get ready for some high IQ text reading, because we're going to enter the Meme world once again! Alright, we finally got through the long introduction I now have several ways to begin the main part, but I'm honestly not sure where to. I could start with citing his first line, analysing his formatting or referenzing the pipe strip video. But I will do none of these things. Instead, I will dig straight to the core of his explanations, and praise or critique anything in the process. Ergo, I'll start with the nature of his text itself. It's, compared to the usual Internet posts, very text-heavy. However this isn't a big surprise since both of us know how much Frank can dive into a subject. He puts a photo of himself in the top left corner below the image he's analyzing, and his text is written solely in the "WimpyKid" font, which already is my first problem. It may have been suitable if it was used in a short paragraph or two, but using it in an entire explanation is a major design flaw. However, this is not the only problem I have with Frank's text, (Don't take it personally, bucko) which brings me to analyzing the content of his explanation, and his ultimate message near the bottom end. Okay, I'll be honest. I don't like the message. His main part of the analysis may have been on the better side, in comparision to his other posts, but this time Frank really shot himself in his cock and balls this time. Saying that "Meme humour is overtaking regular humour" is overly dramatizising and simply putting in a wrong light what is really going on inside the meme creation scene. Frank, I'm sorry to tell it to ya, but a near-sudden cultural shift in humour is not going to happen, pal. What is really happening is that younger kids like to distance themselves from older generations as much as possible, may it be via clothing, music politics or, in this case, humour. Most teenagers eventually just grow out of their phase of shutting themselves off of older people. That eventually happens either when they marry, or when they enter their 30's. I am not saying that a and progressing culture is bad, however it's a lie to say those teens will keep their culture with them as they grow old. Just take hippies, as am example Some of you may remember them promoting peace and other values, and generally having a very liberal mindset. Now, who were those hippies? This answer may be a suprise to you, but those hippies were (mostly) boomers. Yup, the same generation that is nowadays known for being notoriously authoritarian and close-minded. People can change. And those who laugh about their memes now will probably change too, once they reach a certain age. The only thing in favor of Frank's argument is the existence of the Internet. Although that argument isn't that much of a punch when considering the very likely possibility that another game changing form of media will probably pop up within the next few decades. Memes will simply not prevail, or they will be warped beyond recognition (Not as in becoming more abstract and surreal (which is also a very widely spread belief about Memes)), by having different unwritten rules for Memes. If a time traveler from 2011 saw a changing modern meme page from today, they wouldn't think those memes would be funny or should even be called memes. What we call memes now, will be forgotten in the future. To cut it short, memes will not have a major effect on culture, nor will they even be remembered in 20+ years. One more thing. Frank stated that Greg Heffley was saying "Actually, it's only a purse!" in the Meme he explained. That is incorrect, though. Greg says "Actually, it's a purse!" without the "only". I think it's highly unprofessional that he tries to deeply analyze a meme and then doesn't even quote the text correctly. It makes me feel like Frank is just doing this for the fame and money by focussing on dramaticising viewpoints instead of being scientifically accurate. This is probably the true reason Bethany left him and took the kids. Not because she "loved Chad more instead of a nice man like me", as Frank said, but because she can't stand him becoming increasingly narcissistic and delusional about his fame anymore. It's actually sickening me how he is cutting of more and more of his friends and family and doesn't even care for fans either. I know I will probably be fired by Frank for publishing this, but the problem is only turning bigger and bigger with no sight of him changing his ways. Frank should honestly take a break from his job and go visit his kids again. After all, he never bothered to see them once Bethany "took them away" from him. He can visit his children anytime he wants to, but he rather likes to work on another money milking machine again (which is ironically the reason the kids chose Bethany.) Alright, it's time to end this text. Looking back at it, it seems like it's 1/3 explanation, 1/3 critique and 1/3 open letter. I planned this to just be an extension of Frank's analysis and another lie about how we are getting along just fine, but now it turned into a half-agressive rant about him. But I just had to vent my frustations about my buddy. I know he hasa heart somewhere down below his thick skull, but for now it's simply how I and everyone else close to him perceive Frank. Hopefully he'll try to change. Peter Heffley PS: Frank, if you are reading this, please don't fire me for writing this. Try to reflect instead. PPS: Haha PP lol PPPS: I just went to r/Expla memes made me LOLWHMWADCCAEFP nltPeter, and all of the (Laughing Out Loud While Hitting Manny With A Diet Coke Condom And Eating Frank's Penis) out loud! Go visit that subreddit! Thanks for the explanation, Peter Heffley!

#funny #lol #humor #memes #meme #memehumor #dank memes #funny pics #rolf #lmao #A Dream #Bad #and Bru

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halfusek · 6 years ago

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You Left Me in a Heartbeat

I wrote a fic about my interpretation of how things were between Joey and Henry: from before founding the studio to the moment they split up and a bit more. Also it includes a certain theory I would like to discuss in a seperate post some other time. Hope you enjoy! Huge thanks to @pipesflowforeverandever for beta reading and helping me with getting this thing readable! <3 Warning: ...violence.

✪ ✪ ✪

There is nothing wrong with dreaming. Excitement filled his head and buzzing thoughts were running million miles per hour through that brain hidden under dark hair. Although none of that amount of thinking was focused on the real world. At least not yet. Which is why the owner of fancy looking (but actually really cheap, he was just a broke student with nothing but dreams and 60 cents in his pocket, well, at least for the rest of the month) black shoes didn't even notice his feet were constantly switching being attached to the ground between toes and heels. His sight seemed to be focused on a certain covered in lights sign which was hung way above the cogitating head, at the top of an entrance. He was standing close to the gate with the cinema's ticket booth in the middle, his pointy nose pointed at the sky, expression peaceful, shoulders relaxed, and body slightly bending back and forth.

Oh, no, surely nothing wrong with dreaming, especially dreaming big, but who is to say those smaller ones cannot be fulfilled as well? Even those silly ones.

The cinema was showing an animated production tonight. And he had just enough money to see it and only slightly starve for the next week!

He arrived way too early for the show, but he couldn't just sit at home! So he went out for a long walk, well dressed, which wasn't most comfortable, but God, did he feel good!

To be fair it wasn't just the show his mind was currently so occupied with. Oh, it surely is fun doing alone, but what an experience it must be with a company!

He heard his name being shout out from across the street. The man turned around on his heel and sent the best grin the mouth under the pencil moustache was able to make.

Especially good company!

Henry was with some woman.

Joey stood still.

When the pair finally approached him, he whistled under his nose and then bowed. Both of his arms moved right away, one behind his back, and the other one in front of him, reaching for her hand.

"What a pleasure meeting you, my lady,” she giggled and Henry couldn't help but roll his eyes, though his lips twitched, forming a smile, "Can I know your name?”

"Linda,” they exchanged an energetic handshake, "You must be Joey?”

Said man gasped and put his hands on his chest in disbelief.

"Wow! Well...” he pouted comically and put his finger on his chin, other hand resting on his hip, "It is a possibility.”

Linda snorted.

"You know,” she took Henry by his arm and turned her head to him, cascade of blond hair flowing with that movement, "When you said it's just some cartoon I had second thoughts about going... but it might be fun after all,” she bit her lip as she turned back to Joey.

"Oh?” Drew asked, his mind completely ignoring the compliment, "You don't like cartoons?”

"I mean... I never really tried watching any... who knows, maybe it's fun. I know a fella or two who seem to enjoy it," she showed her teeth in a beautiful smile.

Joey noticed with how much affection Henry looked at her face. His eyebrows frowned a tiny bit.

"Let's try making it a three then," Henry beamed and pulled his girlfriend after him to buy the tickets. He did it in such an adventurous way, she couldn't help but laugh.

Joey watched them from behind. He couldn't move his feet. This was stupid.

He was stupid.

He wanted to pay for them. Only the two of them. He didn't expect-

His body shaked for a second. Only now he noticed how cold it was outside. Or...

He took the first step.

They won't last.

He took another step.

They will break up soon and he will never see or hear of Linda ever again.

He came up to the gate and bought a single ticket, then followed his company for tonight.

He won't lose just like that.

After the seance, Linda’s love for toons started and was growing ever since. She couldn't draw a straight line, but was interested in her partner's passion.

He can't lose.

Few years from this night they are planning to get married.

✪

Music was so loud as if the world was ending and it was the last opportunity to dance ever. Wonderful combination of bodies moving to the wild rhythms, people shouting as long as they had air in their lungs, liters and liters of alcohol and pure happiness – truly the most humane form of insanity. Everyone was dressed in their most expensive clothes they should take care of and nobody cared as they waved their arms and legs, drowning in the ocean of sweat and panting breaths.

They owned the place tonight, newcomers could either join or stay being outsiders which ended for all of them in leaving. Judging by how, hm, unusual the party was, it effectively scared away those who could have something against some of its rules. One woman entered looking for someone to make love to, but went out scoffing as her moves resulted in nothing because she aimed at a wrong pal, currently making his own moves towards another pal. How weird!

Oh, those artists. Such deviants!

Joey was forcibly pulling Henry away from the table, despite all of the yet-to-come-animator's protests.

"Come ooooon!” tall man’s voice sounded lower and slowed down. Also very demanding at the moment, "Don't tell me you're not gonna dance at a celebration of YOUR OWN show!”

They finally both ended up in the middle of the chaos which was the said celebration. They were like two pales standing still in a storming sea. Now they either drown or move. Henry didn’t seem up for swimming.

He doesn't like dancing. Joey only knew he performed a few slow ones with Linda, but she wasn't there to get him out of his comfort zone this time.

Obviously Joey was obligated to step in.

"I-I don't know what to do, I feel weird everytime I do this, I-"

"Don't think about it, just do it!” they had to yell in each others ears to make anything out of their conversation.

"I can't. I can't!” light reflected in Henry’s glasses as he looked back at the table.

"It's like slow dancing! But faster!” Henry didn't need to turn again to his friend to see that big grin of his, but he did it anyway just to send him a mildly annoyed look.

"It's not!”

"It is! I'm gonna... fucking... show you!” Joey grabbed his hands and pulled, which took Henry by surprise.

"What the-"

"Think of waltz! But don't be strict! Use some instinct, for crying out loud you're the one with a girl!”

And so they took few first steps like in a classic waltz, which didn't go well with everyone else's tempo but Joey didn't care. Henry got more nervous.

"I told you I-"

"Shut up! Keep! Trying!”

Drew can be really exhausting with his motivational attitude and never-giving-up speeches, but Henry decided to listen to him. After all, he was usually right.

They took their steps faster. Then Joey started leading them into slightly different ones, and with time and occurrence those differences started increasing.

Henry found himself catching up and they both noticed that.

When they achieved a somewhat satisfying pace and didn't bump into others as much, Joey suddenly pulled Henry closer and whispered to his ear something the shorter man couldn't quite catch but it surely included the words "dancing demon" and he bursted out laughing.

Sillyvision pitched their idea.

Way later that night two figures struggled with walking down the street, both clinging to each other. They were trying hard to keep their balance yet still ended up moving between both sides of the road. Luckily for them it was quite a quiet neighborhood, no cars in the sight. There was only one cyclist who tried their best to avoid them with the accompanying sounds of the bike’s horn.

Their long walk was completed at a construction field. Not a recommended place for the drunk, but things were about to start happening here in a few days, only several materials have been gathered for building.

Joey wants to stand on his own but Henry didn’t let him – he knew that would end in the tall man laying face down on the dirt – so instead of making a majestic spin in the middle of the place with his hand pointed at the surroundings, he did an awkward turn-around, which almost knocked Henry off his own feet.

"Look. At. This!” words were pouring out of his mouth in a bulky mutter, "This will be ours. This IS ours.”

"Yeah,” Henry simply replied but then decided to elaborate a bit, "It’s… it feels amazing.”

"Yes! It does,” dark hair fluttered as the head it was on nodded. He kept doing that as he responded, "I think I’m gonna return today’s alcoholic be… be-ve… rages.”

"Ew. Let go of me then. And not on our future floor.”

"Imagine s-someone will be, like, sitting there, like, drawing, and then, I’ll like come to them from behind and be like-"

"Oh, Jesus.”

"Sir.”

"God.”

"You’re sitting on my barf.”

Henry didn’t let this low level joke make him giggle. He made an excessively serious face.

"You’ll be the worst employer.”

"I’ll be an amazing employer. So honest.”

"Please, don’t.”

"Yeah, no, I’ll lie on occasions.”

"I meant don’t puke on our legacy.”

"Oh.”

They took a sit on a stack of desks and breathed in silence for a while. Their shoulders were touching.

"I think I’m better now.”

"Good.”

"I’m so happy,” Drew’s voice broke as tears rolled down his cheeks.

"It sure doesn’t sound like it,” Henry made an awful joke attempt as his own tone hit a higher pitch and he felt a sudden urge to blink more.

Both men raised hands to wipe their eyes- only to be interrupted by their own bursting, bubbling laughter. Cartoonists put their arms around each other and they wobbled, they laughed, and they cried.

They were tired but it was the best kind of tired. The kind you feel after successfully achieving something, so you can rest a bit and let that accomplishment bring some joy into your life.

Henry rested his head on his best friend’s shoulder.

It was so warm. The night was cold and the alcohol wouldn’t help them keep a decent temperature for long, but they simply had each other.

At that moment, Joey could swear he was burning.

His hand found its place on Henry’s hip, long, thin fingers were trembling. He took in a deep, shaky breath.

Henry felt the chest he was almost laying on shiver and for a short moment there was a sensation grabbing his face by the hot hands of confusion. It lasted a few seconds until Joey stood up and took three steps forward. Henry, not expecting this, ended up falling on his elbow, so he was in a kind of semi-recumbent position, his mouth slightly opened. He watched Joey put his hands on his sides, and turn back to him. Shorter man almost expected some sort of negative expression, but the other surprised him with a smile which could only be described as a smile of a dreamer.

Henry forgot to remind him of being careful, because he knew his friend had something important to say. So he listened to the man of ideas.

"This,” he threw one hand in the air, "This will be great.”

His hand fell back on his hip.

"But it’s just the beginning. It will be greater.”

Henry raised his eyebrows and blinked.

"We will expand!” Joey suddenly released an excited shout and lifted both arms to the sky as if he wanted to grab all the stars.

At that moment Henry was almost certain he did. He got up and approached him.

"What do you mean?”

"We’re gonna make it big! Literally!” Joey let out a laughter before he explained, "The grounds were so cheap because most of them are located above a huuuge cave found many feets underground! Of course we won’t start building above that part, but later we could easily use it for building something…” he made a pause and put an emphasis on the next word, "under!”

"Oh, my,” Henry mumbled, genuinely surprised. This lack of knowledge didn’t bother him much. Not now, "That’s… that does sound great… although it will take a lot of hard work before we’ll be actually able to use something… something like that.”

“Yes. Hard,” he grinned widely, "and happy.”

Eyes behind the glasses rolled.

Joey noticed this is how Henry tries to mask his lack of confidence. He patted his friend’s shoulder.

Back then he used his observations for motivation instead of manipulation.

It’s funny how things change over time.

"We’ll make it,” corners of his mouth fell down a bit so the smile appeared to be more gentle, "You just have to believe.”

"Yeah, yeah,” Henry sighed and closed his eyes for a second, before looking up at his pal and reaching his hand to the one resting on his shoulder to grab it in a reacourging grasp, "Thanks, I will try my best. We will try our best. Right?”

Joey turned to look at the foundations of their workshop and released his hand from the touch. He repeated quietly but undoubtedly, "Right.”

Henry didn’t seem to notice weird reactions on his friend’s side and Joey was both relieved and disappointed by that.

He could have tried to make a move on Henry. Well, in fact, he has been trying. His crush already was in a few relationships before and he always waited them out and they always eventually passed.

(He had a bad feeling about this one.)

He didn’t want to interfere. He wanted Henry to be happy the way Henry wanted to be happy. It was the only fair way. But he didn’t see any dangers in his current one. Linda wasn’t… a threat.

(This time he didn’t have a girl just because of social pressures.)

He could try lying to himself, but in reality he was scared of rejection.

(Henry really loves her.)

What if that dream does not happen?

He closed his eyes for a moment. When they opened again, green irises shined with determination.

They will make it. Belief is all they had before and it’s all they need. It’s all he needs.

They will make their dreams come true.

It’s a funny thing.

How so much can fall apart so fast.

✪

He stretched his back and let out a silent groan. No, he needed to stand up, even for a few seconds. And so he did, all his limbs tried to go as far away from his torso as possible. Brain automatically got filled with air. That felt refreshing. He twisted and bent his body before sitting down again. Just as he was finished adjusting his chair, he heard steps coming from the closest room. He peeked his head to the corridor.

A tall figure approached a long table that Henry could only see a small fraction of from this position. The other person wore a black, long jacket, which shoulders were covered in snow, that also was slowly melting on the dark hair making it a bit wet. Joey put some bags in the middle of the table and came back where Henry's sight could reach him. He took off his gloves and threw them next to - how Henry suspected knowing his friend - some warm food he bought for both of them. Cold, currently slightly red hands, rubbed each other energetically and the man grinned.

"Want some coffee?”

"I want you to get your ass over here and help me," his smile was rather sour but shifted to a tired and calm one, "But sure. Just right after that – you stay there.”

"Right, right," Joey did a reassuring gesture and headed for the kettle. He wanted to get a proper break room someday, but Henry couldn't really see it right now. Irrelevant. For this room to have any use they would have to have proper breaks first. At that time everyone was working really hard.

Well they had to. But they wanted to.

Happily tired.

The animator sighed.

After a while his friend was in Henry's little corner with something to fill his stomach and give a little boost to his head. Henry muttered some thanks and tried not to consume everything at once.

It wasn’t the first time he forgot to eat during drawing. Always, even when he did this as a hobby, he since had that problem. This didn't strike anything alarming in regards to his job, though.

He hasn't become aware of his workaholism yet.

Even Linda wasn't concerned yet, they haven't seen each other since that whole thing started but they both tried their best to stay positive. Of course there will be challenges on the way, especially at the beginning. But they won't give up, no, sir.

Joey took a sit on the other chair present in the room, which he once brought in and never got out. It was its only use as no one really needed to come here except for them. Wally or Norman were coming every now and then, but those visits never really required sitting.

Joey let Henry eat in peace and before asking anything, he took a look on what the shorter man was working on. He crossed his legs and studied the frames.

"Aw, that's no fun. I can't even criticize you for anything. Those look perfect,” his tone was mostly playful but with bits of pure admiration. Henry fought the want to hide behind an exaggerated modesty by declining every compliment which dared to tickle his ego. He couldn't just take it though, so he responded with a teasing joke.

"I would introduce my foot to your crotch if you did after last Friday,” he found himself only half joking. He knew Joey well and he was aware of their problems with perfectionism, especially in his pal's case, but the first time it occurred to him as a bigger issue was the aforementioned Friday. Joey didn't accept that character model but he didn't have to reject all those frames Henry did with it...

Joey's lips slightly twitched.

"Sorry. I'll make up for it. No business trips for the whole week.” Joey put one hand on his chest and raised the other, at which his friend chuckled a bit. He meant it and that was enough for Henry. That's great when you have a friend as your boss. You know you can trust him.

"Well then, let's begin!” Henry beamed at him. They assigned what needed to be done by which one of them and set goals for today, each day and the whole week. Deadline was closing in but they still had loads of time. They could do this. Joey moved to the other room with such a strong aura, he wasn’t even taking normal steps, but made small leaps, which made Henry choke on his coffee.

At moments like this you could say they were getting high on believing.

✪

No.

The smiling devil was mocking him.

No.

He turned another paper sheet into a ball and threw to trash.

He let out a silent sigh when he put the pen back in action and his wrist sent a complaining sensation.

No, Henry, we can't go on like this.

She said.

Wrong again.

He tore the sheet apart.

No.

He couldn't work like this.

He had to.

He felt something hot and wet in his eyes.

No.

He needed to be better. He couldn't lose her.

He took the pen back in his fingers and it was at the moment his hand twitched and emitted hurtful spasms through his arm when the water broke through the barrier of his bottom eyelashes.

He grabbed his right hand with the left one. The pen fell on the wooden boards.

Defeated.

"No...”

"Henry...?”

He almost jumped in his seat. Glasses bent askew when he turned his head to the source of the voice.

Joey.

He started wiping of the tears. It wasn’t really effective since he didn't even bother to take the glasses off. He just didn't want his boss... his friend to see him like this.

Well. Too late for that now.

Joey leaned back on his desk. A few months have passed since they started it all and the second chair was moved out of here.

Surprisingly for both of them it didn't take much for Henry to start venting. He never realised how much he has been keeping to himself. How much has bothered him. How bad he felt.

How afraid he was of talking about it with anyone. And his best friend he used to talk with about everything... was a part of the problem.

Heavy thing clenching onto his heart disappeared as he felt relief after Joey's reaction.

Understanding.

He was almost afraid they wouldn't get along as they used to.

Many things weren't as they used to be.

"Linda will be so happy,” Henry sniffed for the last time and used the tissues to stop his face from looking like a mess, "And right now we need every bit of happiness we can get. We planned some big things but... I don't know, maybe they are too big for us...”

"Nonsense!”, Joey exclaimed before he bit his own tongue, "There is nothing on the way to your dreams, Henry. Nothing.”

"I start to feel as if this idea sounds nice only on paper," that's what the animator said, but Joey as an experienced leader and manager knew what his employer meant: convince me. Motivate me.

"Okay, listen to me, dear pal," he put his arm on Henry's shoulder and leaned in a bit so their heads were on the same level, "Of course the idea sounds easier on paper! All ya gotta do is write it! Now – action – is what requires more commitment. But what would you get from just that paper? Welp, nothing, nada, zero.”

"Alright, I get you, please-"

"Do you kind of want it or WANT IT WANT IT?!”

Henry let out a frustrated groan but muscles on his face betrayed him and he smiled and he hated it.

"I want it. I want her.”

"Then get the hell out and make your future wife happy.” he said it as an order but it was one Henry will one hundred percent willingly listen to.

This was a good moment. There has been a lot of stressful situations recently around the studio. Everyone knew what they wanted, everyone knew what to do to achieve what they wanted. It was just... hard. And they had to do their best to be happy.

Joey tried really hard to make it a happy workplace. He might have gotten a bit harsh sometimes but never let his guard of positivity down. Workers were fast to lose trust but slow to regain it. He was trying his damn best and hasn't realised he was pushing his best friend too hard.

He felt awful.

He had to do this, stuff needed to be done, but today? No, he couldn't.

Henry was crying. He had to let him go home, even if that meant he will spent time with his fiance instead of him. Or more like working for him.

But that would make him unhappy. Henry was unhappy for a longer time.

He sat back and lifted his chin up to look at the ceiling.

Most important person in his life was unhappy because of most important thing in his life.

Oh, dear.

Henry's spirit was definitely lifted up when Joey watched him exit the building. He felt an unpleasant feeling in his stomach when he noticed that – almost as if the workshop was some sort of prison. That just felt wrong. But he was glad for his friend. The animator needed rest anyway.

Anyway... what the hell was he doing? Drawing with a hurting hand? Did he really think Joey is some kind of monster that would make him-

No.

He realizes he clenched his fists. His fingers got released right away.

Well. Is he?

No. Calm down. Henry finds it hard to stand up for himself. He never complains! No wonder he just literally exploded from everything he kept inside! Joey never had any problems with giving him feedback or going on and on about what was going inside that idea-pumping head of his, but to be fair he didn't really have any serious issues himself.

(bullshit)

(liar)

The dark haired man shook his head.

They both felt the unpleasant breath of incoming deadline on their backs. Henry was probably too occupied with his mind today to, well, mind going home. But Joey was fully aware.

Oh, well! Who is supposed to make the impossible happen if not him?

He picked up the pen and then he picked up where Henry left off. He felt tired, but only physically (right?) which was something he surely could stand. Unfortunately he had to focus more on the business stuff but some time in the future he planned to hire an entire management department and join Henry in the art one. He could look for more animators first but...

His eyebrows frowned and he bit his bottom lip.

...he didn't want to. Later.

Why?

Oh, obviously because-

Because...

Bendy looked so off model, Joey just stared at the sketch in pure surprise.

Oh, right, he cheered himself up, after that time period some warm ups are necessary.

The amount of time he spent warming up to get the frame right was a bit disappointing, but he kept going.

He was so absorbed by the work, he didn't (want to think) hear the steps approaching him.

"Gee golly. Is that really you, sir?” the janitor's eyebrows instantly rose up as he reached the end of the hall.

Drew gave him an unfocused look and blinked a few times.

"What," he didn't even articulate the question.

"Um, uh, ya know, I'm just doin' the usual, haha,” Wally wasn't sure what to make out of his boss' tone, so his reply was kind of nervous, "Gotta clean up the place!”

The look on Franks face woke Joey up from that strange state of hyperfocusing.

"Oh!” without any reason to he stood up. Just a second after he realized, but didn't sit back, he approached the worker, stretching his back, "Can't you do this later, my boy?”

"It's already after hours, sir," the smile on Wally's face told Joey two things. First: get some rest, old man. Second: I better get overtime for this.

Oh, he heard that second one so often. Not today.

"Forget it. Go home, Wally.”

"Oh, no problemo, I can wait.”

"Wally.”

"Alright, alright," Franks reassured him to back out of his extra work plan by replying with the strongest accent he could pull off, which Joey couldn't help but find amusing. Such personality! Would make a great character trait.

"You can leave the mop here," as Joey continued Wally twisted his head to one side in curiosity. Kinda like a dog, "I will use it later.”

"Wow, mister Drew, you do Henry's job, now mine. When are ya goin’ to write a song?”

"Very funny, Franks.” Joey sent him a tired smile. "I mean – Wally. Quit the mister Drew, please.”

"You got it!” Joey half expected him to salute. Wally Franks might not be the sharpest tool in this shed, but he sure tries his best to be one and works both hard and happy. He would never regret hiring such a character. Good for the janitor, Joey never cared much about papers and qualifications. There were many things to hate this place for but also many things to appreciate. Maybe even love. Like this little comedy he knew he could expect from the boy always walking with his head in the clouds, "Good thing, I don't hafta go back to the closet! Phew! If I met Sammy down here, I wouldn't hear the end of it!”

"Keys?”

"Keys.”

Joey wasn't even slightly mad. That was just hilarious. Even though he was the one paying for a pair of new ones. Well, the studio was, but someone is responsible for it and is in its very name.

After Wally left, he kept working for a few more hours. He almost got the shot done when he felt a gentle touch on his shoulder.

He got up from the desk with a paper attached to his face. There were small spots of ink on his forehead and chin. He was really disoriented and looked at the person standing next to him with two cups of coffee with pure confusion.

Henry.

He was smiling but looked concerned.

"Damn me, I was afraid I will be too much behind so I got up earlier for work, but you..." he sounded genuinely touched, "Thanks.”

"You're welcome," Joey yawned and slowly got up, to which Henry responded by placing the cups on the desk and pushing him back to his place, "Wha-"

"You look like you're about to pass out,” despite his friend's tone, he could tell he wasn't really joking, "How long were you up?”

"Hell if I know," usually higher positioned shoulders now at a lower lever because of their owner's body being laid back in the chair shrugged, "What time is it?” he asked as he reached out for the cafeine.

"Eight.”

Joey took the cup to his hands and simply stared at the surface of what was inside of it. He smiled in an unsettling way.

"I have a meeting at half past nine.”

"Oh,” Henry gasped in that emotionless way of his but in the name of self-awareness added a more concerned: "Shit.”

"Yeah," a loud slorp could be heard.

"Is it important?”

"Yeah.”

"Are you gonna go there?”

"Yeah.”

"Do you want to?”

"Kinda.”

"Do you kind of want it, or-" Henry tried hard not to wheeze as Joey gave him an annoyed look, "want it, want it?”

There was a moment of silence.

"I don't.”

They both laughed hysterically.

Kinda.

✪

First year anniversary party managed to lift up everyone's moods a bit but not long after that event it faded away. They kept pushing but kept losing enthusiasm. It was even harder to stand that grin.

The one Bendy posters have.

The one Joey Drew has.

Said man entered the corridor to the left after coming through the entrance. He stood quietly and watched his only animator work.

He realized it's been some time since they had a normal conversation. He can't deny this feels wrong. He feels... awkward... out of place...

He hesitated to start speaking. It was Henry who sensed someone's presence and looked in his direction.

"Hi," he only slightly raised his eyebrows, "What do you want?”

"Oh? Is it forbidden to just come to see your pal now?” he tried hard to mask his stress and make the tone sound convincing. Henry's sad smile as a reply made him somewhat relieved.

"No. But I need to work on this if I want to get out of this place today," that used to be a joke.

Joey immediately run back to the previous room and returned with a chair.

"Move yo ass.”

"Come on, you don't have to-"

"It's been months since I used a pen for anything else than my signature or script writing. I. Want. To. Draw.” he really did, Henry was almost jealous of his friend's excitement towards drawing. It was only becoming less and less fun for the shorter man.

"Okay, then, here," he gave a folder to Joey and explained what needed to be done.

It was quite pleasant to have some company. Joey was working in the next room but they could shout things at each other. And they did.

Henry worked at a really fast paste. And very effectively on top of that. He didn't realise that himself but there has been quite some time since he heard an actual compliment about his work. He lacked motivation. Maybe that's why not long after Joey started, he went out of his hall and approached his friend's desk.

"Hey, I wanted to ask how you feel about those back-"

Joey has been scribbling circles.

Henry blinked.

This whole time.

"What the-"

"I can't get his stupid head. I'm so out of practice.”

"Are you serious?”

"I know I goof a lot, but not in the mood for it right now, Hen.”

"Ah," he was slightly taken aback by the nickname. It's been so long, "Maybe you want less Bendys and I'll give you some Borises instead? It's good to try different things.”

"Yeah, that does sound good”, Joey gave him a thankful smile.

Henry didn't dare to show him his backgrounds. He thought something but pushed it away.

No way it would demotivate Joey. Nothing was able to bring this man down. Right?

So they kept drawing.

Later, without anything to show this time, Henry came to him again to check how things were going.

Their little devil darling looked on model, just the way he should be.

When he glanced at the Boris Joey was sketching, he almost froze. He saw a mistake repeated on a few sketches already.

"You won't make me correct all the frames to give him a tail, will you?” he let out a nervous chuckle. Joey furrowed his brows as he studied what he made.

He gazed upon Henry who could see something shifting through his boss’/friend's face but couldn’t quite catch it.

"You're tired.”

"I'm tired.” Joey nodded slowly.

He muttered thanks for reminding him and went back to work. So did Henry. As the animator sat down on his own place, he wondered why did this little thing bother him so much.

Because? It's no big deal, right? Everyone makes mistakes.

After something around twenty minutes, Joey took careful steps while going to Henry's desk. He held some paper sheets and a pen. His face was covered by some undefined mask, so hard to guess what he felt at this moment.

Henry guesses he was... embarrassed? Afraid?

Why?

"Can you... show me how the details on Boris’ overalls look like?” his tone was so quiet, Henry got the impression it wasn’t even Joey speaking.

"Sure," he took out one of the concept arts he barely touched now since the designs of the characters were basically engraved on his memory. He smirked teasingly, "What kind of director doesn't know his own characters?”

That was supposed to be a joke.

Gritted teeth and pencil moustache pointed down told him someone didn't take it as one.

"You don't have to remind me about that," he hissed and pretty much threw all the stuff at the desk, "I'm done.”

"No, I didn't mean- Wait, what? What are you-"

"I'm done. I can't... do this anymore.”

"Um, hello? Are you listening to yourself?” Henry pulled out a nervous smile which was supposed to resemble his concern, "You just need-"

"Practice, yeah, no shit," Joey sighed heavily and crossed his arms, "But I don't have the goddamn time.”

Henry just blinked and stared at him. Joey finally realized what was coming out of his mouth.

"I... I'm sorry. I wanted to help you but-"

"No, it's fine. Don't worry ab-" Henry reached for his shoulder to lay a hand on it but Joey flinched back.

"I'm not worried. Of course it's fine. Now excuse me, I won't waste any more of our time-"

"Hey! No! It's... it's okay if it's not fine, we can talk about thi-"

"No need to. It's fine,” it was the first fake smile Henry remembered after finally quitting the studio.

"I don't believe that. Can you just... stop running away from talking about what's really bothering you?” he approached the tall man.

"I have no idea what you're talking about,” he turned away, planning to exit the room.

"It's okay to admit something is wrong!” Henry grabbed his arm.

Before he gets pushed with an unexpected force, he saw Joey in a completely new form. His friend's face was furious. Paper and pens fell from the desk on the ground. An ink well spilled out its content on a few pages by shattering on top of them. Henry hit the wooden structure with his back and the blue eyes watched the green ones in disbelief.

Joey's expression instantly changed. He looked at the other's face, not sure what to say. Seemed like he tried to state something but failed as his mouth opened and closed.

He exited the room in a hurry.

✪

Joey has been sitting in his office for quite a while now. Motionless. Staring at his desk. At an envelope laying on it to be precise.

He was away for a few days so he missed the biggest news going around the studio right now. On the way to this room he noticed some people gossiping and there was an unusual excited atmosphere.

Subconsciously, he knew what was inside of it. The thought just didn’t form inside of his head.

With a slightly shaking hand, he reached for the paper and cut it carefully with a letter opener.

He noticed the biggest word right away and lost his breath.

BEFORE THEY SAY

"I DO”

KINDLY JOIN US FOR THE

WEDDING

UNITING

LINDA & HENRY

After that there were written the date, the place and his own name but he paid no mind to those.

The invitation was put back down slowly, the fingers holding it twitching.

Tall, thin body was unusually still. Looked calm.

But wasn’t.

It’s over.

He stood up and a noise of something shattering could be heard. He felt a pain in his arm as he looked at it being stretched. He stared almost blindly at the wall and hardly noticed a big stain on it. Then his mind went back to focus. There was glass on the floor and on a chest of drawers which stood under the ink splatter. He remembered to breathe again, which he continued to do heavily, and then slowly approached the furniture to study what he’s done.

He appeared to just have thrown an inkwell.

Oh, what a mess.

Nothing like the one inside his head.

Joey pulled out the drawers. Various things ended up flying out of them. Documents, pens, stamps, keys, you name it. Falling wood made cracking sounds as it hit the ground.

He went around the room pulling his hair.

The man passed a wine rack which he pushed furiously. Alcohol spilled on the wood and the luxurious carpet covering it.

He stopped walking ending back again at the desk. With one swing of the long arm, he managed to push everything off it’s surface. There was something wet on his sleeve and he raised it up to his face with disgust, expecting to see ink.

But it was red.

And it hurt.

It must have been the letter opener.

He almost collapsed on his back, but the chair behind him broke the fall, so he ended up sliding down it. His legs were pointed at different directions, his body in general looked like an abandoned doll. The bleeding arm rose to the chest and was being hugged to it by the other one. It was now, when everything else went quiet, nothing was shattered or thrown, that he heard sounds which only a hurt animal could have made.

It slowly got through to him that he was sobbing uncontrollably.

His limbs slowly woke up from that weird apathetic state and along with head started coming together to one point – curled into a ball.

Hide.

Stop.

From what? Stop what?

What…?

He didn’t want to think.

He didn’t want anything.

Not anymore.

He…

He just can’t have it.

He can’t have him.

No matter what he does. Nothing really matters. He can’t succeed.

THIS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!

His whole body trembled.

This isn’t right, this isn’t fair, this can’t be like this, he has to… he… he just needs to…

He has always believed you can achieve anything if you try hard enough. If you believe. If you keep going. At some point that dream will come true.

He fell on his side and put a fist inside his mouth to silence his own scream.

LIES. LIES. LIES.

What was right is wrong. Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be.

He felt that… toxic… desire… to get what he wants.

But the problem was… he didn’t want something. He wanted someone.

Henry isn’t and can’t be your damn property, you stupid piece of garbage. How pathetic can you be?

Dreams are supposed to be your power…

He choked on his tears, but that didn’t stop him from laughing.

…but they can also be your downfall.

✪

This was not what he dreamt of. He run his hand through his brown hair with ending that movement on the neck to give it a small massage. It ached a bit, his back did as well. And his hand.

Henry sighed. He was so tired.

Why won’t Joey hire more animators? They should afford to do so, and even if it was risky, they would rather benefit from it in the future as there would be less dangers of not meeting the deadlines. He managed to do everything alone but at what cost…

A wrinkle appeared on his forehead.

Joey won’t even help him anymore. And his name is in the goddamn-

He released the breath he was holding.

Time passed and things only seemed to get worse.

He put his hands on the Bendy sketch he was working on. He grasped one of the fingers and studied it.

He designed the main character. Heck, two main characters.

He gently touched and twisted the golden ring.

Does he want to live in his shadow?

Does he live in it?

Should he quit? What would happen to them? What job would he look for?

He didn’t want to think about this.

They wanted to start a family. He couldn’t be absent in their children’s life.

He needed to think about this.

Blue eyes closed.

Should he quit…?

✪

There was an unpleasant silence in the office. Heavy atmosphere hanging in the air.

Old friends sat on opposing sides of Joey’s desk.

They couldn’t look each other in the eyes. No one wanted to start speaking.

Henry asked for talking about something. Something important. Privately.

Joey exhaled deeply and looked up at the other one’s face.

"What-"

"I quit.”

Dark haired man blinked. Corners of his mouth rose but the smile didn’t reach the green irises.

"Let’s take it slow from here, okay? Tell me what’s the problem.”

"What isn’t a problem, Joey?” Henry didn’t expect himself to raise his voice. At least not so early, "Short answer is: I’m not happy here.”

Drew folded his hands and put them on the countertop.

"Could you elaborate on that?” his voice didn’t show anything except for impatience.

The animator swallowed his saliva.

"I’m working alone and it’s just too much work for one person, it’s entirely consuming my life-"

"Well, it’s like this in this bus-"

"I’ve become a fucking workaholic, Joey.”

"I… I’m sorry to hear that…”

"Haven’t you noticed?”

"Noticed what? How am I supposed to know what’s going on inside your head? You never tell me anything, you just wait till it all bursts out in one moment, and look what it lead to now.”

"Oh, well I… thought you knew me a bit better and were aware of some changes. I’ve been lying to myself because I have an addiction. And everyone around me seemed to notice. Everyone but you.”

"I thought you liked drawing.”

"I love drawing.”

"What’s the matter then?”

"That I’m a goddamn wreck, maybe that’s what. I’m… sort of… miserable… because of it… If it wasn’t for Linda, I surely would drown the sorrows in alcohol. Almost added drinking to the list of my problems, but she-"

"Oh, thank God, Linda is here.”

Henry didn’t miss the sarcasm in Joey’s tone.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

"She’s convinced you to quit for her, hasn’t she?”

"What? No! Well, we did talk about it, but it’s not like… This is MY decision, I’m doing this for my own sake… Well ours too but…” he shook his head and continued more angrily, "Are you suggesting that she’s… she’s… I don’t know, sabotaging?”

Joey didn’t stop his shoulders from shrugging and Henry could feel his teeth grit.

"I’ll tell you what,” he stood up, "The only person sabotaging anything here is you…”

"Henry, please, sit down-"

"You manipulative asshole.”

His boss gave him a dead stare.

Silence came back for a plenty of seconds, even worse to handle than before.

"You took my designs. You always used pretty words and ideas to get around it but the truth is you stole it from me.”

Joey listened to the accusations without showing any emotions. His mouth only once twitched.

"I won’t let you steal anything else.”

As a confirmation of his words, he turned around and headed for the door. When he pressed the handle, a cold, empty tone reached his ears and sent a shiver down his spine.

"Don’t you dare leave.”

Henry ignored it and walked out of the room. He was aiming his steps at the exit.

He felt as if his head was burning.

This is all wrong. How did they end up like this. Why is it hap-

"WHY AREN’T YOU LISTENING TO ME?!”

Against his will, his body faced the man following him.

Green eyes emitted fury and Henry experienced an irrational fear.

Of course he was mad. This was a hard situation for both of them. But it had to be like this.

It shouldn’t have to.

"I’m leaving. You can’t change my mind.” he replied in apologetic tone, even though he knew he wasn’t the one owning the apologies.

"What the fuck did she put into your head?” Joey asked in a disappointed tone and raised his arms in confusion.

"Leave her out of this. She has nothing to do with-"

"Oh, yeah?! Well, everything was okay before she started putting her fucking nose in places it didn’t belong,” taller man approached the shorter one, who was backing out carefully.

"I just told you to not involve her,” Henry growled, "You don’t even realise you’re the problem, don’t you?”

"Ah, of course!” he shouted and hit his forehead with right hand, completely forgetting they were in the hall where anyone passing could witness this scene. Luckily for them no one was there to see it.

Or maybe unfortunately.

"I forgot that three is a crowd.”

"What…?”

Joey immediately stopped and went silent. He was standing right in front of Henry, who also was done moving. Both of them were panting.

Both angry like they’ve never been.

A realization hit Henry like a train. He opened his eyes wide.

He was wrong. Many years from that moment he understood what was actually… the case…

But for now…

"You’re fucking sick,” now he took a step forward, "Just how controlling can you get?”

"What is that now, huh? What else have I done?”, Joey muttered but his tone seemed to have lost some fury, the loss being replaced with… fear?

That came to Henry as nothing else but a conclusion. Guilty.

He grabbed his best friend by the collar.

"You want to pull me away from her,” he hissed and his voice wasn’t ever as dangerous as in that moment.

Joey didn’t reply but his expression revealed his bewilderment and that somehow made Henry’s blood boil with rage. He rapidly pushed him away, long legs almost tripping over each other.

"You’re fucked in the head.”

"Henry-"

"I can’t believe I let you waste so much of my time, my energy… my… my life…”

"Listen to me-"

"No,” he cut him off and pushed again along with letting out a furious cry: "What the hell were you thinking?!”

"It’s not like this!” Joey noticed Henry getting ready to push him once more and tried to somehow stop his hands.

"Then how, huh?!” he went straight past Joey’s weak arms and grabbed him again, "How is it?!”

"I was just… I-I…” now he was the one pushing, anger suddenly kicking in and increasing his strength, "I was doing what had to be done to achieve our dreams!”

"Our dreams?” then Joey was the one backing out, "Or just yours?”

"I… I thought those were the same,” voice coming out from under the pencil moustache cracked.

"Well… maybe they were…” the animator’s tone calms down a bit as they reached an intersection of corridors. Behind Joey’s back was a place under construction which was going to be a break room. It was kinda upsetting Henry won’t even get to experience it. Would be nice… but at his position he probably wouldn’t even have a chance, "But not anymore.”

He held Joey’s vest with only one hand. He was ready to let go but-

"THEY ARE! IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF THIS FUCKING SLUT!”

Something red covered Henry’s vision. He didn’t know what was happening until he heard a loud thud. He blinked.

There was a smell of blood. His hand hurt and was wet. Blood on his hand. But what was that-

Again. Thud.

His eyes followed the noise.

There was a small trace of red dots leading to the beginning of the stairs.

Thud.

His chest suddenly felt heavy.

If he had air in his lungs, he would scream his friend’s name.

But he didn’t.

There was only one sound.

Thud.

And then silence.

A few seconds have passed before Henry finally moved. To him it could have been as well years. His legs felt like they were made out of iron.

Joey never realized he fell down the stairs. He was unconscious before he even fully registered being punched in the face by the person he only ever cared about.

For some reason there was one thing he remembered from that accident. Very clearly.

A sign he saw while the world was upside down.

"WATCH YOUR STEP”

Henry’s eyes stung. Hot tears rolled down his cheek as he watched the body at the bottom of the stairs. He would have sworn to God, he didn’t see it breathing.

Someone was coming.

People.

They will know.

Everyone will know.

Henry whispered a voiceless "sorry”.

He left in a heartbeat.

✪

There’s not enough air. There’s not enough air. There’s not enough air. There’s not-

Henry.

There were flashes.

Joey woke up in cold sweat and wanted to sit but wasn’t able to and it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt like hell.

There was light. Right above him.

And a face.

Henry?

It was a doctor.

The doctor told him many funny things.

Why was it funny?

Well, because it was a joke, of course! It just couldn’t be true! So it must have been a joke!

It! Was! So! Funny!

He was in a hospital. There were more people in the room, trying to calm him down.

They said he was having a hysteria attack.

How was that possible? It was not.

They’re joking!

They’re lying!

Isn’t joking just funny lying?

He didn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t use his arms properly.

They told him he had a spine injury. That he probably won’t be able to walk. Or at least not much, unless he’s really lucky. But they should focus on saving his arms.

They were so silly.

They said he won’t make it for too long. His body was so fragile right now, it was a matter of months until it shuts down completely.

So, so silly.

He asked for Henry.

Nobody told him anything except for that he had a concussion and shouldn’t have any visitors for a while.

Time passed. He barely noticed from all the drugs they gave him.

Then his head started to feel clearer.

He realized they weren’t lying.

He told them he didn’t remember what happened.

He was the one lying.

He was having visitors. Henry was not among them.

But there was the janitor.

The janitor…

Oh!

Franky!

Like a cute version of Frankenstein!

No, wait, it’s Wally!

Wally Franks. The janitor. A really important visitor.

Joey asked him for a favour.

✪

Wally looked around with confusion and scratched his head. He rang the bell again and held it for a longer while. Then he knocked and shouted out Henry’s name a few times.

Well, time to give up. He obviously wasn’t home. His car wasn’t even on the driveway.

Mister Drew just seemed… it just seemed really important to him. And he didn’t want to bring bad news to him, considering the situation his boss was in.

Speaking of the news, there was a stack of newspapers just laying on the pavement.

No one was there since a longer time.

The janitor didn’t need to count them to know the amount of days it took to deliver these was equal to the amount of days which passed since… the incident.

He even asked some people.

No one knew where Henry was. Same about Linda.

Something was telling Wally they were out of town.

Probably for good.

✪

He let out an unhealthy chuckle after he was done writing the letter.

Why does he keep doing it? No one even reads those. And never will.

Without knowing Henry’s current address, he just kept sending mail to his old one. No one lived in it anymore because it wasn’t for sale and it couldn’t be even considered a property belonging to the town, because they’ve got nothing on him.

That’s because Joey never made any statements about what happened. He faked a memory loss. Some people speculated about him remembering what happened, some tried talking to him about it, pointing out how his disappearance happened at the same time his accident did.

But he didn’t tell anyone.

Police would have to start looking for him. He could ruin his life.

And ruin what was left of his own life. But that would also take away his only achievement.

The studio. The characters they argued about amongst other things.

If he took out Henry’s trash, his old friend would probably return the favour.

He couldn’t move his legs at first but after some rehabilitation he managed to use crutches from time to time. On rare occasions he stood with a cane but didn’t really move with it.

His arms were really weak, but got stronger after he started using the wheelchair. Only the dominant left one was really usable though.

✪

The demon touches his glove with the uncovered right hand. His whole body is cold but this part seems almost comfortable.

✪

He sometimes was coming to the art department to watch the animators work. He has hired many after-

He never really paid attention to them though. The only desk he really looked at was the empty one outside the area they were working in.

Despite everything, he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it.

✪

Old man pants heavily as he escapes inky black stains whirling all around him. He reaches a corridor without a proper floor, only wooden boards put together in hurry to make a provisional bridge.

He can hear the Ink Demon closing in.

Henry takes his steps carefully. Falling would probably cause him to break his spine in half.

He thinks of the vertebrae sticking out of the deformed Bendy’s back.

He notices a sign at the end of the hallway. It’s upside down.

"WATCH YOUR STEP”

#bendy and the ink machine #batim fanfiction #joey drew #henry batim #henry x joey (one sided)#wally franks #halfart #halfpost #violence #injury #drinking #ask to tag

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wannawrite · 7 years ago

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who?: Hotshot’s Yoonsan, Hojung genre: 🌸 type: drabble word count: 1.6K blog navigator. • Yoonsan seems to have caught feelings for you • the only person in the way is Hojung, your protective brother I’m so happy Hotshot is working now, even though they are all split up :”) I’m just extremely proud. Thank you for requesting @huis-totally-innocent-smirk, apologies for the late post and so sorry for only completing one. Played with the format a bit, I hope it’s still readable aha, imagine it’s from a third-party perspective, maybe even like a game. - Admin L

disclaimer: pictures used do not belong to me and credit goes to their original owners

2 February 2018 7.26pm CONVERSATION between YOONSAN and HOJUNG “You’re kidding,” Hojung scoffed, turning to look away from his best friend, eyes rolling. “Hyung, you can’t date my sister. No. She’s off limits.” Yoonsan’s lips curved into an irritated pout, he sighed and sprawled his form out on the dance room floor. “I just wanted to tell you. Help me put in a good word will ya?” Hojung rarely got mad at his rather quiet and bashful best friend, Yoonsan was not the kind of guy to lash out at other about petty problems he faced. He could be grumpy and a tad bit less understanding at times but that was all there was to his tantrums. However, this was a different story, this time he was actually contemplating starting a feud. “How could you even like her? You don’t even talk to her privately? All you do is get that 3 seconds of talk time whenever she brings me lunch or something. Please don’t call it love, please don’t break her heart like this. It isn’t genuine,” Hojung pointed out, his brain frantically analysing the situation, trying to find a loophole in Yoonsan’s confession. Yoonsan only knew you from those moments that lasted no longer than a minute, he couldn’t possibly be attached to a fleeting silhouette. Again, his friend shrugged it off casually, like he wasn’t being fiercely interrogated. Yoonsan avoided eye contact, shutting his eyes as if he was completely serene. “Maybe those 3 seconds was all she needed to steal my heart.”

31 December 2017 11.53pm TEXT MESSAGES between YOU and YOONSAN San: hey San: idw to come off as creepy or anything but I’m gonna try to forge better friendships with my acquaintances San: now, you’re only Hojung’s little sister but I hope we’ll be friends in the new year San: lol haven’t I known you since you were 8? HAHAHAHAHA 11.55pm You: oh gosh hi hdksijssb You: awww that’s so nice of you, it’s great to make more friends and OH GOSH YES YOU HAVE AND I WAS STILL SHY AROUND HOJUNG’S FRIENDS DHJSKSJDND IT WAS SO AWKWARD NO San: I still have pictures of all of us from that era, courtesy of Junhyuk hyung’s mum You:... You: WHAT NO You: NO NO NO NO NO DELETE THEM YOU UGLY You: DISGUSTING San: *PICTURE* San: *PICTURE* The sender has attached more than 10 files. Click here to open files. You: ARE THOSE PICTURES OF MY BRO You: GOOD TEA FOR FAMILY NEW YEAR’S REUNION HAHA THANKS San: is this how we’re bonding? San: nice to know, I have a meme folder just for Hojung You: SEND San: *PICTURE* The sender has reached attachment limit. Please wait for received files to finish loading before more can be received. 12am San: HAPPY NEW YEAR San: with this coming new year, I hope to only grow closer to my new friend and that we’ll make more enjoyable and happy memories together San: friendship? You: HAPPY NEW YEAR🎊🎉💓 You: awww :”) You: of course! We should hang out sometime lol idk if my bro will be 100% happy abt this tho San: aha why wouldn’t he be 12.02am You: I think you already know why

3 January 2018 1.42pm MEETING and CONVERSATION between YOONSAN and YOU She’s pretty, he thinks. Especially with that cold winter blush painted across her cheeks. He’s cute, you think. I think it’s adorable he has sweater paws in a turtleneck. Neither of you says that out loud, but they say someone’s genuine thoughts can be seen through their eyes. Eyes are like the mirrors of your soul. Instead, you clink tea cups and sip on hot chocolate, admiring the last few snowflakes dotting on the large window on your right. This cafe was your idea but the outing was San’s. He appeared awfully mismatched with the whole cheerful fairyland aesthetic but you found it even more attractive. It was not an awkward mismatch but a surprisingly pleasant one like purple and yellow. This isn’t a date, you reminded yourself, taking a cookie from the platter and putting it to your lips as your mind worked to come up with a conversation starter other than ‘what memes have you got of my bro,’. Just talk to him like he’s a friend. “What song’s are you working on right now?” you blurted out then wondered if it was too peculiar or personal of a question. San liked the fact that you took interest in his passion for music. Honestly, he could never hold a face-to-face conversation for long but talking about his music was a different story. He could go on about it for ages. Ugh, he’s so cute when he talks about his passion for music. Oh wow, the small smiles his lips pull into are really charming. Just a friend. Just a friend, Yoonsan. Pull yourself together and calm down. Isn’t this what you wanted? Girls can sense when you’re nervous around them. He’s the forbidden fruit. She’s my forbidden fruit. Both of you remained in Eden, drinking mugs of hot chocolate with extra marshmallows floating inside and biting into butter cookies, wishing all fruits were edible.

8 January 2018 8.18pm MEETING with YOU and HOTSHOT “Uhh San said he’s at Sungwoon’s house playing Fifa or something,” you replied to your parents’ question on where your older brother was. “Oh good,” your father commented. “I need to drop by their house to ask Sungwoon’s grandfather about the new fertiliser I bought. I was wondering if he had tested it yet. Want to get your brother back together?” If I go, I would see San for a bit...I MEAN, see my brother more and see Sungwoon and see Grandfather Ha. It isn’t all about San! “Uh, sure! Just let me...change!” The sentence had not been finished before your form disappeared up the staircase. The drive to Sungwoon’s place made you anticipated yet nervous for no apparent reason. After all, it was just your big brother and some of his close friends. Nothing else to it. For some reason, your hands shook as you closed the car door and walked into the house. “Go and get your brother.” Breathe. At first, San didn’t even look up from his phone when the door of Sungwoon’s bedroom opened but his head snapped up when he heard your melodious voice calling a greeting. A silly smile slipped onto his face as he bashfully waved back, trying not to garner Hojung’s attention. However, Hojung had already gotten a hunch on the interaction but he tried to brush it off. “Ahh, you know Dad won’t be leaving anytime soon. Join me, I’m winning anyway,” Hojung offered, holding up a game controller. He quickly went back to the game, yelling excitedly when you scored a goal against Taehyun and Sungwoon. San’s admiration for you only grew.

2 February 2018 11.28pm TEXT MESSAGES between HOJUNG and SUNGWOON Hojung: like what...do they think I’m blind or something...I get that this was bound to happen but idk how to feel Hojung: I know hyung is a good guy and all but I’m just unsure Hojung: am I being paranoid or mean? Sungwoon: Nah I don’t think so, you’re just looking out for your friends. It doesn’t hurt to be a nice guy like that Sungwoon: san is a nice guy and I’ll be honest and say I never saw it coming Sungwoon: I just need to know if it is genuine or if he’s just doing this for fun or something Hojung: I think they have been texting and meeting up privately bc she’s been quite shady and quiet about her ‘outings’ lately Hojung: idkkkk I’m just...kind of annoyed? Yet relieved that its hyung and not some creep Hojung: idw to lose any of my close friends bc of something like this you know? Sungwoon: I’d say maybe you should talk to them first! After all, it isn’t official right? They just have feelings but they haven’t said anything to each other Sungwoon: tbh it’s cute haha Sungwoon: I think they need to bond more before putting a label on anything. Feels that way. I don’t want anyone to make dumb mistakes with dating Hojung: I feel you. I think I just need time to absorb it. This feels like a pesky annoyance I can’t help it. I just want what is best for everyone Hojung: thanks, hyung, go and rest now. I’ll talk to them Sungwoon: sleep early as well, don’t stress about it 1.15am TEXT MESSAGES between HOJUNG and YOU Hojung: hey sis Hojung: hate to scare you and break it to you but I know about you and Yoonsan, he kind of told me personally today Hojung: don’t freak I know you guys aren’t dating but you can’t exactly hide anything from your big bro Hojung: ...honestly, I’m not sure how to react...knowing how close you both are to me. I’m glad to like a decent guy I suppose Hojung: talk to me about it okay? I just don’t want you to get hurt. Get to know each other a bit more. Hojung: good night, although you’re already sleeping. See you tomorrow 2.21am TEXT MESSAGES between HOJUNG and YOONSAN Hojung: hyung, sorry to text late but abt what you told me...I know how I feel about it Hojung: it’s so annoying Hojung: but I’m willing to accept it if you talk it out with me and her. You’re not a bad guy....hopefully. Please still be the same hyung I’ve known for most of my life. Hojung: I want you two to be real about it. No point dating if feelings are merely fabricated. I don’t need broken hearts and I can’t see my family get hurt, hear me? Hojung: ....just...talk to me and talk to her okay? See you tomorrow

#hotshot #hotshot scenarios #noh taehyun #choi junhyuk #kim moonkyu #yoonsan #ha sungwoon #go hojung

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nostalgebraist · 7 years ago

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I was reading a paper (“Information-Based Clustering”) and got confused, and it turned out I was confused because I had an intuition about information theory that wasn’t true. So I figured I would post about it here in case anyone else has the same intuition.

The paper is about clustering. It starts out with a formulation where you have some similarity measure for the N points you want to cluster, and you want to put them in a fixed number of clusters, N_c.

They write down the objective function I’m used to: the average within-cluster similarity. But instead of just maximizing that, they say they want to maximize it subject to a constraint, eq. 3 in their paper. This is the mutual information between the point labels i and the cluster labels C, which they’ve re-written so it looks like a K-L divergence between p(C|i) and p(C).

Now, to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what we get out of this term. I think what it does is encourage imbalanced clusters, so if we’re asked which cluster a point belongs to, we can express it concisely (with a prefix code where the more common clusters get shorter code words), but still I’m not clear on why that’s desirable. I think the idea is that we can let the number of clusters get very large, and still get readable results, with a few big clusters and then some smaller ones capturing fine-scale stuff. (It also does something to the way we assign fuzzy class probabilities to each point, I guess.)

Forget about that, though. What confused me originally was that this measure of information doesn’t know how close together our points are. That’s all in the similarity measure, which we’re balancing against this information thing.

That means that a clustering rule that seems really simple, like “all points with x>0 are red, all other points are blue,” could have the same amount of information (or more) as one that seems really complicated, with lots of wiggly boundaries. I.e. whatever this is capturing, it isn’t how much information it would take to specify the clustering rule.

Thinking about this led me to realize that information theory per se is entirely about measure-related stuff, and only knows about metric stuff if you put that stuff in yourself, as a constraint.

The usual derivations of Shannon entropy, etc., start out with discrete distributions, where you have a bunch of discrete points that have nothing to do with one another. They have labels, but the labels are arbitrary, and you can permute them without changing anything.

Then, if you want, you can move to continuous distributions, although now there are subtleties (the differential entropy isn’t coordinate-independent, so you have to move to K-L divergence w/r/t some background measure that can stretch when you change the coordinates). Now, suddenly, we’re talking about functions on R^N, where we’re using to there being a metric.

But all of the information theory stuff has been carried over from the context of discrete, unrelated points, so if there’s a metric, it knows nothing about it. What it knows about are measurable sets, the equivalent here of the discrete points. But you can “permute the labels” of these sets all you want, without anything changing.

Like, take a standard normal distribution, and move parts of it around. Take the part on [-1, 1] and exchange it with the part on [1000, 1001]. This is a totally different distribution, with way different moments, and it’s discontinuous now . . . but it has the same (differential) entropy. Because if you had to make an optimal code for these distributions, all that matters is how likely one piece is relative to another piece -- doesn’t matter where they are in relation to the other pieces.

As I said, you can bring metric stuff into the picture if you want, as in the paper with its similarities, or in maximum entropy where you fix things like the mean and standard deviation. But there’s something kind of weird about this to me. On the one hand, you’re saying that you care about metric stuff. On the other hand, you’re quantifying how efficiently you could code a sample from your distribution, using a measure of optimal coding efficiency that doesn’t know about distances.

But this does actually work, because once you write an objective function where distances matter, codes that exploit the distances start winning in your optimization problem over codes that don’t. What got me confused was that “exploiting distances” doesn’t actually let you use fewer bits per se -- it just lets you convey distances better than another code using the same number of bits.

The paper cites something called rate-distortion theory, which seems to be the general theory of doing this. The idea is like: suppose I am using a lossy encoding, and I want to set a maximum on the squared error (“distortion”) between the reconstructed signal and the true signal. How many bits can I afford to throw away? And then you do this same kind of thing, where you minimize a mutual information with a constraint on the distortion (where the paper is basically minimizing distortion with a constraint on mutual information).

As a concrete example of “exploiting distances doesn’t actually let you use fewer bits per se,” consider two distributions over x ∈ [0, 1000]. Distribution A is uniform over [0, 10] and then drops to zero for x > 10. Distribution B splits this into two far-apart bins: one uniform over [0, 5] and one uniform over [995, 1000]. These have the same differential entropy (we can turn one into another by “permuting labels”).

But if we want to minimize distortion for distribution B, our code should start out with a symbol saying which bin you’re in, and then refining from there. If our code corresponds to a continuous distribution (with less entropy than B, so it’s compressed), we’ll probably want it to be bimodal; as the entropy gets lower and lower it would tend to a Dirac delta in the center of each bin. We wouldn’t have the same bimodality if we were trying to code A, I think (although I haven’t actually done the problem -- I don’t even know if it has a solution!). The point is, the distances tell us what shape our code should have, and then the information measure tells us what the cheapest code with that shape is, even though it doesn’t care about shapes per se.

#mathpost

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playingdmmdforplot-blog · 7 years ago

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Book Tag

I’d like to thank @starcrysis for tagging me in this! I never really intended to make this tumblr personal. But I think that there’s nothing wrong with sharing a bit about the person behind all the posts! ^u^

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest? Depends. Are we talking about a book that’s been to my shelves the longest but I actually opened it and read it at some point. Or a book I bought with a naïve though of “Yes, I’m definitely going to read this.” but then ended up not opening it at all? If it’s the first case, then that will be a Family Encyclopedia. The book is so worn out that it’s wrapped in a tape all over. But it’s still readable! In the second case it will have to be Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I read a few pages on the internet some time ago and became really interested in it. Then, after a few months, I happened to visit a book store with my friends and I enthusiastically bought the book, yet haven’t made my way around reading it yet. And I’m not proud of myself.

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next? Well, my current read is a Czech book. So the original title is “Továrna na debilno” which could be translated into something along the words “A Factory For Manufacturing Idiots.” It’s a social, political satire and it’s been really great so far! My next read will probably be either another book of poems by Shel Silverstein, most likely Every Thing on it, or a novel; When Nietzche Wept by Irvin David Yalom!

3. Which book does everyone like and you hated? Oh, that would be Robinson Crusoe. Without a doubt. I remember it being a part of required reading at elementary and my classmates, who usually couldn’t stand the required books, were in a high spirits about Robinson Crusoe, discussing it and sharing their positive points of view and I truly couldn’t get it. I’m not a big fan of adventure fiction, to be honest. And I honestly don’t like the composition of Robinson Crusoe. Maybe I’ll change my mind with passing years!

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t? This statement could be applied to any book, honestly! I always get excited about reading them and then I abandon just the idea of opening them. But I’ll probably have to say The Girl on the Train or The Da Vinci Code. In both cases; A lot of people recommended it to me and I’d really love to actually read it but I’m almost certain I won’t. At least not in the nearest future. Shame on me.

5. Which book are you saving for retirement? None in particular.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end? I’m more of a fan of the last sentence on last page, myself! I read it first in 99% of cases.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside? Definitely an interesting aside. However, that doesn’t mean I read them. Another thing I’m really not proud of because I believe that everything mentioned on these pages is crucial for the whole creation of the book in one way or another. But I can not bring myself to read them. And if, at some rare occasion, I do then I tend to scan the pages with eyes not actually taking in any information.

8. Which book character would you switch places with? Alice from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland! Without a second thought! This book is a pure fantasy come true and I’d love to experience it in person! Even at the cost of getting beheaded.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)? I don’t think I have one. Of course, I recall some events when reading a book I’ve already read once at some point in my life, but nothing very specific. Just the atmosphere of the past-reading, in general.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way. The most interesting way I ever requited a book in would probably be winning it in a contest. When I was younger my school used to push me in all those linguistic competitions (which I’ve never had a problem with! I love anything related to language or literature) and I remember getting an Encyclopedia about flora and fauna as the prize!

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person? I don’t think I have. I bought some books to some of my friends for birthday or another special occasion but I’ve never given away any of mine.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places? I’m not really into taking my books with me. The anxiety of the pages bending or any horrible scenario happening to the book is way too strong, since I’m not the most careful, delicate person on the planet.

13. Any required reading you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later? Personally I think I’m still somehow ‘too’ young to judge that. But I couldn’t stand reading one of required books (Czech book again; “Babička” [ = The Grandmother] by Božena Němcová) yet I fell in love with it when I listened to the audio version of the book, after some time passed.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book? I don’t think I’ve ever found anything particularly strange in a book. I managed to pick up some with a drink (or maybe a different liquid) spilled on some of the pages when I borrowed books from the library, but that’s about it.

15. Used or brand new? I’ve already said it, I’m a materialistic person so I love brand new books. Let alone the wonderful smell! BUT I’ll have to admit that there’s something about old books. Not just “used” but really torn and worn out books which pages are already turning yellow!

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses? I’ve read only The Green Mile out of all the books he’s written, and I love The Green Mile! Although, I’m a bigger fan of thrillers and horrors with a plot which can be explained scientifically. It seems to me that the author can choose to add pretty much anything to the story if they choose to work with mysteriousness. Back to Stepen King; I tried to read ‘It’ as well but that one seemed a little too... constructed for my liking.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book? Is that even possible? If it is, I haven’t seen it yet.

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid? I don’t really want to prohibit anyone from adapting a book to a movie but the director of the said movie should keep in mind all the aspects of the book. But if I’d have to choose one that had been already made into a movie and it was so badly done that it made me question the future of cinematography, then “Death Note”. I’m not sure if manga classifies as a book but the Death Note movie by Netflix is the purest example of why a manga should be a manga and nothing else.

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question? I can’t seem to recall any at the moment.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take? Either my father or a literature professor from our elementary school!

- - - - - -

Thank you for reading the whole thing! I’m aware I’m supposed to tag other blogs but this honestly seems like a great opportunity to share your interests when it comes to literature, so consider yourself tagged by me if you feel like participating in this tag!

#personal #tag #tag meme #book tag #books

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toothextract · 6 years ago

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A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

Posted by rjonesx.

Moz’s Domain Authority is requested over 1,000,000,000 times per year, it’s referenced millions of times on the web, and it has become a veritable household name among search engine optimizers for a variety of use cases, from determining the success of a link building campaign to qualifying domains for purchase. With the launch of Moz’s entirely new, improved, and much larger link index, we recognized the opportunity to revisit Domain Authority with the same rigor as we did keyword volume years ago (which ushered in the era of clickstream-modeled keyword data).

What follows is a rigorous treatment of the new Domain Authority metric. What I will not do in this piece is rehash the debate over whether Domain Authority matters or what its proper use cases are. I have and will address those at length in a later post. Rather, I intend to spend the following paragraphs addressing the new Domain Authority metric from multiple directions.

Correlations between DA and SERP rankings

The most important component of Domain Authority is how well it correlates with search results. But first, let’s get the correlation-versus-causation objection out of the way: Domain Authority does not cause search rankings. It is not a ranking factor. Domain Authority predicts the likelihood that one domain will outrank another. That being said, its usefulness as a metric is tied in large part to this value. The stronger the correlation, the more valuable Domain Authority is for predicting rankings.

Methodology

Determining the “correlation” between a metric and SERP rankings has been accomplished in many different ways over the years. Should we compare against the “true first page,” top 10, top 20, top 50 or top 100? How many SERPs do we need to collect in order for our results to be statistically significant? It’s important that I outline the methodology for reproducibility and for any comments or concerns on the techniques used. For the purposes of this study, I chose to use the “true first page.” This means that the SERPs were collected using only the keyword with no additional parameters. I chose to use this particular data set for a number of reasons:

The true first page is what most users experience, thus the predictive power of Domain Authority will be focused on what users see.

By not using any special parameters, we’re likely to get Google’s typical results.

By not extending beyond the true first page, we’re likely to avoid manually penalized sites (which can impact the correlations with links.)

We did NOT use the same training set or training set size as we did for this correlation study. That is to say, we trained on the top 10 but are reporting correlations on the true first page. This prevents us from the potential of having a result overly biased towards our model.

I randomly selected 16,000 keywords from the United States keyword corpus for Keyword Explorer. I then collected the true first page for all of these keywords (completely different from those used in the training set.) I extracted the URLs but I also chose to remove duplicate domains (ie: if the same domain occurred, one after another.) For a length of time, Google used to cluster domains together in the SERPs under certain circumstances. It was easy to spot these clusters, as the second and later listings were indented. No such indentations are present any longer, but we can’t be certain that Google never groups domains. If they do group domains, it would throw off the correlation because it’s the grouping and not the traditional link-based algorithm doing the work.

I collected the Domain Authority (Moz), Citation Flow and Trust Flow (Majestic), and Domain Rank (Ahrefs) for each domain and calculated the mean Spearman correlation coefficient for each SERP. I then averaged the coefficients for each metric.

Outcome

Moz’s new Domain Authority has the strongest correlations with SERPs of the competing strength-of-domain link-based metrics in the industry. The sign (-/+) has been inverted in the graph for readability, although the actual coefficients are negative (and should be).

Moz’s Domain Authority scored a ~.12, or roughly 6% stronger than the next best competitor (Domain Rank by Ahrefs.) Domain Authority performed 35% better than CitationFlow and 18% better than TrustFlow. This isn’t surprising, in that Domain Authority is trained to predict rankings while our competitor’s strength-of-domain metrics are not. It shouldn’t be taken as a negative that our competitors strength-of-domain metrics don’t correlate as strongly as Moz’s Domain Authority — rather, it’s simply exemplary of the intrinsic differences between the metrics. That being said, if you want a metric that best predicts rankings at the domain level, Domain Authority is that metric.

Note: At first blush, Domain Authority’s improvements over the competition are, frankly, underwhelming. The truth is that we could quite easily increase the correlation further, but doing so would risk over-fitting and compromising a secondary goal of Domain Authority…

Handling link manipulation

Historically, Domain Authority has focused on only one single feature: maximizing the predictive capacity of the metric. All we wanted were the highest correlations. However, Domain Authority has become, for better or worse, synonymous with “domain value” in many sectors, such as among link buyers and domainers. Subsequently, as bizarre as it may sound, Domain Authority has itself been targeted for spam in order to bolster the score and sell at a higher price. While these crude link manipulation techniques didn’t work so well in Google, they were sufficient to increase Domain Authority. We decided to rein that in.

Data sets

The first thing we did was compile a series off data sets that corresponded with industries we wished to impact, knowing that Domain Authority was regularly manipulated in these circles.

Random domains

Moz customers

Blog comment spam

Low-quality auction domains

Mid-quality auction domains

High-quality auction domains

Known link sellers

Known link buyers

Domainer network

Link network

While it would be my preference to release all the data sets, I’ve chosen not to in order to not “out” any website in particular. Instead, I opted to provide these data sets to a number of search engine marketers for validation. The only data set not offered for outside validation was Moz customers, for obvious reasons.

Methodology

For each of the above data sets, I collected both the old and new Domain Authority scores. This was conducted all on February 28th in order to have parity for all tests. I then calculated the relative difference between the old DA and new DA within each group. Finally, I compared the various data set results against one another to confirm that the model addresses the various methods of inflating Domain Authority.

Results

In the above graph, blue represents the Old Average Domain Authority for that data set and orange represents the New Average Domain Authority for that same data set. One immediately noticeable feature is that every category drops. Even random domains drops. This is a re-centering of the Domain Authority score and should cause no alarm to webmasters. There is, on average, a 6% reduction in Domain Authority for randomly selected domains from the web. Thus, if your domain authority drops a few points, you are well within the range of normal. Now, let’s look at the various data sets individually.

Random domains: -6.1%

Using the same methodology of finding random domains which we use for collecting comparative link statistics, I selected 1,000 domains, we were able to determine that there is, on average, a 6.1% drop in Domain Authority. It’s important that webmasters recognize this, as the shift is likely to affect most sites and is nothing to worry about.

Moz customers: -7.4%

Of immediate interest to Moz is how our own customers perform in relation to the random set of domains. On average, the Domain Authority of Moz customers lowered by 7.4%. This is very close to the random set of URLs and indicates that most Moz customers are likely not using techniques to manipulate DA to any large degree.

Link buyers: -15.9%

Surprisingly, link buyers only lost 15.9% of their Domain Authority. In retrospect, this seems reasonable. First, we looked specifically at link buyers from blog networks, which aren’t as spammy as many other techniques. Second, most of the sites paying for links are also optimizing their site’s content, which means the sites do rank, sometimes quite well, in Google. Because Domain Authority trains against actual rankings, it’s reasonable to expect that the link buyers data set would not be impacted as highly as other techniques because the neural network learns that some link buying patterns actually work.

Comment spammers: -34%

Here’s where the fun starts. The neural network behind Domain Authority was able to drop comment spammers’ average DA by 34%. I was particularly pleased with this one because of all the types of link manipulation addressed by Domain Authority, comment spam is, in my honest opinion, no better than vandalism. Hopefully this will have a positive impact on decreasing comment spam — every little bit counts.

Link sellers: -56%

I was actually quite surprised, at first, that link sellers on average dropped 56% in Domain Authority. I knew that link sellers often participated in link schemes (normally interlinking their own blog networks to build up DA) so that they can charge higher prices. However, it didn’t occur to me that link sellers would be easier to pick out because they explicitly do not optimize their own sites beyond links. Subsequently, link sellers tend to have inflated, bogus link profiles and flimsy content, which means they tend to not rank in Google. If they don’t rank, then the neural network behind Domain Authority is likely to pick up on the trend. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to such a dramatic change in Domain Authority.

High-quality auction domains: -61%

One of the features that I’m most proud of in regards to Domain Authority is that it effectively addressed link manipulation in order of our intuition regarding quality. I created three different data sets out of one larger data set (auction domains), where I used certain qualifiers like price, TLD, and archive.org status to label each domain as high-quality, mid-quality, and low-quality. In theory, if the neural network does its job correctly, we should see the high-quality domains impacted the least and the low-quality domains impacted the most. This is the exact pattern which was rendered by the new model. High-quality auction domains dropped an average of 61% in Domain Authority. That seems really high for “high-quality” auction domains, but even a cursory glance at the backlink profiles of domains that are up for sale in the $10K+ range shows clear link manipulation. The domainer industry, especially the domainer-for-SEO industry, is rife with spam.

Link network: -79%

There is one network on the web that troubles me more than any other. I won’t name it, but it’s particularly pernicious because the sites in this network all link to the top 1,000,000 sites on the web. If your site is in the top 1,000,000 on the web, you’ll likely see hundreds of root linking domains from this network no matter which link index you look at (Moz, Majestic, or Ahrefs). You can imagine my delight to see that it drops roughly 79% in Domain Authority, and rightfully so, as the vast majority of these sites have been banned by Google.

Mid-quality auction domains: -95%

Continuing with the pattern regarding the quality of auction domains, you can see that “mid-quality” auction domains dropped nearly 95% in Domain Authority. This is huge. Bear in mind that these drastic drops are not combined with losses in correlation with SERPs; rather, the neural network is learning to distinguish between backlink profiles far more effectively, separating the wheat from the chaff.

Domainer networks: -97%

If you spend any time looking at dropped domains, you have probably come upon a domainer network where there are a series of sites enumerated and all linking to one another. For example, the first site might be sbt001.com, then sbt002.com, and so on and so forth for thousands of domains. While it’s obvious for humans to look at this and see a pattern, Domain Authority needed to learn that these techniques do not correlate with rankings. The new Domain Authority does just that, dropping the domainer networks we analyzed on average by 97%.

Low-quality auction domains: -98%

Finally, the worst offenders — low-quality auction domains — dropped 98% on average. Domain Authority just can’t be fooled in the way it has in the past. You have to acquire good links in the right proportions (in accordance with a natural model and sites that already rank) if you wish to have a strong Domain Authority score.

What does this mean?

For most webmasters, this means very little. Your Domain Authority might drop a little bit, but so will your competitors’. For search engine optimizers, especially consultants and agencies, it means quite a bit. The inventories of known link sellers will probably diminish dramatically overnight. High DA links will become far more rare. The same is true of those trying to construct private blog networks (PBNs). Of course, Domain Authority doesn’t cause rankings so it won’t impact your current rank, but it should give consultants and agencies a much smarter metric for assessing quality.

What are the best use cases for DA?

Compare changes in your Domain Authority with your competitors. If you drop significantly more, or increase significantly more, it could indicate that there are important differences in your link profile.

Compare changes in your Domain Authority over time. The new Domain Authority will update historically as well, so you can track your DA. If your DA is decreasing over time, especially relative to your competitors, you probably need to get started on outreach.

Assess link quality when looking to acquire dropped or auction domains. Those looking to acquire dropped or auction domains now have a much more powerful tool in their hands for assessing quality. Of course, DA should not be the primary metric for assessing the quality of a link or a domain, but it certainly should be in every webmaster’s toolkit.

What should we expect going forward?

We aren’t going to rest. An important philosophical shift has taken place at Moz with regards to Domain Authority. In the past, we believed it was best to keep Domain Authority static, rarely updating the model, in order to give users an apples-to-apples comparison. Over time, though, this meant that Domain Authority would become less relevant. Given the rapidity with which Google updates its results and algorithms, the new Domain Authority will be far more agile as we give it new features, retrain it more frequently, and respond to algorithmic changes at Google. We hope you like it.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

from https://dentistry01.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/a-comprehensive-analysis-of-the-new-domain-authority/

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t-oresama · 6 years ago

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"Ouran High School Host Club" volumes 1-18 by Bisco Hatori

Synopsis: In this screwball romantic comedy, Haruhi, a poor girl at a rich kids' school, is forced to repay an $80,000 debt by working for the school's swankiest, all-male club-- as a boy! There she discovers just how wealthy all six members are and how different the rich are from everybody else...

Published: 2002-2010 (Hakusensha/ LaLa Magazine [JPN], Viz Media [USA] Genre: Manga, Romantic-Comedy, Slice-of-Life, Parody Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Reader Review: It has been nearly a year (or so) since I've done a review. Half of the reason for this is because I've been too busy to be reading much of anything. The other half of the reason is because I've been reading (pretty much) nothing but this series. I don't remember how I was first introduced to the manga series, but it was years ago and probably came to know about it from knowing the anime. Because, let's be honest, every anime originated from some sort of manga. My best friend and I were looking for something to watch one night way back in 2011 (as I said, years ago), and stumbled upon the "Ouran High School Host Club" show. We binge-watched it over the course of a week and loved its humor and the way it constantly broke the 4th wall and parodied many a played-out trope of manga/anime/otaku culture. It must have been from there that I found out it was a manga and started to chip away at it. 7 years later... I only had volumes 1-10 in my possession and I must have only read half of them. Meanwhile, work, life, other books etc, took precedence and Ouran the manga sat on my bookshelf. For the incoming new year, I decided to (try not to) buy any new books and read the ones I had first, starting with the entire Ouran manga series. And finally, I’ve finished.

Let me just say now that I'm going to get very nerdy with this review and talk about things apropos of nothing. And let me also say that, although I love the Ouran TV series, 26 episodes are not enough to do the whole manga story justice. Much like FullMetal Alchemist, Inuyasha, and so on, the manga was an ongoing publication when the idea to turn it into a TV series came about. But the need to have it made into a TV series outweighed the patience to wait for the manga to end, thus the show got a new, original ending, completely separate from how the manga ended. In fact, the manga wouldn’t get its ending until FOUR YEARS after the anime ended. Because of this, a lot of creative liberties were taken for the second half of the show. It's something I both understand and hate about anime adaptations. Like, there wouldn't have been a "FullMetal Alchemist Brotherhood" if the anime creators just let the manga creator finish her series, and then we'd only have one FullMetal Alchemist anime series to save all the confusion. Long story short, the Ouran manga series has so much packed into it, that a lot of the things alluded at in the anime series (Tamaki's relationship with his family, Hikaru's feelings for Haruhi, and so on) make so much more sense now. It really makes me want to re-watch the anime to look out for those subtle nuances portrayed in the manga. ***I will add that there is a live-action TV series and movie for the Ouran series that does take place while the manga was further along than when the anime series was made, but both series were made while the manga was ongoing. Anyway, the manga series itself is a visual feast. It switches up art styles so many times, mostly to show the zany/funny parts, with a consistent, beautiful art style for the more serious parts. You could read the whole manga series in Japanese and still get the gist of the story based on the illustrated panels alone. The dialogue is also equally sharp, with the same ability to go back and forth between a funny moment and a serious moment without the tonal changes being too jarring for the reader. It's a testament to Hatori's storytelling ability that such transitions happen pretty frequently, yet instead of feeling inconsistent or sloppy, the comedic moments hit you that much harder because of how well-timed they're delivered. Better yet, Hatori creates this world of flip-floppy wacky-serious moments and makes you believe that, in this world, such back and forths are totally normal. The dialogue between characters itself feels organic despite some of the topics being absolute nonsense (after all, this series is mostly about boys who are stupid rich and mistake middle-class living for living in poverty), but it adds to the characterization of the Host Club boys (and girl). The characters, much like the situation, are caricatures of tropes long unironically portrayed in mangas that have come before it. Tamaki is the darling charmer who knows just the right mushy thing to say to make the ladies swoon, Mori is the ridiculously strong and stoic type, Hunny is the cavity-inducing cute boy who likes sweets and bunnies and everything pure in the world, etc. And the character of Haruhi, while of course having her own personality, works for the reader as one that the reader can insert themselves into, as she sees the absurdity of the rest of the boys, and the workings of the rich in general, that no one else in the school sees, and reacts accordingly. It makes the reader's transition into this fanciful world easier thanks to Haruhi acting as the bridge between the two. If not for her, the goal of understanding this world, rather than taking it seriously, because it really isn't a series to take all that seriously, would be much harder to do. The cohesion of the main story itself is consistent. This is a series based in romance, after all, and at one point, there is a love square with Haruhi as the object of three boys' affections. While the main story is going on, we get side stories and inside looks into the lives of the Host Club members, which allow for us to get a better understanding of who each of the characters are and why they are the way they are. There's world-building in conjunction with story-building, and that makes for a more well-rounded story. By the last volume, the main story really picks up, but it's also the volume that let me down the most just because of how rushed things felt (despite the last volume actually being the thickest). The main romantic plot is comes to fruition, but the slow build that has been happening since volume 1 becomes a jump from present-day to three months in the future to eight months in the future in volume 17. Don't get me wrong, I loved the little future bits, but it didn't flow with me as well as the rest of the series. Oh, and the ending. I won't spoil much of it, but you really really really have to bear in mind that this is a series of nonsense and that anything can happen because most of the characters are rich enough to make that happen. Despite all of that, the ending, which I can best describe as a "tie it all up in a nice neat bow" happy ending, asks a lot of the reader to accept. It doesn't really provide the characters with the obstacles that I'd hoped for (in the same way that Hunny and Mori graduating high school didn't provide the situation of the Host Club going on without two members in the way I'd expected). If I could just have one more volume to develop the story and relationships just a bit more between the present day and the eight months in the future we’re left off at, I would in a heartbeat. It wasn't that I was dissatisfied, quite the opposite, but more just that I feel there's unexplored opportunity that would've really done justice to the pace and world-building of the rest of the series. With the completion of this manga series, Ouran High School Host Club goes up there as one of my favorites series. Its re-readability is way up there, and its comedic tone is unmatched even today.As Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” is a parody of Gothic tropes, “Ouran High School Host Club” is a parody of romantic tropes in manga, and if you like humor in your romantic shojo mangas, this is quintessential for you. The series also succeeds in helping me overcome a huge hurdle as the Haruhi/Hikaru shipper I came in as reading this: it made me not only understand, but like Haruhi and Tamaki as a couple. That alone makes it worth the read, and re-read.

[EDIT: Tumblr is apparently a money-hungry schmuck ever since they partnered with Yahoo, and because I used “Ouran High School Host Club” as a tag, they put a Yahoo advertisement on my post like ?????? That’s just icky. Since I’m obviously not going to remove the tag, I just want to say please DON’T CLICK THE LINK BELOW THAT TUMBLR/YAHOO IS FORCING ON MY OWN PERSONAL POST. I DON’T APPROVE OF IT BEING THERE. Man, Tumblr’s really hit a new low... Anyway, thanks for reading <3 ]

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harlanrwiley89 · 5 years ago

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The Prime Minister Who Cried Brexit (Ep. 392)

David Cameron and his Conservative administration became synonymous with Brexit, but he points out that every other political party in the U.K. has in recent history “supported a referendum on Europe.” (Photo: Kitwood/Getty)

In 2016, David Cameron held a referendum on whether the U.K. should stay in the European Union. A longtime Euroskeptic, he nevertheless led the Remain campaign. So what did Cameron really want? We ask him that and much more — including why he left office as soon as his side lost and what he’d do differently if given another chance. (Hint: not much.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Stephen J. DUBNER: You know, there’s research that shows that happy endings are really powerful, that even a bad experience — like going to the dentist or having a colonoscopy — if the last couple minutes is somehow made more pleasant, people remember the entire term as being not so bad. It strikes me that you got that exactly backwards with your political career.

David CAMERON: Well, obviously, as this uncertainty continues, there will be those who say, “Well, you made a promise about having a referendum, you kept that promise,” and that is a credit. But there’ll be those who say, “We shouldn’t have had a referendum, and look what’s followed,” and I accept my share of responsibility for the situation we face. Look, at some stage, this will be resolved. We will either leave with a deal and people will see a sort of certain path for Britain on the outside of the E.U. but with a partnership with it that I believe will be very close. Or, who knows, maybe we’re going to get so stuck we have to go to a general election or a referendum and that might mean a different outcome. One way or the other, this uncertainty has to come to an end. It has gone on already for too long, and I for one can’t wait for it to end.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: the man who many people believe to be singularly responsible for Brexit: David Cameron, former prime minister of the United Kingdom. He explains why he called for the referendum that effectively ended his political career. And he explains the other stressful parts of being prime minister.

CAMERON: It is very intense — very noisy, pretty terrifying.

We get into his relationships with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin:

CAMERON: I found in the end I just couldn’t trust what he was saying.

All this from a man who, it turns out, loves American football.

CAMERON: Yes, I’m a bit of a cheesehead, actually.

But not, alas, American cheese.

CAMERON: I think it’s one of the very few weaknesses of your great country.

David Cameron has just written one of the most candid political memoirs in recent memory. It’s called For the Record.

CAMERON: Well, the discipline I put on myself was thinking, what did you think then, what do you think now? What decisions do you think you got right, what decisions do you think you’ve got wrong? And look, all memoirs are exercises in self-justification, and I accept there’s quite a lot of self-justification in the book. But I tried to be honest about things that could have gone well, could have gone better.

* * *

On June 23, 2016, voters in the United Kingdom — that’s England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — were asked to vote on a referendum put forward by Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party. It asked a simple question: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” — the European Union, or E.U., being an economic and political consortium of 28 member states. The outcome of this Brexit vote, as you likely know, has been anything but simple. A couple foundational facts to keep in mind: Cameron was a longtime Euroskeptic, believing that the U.K. contributed much more to the E.U. than it got back. But: he also said he didn’t want the U.K. to actually leave; rather, he wanted to negotiate with the E.U. better terms on trade, regulation, immigration, and so on. So even though it was Cameron who put forth the Brexit referendum, he led the campaign for the U.K. to remain in the E.U., not to leave. The vote was widely expected to go his way — but then it didn’t.

ITV: An extraordinary moment in British history—

BBC: The British people have spoken, and the answer is: we’re out.

The vote was 52-48 percent in favor of leaving.

Channel 4: The immediate economic and political consequences tonight are grave, and the future deeply uncertain.

Those who voted to leave were thrilled:

Channel 4: We’ve got our country back!

But those who wished to remain — younger voters especially, and those concentrated in London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland — they blamed David Cameron. After all, who calls for a referendum, campaigns against it, and then loses? As weird as that was, it instantly got weirder. Cameron had promised to stay on as prime minister whatever the vote’s outcome:

CAMERON (archival): I will do everything I can as prime minister to steady the ship over the coming weeks and months.

But then he didn’t:

CAMERON (archival): But I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination.

His resignation had the whiff of noble intentions, but it wasn’t received that way. It was received as if Cameron were a party guest who’d knocked over a tower of Champagne glasses and then ran for the door. He was replaced as prime minister by Theresa May, his Home Secretary. She began trying to negotiate a sensible exit from the European Union. But no country had ever done that before, and as it turns out:

Nick SMITH: The ayes to the right, 202. The nos to the left, 432.

It was difficult, and complicated.

Theresa MAY: It is clear that the House does not support this deal. But tonight’s vote tells us nothing about what it does support.

Simon COVENEY: You can’t say we’re leaving the single market, the customs union, and the European Union, we’re going to do our own free- trade agreements across the world — and, by the way, you have to allow us seamless access into your market too. Why would the E.U. ever facilitate that?

Jeremy CORBYN: The government has lost control of events and is in complete disarray.

The government had lost control of events and ultimately, Theresa May lost control of the Conservative Party. She had spent three years trying to come up with a workable Brexit strategy, and failed. This past July, May was replaced as prime minister by Boris Johnson, her former Foreign Minister and, before that, the Mayor of London. A few foundational facts to know about Boris Johnson: he and David Cameron are longtime frenemies. They’d gone to the same schools — Eton and Oxford; they ran in the same political circles; and they seemed to irritate and snipe at each other in equal measure.

CAMERON (archival): If any other politician anywhere in the world got stuck on a zipwire, it would be, you know, disastrous. But for Boris, it will be an absolute triumph.

Boris JOHNSON: I was pleased to see that you’ve called me a blond-haired mop in the pages. Well if I’m a mop, Dave, then you are a broom.

During the referendum campaign, Johnson, unlike Cameron, was in favor of Britain leaving the E.U. — although, as Cameron writes about Johnson in his book, “He seemed to have done almost no thinking about what sort of referendum, when it should be held, or what the government’s view should be.” Given Boris Johnson’s reputation for operating with more vigor than rigor, this may well be true — and yet, it is now Johnson’s job to extricate the U.K. from the European Union. The deadline, twice delayed, is currently set for Oct. 31. There may be a “soft” exit from the E.U., with trade and border terms and other details agreed upon in advance; or there may be a “hard” Brexit, with a complete separation from the E.U. — the equivalent of an acrimonious divorce. Either way, Johnson is determined to leave.

JOHNSON: And though I am confident of getting a deal, we will leave by October the 31st, in all circumstances. There will be no further pointless delay.

It’s been very messy — even messier than I’ve made it out to be. There was Boris Johnson’s unlawful suspension of Parliament; investigations into the campaign finances for the Leave campaign; rumors of Russian interference in the referendum vote — all of which have produced a deep reservoir of uncertainty.

Financial Times: So the big question is, what happens next?

MSNBC: Nobody knows what’s next.

Neil DWANE: People just want a decision, are we leaving or are we staying, but let’s just get on with it, because the uncertainty is now killing the economy.

One of the few constants since the vote has been resentment toward the man who pulled the Brexit trigger.

Danny DYER: He called all this on—

And then vanished:

DYER: Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah? Where is the geezer?

But last week, David Cameron was in New York City.

CAMERON: Thank you. Great to be here.

Over the years, he’s spent a fair amount of time in the States.

CAMERON: I love coming here. It’s the only place where your politics is almost as crazy as our politics at the moment. The difference being that at least in the U.K., you can watch one television channel and find out roughly what’s going on. Here, if I watch Fox, I think the president is doing brilliantly. If I watch CNN, I think he’s about to go to prison.

DUBNER: So I’ve read what you’ve written. I’ve heard what you’ve said. I’ve heard what everyone else has said. People are so angry at you, in some quarters.

CAMERON: Well, you’ve got— I mean, the 52 percent of people who voted to leave the E.U., those people are pleased we had a referendum, are pleased that their voice got across. There are many also on the Remain side, on my side of the argument, who lost, who accept that a referendum was inevitable, or accept that a referendum was mandated by Parliament. I mean, nine out of 10 members of Parliament did actually vote to have a referendum. But I accept there are some people who won’t forgive me for holding a referendum. They didn’t think it was a good idea. And they’re furious that my side of the argument lost.

So how did it come to this? How did a relatively popular prime minister, who seemed to be doing a relatively good job of steadying his country after the global financial crisis — how did he produce such a calamity? To be fair, there were a number of contributing factors, as we’ll hear today: economic pressures within the U.K.; what the U.K. saw as intransigence within the E.U.; even a faraway civil war. But it would be wrong to understate the role of David Cameron himself. He represented a new breed of political leadership in the U.K., especially in the Conservative wing: he was younger than usual, and more chipper, with an optimistic bent and an embrace of what’s come to be called “compassionate conservatism”: sober on the fiscal front but open-minded on social issues like gay marriage and eager to address climate change. On many issues, if he lived in America, he could easily be mistaken for a centrist Democrat.

CAMERON: Well, that’s what Obama always used to say to me, but I used to say, “Please don’t say that publicly.”

Cameron is a political animal, as one must be to thrive in British politics. How does he rate as a thinker? That’s hard to say. He was well-bred, well-reared, well-educated, and he married well too; he is tall, quite handsome, and he has lovely manners. Knowing what we know about cognitive biases, it’s easy to see why he might also be perceived as brilliant, or at least very clever. There’s a telling anecdote in his memoirs, when Cameron is being interviewed by three “badly dressed and disheveled dons” as part of the university-admissions process. “I still shiver at the memory,” he writes. They were asking Cameron which philosophers he’d read; it turned out the answer was “not many.” The three men, he recalls, were “trying to work out whether you were just the product of a good education, or genuinely bright. They were pretty convinced that I was the former.”

Cameron became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2010. His Conservative Party hadn’t won a clear majority in the election, so it had to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats — not a natural fit, at least ideologically, but a workable one, and it was the U.K.’s first coalition government since 1945. That said, it was not the best time to come to power: the global financial crisis was still deepening, casting long shadows in every direction.

CAMERON: Well, Britain— we actually had the biggest. I mean, here we are in New York City, where you were very affected. But actually, the biggest bank bailout was the Royal Bank of Scotland in Britain. I think the longest and deepest recession was ours, because our financial sector was so big. So yes, we were very affected, and I inherited a pretty difficult situation.

DUBNER: So talk about generally, for people who don’t follow it at all — you had to consider austerity, and you enacted some austerity. You also wanted to do a lot of reform in the realm of education, crime-fighting, streamlining the National Health Service. Talk about whether in retrospect you feel that the reforms and cuts were sufficient. There were good outcomes on some dimensions — you got the unemployment rate way, way down. But wage stagnation is still a big problem. And then debt is still very, very high.

CAMERON: Yes, the fundamental point is that when I became prime minister, the deficit forecast was for an 11 percent budget deficit, which would have given us the biggest budget deficit in the world. And by the time I left office, we’d cut that by two-thirds. So we still had a deficit, but it was well under control, and now it’s been virtually eradicated.

DUBNER: But the ratio of debt to G.D.P. is still relatively very high.

CAMERON: It is high, but it would be a lot — if we’d carried on with a 10 or 11 percent budget deficit. And I tried to explain in the book, it’s pretty dry stuff, your debt-to-G.D.P. ratio, but to me it’s a fundamental thing about political responsibility. If you allow the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio to get up towards 100 percent, there’s no capacity left when the next crisis hits. And I don’t believe we’ve abolished boom-and-bust, we’ve abolished the trade cycle. I know there’ll be another crisis at some stage, and you’ve got to have the capacity to deal with it.

Look, we knew that you couldn’t stand aside as financial institutions went to the wall. We’d learnt the lesson of the 1930s — which was, you must recognize the monetary nature of the crisis. But we were very concerned that the budget deficit was out of control, that we had to have a program to bring it back. And we fought the election — very rare for a party to fight an election on the basis of, we’re going to cut spending and we’re going to have to put up some taxes and we’re going to have to make some difficult decisions. But that gave us a sort of window of permission to take these difficult steps.

DUBNER: We should say also, one measure that you improved a lot on — which in this country we have not improved on — is income inequality.

CAMERON: Yes, I— I’m not saying we’ve entirely avoided the sort of Piketty thesis, and what’s gone wrong in America with stagnant wages at the bottom. But we saw huge job growth, and then we also saw — partly because of the changes we made — inequality actually went down rather than up. We did protect the poorest in a number of different ways. For instance, we froze public-sector pay, but we omitted from that freeze the very lowest-paid. We cut taxes for the lowest paid.

DUBNER: So we’re sitting here in 2019. Let’s pretend you were still P.M. You would have been— you’d be a year away from the end of your second term. And let’s pretend that Brexit had never happened.

CAMERON: Or we’d won the referendum, I suppose.

DUBNER: Or you won the referendum. Do you think that your administration would be seen as largely successful?

CAMERON: I think if we had won the referendum — I mean, if you go back to 2014, we were the fastest-growing country in the G7. We had a very good relationship, obviously, with yourselves. The “special relationship.” But we also had very good partnerships with India, with China. We had been ranked the second-greenest government in the world. We had been ranked the most open in terms of information, and we were a very transforming government in terms of digital and online services and the rest of it. I’m not saying we were perfect. Of course we weren’t. There were lots of problems to deal with. Some reforms that didn’t go right.

DUBNER: Name a few.

CAMERON: Well, the health reforms were less successful. I love our National Health Service. I’m a great believer in free health care. But I think our reforms were too much about changing the bureaucracy rather than really focusing on the problems our modern health service faces, which is actually the costs of looking after the elderly, the costs of people with multiple health conditions, and the sort of divide we have in Britain between health care, which is free, and social care which is means-tested. So there are lots of areas we could’ve done better. But it was, I would argue, if you leave Brexit to one side for a second, it was a successful government, economically and in terms of reform.

DUBNER: So it is hard to leave Brexit to one side obviously, because it came to dominate the conversation. The way I assess it, and I may be totally wrong, is that you and your administration were making significant progress in renegotiations with the E.U. — on immigration and regulations, and the power of national governments — but you felt you weren’t making enough progress. And, therefore, it seemed like a good idea to propose a referendum to create more leverage for further renegotiation — while, however, hoping and thinking that the referendum would fail, because then you went out and campaigned for the Remain side. That’s the calculus that for me is difficult to understand.

CAMERON: The calculus was this: that I knew we needed reform of our position in Europe, because of this problem of the changes in the Eurozone. I was hoping that a more general treaty change was coming down the track. And to me, the referendum and the renegotiation went together. You wouldn’t get much renegotiation without a referendum. And I wouldn’t want a referendum on its own, because you’d just be saying, “Do you want in or out on the status quo?” I want to improve on the status quo. So these things did go together.

I think the reforms we achieved, which were carving Britain out of ever-closer union — so for the first time the E.U. was accepting not that we were going to the same destination, but in a slightly slower way, but actually we had a different destination in mind to the rest of Europe. Hugely important. We also fully protected the pound sterling as our currency, recognizing that the euro was the currency of 18 of the 28 members, but it wasn’t for everybody.

DUBNER: I always wondered what England would have been like had you accepted the euro.

CAMERON: Well, I think if we had joined the euro, I’ve got a feeling the whole project might have come badly unstuck by now.

DUBNER: Badly unstuck meaning—

CAMERON: Well, if you go back— there’s an important chapter in the book about when I worked in the Treasury as an adviser when we were in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which ultimately failed. And that was one of things that taught me, we should stay out of the euro. There are times when economies need different interest rates, different economic policies. And the problem with the euro is easily stated. Here we are in the United States, you’ve got a single currency called the dollar. If Texas has a bad year, it gets more in federal spending, it pays less in taxes, not that Texas ever does have a bad year, of course. We don’t have those fiscal offsets in the European Union.

So I’ve always believed that the euro is problematic, because you’re creating a currency, but without a single banking system, without a fiscal union, without offsets to deal with it. And I’ve always felt it inherently unstable. Had Britain joined it, which I think would have been a disaster for us, I think it probably would’ve been a disaster for the euro as well.

DUBNER: Was the original sin, in your view, in terms of the U.K., having joined the E.U. itself?

CAMERON: No. I believe that Europe is our biggest market and our neighbors and friends. Our relationship with the French and Germans and Italians and others is very, very close. And I’ve always believed—

DUBNER: Not as close today as it was a couple of years ago.

CAMERON: No. But don’t underestimate the sense of partnership and shared endeavor that there is, and that there will be, even when we leave the E.U. If we do so. We will be their closest friend, neighbor, and partner. So I’ve always believed, for Britain, it’s in our interest to be round at the table with the other members of the E.U., making sure that the rules of the market, which is our biggest market, suit us. And making sure that as we deal with Russia, or as we deal with Iran, that we have the leverage of working together and in many cases trying to lead. I’ve always loved that bit of Europe. What I’ve not liked is the sort of pretensions towards statehood that the E.U. has always loved — the flag and the parliament, and all the rest of it. So, like many British prime ministers, I was always sort of battling to stay in the bits that we liked but to try and carve us out a special place.

DUBNER: Well, it doesn’t seem so strange to me that lesser countries would want to feel that sentiment with a bigger union, because you already have it.

CAMERON: Well, there’s that aspect. If you’re a smaller European country, you feel sometimes your power enhanced, because you’re sat around that table. And often sitting round the E.U. table, you notice that the representatives from Malta or Cyprus or whatever, they’re loving it because they’re having— they’re around the big table. There’s that aspect of it.

But there’s another aspect, which is of course, the U.K., we’ve always seen our nationhood as part of the secret sauce of our success. And if we go back to such a crucial moment in British history as May 1940, when the rest of Europe had fallen and Britain was standing alone against Nazi Germany, why that’s so important to our consciousness is, it’s not only a fantastic thing that we did on behalf of humanity, but it was something our nation did. So we’ve not seen our nationhood as a source of trouble or strife or difficulty, we’ve seen it as a part of our success. So that has marked us out a bit, too.

One common critique of David Cameron is that he called for the Brexit referendum because he wanted to settle the so-called Europe question once and for all — to get it out of the way so he could spend his second term as prime minister on other priorities. He’d been re-elected in 2014, to a second five-year term. Going into that election, one poll showed that only eight percent of British voters listed “Europe” as one of the most pressing issues — although that answer doesn’t take into account concerns about immigration, which did feed the appetite for a Brexit vote. So too did Cameron’s austerity policies and public-spending cuts. For his part, Cameron was adamant that a Brexit referendum was just a matter of time. After all, Euroskepticism has deep tendrils in the U.K., going well beyond the Conservative Party.

CAMERON: Yes, of course. I mean, the thing I like reminding people is that, well, sometimes I do it as a quiz — can you name a British political party that didn’t support a referendum?

DUBNER: The answer is, there is none.

CAMERON: There isn’t one. Between 2005 and 2015, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Green Party, they all, one stage or another, supported a referendum on Europe. So it was— it’s not just that the Conservatives were interested in this issue. It was an issue running through British politics.

Cameron’s own Euroskepticism dates all the way back to his youthful admiration of Margaret Thatcher, the budget-conscious former Conservative prime minister. Although, as Cameron writes, in a typical case of his have-it-both-wayism, “I had always felt myself more of a Thatcherist than a Thatcherite.” At Oxford, Cameron studied PPE — philosophy, politics, and economics — the gold-standard degree for Britain’s political elite. He went straight into politics, and wound up serving under Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont in the Treasury Department, just in time to see Lamont forced to pull the flailing British pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. That, as Cameron noted earlier:

CAMERON: That was one of things that taught me, we should stay out of the euro.

But it was once Cameron had been prime minister for a year-and-a-half that he experienced perhaps his sharpest bout of Euroskepticism. It happened during the so-called Eurozone crisis. Several weaker E.U. economies — Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus — had massive debts or needed bailouts, and the value of the euro was dropping. So it fell to the richer countries, like the U.K., to step up. There was a proposed treaty change to address the crisis; David Cameron vetoed it.

CAMERON: I did veto, and then they went ahead and did the treaty anyway.

European Union treaty changes were supposed to be unanimously approved; in this case, as a workaround, the E.U. instead established an “accord.”

CAMERON: And that was the moment it seemed to me that Britain’s position within this organization was very precarious. And we needed to sort it out. And I believe that, allied to the fact there was growing political pressure to solve this problem, meant that it was inevitable and right to try and renegotiate and hold a referendum and sort things out. But I accept this attempt failed. I mean, in the end, my aim to keep Britain in, but in a special place, wasn’t successful.

DUBNER: Difficult decisions are inherently difficult to predict. You can make a good decision based on all the available logic and information, but you don’t know what the outcome will be. Had you the decision to make again today, whether to put forth a referendum, would you do it again?

CAMERON: Well, what I say in answer that is, I believed at the time that it was inevitable a referendum was coming, and I thought it best therefore to try and effect a renegotiation and improve and deal with these problems at the same time. And I still think that’s the case. So if you go back in time and say, “Could you have done things differently?” — I mean, if I’d put off the referendum, all I would have done was put it off. I mean, it still — it would have landed on maybe my successors.

DUBNER: But there may have been some value for you personally, reputationally. Correct?

CAMERON: My feeling was, what the job of a prime minister is, to try and confront the issues, not just in front of you, but the ones you see coming down the track. Not doing something is also a decision.

After Cameron’s impotent veto of the E.U. treaty but before his eventual call for the Brexit referendum came another referendum, in 2014: the Scottish Nationalist Party wanted Scotland to break away from the U.K., and they wanted to put it to a vote.

CAMERON: Of course, I could have said to them, “No, you’re not having it. Let’s put it off.” But that would have just made the problem worse.

DUBNER: So the Scottish referendum did come up, for independence. It failed. I was curious whether that may have given you and some of your allies a false sense of security that a Brexit referendum would also fail.

CAMERON: It gave me a sense that here was a problem that was coming down the tracks and we confronted it, and that was the right thing to do. So the way I think about it is, you have to try and confront and deal with these issues, and then there are all the decisions around the decision you make. Was it the right campaign? Was it the right renegotiation? Was it the right timing? And I’m pretty frank that I think I probably got some of those wrong. But on the central question, was this problem coming, and was a referendum inevitable? My answer is yes, it was.

* * *

Former British Prime Minister David Cameron has just published a memoir, called For the Record. If you identify with the 48 percent of Britons who voted for the U.K. to remain in the European Union, the book may not improve your view of Cameron. But it’s a remarkably interesting account of a remarkably tumultuous era of modern history. It’s also rather direct. Cameron pulls few punches in his descriptions of world leaders — Vladimir Putin, for instance.

CAMERON: Look, I did try to forge a good relationship with him, because in spite of all the disagreements and difficulties, you should make an effort. And there were moments of success. But in the end, when it came to the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, when it came to what was happening in Syria, when it came to chemical weapons and what Assad had done, who was his ally, I found in the end I just couldn’t trust what he was saying to me as true.

DUBNER: Here’s how you put it in the book: “For Putin, lying is an art form.” Which is, I guess, a left-handed compliment. He was very good at it, at least, yeah?

CAMERON: Well if we take what was happening in Ukraine, where effectively, Russia took a part of a sovereign country. Always trying to claim that it was sort of Ukrainian breakaway forces. But we all knew that they were largely Russian soldiers. He is very good at information war. Modern war is fought not just with tanks and bombs and guns, but with P.R. and media and manipulation—

DUBNER: And cyberattacks as well.

CAMERON: And cyberattacks. That was something the Russians got very good at, and frankly, we need to raise our game at it.

DUBNER: Now, Germany — Angela Merkel you seem to hold in very, very high regard.

CAMERON: Yes. I mean, she is a remarkable politician, also, with huge staying power. I mean, I remember watching her back in 2006, I think it was, when she first sort of fought her campaign and became chancellor and here we are in 2019 and she’s still there.

DUBNER: Well, just barely, I mean—

CAMERON: Barely, but still—

DUBNER: I get the sense from reading your book that she very much empathized with your desire to disentangle the U.K. from the E.U. And I wondered if she was a closet Brexit fan, and maybe even a Gerxit fan — would she, given the opportunity—

CAMERON: No, no, no. Look, I would phrase it differently. She didn’t want Britain to disentangle itself from the E.U. But I think she did have an understanding that Britain was quite a Euroskeptic nation, that we were in the E.U. for the things that we wanted, the trade and cooperation, but we didn’t want deeper political union. She did understand that. You can argue that she didn’t do enough to help us with that.

DUBNER: What should she have done, or could she have done?

CAMERON: Well, I think she did help, and we cut the budget together. That was important. We were cutting budgets at home and it would have been outrageous to just keep spending more in the E.U. She did help with my renegotiation. But I think we came up against this problem, which was, the free movement of people in Europe is a good thing. Millions of British people go and live and work in other European countries. But what was originally the free movement of workers became the free movement for everybody.

DUBNER: Well. Let me ask you about — this is a complicated conversation, but let’s try to have a quick version of it. Merkel, one could say, was brought down primarily by her generosity in accepting refugees. Yes? Primarily.

CAMERON: Look, I think she made a mistake. Because I’m all for showing generosity. We actually went out to the camps and brought people back from the camps and gave them the right to live in Britain, and educated their children and housed them and clothed them and fed them. And I think that’s the right answer.

I think the wrong answer is what Germany did, which was just to say, “All who can make it are welcome.” It was a green light to the people smugglers to just keep going with their work. And I felt that Europe handled this issue very badly. You’ve got to demonstrate, look, we all know that border control is only one aspect of a sensible immigration policy. But you do need to have borders, particularly if you’ve taken down the internal borders between France and Italy and all the rest of it — if you take down the internal borders, you do need a strong external border. So, I thought big mistakes were made.

DUBNER: Well, let’s unpack that, going back to Syria. Because you write incredibly about your desire to get involved in Syria, to retaliate or to stop Assad. You write about your conversations with Obama, which led you to believe that America would lead the strike. And then you write this — it’s hard to believe, I read it three times, it was so hard to believe that it was true. That you called Obama to help finalize the plan. And he didn’t return the call for four days.

CAMERON: Well, this was after— there’s sort of two Syria chapters, and two Syria, sort of, things to focus on. One is the appalling civil war and events that have taken place. And the question, could America and Britain and others, could we have done more to try and help resolve this crisis? And I believe we could have done. Then there’s a second question, which is, on the use of chemical weapons, where Barack Obama rightly said it was a red line, why was it that we failed to respond to that red line?

And while I make the point that after it happened, it took too long for us to speak, the real mistake we made was that when we drew the red line, and we discussed it sometime before the chemical-weapons attack took place, and we were at the G8 in Northern Ireland, we should have agreed at that moment, “Right, we’re setting a red line, if he uses chemical weapons, here’s what we’re going to do.” And if we’d agreed it, we could have taken instant action before having a sort of parliamentary and U.N. debate and all the rest of it. I blame myself as much for that as Barack, because we — I could have made that argument, and I should’ve made that argument.

DUBNER: Were you each waiting for the other to take the lead?

CAMERON: No, it was — and he would say this too, I hope — we were both operating in the sort of post-Iraq world. And President Obama was very much elected on the basis of, let’s try and end some of these entanglements, and make sense of them. In Britain, we had lost a lot of people in Iraq. We were operating in an environment where the public and Parliament was deeply skeptical about getting involved in these entanglements. I just thought the chemical weapons issue was different. Apart from Saddam Hussein at Halabja, chemical weapons hadn’t been sort of used on the battlefield for decades. And there was a taboo about it, and there was international rules about it. And I thought we’d have been totally justified to say, this is a red line. The red line’s crossed, bang.

DUBNER: But by the time Obama then reappeared or reconnected with you, you had had a vote in your Parliament, correct?

CAMERON: We reconnected before the vote in my Parliament, but because we hadn’t prior-agreed the actions, I got onto a track of having to take it to Parliament. And then I made one of these sort of miscalculations, and I thought that others like me would be so shocked by the use of chemical weapons and would sufficiently separate it from the other foreign-policy issues. But actually people in my own party, in my own caucus as you would say, a lot of them said, “I’m voting against this action because of what happened in Iraq.” And I was saying, “But this isn’t Iraq, this is chemical weapons, this is Syria.” This is, you know — but I didn’t convince enough of them, and I lost the vote in Parliament, which was a very bad thing to do.

DUBNER: So when we look at foreign policy, we know that economic sanctions don’t often work the way they’re supposed to. We know that military intervention is costly on many, many, many, many dimensions. But can you talk for a minute about the cost, in the case of Syria, of non-intervention?

CAMERON: I think what’s so hideous about the Syrian conflict is, there were so many bad effects from it. Obviously, predominantly, the appalling suffering of the Syrian people, and the civil war that has gone on for so many years. But it also helped to spawn the growth of ISIS. It also created the background to the refugee crisis that has caused so much human suffering, and possibly, you could argue, led to some of the problems in Europe, perhaps even Brexit itself.

How much, if at all, did the Syrian war and the resulting refugee crisis contribute to the demand for Brexit? That is very hard to say. And there were, of course, plenty of other economic factors already pushing the U.K. in that direction. But it’s a compelling argument. The Leave campaign certainly took advantage of anxieties over immigration. As Cameron noted earlier, the free movement of people is written into the European Union treaties, and it gives the citizens of any member state the right to move and live in any other member state without needing a permit. This provision was a major target of Cameron’s renegotiations with the E.U. before he called the Brexit referendum.

CAMERON: To the E.U., free movement and not reforming it was something of an article of faith. And I couldn’t persuade them that we needed some reforms to free movement. So in fact, what I did in the end was I persuaded them to accept something which was difficult for them, which was that new arrivals to Britain couldn’t access our welfare system for up to four years, which was a huge give for them. And a great gain for me. But in the end it didn’t quite take the trick in the referendum that I needed.

DUBNER: There was an economic analysis of migrants done after the referendum, which showed that European migrants to the U.K. produced more gains for the U.K. economy than the standard existing British citizen. So people were coming to Britain because the British economy was doing well.

CAMERON: And they were coming to work, and that was great. There were two problems I’d mention. One is, when Poland and the other seven Eastern European countries joined the E.U. back in 2004, the U.K. government said, “We expect about 14,000 people to come and live and work in Britain.” And in the event, it was actually more like a million people came. So that had created a sense amongst the British people that the politicians just didn’t have a good handle on the numbers, and that created a worry.

The second thing was, that yes, these people were coming to live and work in Britain and contribute and pay taxes. But the way our welfare system worked meant that a new arrival could actually claim up to £14,000, sort of $20,000, in their first year, in terms of tax credits. This was an issue. And I thought that my negotiating the welfare side of it would really help. And it helped a bit. But it wasn’t direct enough at sort of demonstrating a control of the numbers.

DUBNER: You love and were petrified by, at the same time, Prime Minister’s Questions.

CAMERON: Yeah.

DUBNER: Maybe you could just in a sentence or two explain what this tradition is.

CAMERON: What happens is, every Wednesday at 12 o’clock, the prime minister turns up to the House of Commons and you take questions from everybody for half an hour. You don’t know what you’re going to be asked. The leader of the opposition gets six questions at you. And because our House of Commons is small — it was bombed in the war, and Churchill rebuilt it on exactly the same size, where you can’t actually fit all the people in. And he did that because he said he liked it being small because it made it an exciting cockpit of debate, and that’s true. So for that reason, it is very intense — very noisy, pretty terrifying. And you can get caught out. So you can go from a triumphant, brilliant, off-the-cuff or previously planned answer:

CAMERON at P.M.Q.s: And for the first time in a long time, the number of doctors is growing very quickly, and the number of bureaucrats is actually falling.

CAMERON: To really screwing up and failing to remember the right fact or figure.

Ed MILIBAND: Mr. Speaker, in case the prime minister didn’t realize, it takes seven years to train a doctor. So I’d like to thank him for his congratulations for our record on the N.H.S.

CAMERON: While it is terrifying, there’s a purpose to it, and that is that because you know it’s coming, it’s a great moment of accountability, where the prime minister’s tentacles have got to get all over Whitehall and the government machine and know the answer to every question. And it’s often a time where you find out some of your own government’s policies and you realize they’re not the ones you thought they were, and you change things.

DUBNER: So let me just devil’s-advocate this for a moment. I love Prime Minister’s Questions, I’ve been a few times. It’s a thrilling exhibit of democracy, which is what it’s supposed to be. On the other hand, if we think about it economically, you think about opportunity costs. So you’re getting your first round of prep on Monday, along with all your other work. Then some more on Tuesday, then Wednesday is really devoted to it. Then afterwards it sounds so draining that you have to go have some roast beef and red wine immediately after to refortify yourself.

CAMERON: It takes up a lot of time. I think really it takes up Wednesday morning, is very intense preparation. The rest of the time you’re perfectly capable of doing other things. And don’t underestimate — if you didn’t have this, you’d have to find some other way of absolutely mugging up on every different aspect of what the government’s doing. So I find it quite useful as a sort of accountability mechanism. But it is— look, it is more theater than reality.

DUBNER: But let me ask you — and I mean, I really do admire the fact that every week, the leader of the country stands up before the Parliament. We don’t have that. We have nothing like that, and I think it would be—

CAMERON: Obama once said to me, “I’m thinking of doing something like that.” So it was, “Just hold on a second before you dive in. You might want to think about this.” But no, there’s a justification for it.

DUBNER: Okay, let me again be pure devil’s advocate for a moment and say this. One thing that many in your country, especially from the educated class, like yourself — Eton, Oxford, and all the Oxbridge universe — one thing that you’re particularly good at is talking, which we underestimate as a skill. But it’s a very effective skill. P.M.Q.’s are in a way a pure demonstration of how well you all speak about the issues, about disagreements, so on. So let’s put that in the pro column. In the con column, however — I believe it’s in your book — a saying that goes back a ways in, to the military setting, that amateurs strategize, and professionals execute.

CAMERON: Yeah, I used the phrase that — one of my generals said, yeah, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. And no, I think your critique is a good one. I would argue that good leaders have to be good teachers. You have to take the country with you, you have to keep explaining. And Prime Minister’s Questions can be — it is a time when you’re trying to explain, you’re trying to set out your course of what you’re doing. And looking back, I wish we’d done more of that. Just trying to explain. Whether you’re reforming schools or you’re intervening in Libya or you’re trying to win a referendum on Brexit, just communicate, communicate. One thing we don’t have that you have is that State of the Nation moment. I find sometimes — I find this a bit frustrating, that too much of our politics is very confrontational, and you know, in that sort of cockpit of combat.

DUBNER: But you’re confronting each other in person, which is a totally different dynamic than sniping in the press. I mean, you do a lot of that, too.

CAMERON: So I know— what I’m saying is, your critique has got some fairness to it. But don’t underestimate the importance of the communicating part of politics, it does matter. On the part of politics which is actually delivering change and making things happen, and the importance of logistics, I completely agree that I don’t think there’s enough attention to that in most governments. I joke in the book that early on as prime minister, someone asked me, “What’s the job?“ And I said, “Well, there’s two jobs: first we’ve got to find out what the government’s doing, and second, you’ve got to stop it,” because it’s an enormous machine that you’re running.

I’m a huge fan of the British civil service, but if I had a criticism, it’s that they are great at developing policy but not so good at implementing policy. In schools of government, in training of politicians and civil servants, in thinking about these things, we need to spend a lot more time on how to get things done rather than how to develop a policy.

DUBNER: It’s something we talk about on the show a lot. So in the medical field, for instance, innovations happen in medicine all the time, but they take on average about 12 years to work their way in. So government, I can understand why that’s difficult. In the real world, however, what do you see as ways to shorten that lag between good ideas and implementation?

CAMERON: Let me give you one example, which shows all the things we’ve been talking about. I became obsessed by the power of genomics to try and get to the answer of rare childhood diseases and cancer and other things. I said, “Right, let’s be the first government in the world to sequence 100,000 genomes.” And the officials all said, “That’s a great idea, Prime Minister, we’re going to do that.” Six months later, I say, “How is my 100,000-genomes project going?” And literally nothing had happened. Lots of people sat around and talked about it, and then we set up a company. And now as we sit here today, more than 100,000 genomes have been sequenced. Britain is still leading the world, we are now heading for a million sequenced—

DUBNER: Is this an argument for the private sector providing the proper incentives?

CAMERON: Where I’m going to is, A, sometimes you think you’ve done something in government, but nothing happens. B, you have to drive change by going back and back and back and checking. But C, where I was going to, is actually I think genomics is a good example of how we must get new clinical discoveries into clinical practice faster. And I suspect we can because of the way we can change education modules, the way that we can educate people online, the way that doctors can share research, etc. It must be possible.

DUBNER: We should say, your personal connection to this story is your son Ivan, your firstborn son, who died at age 6, yes?

CAMERON: Yes, that’s right. And he had a rare— he had Ohtahara syndrome, which was a rare childhood disease, which meant that he had — he was quadriplegic, he couldn’t move his arms and legs, he had terrible epileptic seizures. This was one of the things that sparked my interest in genomics, because when he was born, it was very, very tough, and— rewarding, looking after someone like that, but very, very tough. And interestingly, when we sort of asked the doctor, “Wan we have other children, what will happen?” And back then, genetic counseling was, “Well, it could be genetic, in which case, one in four, it might not be, it which case, one in—”

DUBNER: It’s remarkable, it wasn’t that long ago.

CAMERON: This was — exactly. They gave us a blended probability of one in twenty. And luckily I’ve had three healthy children since then.

DUBNER: Has there since been a better test for Ohtahara in utero?

CAMERON: Interestingly, one of the breakthroughs from genome sequencing has been in some cases discovering children with Ohtahara syndrome much faster. And I think in some cases, actually some changes in diet and vitamins has led to some better outcomes. But like all these things, when people say Ohtahara syndrome, what they really mean is, it’s a description of the symptoms. We still don’t know some of the underlying causes.

DUBNER: I was always curious why you named him Ivan. It’s not a common name in Britain.

CAMERON: No! I can’t— my wife liked it. I took the view that she was the one who had the children, and I always used to argue my corner on names, but on the whole, she’d win these battles.

DUBNER: Let’s get back to Brexit for just a moment. As we speak, it’s the 27th of September. A lot of things are going to happen in the next month, including a Conservative Party conference. And then theoretically the Brexit deadline. It’s impossible to predict the future. But if I asked you to give me a high-certainty prediction of something that you definitely think probably will or probably will not happen. And really, I’m mostly interested in what you think happens for Britain economically.

CAMERON: It is too difficult to make an absolutely categorical prediction about what will happen next. The best you can do is sort of attach some probabilities for what might happen next. What I want to happen is for the prime minister to go to Brussels and negotiate a deal and for that deal to go through, so we leave on the basis of a deal. There’s a good chance of that happening, but I can’t absolutely for certain say it will happen.

DUBNER: Are you speaking with Boris regularly now?

CAMERON: We have texted a little bit.

DUBNER: He asks for advice?

CAMERON: Not so much. I mean — I want to do everything I can. That is the right thing to do. But of course, if that doesn’t happen, you want a range of other possibilities from a no-deal Brexit, which I hope won’t happen, it looks like Parliament has closed that option off. And then you get into general elections or potentially second referendums to unblock this situation. So I’m afraid, and I hate to say this, it is a period of great uncertainty.

DUBNER: All right, final question: do you harbor fantasies that someday the average Briton will look at you as the man who saved the U.K. on some dimension, who salvaged its independence?

CAMERON: I don’t harbor any fantasies about almost anything. I hope people will take a sort of balanced view and say that important changes were made in terms of our economy that strengthened it. Important social changes were made. So I hope people will look across the record. But obviously until the Brexit uncertainty is ended, that’s going to be a very big question. But look, you don’t get to write your own legacy. Historians do that. I’ve written a book to try to explain my perspectives, and I hope people will say that it’s a frank and reasonable effort, and some important things change for the better. But there are lots of challenges still to answer.

DUBNER: I thank you for writing it. I thank you for speaking, and I feel we need to let you go see the rest of America now, but thanks for stopping in.

CAMERON: Great pleasure. Thanks.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Matt Hickey, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Greg Rippin, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

David Cameron, former prime minister of the United Kingdom.

EXTRAS

For the Record, by David Cameron.

The post The Prime Minister Who Cried Brexit (Ep. 392) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/david-cameron/

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filipeteimuraz · 6 years ago

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Learn from the Best: 6 Skills All Great Writers Have (and How to Learn Them)

If you want to be a successful online marketer, there’s one thing you must be able to do:

you must be able to write.

Writing is involved in almost every type of content creation there is.

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I’ll be honest with you:

If you’re a terrible writer, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

It’s harsh, but it’s true.

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But at the same time, it’s hard to become a great writer.

Even after years of writing, I still wouldn’t say I’m a great writer—maybe a good one.

The key thing that you need to know is that you can improve your writing skills.

By studying the works of great writers, you can learn what makes their writing great.

And with practice, you can improve the effectiveness of your own writing, which means more traffic, subscribers, and customers.

Although you could spend dozens of hours doing that research yourself, you could just let me show you which skills are the most important when it comes to writing.

I have studied a wide variety of top notch writers (who are also great marketers) over the years and noticed that they all have certain skills in common.

In this article, I’ll break down these skills, showing you examples of them in action and ways to develop them.

By the end of this post, you should have a concrete game plan of how to become a better writer for the benefit of your business.

1. Having a big vocabulary doesn’t make you a great writer

When most people picture great writers, they think of them crafting sentences full of obscure words such as aphesis and esculent.

But the people who use words like that are usually terrible writers.

The measure of a writer is not how big his or her vocabulary is. As long as you have a decent vocabulary and understand the fundamentals of grammar of the language you’re using, you can be a good writer.

Even if you’re just learning a language, don’t think that you can’t be a good writer just because you don’t know every word of it.

There are plenty of successful bloggers who write in their second language (e.g., Bamidele Onibalusi).

Is their writing perfect from a grammar and vocabulary perspective? No, of course not.

But even without an extensive vocabulary, they’re able to create content that people love to read.

There’s actually a way for us to quantify the complexity of writing. It’s called the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale.

It looks at the length of words, and a few other factors, in order to determine at what grade level people could understand your content.

By copying a few sample blog posts into this readability score calculator, I was able to create this chart:

The three other writers on this list are all great writers in my opinion, or at least very good.

Notice that Brian and Ramit both write at about 4th grade level, as do I. That means the average 10-year-old could read most of our content because it’s not very complex.

Even though Michael Hyatt writes at a more sophisticated level, it’s still only at a grade 7 level.

The big question then becomes: Why?

The reason why great writers use simple words and phrases is because they write for the reader, not themselves.

They may appreciate the intricacies of the English language, but most readers don’t care about that. They want their information in the simplest and easiest to comprehend way.

Obviously, it’s much easier to read and understand short simple words than to figure out what the heck clandestine means (if you are curious, it means “done in secret”).

Oh yeah, there’s one other benefit to writing simply: you can write much faster.

Instead of searching for the “perfect” word, you use plain language—typically the first words that come to mind. These words are usually the words that your audience understands easily as well, so they’re really the perfect choice.

How can you apply this? This is a very simple skill to develop: just write. When you’re writing something, write down the first things that come to mind instead of searching for more complicated words instead.

Don’t worry if you make mistakes; you can always fix them when you edit.

2. Do you care how your readers feel?

Poor writers do a variety of things.

Some write what they themselves would want to read.

Others write to sound as intelligent as possible.

Either way, it’s not about the reader. Instead, it’s more about “look at how smart and awesome I am.”

Very few people are interesting enough to make this strategy work for them.

When writers focus on themselves, their writing is not compelling to the reader. These kinds of writers either improve over time as they recognize their mistakes, or they blame the readers for not recognizing good content.

I have to ask you a tough question now:

When you write content, do you think of the reader first or do you think about how to make yourself look the best (as the author)?

It’s not necessarily one or the other. Your answer could be somewhere in the middle (i.e., sometimes you focus on yourself).

The simple solution: If you’ve recognized an opportunity for improvement here, it’s easy to take advantage of it, at least in theory.

The answer is to develop empathy.

Empathy basically means that you can understand your readers’ perspective: their problems, interests, personality, and other relevant aspects of their lives.

It takes time to develop empathy, and I’m not sure if you can ever master it completely.

But empathy really shows in great writing.

The best writers use empathy both to understand what readers need to hear (solve their problems) and to determine the best way to teach them.

Some audiences need to be shown direct solutions; others need step-by-step directions; while others need a gentle prod in the right direction.

Examples of empathy in action: When writers truly understand their audience and then focus all their attention on writing that will help the audience as much as possible, it shows.

Take a look at this post from Seth Godin. He mentions the word “you” or its variations 10 times in about 100 words. This post is all about the reader.

The post is about being passionate about your work.

Many bloggers write on this topic. Most would have focused on how their own corporate experience led them to the epiphany that they needed to care more.

But that would have fallen on deaf ears.

Instead, Seth focuses on the reader’s life. He explains the problem using the language that the reader would use to describe the problem in detail.

And then, he offers a simple, one-line solution.

Or how about James Clear? He’s another great writer.

His posts aren’t based on the numbers in Google’s Keyword Planner. They are based on questions that he gets from his readers.

He knows that for every person who expresses frustration or identifies a problem, there are a hundred other people in his audience with the same issue.

So James uses his readers’ language so that other readers can relate to it and feel that the content was created specifically for them.

There’s no other way to do that other than by writing solely for the reader.

The hard part – How to develop empathy: Telling you to develop empathy is easy, but actually doing it isn’t so easy: it takes a lot of conscious practice.

But it’s not all or nothing either. Just because you don’t perfectly understand your audience doesn’t mean you can’t partially understand them.

And as you get better at empathizing with your audience, your writing will improve.

To practice this skill and develop empathy, I suggest the following five-step process. Perform it every time you create content:

1. What problems (and related problems) do your readers have around [topic of choice]?

2. How significant are these problems (very serious? or just minor pains?)

3. How do you think your readers would describe these problems?

Use steps #1-3 to outline your post. Create an intro and headlines that a reader would not only understand but would see and think, “I was just wondering about that!”

4. After writing the content, look at every single sentence/paragraph and ask yourself: “Does my reader actually care about this?” If not, either rephrase it, or take it out completely.

5. Study all comments you get on your content (whether it’s a blog comment, review, email, etc.). Try to understand why a reader says they do or don’t like it.

Create a simple checklist using these five steps, and follow it every time you write.

If you do, you’ll notice that your content will start to resonate with readers more and more.

Your audience will be more excited to read your posts, and they’ll be more engaged. You’ll get readers’ comments telling you their thoughts and opinions, which will be full of great ideas for more content (I get great suggestions all the time from my readers).

Ultimately, when it comes to your business, this type of resonance is very important because it tells the reader that you understand them.

If you create a product, they know that you’ve created it just for them and that it will meet all their needs and wants. Developing empathy is a skill that will have a long-term impact on your revenue.

3. Great writers aren’t born overnight

Think of the great writers in history: Shakespeare, Hemingway,…Neil Patel (maybe one day).

Whomever you think of when you think of great writers, it’s important to realize that they were not born that way.

Although writing is more abstract than mathematics or programming, it is a skill like any other and can be developed.

At one point or another, all writing greats could barely string a sentence together.

However, they all shared one thing: a drive to be a great writer.

Right now, you need to check if your motivation to become a better writer is enough to get you to the level you want.

If you really want to be the best writer you can be, you’ll have to write many hours, every single day. That’s what it takes to be the very best.

If you want to be one of the best writers who is also a marketer, that’s still hard, but not quite as difficult. You’ll still want to practice at least 10-20 hours a week.

But the most important thing you need to determine is this: do you really want to be a better writer?

Determine your goals, and then figure out what you’ll need to do to get there.

For example, if you want to be a blogger, start by taking a look at your favorite bloggers.

If you scroll down to the bottom of Quick Sprout’s blog page, you can click on the “last” button to see my oldest posts.

And if you do, you’ll see that my first post on this blog was written in 2007:

If you wanted to reach my current level of success, are you prepared to write about 2-3 posts a week for 8 years?

And then write over 300 guest posts as well?

If you are willing to put in that work, I guarantee that you will be very successful.

How to put in your dues in a systematic way: If you simply say out loud, “I’m going to write a blog post every day for the next three years,” chances are that you won’t.

You need to develop your own system that keeps you accountable.

Step 1 is to determine what you need to do to become the writer you want to be.

Create a new document that clearly states what you think you need to do.

For example:

Step 2 is to determine a schedule that you can stick to. This is formed by your personal schedule. If you have more time to spend on writing, you have more flexibility.

Here’s what it might look like:

I will write and publish a post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, no matter what.

You have the plan, but you need to make sure you follow through with it.

Step 3 is to find a way that will hold you accountable.

It’s really easy to just not write a post because you’ll barely notice the difference in the short term. But in the long term, it can make a huge difference.

So, how will you hold yourself accountable? There’s no wrong answer, but make sure that there’s a serious consequence if you don’t follow through with your plan.

For example, you could say that if you miss a post:

you will donate $50 to a charity

you will do something that you don’t like

you will email a friend or family member revealing an embarrassing secret

When you’re feeling motivated, you’ll have no problem writing. But when you’re not feeling motivated, this accountability plan will keep you on track.

Now you should have a simple but solid writing plan:

You should print this out and put it somewhere where you will see it at least once a day (at least until you develop good habits).

Finally, step 4 is to forget about the result, and focus on the process.

The reason for this is that in order to get the most out of your writing, you need to focus on writing itself as much as possible.

The whole point of this writing plan is for you to not focus on the results.

You don’t need to worry, thinking: “Am I doing enough to become a successful writer?” because you’ve already determined exactly what you need to do.

If you just focus on adhering to your plan, you’ll know with nearly 100% certainty that you will become a very good and successful writer when you are done.

So, don’t worry about traffic stats and other metrics while you write; just focus on writing well—the result will come.

4. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”

That quote has been attributed to many great writers, but it appears to have been first said by Blaise Pascal.

Regardless of who said it, the meaning is incredibly powerful.

When we talked about using simple words in writing, I advocated writing down the first words that came to mind.

When you do this, you’ll often end up using more words than you need to.

And the reason why this is a bad thing is because it dilutes the value in your content.

Think of it this way: your content has a message that has a certain value to your readers.

I would define the intensity—or quality—of writing using a simple formula:

Intensity = Value / Length

The longer your content is (if the value is held constant), the lower the intensity.

If you really want to inspire your readers to take action, your writing needs to blow them away.

It needs to provide value at a fast enough rate so that it feels to them as if a light bulb went off in their heads. In other words, your writing needs to be of a high intensity.

The more unnecessary words you have, the lower the intensity of your writing will be, and the smaller the impact your content will make.

Again, we can look at Seth Godin for a perfect example of high intensity writing. He makes every single word count.

Despite writing very short posts, he delivers a ton of value to his readers, which results in significant emotional reactions from them:

As you’ve noticed, I take a very different approach with my posts.

They are very long, usually at least 4,000 words. Since they are so long, I need to pack them with value.

Where Seth’s content is more strategic (broad thinking), my posts are more on specific tactics and ways to implement them, which takes more time to explain.

But although my posts are between 4,000 and 6,000 words, they are usually much longer when I first write them. I edit them down and remove as much “fluff” as I can.

With blog posts, you have a lot of flexibility with length. In other forms of writing, you don’t.

In emails or landing pages, you typically only have a limited amount of space (often fewer than 100 words) to get as much value across to your readers as possible.

Notice in the above example that every sentence either describes a feature or a benefit of the product.

How do you cut out the “fluff”? Like with these other skills, it takes practice to become a good editor (you could hire one if you wanted).

To practice, go through your content, sentence by sentence, and ask yourself if there is a simpler way to get your message across.

For example, the sentence:

There are some marketing channels that are better than others, like email marketing.

could be reduced to:

Email marketing produces the best ROI of any marketing channel.

That simple change took the sentence from 13 words to 10 words, and made the meaning of the sentence clearer.

That’s a 23% decrease in length. If you originally wrote a 3,000-word article and decreased every sentence by that percentage, you’d end up with a 2,300 word article.

Although it’s shorter, it will make a bigger impact on your readers because of its increased intensity.

Here’s a brilliant article on specific edits that you can make to make your writing more powerful to get you started.

5. I’ve never seen a great writer that doesn’t have this

What do typical writers do to prepare for an article?

They do a bit of research on Google and then compile what they learn into an article.

This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s a recipe for producing content that is very similar to what’s already out there.

The best writers I’ve seen can write about any topic in their niche and put some kind of unique spin—angle—on it.

Besides being unique, that additional something is also insightful and adds to the value the reader gets.

In Breakthrough Advertising, a legendary copywriting book by Eugene Schwartz, he notes that great copywriters have a wide array of experience.

You might consider them jacks of all trades.

Great writers read and practice things in all sorts of fields. If I had to boil it down to specific traits, they all possess high levels of curiosity and an open mind.

They can write an article about social media marketing and use an example of hiking up a mountain in a way that makes the point they are making clearer to the reader.

One marketer that does this really well is Bryan Harris at Video Fruit. He often shares personal stories in the introduction of his posts. But he always finds a clever, insightful way to tie it back to the point he’s making:

Another well-known marketer, Ramit Sethi, often mentions real life stories in his blog posts and emails.

For example, in an email about “unconventional ways to win,” he mentions both baseball and government officials as examples:

The great power of connections: The reason why these unexpected connections are valuable is because they can relate your thoughts using a different language.

Some points will be difficult to explain no matter what niche you are writing for.

For example, maybe you’re trying to explain to your readers how to write in a conversational tone and why it’s more interesting to their readers.

If your readers don’t understand your explanation, reading it over and over again won’t help them.

But often, when you make a point in a different context, it becomes much clearer.

With regards to writing conversationally, for example, you could tell a story of being bored at a lecture when a lecturer simply read his slides to his students instead of talking to them. That’ll illustrate your point in a way that’s recognizable to most people.

So, how do you do it? The very nature of this skill is abstract. You’re making connections that other people don’t think of naturally, and that’s what adds a unique angle to your writing.

In order to do this, you need two things:

Experience – The more experiences you have in life, the more connections you can make.

Practice – At first, you won’t make these connections naturally. When you write about a complex topic, force yourself to come up with five connections you could use to explain your point. Over time, you will naturally notice good opportunities.

And when I’m talking about experience, I mean different experiences.

Always be ready to try something new:

travel

take a cooking class

reconnect with old acquaintances

take an online course in a subject you’ve never studied

Basically, now you have a very good reason to learn or try anything you’ve ever wanted.

6. Want to become (and stay) a great writer? You need to have this…

The final skill that the best writers (in a marketing context) have is adaptability.

Each content medium has its own quirks. Although your writing style will be more or less the same, the best writers know how to tailor their writing for each medium.

When I say medium, I’m talking about forms of content such as:

blog posts

emails

Kindle books

social media

I could give you many examples, but let’s look at Danny Iny, founder of Firepole Marketing.

He’s written multiple courses in the past:

But he’s also written hundreds of blog posts and guest posts.

On top of that, he actively engages with his followers and customers on social media:

And if that wasn’t enough, he just released a new book, in addition to several others:

On top of knowing how to write for different formats and audiences, great writers keep up with change.

Take me as an example. If you look at older Quick Sprout posts, you will see that many are only 500-1,000 words.

But as blogging has developed, good writing practices for the topics I cover have changed.

I noticed that longer posts performed better, and now almost all my posts are 4,000+ words long. I try to make every post the definitive post on that specific topic.

How do you develop adaptability? By definition, you need to learn how to respond positively to changing circumstances. And in the marketing world, things change fast, which makes it even more important.

The first key takeaway for you is this: adaptability comes second. First, you need to hone your initial skills.

In practical terms, this means that you should pick one main format of writing and focus as much of your attention on it as possible. That’s how you’ll learn all the ins and outs of it.

For most, blogging is a great place to start.

Once you’ve put in the time and effort to fully understand how to write great blog posts, you can move on to the next format, be it email, social media, or something else.

In the initial period, you can still write emails or other content, but most of your focus will be on the first format you’ve chosen. Then, you’ll shift that focus to the second medium.

The second key takeaway is that you always need to be looking for what’s next, whether it’s a new medium or changes happening within an old format.

When you see a new type of content becoming popular (e.g., lately video content and podcasts), give it a try because you can always learn something from it to become a better writer.

You should always be testing different ways of reaching your audience.

Conclusion

Being a great writer will be very valuable for the foreseeable future, no matter which industry you work in.

And even if you’re not an experienced writer today, you can become one with practice: all great writers had to start from some point.

If you follow the steps I laid out in this post, I guarantee that in a few years, you will be an excellent writer.

You can use those skills however you please, whether it’s to get more followers, subscribers, a better job, or take your sales to a new level.

http://www.quicksprout.com/learn-from-the-best-skills-all-great-writers-have-and-how-to-learn-them/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/learn-from-best-6-skills-all-great.html

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miami-web-designer · 6 years ago

Text

A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

New Post has been published on http://miamiwebdesignbyniva.com/index.php/2019/03/19/a-comprehensive-analysis-of-the-new-domain-authority/

A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

Correlations between DA and SERP rankings

Methodology

The true first page is what most users experience, thus the predictive power of Domain Authority will be focused on what users see.

By not using any special parameters, we’re likely to get Google’s typical results.

By not extending beyond the true first page, we’re likely to avoid manually penalized sites (which can impact the correlations with links.)

Outcome

Handling link manipulation

Data sets

The first thing we did was compile a series off data sets that corresponded with industries we wished to impact, knowing that Domain Authority was regularly manipulated in these circles.

Random domains

Moz customers

Blog comment spam

Low-quality auction domains

Mid-quality auction domains

High-quality auction domains

Known link sellers

Known link buyers

Domainer network

Link network

Methodology

Results

In the above graph, blue represents the Old Average Domain Authority for that data set and orange represents the New Average Domain Authority for that same data set. One immediately noticeable feature is that every category drops. Even random domains drops. This is a re-centering of the Domain Authority score and should cause no alarm to webmasters. There is, on average, a 6% reduction in Domain Authority for randomly selected domains from the web. Thus, if your Domain Authority drops a few points, you are well within the range of normal. Now, let’s look at the various data sets individually.

Random domains: -6.1%

Moz customers: -7.4%

Link buyers: -15.9%

Comment spammers: -34%

Link sellers: -56%

High-quality auction domains: -61%

Link network: -79%

Mid-quality auction domains: -95%

Domainer networks: -97%

Low-quality auction domains: -98%

What does this mean?

What are the best use cases for DA?

What should we expect going forward?

Be sure to join us on Thursday, March 14th at 10am PT at our upcoming webinar discussing strategies & use cases for the new Domain Authority:

Save my spot

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thanhtuandoan89 · 6 years ago

Text

A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

Posted by rjonesx.

Moz's Domain Authority is requested over 1,000,000,000 times per year, it's referenced millions of times on the web, and it has become a veritable household name among search engine optimizers for a variety of use cases, from determining the success of a link building campaign to qualifying domains for purchase. With the launch of Moz's entirely new, improved, and much larger link index, we recognized the opportunity to revisit Domain Authority with the same rigor as we did keyword volume years ago (which ushered in the era of clickstream-modeled keyword data).

Correlations between DA and SERP rankings

The most important component of Domain Authority is how well it correlates with search results. But first, let's get the correlation-versus-causation objection out of the way: Domain Authority does not cause search rankings. It is not a ranking factor. Domain Authority predicts the likelihood that one domain will outrank another. That being said, its usefulness as a metric is tied in large part to this value. The stronger the correlation, the more valuable Domain Authority is for predicting rankings.

Methodology

Determining the "correlation" between a metric and SERP rankings has been accomplished in many different ways over the years. Should we compare against the "true first page," top 10, top 20, top 50 or top 100? How many SERPs do we need to collect in order for our results to be statistically significant? It's important that I outline the methodology for reproducibility and for any comments or concerns on the techniques used. For the purposes of this study, I chose to use the "true first page." This means that the SERPs were collected using only the keyword with no additional parameters. I chose to use this particular data set for a number of reasons:

The true first page is what most users experience, thus the predictive power of Domain Authority will be focused on what users see.

By not using any special parameters, we're likely to get Google's typical results.

By not extending beyond the true first page, we're likely to avoid manually penalized sites (which can impact the correlations with links.)

I randomly selected 16,000 keywords from the United States keyword corpus for Keyword Explorer. I then collected the true first page for all of these keywords (completely different from those used in the training set.) I extracted the URLs but I also chose to remove duplicate domains (ie: if the same domain occurred, one after another.) For a length of time, Google used to cluster domains together in the SERPs under certain circumstances. It was easy to spot these clusters, as the second and later listings were indented. No such indentations are present any longer, but we can't be certain that Google never groups domains. If they do group domains, it would throw off the correlation because it's the grouping and not the traditional link-based algorithm doing the work. I collected the Domain Authority (Moz), Citation Flow and Trust Flow (Majestic), and Domain Rank (Ahrefs) for each domain and calculated the mean Spearman correlation coefficient for each SERP. I then averaged the coefficients for each metric.

Outcome

Moz's new Domain Authority has the strongest correlations with SERPs of the competing strength-of-domain link-based metrics in the industry. The sign (-/+) has been inverted in the graph for readability, although the actual coefficients are negative (and should be).

Moz's Domain Authority scored a ~.12, or roughly 6% stronger than the next best competitor (Domain Rank by Ahrefs.) Domain Authority performed 35% better than CitationFlow and 18% better than TrustFlow. This isn't surprising, in that Domain Authority is trained to predict rankings while our competitor's strength-of-domain metrics are not. It shouldn't be taken as a negative that our competitors strength-of-domain metrics don't correlate as strongly as Moz's Domain Authority — rather, it's simply exemplary of the intrinsic differences between the metrics. That being said, if you want a metric that best predicts rankings at the domain level, Domain Authority is that metric.

Note: At first blush, Domain Authority's improvements over the competition are, frankly, underwhelming. The truth is that we could quite easily increase the correlation further, but doing so would risk over-fitting and compromising a secondary goal of Domain Authority...

Handling link manipulation

Historically, Domain Authority has focused on only one single feature: maximizing the predictive capacity of the metric. All we wanted were the highest correlations. However, Domain Authority has become, for better or worse, synonymous with "domain value" in many sectors, such as among link buyers and domainers. Subsequently, as bizarre as it may sound, Domain Authority has itself been targeted for spam in order to bolster the score and sell at a higher price. While these crude link manipulation techniques didn't work so well in Google, they were sufficient to increase Domain Authority. We decided to rein that in.

Data sets

The first thing we did was compile a series off data sets that corresponded with industries we wished to impact, knowing that Domain Authority was regularly manipulated in these circles.

Random domains

Moz customers

Blog comment spam

Low-quality auction domains

Mid-quality auction domains

High-quality auction domains

Known link sellers

Known link buyers

Domainer network

Link network

While it would be my preference to release all the data sets, I've chosen not to in order to not "out" any website in particular. Instead, I opted to provide these data sets to a number of search engine marketers for validation. The only data set not offered for outside validation was Moz customers, for obvious reasons.

Methodology

Results

In the above graph, blue represents the Old Average Domain Authority for that data set and orange represents the New Average Domain Authority for that same data set. One immediately noticeable feature is that every category drops. Even random domains drops. This is a re-centering of the Domain Authority score and should cause no alarm to webmasters. There is, on average, a 6% reduction in Domain Authority for randomly selected domains from the web. Thus, if your Domain Authority drops a few points, you are well within the range of normal. Now, let's look at the various data sets individually.

Random domains: -6.1%

Using the same methodology of finding random domains which we use for collecting comparative link statistics, I selected 1,000 domains, we were able to determine that there is, on average, a 6.1% drop in Domain Authority. It's important that webmasters recognize this, as the shift is likely to affect most sites and is nothing to worry about.

Moz customers: -7.4%

Link buyers: -15.9%

Surprisingly, link buyers only lost 15.9% of their Domain Authority. In retrospect, this seems reasonable. First, we looked specifically at link buyers from blog networks, which aren't as spammy as many other techniques. Second, most of the sites paying for links are also optimizing their site's content, which means the sites do rank, sometimes quite well, in Google. Because Domain Authority trains against actual rankings, it's reasonable to expect that the link buyers data set would not be impacted as highly as other techniques because the neural network learns that some link buying patterns actually work.

Comment spammers: -34%

Here's where the fun starts. The neural network behind Domain Authority was able to drop comment spammers' average DA by 34%. I was particularly pleased with this one because of all the types of link manipulation addressed by Domain Authority, comment spam is, in my honest opinion, no better than vandalism. Hopefully this will have a positive impact on decreasing comment spam — every little bit counts.

Link sellers: -56%

I was actually quite surprised, at first, that link sellers on average dropped 56% in Domain Authority. I knew that link sellers often participated in link schemes (normally interlinking their own blog networks to build up DA) so that they can charge higher prices. However, it didn't occur to me that link sellers would be easier to pick out because they explicitly do not optimize their own sites beyond links. Subsequently, link sellers tend to have inflated, bogus link profiles and flimsy content, which means they tend to not rank in Google. If they don't rank, then the neural network behind Domain Authority is likely to pick up on the trend. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to such a dramatic change in Domain Authority.

High-quality auction domains: -61%

One of the features that I'm most proud of in regards to Domain Authority is that it effectively addressed link manipulation in order of our intuition regarding quality. I created three different data sets out of one larger data set (auction domains), where I used certain qualifiers like price, TLD, and archive.org status to label each domain as high-quality, mid-quality, and low-quality. In theory, if the neural network does its job correctly, we should see the high-quality domains impacted the least and the low-quality domains impacted the most. This is the exact pattern which was rendered by the new model. High-quality auction domains dropped an average of 61% in Domain Authority. That seems really high for "high-quality" auction domains, but even a cursory glance at the backlink profiles of domains that are up for sale in the $10K+ range shows clear link manipulation. The domainer industry, especially the domainer-for-SEO industry, is rife with spam.

Link network: -79%

There is one network on the web that troubles me more than any other. I won't name it, but it's particularly pernicious because the sites in this network all link to the top 1,000,000 sites on the web. If your site is in the top 1,000,000 on the web, you'll likely see hundreds of root linking domains from this network no matter which link index you look at (Moz, Majestic, or Ahrefs). You can imagine my delight to see that it drops roughly 79% in Domain Authority, and rightfully so, as the vast majority of these sites have been banned by Google.

Mid-quality auction domains: -95%

Continuing with the pattern regarding the quality of auction domains, you can see that "mid-quality" auction domains dropped nearly 95% in Domain Authority. This is huge. Bear in mind that these drastic drops are not combined with losses in correlation with SERPs; rather, the neural network is learning to distinguish between backlink profiles far more effectively, separating the wheat from the chaff.

Domainer networks: -97%

If you spend any time looking at dropped domains, you have probably come upon a domainer network where there are a series of sites enumerated and all linking to one another. For example, the first site might be sbt001.com, then sbt002.com, and so on and so forth for thousands of domains. While it's obvious for humans to look at this and see a pattern, Domain Authority needed to learn that these techniques do not correlate with rankings. The new Domain Authority does just that, dropping the domainer networks we analyzed on average by 97%.

Low-quality auction domains: -98%

Finally, the worst offenders — low-quality auction domains — dropped 98% on average. Domain Authority just can't be fooled in the way it has in the past. You have to acquire good links in the right proportions (in accordance with a natural model and sites that already rank) if you wish to have a strong Domain Authority score.

What does this mean?

For most webmasters, this means very little. Your Domain Authority might drop a little bit, but so will your competitors'. For search engine optimizers, especially consultants and agencies, it means quite a bit. The inventories of known link sellers will probably diminish dramatically overnight. High DA links will become far more rare. The same is true of those trying to construct private blog networks (PBNs). Of course, Domain Authority doesn't cause rankings so it won't impact your current rank, but it should give consultants and agencies a much smarter metric for assessing quality.

What are the best use cases for DA?

What should we expect going forward?

We aren't going to rest. An important philosophical shift has taken place at Moz with regards to Domain Authority. In the past, we believed it was best to keep Domain Authority static, rarely updating the model, in order to give users an apples-to-apples comparison. Over time, though, this meant that Domain Authority would become less relevant. Given the rapidity with which Google updates its results and algorithms, the new Domain Authority will be far more agile as we give it new features, retrain it more frequently, and respond to algorithmic changes from Google. We hope you like it.

Be sure to join us on Thursday, March 14th at 10am PT at our upcoming webinar discussing strategies & use cases for the new Domain Authority:

Save my spot

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liteblock · 6 years ago

Text

A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

Posted by rjonesx.

Correlations between DA and SERP rankings

Methodology

The true first page is what most users experience, thus the predictive power of Domain Authority will be focused on what users see.

By not using any special parameters, we're likely to get Google's typical results.

By not extending beyond the true first page, we're likely to avoid manually penalized sites (which can impact the correlations with links.)

I randomly selected 16,000 keywords from the United States keyword corpus for Keyword Explorer. I then collected the true first page for all of these keywords (completely different from those used in the training set.) I extracted the URLs but I also chose to remove duplicate domains (ie: if the same domain occurred, one after another.) For a length of time, Google used to cluster domains together in the SERPs under certain circumstances. It was easy to spot these clusters, as the second and later listings were indented. No such indentations are present any longer, but we can't be certain that Google never groups domains. If they do group domains, it would throw off the correlation because it's the grouping and not the traditional link-based algorithm doing the work. I collected the Domain Authority (Moz), Citation Flow and Trust Flow (Majestic), and Domain Rank (Ahrefs) for each domain and calculated the mean Spearman correlation coefficient for each SERP. I then averaged the coefficients for each metric.

Outcome

Handling link manipulation

Historically, Domain Authority has focused on only one single feature: maximizing the predictive capacity of the metric. All we wanted were the highest correlations. However, Domain Authority has become, for better or worse, synonymous with "domain value" in many sectors, such as among link buyers and domainers. Subsequently, as bizarre as it may sound, Domain Authority has itself been targeted for spam in order to bolster the score and sell at a higher price. While these crude link manipulation techniques didn't work so well in Google, they were sufficient to increase Domain Authority. We decided to rein that in.

Data sets

The first thing we did was compile a series off data sets that corresponded with industries we wished to impact, knowing that Domain Authority was regularly manipulated in these circles.

Random domains

Moz customers

Blog comment spam

Low-quality auction domains

Mid-quality auction domains

High-quality auction domains

Known link sellers

Known link buyers

Domainer network

Link network

Methodology

Results

In the above graph, blue represents the Old Average Domain Authority for that data set and orange represents the New Average Domain Authority for that same data set. One immediately noticeable feature is that every category drops. Even random domains drops. This is a re-centering of the Domain Authority score and should cause no alarm to webmasters. There is, on average, a 6% reduction in Domain Authority for randomly selected domains from the web. Thus, if your Domain Authority drops a few points, you are well within the range of normal. Now, let's look at the various data sets individually.

Random domains: -6.1%

Using the same methodology of finding random domains which we use for collecting comparative link statistics, I selected 1,000 domains, we were able to determine that there is, on average, a 6.1% drop in Domain Authority. It's important that webmasters recognize this, as the shift is likely to affect most sites and is nothing to worry about.

Moz customers: -7.4%

Link buyers: -15.9%

Surprisingly, link buyers only lost 15.9% of their Domain Authority. In retrospect, this seems reasonable. First, we looked specifically at link buyers from blog networks, which aren't as spammy as many other techniques. Second, most of the sites paying for links are also optimizing their site's content, which means the sites do rank, sometimes quite well, in Google. Because Domain Authority trains against actual rankings, it's reasonable to expect that the link buyers data set would not be impacted as highly as other techniques because the neural network learns that some link buying patterns actually work.

Comment spammers: -34%

Link sellers: -56%

I was actually quite surprised, at first, that link sellers on average dropped 56% in Domain Authority. I knew that link sellers often participated in link schemes (normally interlinking their own blog networks to build up DA) so that they can charge higher prices. However, it didn't occur to me that link sellers would be easier to pick out because they explicitly do not optimize their own sites beyond links. Subsequently, link sellers tend to have inflated, bogus link profiles and flimsy content, which means they tend to not rank in Google. If they don't rank, then the neural network behind Domain Authority is likely to pick up on the trend. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to such a dramatic change in Domain Authority.

High-quality auction domains: -61%

Link network: -79%

Mid-quality auction domains: -95%

Domainer networks: -97%

If you spend any time looking at dropped domains, you have probably come upon a domainer network where there are a series of sites enumerated and all linking to one another. For example, the first site might be sbt001.com, then sbt002.com, and so on and so forth for thousands of domains. While it's obvious for humans to look at this and see a pattern, Domain Authority needed to learn that these techniques do not correlate with rankings. The new Domain Authority does just that, dropping the domainer networks we analyzed on average by 97%.

Low-quality auction domains: -98%

What does this mean?

What are the best use cases for DA?

What should we expect going forward?

Be sure to join us on Thursday, March 14th at 10am PT at our upcoming webinar discussing strategies & use cases for the new Domain Authority:

Save my spot

0 notes

charlesswink19 · 6 years ago

Text

A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

Posted by rjonesx.

Correlations between DA and SERP rankings

Methodology

The true first page is what most users experience, thus the predictive power of Domain Authority will be focused on what users see.

By not using any special parameters, we're likely to get Google's typical results.

By not extending beyond the true first page, we're likely to avoid manually penalized sites (which can impact the correlations with links.)

I randomly selected 16,000 keywords from the United States keyword corpus for Keyword Explorer. I then collected the true first page for all of these keywords (completely different from those used in the training set.) I extracted the URLs but I also chose to remove duplicate domains (ie: if the same domain occurred, one after another.) For a length of time, Google used to cluster domains together in the SERPs under certain circumstances. It was easy to spot these clusters, as the second and later listings were indented. No such indentations are present any longer, but we can't be certain that Google never groups domains. If they do group domains, it would throw off the correlation because it's the grouping and not the traditional link-based algorithm doing the work. I collected the Domain Authority (Moz), Citation Flow and Trust Flow (Majestic), and Domain Rank (Ahrefs) for each domain and calculated the mean Spearman correlation coefficient for each SERP. I then averaged the coefficients for each metric.

Outcome

Handling link manipulation

Historically, Domain Authority has focused on only one single feature: maximizing the predictive capacity of the metric. All we wanted were the highest correlations. However, Domain Authority has become, for better or worse, synonymous with "domain value" in many sectors, such as among link buyers and domainers. Subsequently, as bizarre as it may sound, Domain Authority has itself been targeted for spam in order to bolster the score and sell at a higher price. While these crude link manipulation techniques didn't work so well in Google, they were sufficient to increase Domain Authority. We decided to rein that in.

Data sets

The first thing we did was compile a series off data sets that corresponded with industries we wished to impact, knowing that Domain Authority was regularly manipulated in these circles.

Random domains

Moz customers

Blog comment spam

Low-quality auction domains

Mid-quality auction domains

High-quality auction domains

Known link sellers

Known link buyers

Domainer network

Link network

Methodology

Results

In the above graph, blue represents the Old Average Domain Authority for that data set and orange represents the New Average Domain Authority for that same data set. One immediately noticeable feature is that every category drops. Even random domains drops. This is a re-centering of the Domain Authority score and should cause no alarm to webmasters. There is, on average, a 6% reduction in Domain Authority for randomly selected domains from the web. Thus, if your Domain Authority drops a few points, you are well within the range of normal. Now, let's look at the various data sets individually.

Random domains: -6.1%

Using the same methodology of finding random domains which we use for collecting comparative link statistics, I selected 1,000 domains, we were able to determine that there is, on average, a 6.1% drop in Domain Authority. It's important that webmasters recognize this, as the shift is likely to affect most sites and is nothing to worry about.

Moz customers: -7.4%

Link buyers: -15.9%

Surprisingly, link buyers only lost 15.9% of their Domain Authority. In retrospect, this seems reasonable. First, we looked specifically at link buyers from blog networks, which aren't as spammy as many other techniques. Second, most of the sites paying for links are also optimizing their site's content, which means the sites do rank, sometimes quite well, in Google. Because Domain Authority trains against actual rankings, it's reasonable to expect that the link buyers data set would not be impacted as highly as other techniques because the neural network learns that some link buying patterns actually work.

Comment spammers: -34%

Link sellers: -56%

I was actually quite surprised, at first, that link sellers on average dropped 56% in Domain Authority. I knew that link sellers often participated in link schemes (normally interlinking their own blog networks to build up DA) so that they can charge higher prices. However, it didn't occur to me that link sellers would be easier to pick out because they explicitly do not optimize their own sites beyond links. Subsequently, link sellers tend to have inflated, bogus link profiles and flimsy content, which means they tend to not rank in Google. If they don't rank, then the neural network behind Domain Authority is likely to pick up on the trend. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to such a dramatic change in Domain Authority.

High-quality auction domains: -61%

Link network: -79%

Mid-quality auction domains: -95%

Domainer networks: -97%

If you spend any time looking at dropped domains, you have probably come upon a domainer network where there are a series of sites enumerated and all linking to one another. For example, the first site might be sbt001.com, then sbt002.com, and so on and so forth for thousands of domains. While it's obvious for humans to look at this and see a pattern, Domain Authority needed to learn that these techniques do not correlate with rankings. The new Domain Authority does just that, dropping the domainer networks we analyzed on average by 97%.

Low-quality auction domains: -98%

What does this mean?

What are the best use cases for DA?

What should we expect going forward?

Be sure to join us on Thursday, March 14th at 10am PT at our upcoming webinar discussing strategies & use cases for the new Domain Authority:

Save my spot

0 notes