#and i realized it wouldn’t upgrade to the sale price so i was like why am i paying for the price of the exclusive when i’m going to get

[river--ghost]

wait which pages are the extra ones

[pseudospectre]

A Ghost Story

It was even better in person.

Walking up the cracked old sidewalk, the little white farmhouse I was here to see came into view, and I had never wanted anything so badly in my life. The realtor was waiting for me on the tiny sagging porch trying to look perky. "Hi! I'm Rhonda, are you ready to take a look around?"

I shook her offered hand and nodded. "Absolutely. Do you know anything about it? There wasn't much in the listing."

She unlocked the door and led us inside the dark front hall, fumbling for a light switch. Her voice remained chipper as she launched into her presentation. "Well! It was originally built in 1898, and you can see that most of the original features remain. All the woodwork, flooring, window trim...it's really got a lot of charm! And it's nice and small, perfect for someone just starting! The furnace, electrical, and roof were all upgraded by the last owner..." I stopped listening, happy to just wander through the few rooms and admire the old building. It really seemed to be in very good shape for being so far outside of town, and it wasn't much bigger than many apartments I'd looked at closer to work; but crucially, this little place would be cheaper than anywhere I could rent, and it would be mine. The farm town it was in wasn't close to much, but the highway was near enough that the commute would be reasonable.

"Wow..it really does sound great. I can't see much wrong with it though, for the price...it's not haunted or something, is it?" I joked. But to my surprise, her sales pitch demeanor instantly fell, and she just looked tired.

"Who told you."

"What, really?" I laughed, thinking maybe she was joking. Surely the one trying to make a sale like this wouldn't seriously tell someone there's ghosts. But she sighed.

"I was hoping it wouldn't come up, but that's why it's being sold again. The last several owners have all moved out within two years, and I've been told hearing noises and footsteps at all hours is a main reason. Apparently a little boy died here in the late thirties, just an accident, I think he fell out of a tree? The parents ended up splitting and the father lived here until his own death in the 80s, it sat vacant for a while before finally selling, and from then on it's gone through several hands and periods of vacancy. I personally find it ridiculous, but perhaps you will finally be the first sane person to want it. It is, in my opinion, in very good shape for its age and history, and for the price...?" She looked at me, hopeful.

"So what you're telling me is, it comes with a roommate that won't even help with utilities?" I tried to look serious but couldn't keep it up, and laughed again. "You hear that, kid? If you're sticking around, there's gonna be some rules around here." I grinned at the realtor. "I really do love the place. What do I need to do to put in an offer?" Rhonda smiled, and started pulling out paperwork.

------------------

Closing took longer than I expected, but soon enough I had a handful of shiny old keys and a little white haunted farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. My family told me I was crazy to move "all the way out to hicksville," but move I did, until the place finally started to look like a home. And as I moved things in, and cleaned, and painted, I would talk to the supposed ghost, mostly for fun. When the house settled at night, I'd sternly inform him it was after curfew, or that he's making me miss my beauty sleep. All in all, though, I rarely heard anything that I couldn't immediately attribute to the quirks of an old house. Every now and then, I'd hear rattling or scraping, but old country houses have mice, it's almost impossible to avoid. I did have a pest guy come look just in case, but if scratching and tapping was the worst my ghost could do, I could live with it and be happy.

I couldn't understand how the procession of previous owners hadn't been able to feel how comfortable and welcoming the place was; I could sit on the porch looking down the narrow asphalt road, listening to the birds and the wind and the droning insects with a patch of woods to one side and endless fields spilling out to the horizon on the other. And even as the seasons started to change, the house, with its well pump that liked to short out now and then and the somewhat uncertain electricity, was beautiful to me. Me and my ghost and my little haunted house.

A sudden late summer storm on evening put some of those feelings to the test-the power had gone out twice so far, and the cellar was prone to take on water when it rained hard enough, which it was definitely doing. I had found some old white candles wrapped in what was probably forty year old newspaper stuffed in a kitchen drawer I had somehow never opened til now. It was getting dark, and it turns out I don't own a flashlight. My cell phone would only go so far if the lights went out again...and then of course, they did.

And the noises started.

At first, I barely noticed over the rain and wind literally rattling the windows. But soon enough, it was definitely distinct from the storm sounds. "Hey, buddy, everything ok? Are you afraid of storms?" By now I was pretty solidly in the habit of talking to my ghost; it even helped with my own anxiety. "You don't have to be scared, come sit in the room with me, we'll wait for it to finish together." I lit one of the emergency candles in the living room, just to have another source of light. The dragging and thumping sounds were even louder now, with strange, shrill noises added. I can't explain why they were making me afraid; I love storms usually, but something about this one, alone in the dark and with something unknown here with me, making noises, was activating my fight-or-flight response.

And then lightning flashed through the window along with the gunshot sound of thunder directly overhead, and I screamed. And then I broke down laughing after seeing the tree branches thrashing the side of the house in the lightning flash. The noises were just from the tree. How stupid, stupid that I'd never thought of that! With that realization, my anxious mood broke. "Come on, kid, let's go to bed, huh? You're not allowed to tell anyone how dumb I am though, ok?" I made a mental note to get any fallen branches cleaned up from the yard in the morning, and went to bed.

The next morning, standing on the porch to check out the aftermath, it occurred to me why I hadn't thought of the tree as I stared at the old, rotten stump of an oak tree outside the front window-cut down decades ago.

[thisurlwasnttakenbutnowitis]

Just bought a collection of all the old Spider-Man movies on Blu-Ray in anticipation of No Way Home, and I got to thinking about how I have never in my life owned a dedicated Blu-Ray player but I've been able to play them thanks to my Playstation systems. And in retrospect, that's kinda funny when you remember the history of Blu-Ray.

Back in 2006, the Blu-Ray format was only just emerging. It only had a very niche following of basically just movie buffs. A large portion of people didn't even have HD TVs yet, so most people didn't see the point in upgrading past DVD. And even for those who did want to upgrade, Blu-Ray had a direct competitor - HD-DVD.

So we get to the Playstation 3's launch, and it seems like a disaster. The launch price of the cheapest model of the system is $499, a whopping $200 more than the price of the system's direct competitor, the Xbox 360. The reason for the much higher price? The PS3 had a built-in Blu-Ray player.

At the time, this seemed like a suicidally idiotic idea. Why would you price yourself so much higher than your competition just to include a feature that most people wouldn't even care about? The thing was, Sony was playing the long game here. They knew that they very well may lose the console war with this decision. But Sony's a much bigger company than just video games, and they had their eyes set on a bigger prize - winning the home video format war. They would take a hit in the video game department, sure, but the PS3 would be the Trojan horse for Blu-Ray.

As the years went on, the PS3's price dropped and more and more people bought it. And over time, it dawned on the growing population of PS3 owners - "I can buy Blu-Rays now because my PS3 will play them". Blu-Ray's sales climbed steadily over time because even people who had no interest in upgrading beyond DVD now could buy Blu-Ray because they already had a device that could play them.

Conversely, HD-DVD had no such "aha" moment. Sure, there was an add-on for the Xbox 360 to allow it to play HD-DVD, but that was just it, it was an additional accessory. In order to buy an HD-DVD, you had to make the conscious decision to buy some form of player for the format, whether it was the Xbox 360 accessory or a standalone device. No one would see an HD-DVD on the shelf and have that sudden realization hit them right then and there of "Wait, that's right, I can buy those now!". But that's exactly what happened with me and Blu-Ray, and I'm sure I'm far from the only one who had that moment.

And I think we all know how the story ends, given that you don't see HD-DVDs anywhere anymore. I'm sure there's millions of people out there just like me, who have never owned a dedicated Blu-Ray player but can still confidently buy Blu-Rays thanks to a little move by Sony that seemed dumb in the short term but was absolutely genius in hindsight.

[breezethegame]

Dev Log #1-ish?

Seeing how I missed like two weeks of mini blog posts, I’m deeming this one an actual “Devlog” (fanfare and such yada yada). I'm just going to call it a Dev Log.

So much has gone on the last few weeks that I’m struggling to piece it all together, so here is an attempt:

Computer Adventures:

So, I don’t haven’t built a dev machine from the ground up for years now, (maybe since college?) and typically just upgrade parts as I see fit (graphics card, ram, processor, etc).

Well, my motherboard has been giving me problems for close to a year now, where it occasionally decides “yeah, don’t really care about your boot device today”, as well as other miscellaneous things that required me to do things like removing the CMOS battery or main drive. I was also running out of upgrade options, so I got a bit fed up and decided it might be time to replace it.

I wasn't going to be cost-effective to get another LGA1150 board and CPU, and I try to build computers with future-proofing in mind. I was also looking to get a smaller case too. I already had a nice GPU (GTX 1070) that I got a couple years ago before cryptocurrency “did the thing” and graphics card's prices got ridiculous, so didn’t have to worry about replacing that.

Ultimately, I decided to do a "completely new" build.

I’ve been building computers for friends and family for many years, so I literally woke up the next day and said, “I’m about to build this thing blind”.

Well, kinda learned the hard way of the hassle of going at it that way (along with committing a couple noobish mistakes)...

Shopping Time!

Lesson 1: Double check store inventory before heading to a store that's 20 miles away

Well, I choose the nearest Fry's Electronics (it was Saturday, and I really wanted to get a machine built the same day). I get there and start looking for all of the cases and motherboards (severally disappointed that they only had one Micro ATX board in stock, something I was looking to get for the more compact build, but not as restrictive as a Mini-ITX, which they had several of). Impatient as ever, I decided I was going to pick it up.

While looking at other things, I hear another customer talking to sales rep, and the rep mentions that they don’t have a certain CPU in stock. After listening even more (I’m noisy, sorry), he mentions that they have NO Intel CPUs in stock. I decided that I had to get in on this convo.

He informs up that as of late, their store may receive like, 10 at a time, and also mentions that their other location doesn’t have any either (both of these locations are 20+ miles away from me in Dallas).

I also find out that they don’t have the specific ram I was looking for either (I ended up getting something a little pricier). He ends up informing me that the Micro Center 10 minutes away from where we were should have some CPUs.

So I end up at the Micro Center and they did have the CPUs, as well as a case that caught my attention. They also had a lot of other nice things too! Kind of wished I would have known to go to Micro Center first, despite it being much farther from home.

Building Time!?

Lesson Two: Get a head-start of figuring out your plan for wire management and how pieces will fit in your new case

I got home and was ready to build. I spent a lot of time trying to get the interior wire management together since it’s a much smaller case than my last one. I ended up spending a couple of hours getting it just right (I don’t intend to go back into this machine once it’s complete since I’m nearly maxing it out spec wise for now), before moving out to everything else.

Getting my old water-cooling radiator in was a bit tough (a very tight squeeze), but after that, adding in the ram, etc was a Breeze.

Hours went by, I installed Windows, software, etc…

I go to shut it down (after having done several restarts for the software installs prior), and it doesn’t want to power off. After 10 minutes of waiting, I manually power it off. Whatever, I’m super tired at this point.

The next day (Last Sunday), I’ve encountered several other smaller issues. Updating the BIOS didn’t help either. Great…

Okay, Building Time For Real

Lesson 3: Kinda make sure things boot up and work before you get too early to clean/tighten things down in your build

After taking the whole thing apart, I ended up swapping out that mobo for another of the same kind (since Frys didn’t have any others), but then ended up ordering different board on Amazon. So waited another day or so and the new board arrived (it’s now Tuesday evening).

I rewired/rebuilt the computer once again, installed the software, etc. I spent most of Wednesday day checking in with the team and catching up with emails and such. Then Thursday as I was beginning to do some work, I noticed that the computer was saying that my Windows wasn’t activated. I go to my Microsoft account to retrieve my key, and the page wouldn’t load to provide me the key and would only show the transaction.

Lesson 4: Make sure to keep your activation key(s) somewhere other than online/digital if you can

It’s super late and the option to speak to someone was obviously closed, but they had a chat option, so I reached someone through there. After back and forth for a while, and him remoting into the machine to check the activation status, he tells me that the key might not be showing up because it was an “upgrade”, so I would need to buy another copy of Windows 10 again.

Lesson 5: Tell "Aaron" from Microsoft no over and over, and don't fall for possibly sketchy things like sales pitches that come out of nowhere

I originally bought Windows Home and upgraded it to Pro on the same day back in 2015, so I told him that and he kept insisting that I buy Windows 10 again. I refused and told him that I wouldn’t and that I’d take care of this in the morning, and he then offered that I could pay a smaller fee to reactivate my Windows 10, but it would be a one time fee of like, $40. (I refused again).

When I go to end the remote session, he then informs me that he “Really wants to help me out” and ends up activating it anyway. (This whole thing seemly suspicious, I ended up recording it). I watched him activate Windows for over 10 minutes through some manual process (it's almost 2am, and I had work in the morning). He eventually finishes and thanks/apologies. Not sure why I even had to go through all that, but whatever...

I ended up spending Friday wrapping up installs and doing a fresh system backup afterward, before moving along with pulling down the Breeze project from source control, and reminding myself of where I left off…

Anyway, long story short, I tried to get a system built in a day, and it ends up taking almost a week!

Okay, but did you get any dev done these last two weeks?

Yeah, somehow!

Health Bar and Health System:

First thing the team and I did was evaluate a few things that are critical, but we’ve been bouncing back and forth on: The Health System

(WIP of a concept we're working on for his health bar)

The reason for this is mostly for game balancing purposes:

Is this a game that focuses on having Breeze (the player) overwhelm his opponents with an array of abilities (think Devil May Cry/Bayonetta, Kingdom Hearts, God of War?)

Or is this a game where Breeze must focus on finding openings to deal damage and avoid an onslaught of danger (think Hollow Knight, Ori, Megaman, pretty much most NES/SNES platformers)

Game design… is hard at times. Sometimes you think something will work well in theory, but when you get down into the specifics, you begin to question how certain things will balance out.

You’d think something like designing a health bar isn’t too trivial, until you realize that the Health bar represents the player’s health, and the player’s health influences the character’s survivability, which is then tied to other factors: what options does the player have to “survive” and what threatens that?

Anyway, not going to get too deep into that because I lack the PhD.

Basically, there was a bit of a rift in the UI design process that led to really evaluating game design items, and I’ve been working towards seeing what Breeze’s options are and how to limit them in areas, or how I can build the world and it’s inhabitants in a way that will make this all work out.

It’s not going to be something that will likely be answered quickly, but nevertheless, that’s Game Design™ sometimes...  

Frame Data:

[Insert Craig of the Creek frame data meme here]

I used to have a really convoluted way of tackling this in which I would have events in the animation that if given an ID, it will look for a set of “Frame Data” and then look for a specific frame and then load that information up.

It would then pass that frame information into the active hitbox and if something is in it, math and physics and stuff would happen.

I didn’t change this up too much, but I did reduce the setup process by allowing you to just drop the FrameData right into the frame of the animation (no more extra array and ID lookup stuff!)

New Particles:

We’ve got new particles! There’s one for jumping/landing/dashing dust, as well as one for wall sliding.

In the last update, I added a feature that generates “points” at the edges of a character’s collider box (as well as other “checks”), so this helped in making sure that the particles are created in the right place. This was especially challenging with the wall sliding particle.

Also, with the wall sliding particle, I needed to implement a way to have a “looping” particle effect, as well as making sure the particle effect follows Breeze as he’s moving down the wall

Developing Sprite Model Sheets

We've got models sheets completed for just about all of the cast members, though, since there's several artists on the project, as well as animators (including I), I wanted to get some sheets together that would work as a base for animators to use, and to eliminate elements that aren't needed in the sprites (minor details that would be seen in promotional art or more detailed art in general), as well as get a proper size for the characters in-game.

Misc. Features

I’ve done various other quality of life code changes to make it easier to do certain things, like creating new attacks, making the screen pause/slow-mo when Breeze changes forms, and updated my Debugging Manager so that I can hide/show certain debug messages.

I’ve also been working on a RoomManager, and writing features to look handle what happens when the player enters a room (like starting a cutscene, showing UI, spawning things, etc)

I’ve also been looking into updating the game’s Music Handler, mostly for how to handle looping a song after it's intro plays, as well as finding ways to add effects to tracks!

Other Breeze things:

I’ve been working on getting shirts done through Teespring, and I would have loved to show off some of the shirts I ordered, but Teespring shipped them using DHL, and somewhere between DHL and USPS, my shirts have been sitting in shipping limbo for 5-6 days, despite being like a city or two away from me… Maybe tomorrow ~

Also, working on a couple of enamel pin designs! Haven’t figured out the maker yet, but designs are coming along nicely!

Quick Test Build Coming

So, a week or two ago, I planned on releasing a quick build for the Drop Tier backers and above. There was a lot of features and such that I wanted to get done... before my computer stuff happened. Our goal was to have one out before the end up March, so....

I’m going to release one anyway. Maybe tomorrow?

I’ll be creating a post for those in the eligible tiers once I’m done compiling/building it! Please keep in mind that this build will be very minimal and exists to test out controls/physics. I wanted to make a strong first impression, but I'll chill on the whole "striving for perfection" thing for now!

Also, I'm on vacation this week, so I'll be cramming on Breeze stuff this whole week to make up for lost time!

[anton-chekhlenkov]

As for motivation and goal setting, it’ll come in my favorite format: it’ll be tough, practical and effective. I’m telling what is happening right here and right now.

On Saturday, I got rid of the burden that I’d set up for myself: 3-5 stories every day, scheduling the posts, content plan. I felt free and at ease immediately and I was thinking that l wouldn’t even publish anything for a week, I would relax. Yeah, I would. But when Sunday evening came, I felt the inevitable desire to write though this time I wished to share something else – what was happening right now. If you want something, then you can do it. And off any schedule.

I’ve added a new item into the updated heading of the blog – let me call it the next “stronghold” of a goal. It would cost a fortune (over 26 million) and this is not a joke: it’s the initial price of the desired apartment. To cut the story short, while I was gazing at the wall in the bathroom, all alone, I tried to structure the information and understand what was going on. Why so… why so much… damn, everything used to be ok!

And now let me share with you what I’ve managed to “realize.” What the goal that upgrades you to the next level should be like:

1. IT SHOULD BE INSPIRING Thinking of this goal should drive you mad and encourage. It should create the fountain of ideas describing the ways how to achieve this goal. It’s come as one of the reasons why we are living in St. Petersburg now. No such goals exist for me in Smolensk, but if they ever do, they just appear ridiculous. You know, it's weird and silly to maneuver around the typical Smolensk potholes on a brand-new Tesla-S. It’s a total blasphemy!

2. IT SHOULD BE SPECIFIC and VISUALIZED A plain house near the lake, a plain apartment in the metropolis or just one million dollars mean nothing to our brain: all mentioned doesn’t motivate us to spend any extra drop of energy. You need the whole picture and specific details. The more vividly and brighter they are, the better. So far, we’ve had enough of photos and ads of the apartments for sale, but I guess we’ll pop in one of them soon just to look.

3. IT SHOULD BE REAL …and achievable in a reasonable time. My interval is 2 years. Well, a maximum of 3. If it takes longer, it isn’t interesting. When the brain doesn’t believe that the goal is achievable, the protective mechanism of energy saving turns on and you don’t begin to act.

4. IT SHOULD BE INCOMPATIBLE …with your current lifestyle or so-called energy level. It appears obvious to me now: if, just imagine, I earn 100 thousand candy wrappers per month, and set a goal for myself to achieve within 2-3 years, that costs (3 years) * (12 months) * (100 000) * (~ 1.5) = ~ 5,400,000 candy wrappers, then this doesn’t motivate me to make any significant changes. I would count how to increase the monthly income a little, or would try to squeeze into the budget or would wait a little longer. And would even decrease the quality of life. No, under no circumstances!

Such an approach DOES WORK, I feel like my brain is being modified and it starts to get rid of rubbish, looking for the shortest way to the goal. You’ll note this even regarding my blog. The stories will become few, they will be posted only in Instagram and only when I want them (SMM God, please forgive me). The posting process will be greatly simplified. There will be fewer commas again. Frankly speaking, I did make efforts, but the result doesn’t appeal to me. I take off the responsibility of being an expert as well, another type of burden of mine. I will stop trying to make my texts look like universal recipes for anything. I’m a man of practice, and I’ll write about what I’m applying in my everyday life, especially now, so you need to filter whether this can be applied to your life and appears safe to you. You always have comments at hand for discussions and clarifications. I’ve given up content plan. Frankly speaking, I’ve never got one, but now at least it won’t be another burden for me. However, I’ll create a set of key sections that will help me to coordinate my further publications. Btw, you can offer the variants of topics in the corresponding discussion field (just added).

I’ve quickly come to the following insight: when you occupy all the free time with important stuff to the detriment of your family, be ready to come to a dead end. So, I’ve intuitively set this goal for myself: it’s unattainable even if I work all my free time all day long from dawn till dusk doing the same kind of work. This is important for me not only because it’s so difficult and dangerous, I just don’t want to lose that close communication with my daughter I established during our Nice vacation in December and on New Year holidays. I don’t hear her “PFffeeeee!!” any longer as a reaction to my comments or prohibition. This is my personal conscious achievement. The child shouldn’t see that parents prefer some ephemeral “work”, no matter how important it appears for them to make such a cruel choice.

I don’t want to share yet how I’m planning to achieve my goal. Try to guess in the comments - maybe we’ll scrape together enough material for another useful article. If suddenly the fuse runs out, I will use a powerful tool of self-motivation that I keep in store. I will share it the moment I apply it and have inspiration.

PS:  I could have missed something that seemed obvious to me – please, don’t hesitate to ask or add it. Hereinafter I won’t be so meticulous regarding new posts. What is happening in life is more important and interesting than minor discrepancies in the narrative.

Translated by Irina Zaitseva

[rayadraws]

BotGeno Valentine Countdown 2019 - Valentine date

Time for another ficlet! It’s date time! 1.6k today.

Relationship: Saitama/Genos Tags: New(ish) relationship, bilingual borg Warnings: None (G)

”I love you.”

”Once more?”

”I love you. I love you… to the moon ah… uh…”

”To the moon and back.”

”Right, right. To the moon and back. Am I doing it right? You can tell what I’m saying?”

”I can, well enough.”

King seemed to think they were done. Not yet. Saitama wanted to get this perfect.

”I love you to the moon and back..! To the moon… and back! Irresistible!”

”...”

”What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

”Is that… your usual expression when you tell Genos that you love him?”

”Uh. Yes? What of it?”

”I suppose… it’s not my place to judge your boyfriend’s tastes.”

”What’s that supposed to mean?!”

-

Genos talked a lot, but not usually about himself. When he did, it was typically about a new upgrade or something. Genos talking about his upbringing, or even his past in general… that was rare. So he hadn’t realized it immediately. Maybe his Engrish (he’d been told, by both Genos and King) shirts should have been a clue, but Genos disapproved of so many of his clothes anyway that he hadn’t paid it much mind.

The second clue was maybe some of that techno talk with the doc, but almost all of what they talked about when they got going flew over his head anyway, so he didn’t really think about it.

Instead, the first time he really realized it was when Genos talked in his sleep. It wasn’t something that happened super often, and even when it did Saitama wouldn’t usually be awake to hear it. But that one time he was, and he was surprised to hear the other muttering stuff in a foreign language. At least he understood enough to realize that Genos was sleep talking in English.

He’d asked him about it at breakfast the next day, and Genos had been mildly surprised Saitama had found it out, but otherwise pretty blasé about it.

”I was raised bilingual,” he’d simply said. Knowing his childhood was kind of a sore point Saitama hadn’t really dug deep into it, but he’d learnt that Genos was fluent in English, though he rarely got the chance to like, have a casual conversation in it with anyone. The closest he got these days was reading foreign cyborg research papers, or talking to people online, or, well, the Engrish shirts. But they didn’t really have people who spoke English (who spoke it well, anyway) among their friends. Which was maybe a little sad? Like, you’d probably miss casually speaking a language you were raised with, right?

Genos had assured him that he was fine, but Saitama had prepared a little… surprise for him, all the same.

Valentine's was coming up and he thought it’d be fun to maybe like, surprise him by saying a phrase in English. A loving phrase, of course.

He’d asked King to help him get it right - the guy was exposed to more English than any of them, thanks to his video games, and they’d practised in secret, while Genos was out.

The days leading up to Valentine’s were busy, with lots of monster reports. Not terribly dangerous ones, but they still needed to be dealt with. There were monsters spawned from jealousy, and unrequited love, and the one who must have had a really weird relationship to chocolate. Genos was called out to deal with several of them and even Saitama got an official call to take care of a sentient candy heart that had somehow made its way to the outskirts of City Z.

It sucked that they were apart so much for several days, but at least it gave Saitama lots of time to practice, with Genos out of (cybernetically improved) hearing range.

”You are amez-... no… you are amiz… you are cool! Yeah, that will have to do…” he muttered to himself. Why did it have to be so difficult to memorize a few lines?! How could Genos make it look so easy to just keep going?

He kicked a pebble as he crossed the street, not bothering to look for cars. None ever made it to their dilapidated neighbourhood. Instead he looked up, to the one lit window in the building, while slowly twirling his gift around in his fingers.

He was home.

-

”I assure you that I will not go overboard today. On this, you have my word.”

Saitama lifted one eyebrow, eyeing the man across the table. Genos sat in a (somehow) even more rigid seiza than usual, vents faintly glowing and whole body borderline vibrating.

”You’ll be pleased to hear I upheld your ’spend no more than 500 yen on me dude’ rule, Sensei!”

”Really? Huh,” Saitama said, blinking slowly. He hadn’t expected the other to live up to that promise, to be honest.

”Yes,” Genos purred. ”Please leave it to me!”

-

Genos was a sneaky bastard, but he already knew that. Saitama had realized he most definitely had put more than 500 yen into their first real valentine’s day date the moment he led them down the street to the restaurant. The food there did not cost 500 yen. A glass of water from them, maybe.

He’d narrowed his eyes accusingly when they were handed the menus after being shown to their table, but Genos had once again assured him that he’d followed the rule. It just so happened that the restaurant’s owner was a very big fan of Demon Cyborg. And… maybe he’d used that, a little bit. Maybe he’d signed one of the plushies of himself that fans sent him sometimes and given to her, along with one of his exceptionally rare public smiles, with the glowy eyes. And maybe she’d been more than happy to let him and his significant other eat for free at her restaurant in return for his smile and his signed plushie and a good word about her restaurant.

Sneaky bastard.

He couldn’t deny that the food was tasty, though. Especially for being free. He even got to sample some wine, though that was a taste he had yet to acquire (Genos too, going off his grimace after trying it, but free was free).

After that, they walked down the shopping district of City Z, looking at all the lovey-dovey stuff for sale in the shop windows. There was so much pink and red and of course, all the chocolate.

”You didn’t spend your money on overpriced chocolate, right? I don’t think any of these cost less than 500…”

”No, we will buy chocolate tomorrow, at half-price.”

”Good boy.”

He filed away the way Genos lit up at that comment for later.

”Of course, since the food was free, and the walk too, I still have 500 yen left to spend on Sensei as I see fit. Or rather, as he sees fit… Would you please pick out what you want in this store? Anything Sensei wishes - as long as it costs 500 yen or less.”

He’d stopped and was motioning to the store closest to them. Saitama peered past him to look inside the window and oh, it was a manga store?!

”Good boy,” he repeated himself, Genos smiling ear to ear as they went inside.

Saitama made a bit of a show picking out a manga volume he didn’t yet own, feeling those eyes, and that grin, on him throughout the whole time in the store. Not to mention the way Genos held his hand the whole time, doing these weird swinging motions from time to time. He wondered why he kept doing-

”Hey. Are you like… showing off to people that we’re a couple?!”

Genos lifted their hands again, and this time Saitama noticed the phone, held by a red-faced, giggling teenage girl. She bowed her head in gratitude before running off into the crowd again.

”If they want a picture, the least we can do us to offer a good pose...”

”Geez, aren’t you being exceptionally friendly today!” He snorted and gave Genos a small shove with his free hand, but only held on tighter with the other.

They left the store and started to trudge home again.

It was Saitama’s turn.

-

”I didn’t like, go through all the trouble you did, and I’m not good at coming up with cool personalized ideas and all but, um, here.”

He’d led Genos home, and made him sit down on the floor by the table (and Genos was definitely vibrating this time), and then he’d gone to fetch the things. He’d kept them in his side of the clothes closet, hopefully they’d still be okay…

”Here. And, here too…”

He handed Genos the red rose, still looking none the worse for wear, thank goodness, and the card. ”It’s dumb, I know, but I thought it was cute…”

Genos took the rose from him like it was made from gold, slowly turning it around in his hand to see it from every angle. And when he was handed the card - featuring a cartoon robot (”Valentine, I like you a Bot”) he studied that up close to - Saitama could tell his eye was doing the sparkly thing that meant he was scanning or analysing or whatever.

”Saitama… this comes from the heart. Thank you…”

”Ah, wait! There’s one more thing. You’re gonna have to excuse all the mistakes, because I’m sure there will be many. Just hang in there, okay?”

”Sensei..?”

Saitama cleared his throat and Genos went back to being quiet, eyes wide and mouth tightly shut.

”You are really cool Genos. Thanks for putting up with me. My days are brighter with you around. I’m bad at emotions, but I love you to the moon and back.

Genos just stared at him for what felt like an eternity, and then it was as if he exploded, talking fast and loud.

”Sensei… no… master! Thank you! You learnt to say all of that in English… just for me? I love you too! I love you so much!”

”Uhh. I didn’t catch most of that, sorry dude. It was cool to hear you say it though. And I got the last part...”

”You did so much. You spent your 500 yen more thoughtfully than I did…”

”Nah…”

”Come here, Sensei. Tonight I will teach you how to scream... in English.”

”R-right…”

He had a feeling he was about to learn a bunch of new words, but not ones he’d be able to use in public.

This was going to be fun.

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, late June - early July 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across from June 21 to July 13, although some may be older than that.

I may not be able to do the next update until early August, given the upcoming Etsy search changes and my schedule, but I will continue to tweet big news, & may do a short post or two here. 

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

On July 9, Etsy announced it would be giving “priority placement” in US searches to items that have no additional shipping cost starting July 30th. Obviously we don’t know how this will really work until we see it in action, but the outcry has been predictable. I summarize the facts in my blog post here. There is also an admin Q&A thread, a survey, and plenty of news coverage:

Etsy's Free Shipping Push Sounds Like a Marketing Gimmick (Motley Fool, through Yahoo)

Etsy faces backlash over attempt to push free shipping (Engadget) “And while a large business can take advantage of economies of scale to lower the shipping cost, that's not usually true for an individual crafter who may only sell a modest number of items.”

Etsy sellers aren’t happy with the platform pushing them to offer free shipping (The Verge) “Implementing flat shipping fees in prices can pose a challenge to international sellers who ship worldwide. Cambridge-based artist Katie Fuller, whose run her Etsy shop since 2015, says including the cost of shipping in her products would put her at a disadvantage. “If I [raise my prices], then I’ll be making my prices uncompetitive for customers elsewhere. Most of my customers are in the UK; it wouldn’t make sense for me to do it so it sounds like I can wave goodbye to my American sales.” 

Etsy Will Start Pushing Sellers To Include Free Shipping (Fortune)

Why Is Free Shipping So Important to Etsy? (Inc.) “... 75 percent of consumers today now expect their delivery to be free even when orders are less than $50 according to a survey published by the National Retail Federation earlier this year. That number has increased from 68 percent last year.”  

As marketplaces compete with Amazon on shipping, sellers are shouldering the burden (Digiday UK) “Like Etsy will soon do, eBay said it does prioritize items that ship for free in its search results and offers sellers pricing tools to help them better figure out how to factor in shipping costs.”

Etsy Stock Is Getting a Lift as It Jumps on the Free-Shipping Bandwagon (Barron’s) “Etsy stock rose 4.3% to $66.78 Tuesday afternoon as the S&P 500 was about flat. ... Roughly 70% of items sold on Etsy in the U.S. weren’t available for free domestic shipping in the first quarter, according to Etsy; it wants that number closer to zero.”

Remember, Etsy started boosting items that ship free to Canada in Canadian searches in January, but they never announced it, or gave us tips, or tools, etc.  We won’t know if the US version will work exactly the same way as the Canadian until the former is released; a short test in the US in late May-early June generally took the first three rows of search for free shipping items, even if they weren’t all that relevant. 

ETSY NEWS

Just in case you didn’t receive an email, Etsy is making changes to their policies. They include the fact that all new listings will be set to auto renew as of July 25 (but you can change them to manual), and info about their advertising tools. Keep an eye on the latter - I think they might be releasing something new soon.

Etsy will be releasing upgrades to the sales tool in August, including the ability to offer sales in specific countries only. Hidden in that post is also a promise to increase international advertising & promotion: “We’ll also continue to invest in the success of our international markets. In the coming months, you’ll see increased marketing efforts across many channels, all aimed at bringing more buyers from your country to Etsy.” (I suspect this is related to the free shipping announcement which came a few days later; they want to reassure non-US sellers that they won’t lose too many sales.)

Etsy released new attributes and sub-categories again, including in Accessories, and Bags & Purses. 

Shops in vacation mode are now showing up in search, as of July 10. The number of shops found in a shop search nearly doubled, to over 2.8 million, but only about half of them have active listings. No word on whether or not this is a permanent change; for many years, shops with no active listings have not been searchable on Etsy. 

Etsy is working on personalizing search by using image recognition identifying 42 different styles, and the engineers involved are presenting a paper [pdf] on this topic at a technical conference. They are about to start testing this, so expect to see more personalized results soon. I need to do a short post on this topic alone, but right now I need do some more research before that will be possible. I found this interesting, though: “Since sellers don’t reliably convey a product’s style in their descriptions, scanning text alone produced results that were “okay but not great,” says Fisher.” Quit being unreliable describers, folks! 😁

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

A common question: how long does it take to get to page 1 of Google search? Answer: it depends, plus it might not even be worthwhile if the search doesn’t convert. The article explains why. 

How to fix the 5 biggest SEO mistakes website owners make.

Writing a title for Google search is very important, and many people do it wrong. Here’s how to do it correctly. 

Long-tail keywords: definition, why & how. And even more on why you definitely should aim for very low-volume keywords. (I do a lot of this.)

Somewhat advanced content: how Google's neural matching works, and how to optimize for it. “Based on the information Google has given us about neural matching over the past nine months, it appears to be most active when users have a problem they don’t know how to describe... To capture these opportunities, you need to know what problems your target audiences are facing. You also need to pinpoint what information is going to solve their problem, help them accomplish tasks and make decisions.”

Link building doesn’t require a lot of technical skill, but it does involve marketing skill. Or some public relations (PR) skill. [video & transcript] Remember, some types of links are definitely better than others. (If you don’t know what link building is, read this.)

Advanced content for people who code their own sites: Google says you won’t be able to use “noindex” in robots.txt as of September. (Bing never recognized it.)

How to game Google to make negative results disappear. I don’t expect anyone here will be paying for these services, but it is useful to see what you are up against when you are trying to get your own website to rank. More of us may also be up against AI-generated spam in Google rankings sooner rather than later. Someone is always trying to game Google. 

Was there a Google algorithm update around June 19th? Maybe. The big update at the beginning of June hit the Daily Mail hard, and the so-called “diversity update” apparently didn’t change much.

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

The best time to post on social media depends on the platform, your target market, and what you are posting.

Sell health products? Beware of the changes to Facebook’s algorithm, which are designed to limit views on fake health claims. 

Facebook outage gave insight into how their machine learning process describes your photos. “... a lot of internet users don’t realize the amount of information that is now routinely extracted from photographs”. 

Facebook will be reformatting their Business Page layout, & removing some sections, so make sure you check this out & move any content you want to keep by August 1. 

What works best on Instagram has been changing; here’s what you need to keep up with. Brand engagement rates on the platform have been dropping this year, likely due to the increased competition. Get some of that traffic back with 8 SEO tips for Instagram. 

Want people to watch more of your YouTube videos? (Pro tip - that’s part of the search algorithm, so you should.) Here’s 3 things you can do to get people to stick around longer. 

LinkedIn has some good marketing tools, including ad tools & analytics. They’ve also recently changed their algorithm to show you more things you might be interested in, as opposed to just the things that go viral site-wide, among other changes. 

Twitter ends tweet geotagging, supposedly due to low use. 

A judge in Hawaii ruled that repinning a photo on Pinterest can infringe copyright. 

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Retailers are spending less on YouTube ads overall, possibly due to the US struggles for brick & mortar stores, as other sectors are actually spending a bit more than the previous year.

Amazon’s share of the online ad market is expected to increase to 8% by 2023, compared to 3% now.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

For tracking activity on your Facebook page, set up Facebook Analytics & Facebook Attribution.

Advanced content: new coding tools in the Google Search Console. 

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Amazon’s Prime Day is actually 2 days this year - July 15 & 16. Apparently it is now the official start of back to school shopping for many people.

Beware of Alexa if you care about privacy & data retention: Amazon admits that Alexa data is kept “indefinitely”. “...for Alexa requests that involve a transaction, like ordering a pizza or hailing a rideshare, Amazon and the skill's developers can keep a record of that transaction. That means that there's a record of nearly every purchase you make on Amazon's Alexa, which can be considered personal information.” (Google Home is not necessarily better - they are letting subcontractors listen to your random conversations, not just your instructions to the device. “According to the whistleblower, the recordings presented to them are meant to be carefully annotated, with notes included about the speakers presumed identity and age.”)

Walmart’s ecommerce division may lose as much as $1 billion this year. Their brick & mortar business is still doing fine, however. 

You can now “try on” Gucci sneakers through its app. Expect to see more of this happening fairly quickly, which is something that people who sell clothing, accessories & jewellery should be watching closely. 

A. C. Moore is launching a new handmade marketplace, which you can sync to your Etsy & Zibbet listings. So it looks like that was their reason for investing in Zibbet a few years back. It’s not yet clear that they’ve put the work in to make this successful, but we’ll have to wait to see how it looks once it is launched, and how much they advertise it. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Dark patterns: how websites manipulate people into buying things they weren’t shopping for. [NY Times article - paywall after your limit of free monthly articles.] “... researchers developed software that automatically scanned more than 10,000 sites and found that more than 1,200 of them used techniques that the authors identified as dark patterns” including outright lies. 

Call-to-action phrases [infographic] that can help your pages convert. These work on web pages, emails, social media etc. My favourites are in the “lower-risk” section; I don’t think enough articles focus on this aspect of conversions. 

Wedding gift buying may be changing as traditional wedding registries drop in popularity. Apparently lots of people want cash to pay for their own expenses & trips now. 

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Great list of marketing definitions you will find helpful if you do much industry reading & research. (Pretty sure I posted this before, but it has been updated.)

Chrome is becoming more & more like spyware; the author suggests using other browsers. 

The Wayback Machine now compares current web pages to their previous versions. “One of the best uses of this feature I can think of is to track changes in privacy policies.”

How not to design a payment app: make it easy for anyone to change the password. 

[tittaadvance]

Carmageddon max damage controls

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS PC

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS PS3

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS SERIES

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS FREE

I would personally wait for a hefty sale on it. It’s cheap and quick fun, and it should be priced that way. If this game was $4.99, I’d tell everyone to buy it. Well, yes, if you’re willing to burn $39.99. Should you play Carmageddon: Max Damage? No. I don’t understand it, and I tried to explain it as best I could in this review. It is categorically, inherently, and objectively bad… but I kinda liked it. Therein lies my conundrum with this game. While these were few and far between the more I played, they were definitely present. But I also continued having “Haha WTF that was awesome” moments for a while there. The load times are atrocious, the gameplay is not up to par, blah blah blah. Throughout my experience with this game, I kept pointing out the flaws of this game to myself. Dang it if I didn’t enjoy launching my opponents sky high for no apparent reason. Dang it if there isn’t something enjoyable about driving around in half a car. But dang it if there isn’t something maniacally enjoyable about getting a power up called “Mostly Armless” and then proceeding to sear off random civilians arms. I realized how terrible the game was almost instantaneously. And that, I believe, is where I actually had fun in this game.Īll of my complaints aside, I (in a sick sort of way) enjoyed the ridiculousness of Carmageddon: Max Damage. On the other hand, why the hell not try to kill all of the civilians? This game put me in a “screw it, I’ll try everything” kind of mood. On one hand, who in their right mind would actually try to kill all of the civilians? It’d be much easier to do the other tasks. For me, this was borderline idiotic and genius. Ignore everything- you pick whatever you want to do and go for it. Actually, scratch that, you try to kill all of the civilians. Wait no, you try to kill all of the other cars. Ultimately, what this game boils down to is its “classic” mode. Granted, a game like this doesn’t really need a story. It gives you no setup for why or how you can be mowing down all of these people. There is no story in Carmageddon: Max Damage. Once you get used to it, it isn’t GAME BREAKING, but it remains annoying. His first words were “this controls horribly”. I called in my little brother to play the game for a match and to tell me his immediate thoughts. The game, however, snaps to attention after about half a second of holding the stick, so your car will do an unrequested 180°. Turning in the game is atrocious it isn’t responsive at all, and so your instinct is to push the left analog stick all the way to the left or right. The cars are all slow for the most part, and acceleration is a tricky beast. But it seems like Carmageddon: Max Damage tries its darndest to hinder your racing ability. How the game looks wouldn’t matter so much if the game played competently. The art style is ugly, uninspired, and it looks like it was slapped together by amateurs. It would be one thing if the art style was cool this, however, is not the case.

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS PC

I realize that this game is harkening back to its series’ late 90’s PC roots, but there is no need to stay THAT faithful.

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS PS3

At best, it looks like an early PS3 or 360 game at worst, it looks like a PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube game. This game, however, made me question the power of my PS4. Normally, I am not a graphics connoisseur by any means. Alright, now let’s get all of the crud out of the way, shall we?įirst, the graphics. It’s your standard affair for any game such as this. As you play, you earn credits which unlock more courses, car upgrades, other cars, etc.

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS FREE

You can start a “career” (that’s a generous term- it’s essentially just random missions over and over), you can free roam, and you can play online (which I can’t really comment on, as there were only three people online as I reviewed this game). In this iteration of the series, there are three primary game modes. It has a focus on being an ultra violent civilian-killer simulator, which gave the original release plenty of controversy. Think Mad Max or Twisted Metal, except not nearly as competent.

CARMAGEDDON MAX DAMAGE CONTROLS SERIES

Carmageddon is a car combat series that began in 1997. To understand this mixed response, you first must understand what Carmageddon is. I asked myself “Am I having fun while playing this?” The answer to that question was an astounding “yes”. There is one category that Carmageddon actually made me pause and think: “Wait a second… is this actually kind of good?”. But notice that I did indeed say almost every category. In almost every video game category imaginable, you could point out each flaw within Carmageddon. In fact, I would go so far as to call it a bad game. Make no mistakes, Carmageddon: Max Damage is by no means a great game.

[morkmywords]

Sales | EXO | Chanyeol

Masterlist

Note: I didn’t edit like always cause I hate editing so please excuse any mistakes, other than that enjoy!

Length: 1.4k

The mall was overflowing with people, like a river leaking from every store front and into the halls between. You were being dragged from store to store by your sister and father in search of the best sales. In all honesty you hated shopping with every bone in your body, the blaring music, the clutter of people cutting around, and least of all the sales. Sales were where thrifty people gathered to try and spend even less money than they already did. But you still went and suffered through people shoving you around and the shouting.

You mainly went for your sister, you knew it wasn’t easy trying to shop for clothing with your dad, for the most part he was a middle aged man and not a highschool aged girl but also because he didn’t see the point in buying clothing or posters of her favourite bands. I guess you also kind of went for your dad so he wouldn’t have to put up with your sister’s whining and so he could look at all the kitchen wares and sportsmemorabilia he wanted. You were also there for more hands to carry bags.

So there you were lugging around the bag of clothes your sister had just purchased through a music store while she browsed the isles looking for more kpop albums, or poster, you really didn’t know. You had only ever been in this sort of shop once before when your friends desperately wanted an album that just came out and she couldn’t order it online. You had to say it had definitely been upgraded since two years ago. You wandered the isles looking at the different posters lining the walls and browsing the many albums from all sorts of different groups until you found one you liked. You stopped at a bucket near the front as you waited for your sister to find everything she wanted and started digging through the pins and patches on sale. She came up behind you and started you making you jump into a cardboard display behind you almost knocking in over. Her arms were full of albums, figurines, pins, and the most daunting item of all, a giant cardboard cutout of some dude you assumed to be in one of the boy groups she liked.

“Why do you need THAT!?” You exclaimed pointing at the cardboard man.

“What do you mean that thing,” she said fuming, “this thing is EXO’s Xiumin and he is amazing.”

“Do you really need that?” You asked cringing at the idea of carrying it through the rest of the stores. You could see the tears beginning to well in her eyes and she started blubbering about how nobody ever lets her get what she wants and how everyone must hate her. Trying to stop her before the full on sobs came you quickly agreed to buy it and her mood did a complete 180 and she was smiling, practically bought mixing off the walls. You walked up to the cash register to buy the stuff while your sister looked at the sale items you were previously searching through, the young girl running the register gave you an odd look as you handed her the life sized man made out of cardboard, you just sighed and finished the transaction and dragged yourself out of the store behind you sister who was having the time of her life.

Thankfully she took the bag of albums but you were still left with the pieces of the cardboard man as you walked around the department store your sister dragged you into a few minutes previous. You looked through the jacket section as it would soon be winter and your jacket from last year was so worn out it was pasically a long sleeved shirt. You pushed the various jacket aside searching for one in your size and in a decent price when some bumped into you pushing you into a rack of ski jackets. You groaned and we’re about to start pushing yourself up when you were met with a hand in you face. You looked up to see if there was a body attached to the hand and to your surprise you were met with a very tall man who had the cutest ears poking out from underneath his hat. You grabbed his hand and ungracefully stood up, your balance was off and you started falling backwards again before strong arms caught you and brought you back to a standing position.

You gave him a small thank you as you turned around to search for the cut out you misplaced. You let out a small sigh when you checked it over and found it was still in one piece and nothing was broken. You brushed yourself off and turned around to see the guy who knocked you over still standing there.

“I’m sorry for knocking you over.” He said although it was slightly muffled by the mask he was wearing. You smiled in response and assured him it was no problem. You swore he was smiling under the mask he wore, and you noticed the little whisper of light pink hair peeking out from under his hat.

“Do you know what brand jacket is the best?” He asked pulling down his mask so you could hear him better. He looked somewhat familiar but you ignored it and answered his question.

“I’m not a jacket expert myself but maybe you could ask a sales associate.” You said with a small smile and pointed over at the information desk with your cardboard dude. He burst out laughing when he noticed the cutout and you face turned bright red.

“It’s rude to laugh,” You huffed out, “don’t you have any manners?”

“I’m sorry it’s just kind of funny since I know him.” He said in between giggles. You were puzzled wondering how he knew an idol but then you remembered seeing his face on the same poster as cardboard cutout guy in your sister’s room. Your face turned a whole other shade of pink as you stutter out.

“Y-y-you’re from exo, right?” All he replied with is a small nod his smile growing even bigger. At his confirmation you panicked.

“I’m sorry for being so rude I didn’t mean it.” You hurriedly said before bowing and starting to back out of the cramped isle.

“It’s fine, it was me who bumped into you in the first place.” He said reassuringly. Your nerves got the better of you and you blurt out.

“So if I sue you for assault I could get a lot of money.” You internally cursed yourself for you lacking known in law and stupid big mouth. You were about to leave before you realized he was laughing again.

“I don’t think that’s how it works but you could try.” He said matter of factly.

Fed up with him laughing at you, you hit out “maybe I will!” Before stomping away annoyed with the situation. You were a few isles away when a hand caught your wrist forcing you to stop and turn around. You were met again with the sight of the gigly giant idol and you tried to pry his hand off your wrist.

“I’m sorry for laughing at you but I didn’t introduce myself,” he said removing his hand and stepping back, instead he held out his hand for you to shake, “ My name is Chanyeol from Exo.”

“Chanyeol....” you said testing out his name, it seemed familiar probably because your sister had mentioned him multiple times.

“My name is y/n.” You said reaching out and shaking his hand, he smiled at you and you found yourself smiling back at him, he was kinda cute.

“If you don’t mind me asking, could I have your phone number you’re funny.” He said shyly. You were a bit taken aback by this seeing it was your first time having someone ask for your phone number let alone an idol with millions of fans. But you found yourself nodding and exchanging phone numbers with him.

As you were typing in your phone number you screeched as somebody tapped your shoulder. You turned around to see your sister giggling, she really knew how to get on your nerves. She kept laughing until she realized who was standing behind you, she looked starstruck whne she saw the confused Chanyeol. You giggled at both of their faces before finishing typing in your number and handing his phone back to him and snatching yours away.

“Nice meeting you!” You called over your shoulder as you dragged your sister behind you and out of the store. Once you were out of earshot she whispered

“Did Chanyeol from exo just ask for your number?” You nodded in response thinking to yourself he did didn’t he as a smile crept into your face. But you still hated sales.

[you-are-worth-the-wait]

This is super long or at least I feel it is...

I kinda wonder how I’d do on that show. The part of me that likes to watch people sing would be that person who nods their head along and watches the other contestants sing so I could possibly miss my turn. Then there’s the paranoid side of me that would be totally focused on the screen too since I know I have to watch for when it’s my turn. Then the part of me that doesn’t want to lose will be so obsessed in making sure I don’t sing when it’s the other persons turn so I don’t give them points. I wonder if your mic automatically cuts off when it’s not your turn. If so, that would eliminate that one aspect of my mind game. I still can’t tell if being “good” is a good thing or not. I’ve only watched the first episode but it’s like having a target on you if you are too good. Compared to the singers, I think I’m in the middle to low so I think I’d rank 4-5/6. I don’t think I’d be the worst. I think my top potential would be 3/6. Not the top 2 spots. I almost feel like if I can’t reach a bit or even know the words for that matter I’ll just hum or vocalize a sound to at least match the pitch. I’ve only played rockband a handful of times doing the vocals. I also have sung on those karaoke mics where they give you a score. Their algorithm needs to be fixed...lol. Cuz people I think who sing well sometimes score lower than people who don’t. So usually turn off the score function so people don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed by a score when they are purely singing for the joy of it. People shrug off and down play a low score but for a moment I know it prolly does put them down or embarrasses them for a moment or two.

I don’t think there’s ever been a competition between us as to who can sing better. I really do like your voice and, if anything, I’m more so pushed competitively to compliment your voice and like to sing duets and harmonies with duets. Ohhh...duets...cruising. I remember us singing that for fun and the second time around really just looking at the words and being like, “huh. Damn. That’s some crazy word play there. Innocent nice song my ass.” Haha. I think the thing I would like to do is sing more songs with you or just listen to songs together that have two people/harmonies that are cute, sweet, or themes of love, and just be able to connect with you/each other with them. Like all the Mraz songs I know, I think about/sing for you. His collaboration with other artist are just as powerful that I do want to share/sing those songs with you. Bryan Adams, always loved his songs, had deeper meaning when associated with you. If we ever go out to karaoke, I’d love to be able to sing random songs with you and for people to know/feel that we have a connection when we sing together as compared to if someone asked either one of us to accompany them to sing a song. Like, I remember there was a girl who liked me and her way of trying to connect with me was during karaoke, she’d ask me if I knew whatever song and if I did, she’d ask if I wanted/could sing it with her. I still don’t really like to sing at karaoke but I kinda knew where she was going with it so I reluctantly agreed. So I could see how she enjoyed being able to sing with me whatever song she picked out and then there were times when the song she chose did appear and no one knew who picked it, she didn’t respond fast enough, or someone who had the mic liked the song and took over in singing it and I could see how bummed out she was about that. Where I ended up singing with someone else or I didn’t sing the song either since she wasn’t able to sing it.

It was weird. I did have confidence in myself and in my voice before I got hurt because even though I didn’t brag or show it off often, I knew I could hold my own against most average singers. So really, only family, close friends, or my group of friends know that I can sing. And like I said, the girls/women I’ve been with, including you, prolly only 5 know I can sing? I always used to joke around that if I wanted to get a girl to like me, I’d just take them to a karaoke type setting or one of those get-up-on-stage and sing situations and once I sang or people realized I had a voice, instant panty dropper...lol. I was so shy and guarded about my voice that I once said that the only way I’d ever sing in front of anyone was if I was in another state cuz I couldn’t come to terms with the running the risk that someone would hear my voice and make a big deal out of it. I think it may have stemmed from random family functions with guest when my dad and/or mom pressured me to sign in front of people when i didn’t want to or it wasn’t even a planned thing, I clearly have no experience with stage presence, and I have such anxiety when the focus of attention. Them doing that to me made me retreat and hide my myself/voice even more. I didn’t want to be put in that situation. It happened one too many times that I think I just got really turned off about it. You see how big a part music plays in my life and I do enjoy singing. I guess I’m willing to share it only when I feel I’m comfortable enough to. Otherwise, I’m okay with people not necessarily knowing. It’s a secret and a hidden talent. Like the second part of my first name :)

Like I said, I really like your voice. People don’t necessarily need to be powerhouse singers to be great singers. And sometimes just the joy, love, and passion of singing can trump the fact that you don’t have a great voice. That’s why I enjoy watching people sing at karaoke. I could prolly sing for 5 hours straight by myself in a room or with you or with my brother and cousins. Even with family/relatives. But with relatives it’s because a lot of people like to sing too so it works out perfectly for me where I sing maybe 1 song out of every 10-12. I used to sing more when I voice was decent but not I’m extremely self conscious about the fact that I can’t sing as well anymore. That’s prolly another reason why I don’t sing as much. But like my brother and I rationalize, if you sing in the right key and play to your strengths, you can be on par with decent singers as well. So I think that’s prolly like you and me. But then again, maybe we are tougher critics on ourselves. But I see when you sing you do enjoy singing. I see that you do try and want to sound well and aren’t afraid to just sing for the pure fun of it. Even when that high part came and you just “nooope” out of it...lol. I admire and like that about you which is why I do enjoy you and your singing voice. You have a nice voice and with the right songs and moments, you do it kill it, and you sound amazing. That’s why I sooo want to be able to listen to/sing songs with you. I’m intrigued by the prospect of what we can pull off. You seriously would fit right in with my family if/when we would ever do karaoke :)

Ha...my shoes. Yeah...I guess you did have a problem with my white-not white anymore shoes...*ws* I don’t know. It was still functional and the grip was the most important thing. Now if my toes started sticking out of them, then that’s a problem. But if they grip well and are able to serve its purpose, technically, they are still “good”, right? Except for the color. I don’t know. I guess it’s because I’ve been raised or have the mentality that I don’t/shouldn’t pay more for something when there is something with equal quality or serves the same purpose at a more reasonable price? Like with basketball, I was still buying my basketball shoes from Ross, discount stores, or if I went to Nike, I couldn’t see myself spending more than $25 for basketball shoes, and I wore them out till the show literally fell apart on me. Or when I ran marathons. They say to change your shoe every, I don’t know how many miles. But it technically would last 6-9 months, a year at the most. I trained and ran marathons in the same shoe 2-3 years in a row cuz the shoe I bought was like $150. I was sick when we paid for it. My dad was insistent that I buy quality shoes. There were even shoes for $250-300-350 and I was just getting sick looking at those prices. I immediately looked at their sales and clearance ones. I think $99-129 were the lower end prices. The first marathon I ran I prolly bought running shoes from Nike for less than $50. It wasn’t till my dad decided to run it with me too that he decided to get real running shoes and brought me along to but quality ones for me as well. So yeah. Marathon shoes and basketball shoes are now the only shoes I can justify paying more for quality.

Nurse salary. Ha. I know I told you that my “splurge” with my first paycheck was going to be ordering a “meal” from the preset meals from a fast food place. Chick fil a doesn’t count nor does in and out or raising canes since they don’t have value meals. Like you can get items from the value meals to create a complete meal. That was my speciality. It was crazy that at one point for the longest time I could quote the value meal/$1 menu items from most fast food places since that’s what I ordered from. I finally ordered something off the meal menu about 3 months ago. It was a sourdough jack meal from jack in the box, upgrade to large size, and substitute for seasoned curly fries. And I only got it because my brother agreed to share the meal with me...lol. So yeah. It was pretty momentous :P

What? Watch the second hangover with mike Tyson. Di-djew di-djew di-djew di-djew di-di-djew...ad lib for finishinf effect...then sing with feeling, “I can feel it coming in the air tonight.” :P I don’t know about the rest of that song but that’s all you wait for. You wait so long for it and the anticipation just builds since the song is so dang slow. But when it finally comes you just let all the build up rush out in that 3 second interval...lol. Classic.

I wouldn’t say it was his velvety voice but he does have a good voice. What I liked was that he held out the notes. Other people cut the words/notes short so it didn’t have that singy/songy flow and transition that I feel that song should have. It’s like a song where you sway from side to side. Other versions, you don’t sway from side to side as much. With Barry, you reeeally sway from side to side and it’s a smoother type of sway where your body starts to sway back and your head needs to catch up since it’s still caught up in the position from the original sway but it’s time to sway to the other side like your body is doing the swaying and your neck and head are just along for the ride :P haha...how many versions did we listen to? Like 3-4-5? :)

Of course I’d want to spend time with you Love. Come on. It’s Christmas. How could I not not? Not that I need an excuse to be around you but yeah, it was totally worth it and I would do it all over again. I think the only thing that could have made it better was the situation, obviously, in where I didn’t have to look at the clock. That way we could have done whatever at our leisure. Like if we wanted to make hot cocoa and enjoy that during the movie and not have to worry about the time. I always felt that I was gambling on how many more minutes could I milk with you before I had to leave. Those were so difficult. The “goodbyes”.

I know what you mean. Thanksgiving came and went and it didn’t really feel like it to me. Like I said, it didn’t really register in my head it was thanksgiving until the week of. It’s still difficult to wrap my head around the fact that it’s December and it’s almost Christmas. Truth...I saw this holiday season being waaay different than what it currently is for you and me. I know. I’m a dreamer. A part of me still keeps saying, “but it’s not here yet. It’s not time yet. Things can still happen.” And I’ve thought that with every moment, holiday, or time table I’ve given myself. I guess you only fall as hard when you dream as big. But I understand. I do feel hollow. My body is in the moment but my heart, spirit, and mind is consumed with the alternate reality of being with you. Wondering what you are doing vs what we could be doing. I’m not so sure what kind of meaning you’ll be able to formulate, understand, or reinvent somehow. I think we both have different approaches in how to make sense of it and just survive the actual holiday. I don’t know how it is for you since you have him and your family/life there. I guess you are “reinventing” the holiday to give it some kind of meaning for you. For me, it’s kind of just trying to survive it in the sense that I think I’ll have that “so alone in a room full of people” overacting sort of emotion. I know people will ask me about you and/or about someone in my life and I’ll have to side step or joke about if they know anyone then let me know. Or I will be present and look at everything around me and my mind will drift off to what you would be saying/doing/reacting to everything. People will smile and talk stories as usual and I’ll prolly just listen from afar. And at some point the reality will sink in and I know that I’ll go through the thoughts of “honestly being alone”. And I’m going to struggle with my thoughts/feelings. They will go up and down like they already do. My resolve for you/us will never feel stronger nor weaker in any given moment. And even though time does feel irrelevant, the only constant is that it keeps moving forward and that’s something I have no control over.

I think it’s safe to say that most anything we do together, it will be fun or we’ll end up making it fun somehow. But yeah, holiday pop up bars would totally be a thing you and I do. Honestly, I feel there’s just so much you and I can do and experience. What gets to me though is I don’t know why I feel like I don’t have enough/the time to do whatevers with you. The only reason I’m aware of time/dates is because of the stock market. Other than that, days just go by and next thing I know, time has passed, I feel I haven’t accomplished much, and I feel like I just lost time. It’s not really something that used to get to me but now I’m more aware of my mortality. Every time my heart has that irregular beat, every time I feel my knee twist or I feel a pain, every time I almost get into an accident. They recently shut down the freeway due to an accident and I got rerouted 30min out of my usual commute time and the first thing I thought about was you and then the second calming thought that it couldn’t be you since you’d have no reason to be on this side of town.

I think about even though my knee is messed up and ice skating could do some serious damage if I feel wrong, I still wanted so much to be able to make it and take advantage of the hot cocoa they were giving out with the package that we bought. I’d love to share that experience with you and it does bother me a little that that’s something I haven’t been able to do with you. Even though we’ve done a lot together, I feel we could do so much more.

[entrepreneurnut]

GrooveFunnels Review - Is It Worth Your Time?

New Post has been published on https://entrepreneurnut.com/groovefunnels-review/

GrooveFunnels Review - Is It Worth Your Time?

In the world of funnel builders, GrooveFunnels is the new kid on the block.

Promising to be an all-in-one business and marketing suite capable of handling the work-load of any online business, GrooveFunnels has set itself a lot to live up to.

Fortunately, there is an impressive team of well-known and highly successful marketers and entrepreneurs behind the platform, led by the CEO, Mike Filsame.

If you haven’t heard of Mike, he’s the guy behind other massively successful software brands, including, WebinarJam, EverWebinar and Kartra.

If Mike and his team can make GrooveFunnels as good or better than the above mentioned brands, then Groove is set to be one of the new market leaders.

Bear in mind, GrooveFunnels is still in Beta and does not officially launch until October 2020. But, you can get in now on either the free Base account or get their GrooveFunnels lifetime deal, for a very limited time.

Just note that if you want to upgrade and get the Platinum account on the lifetime deal then you will first need to sign up for a free account and then upgrade from within your dashboard.

In this article, I’m gonna do a deep-dive on this new funnel building software extravaganza to give you the full picture of what it can do.

Get A Free GrooveFunnels Account Here

Things To Consider Before Buying a Funnel Builder

Before we dive into this GrooveFunnels review, I wanted to share a few key points that are important to look for before you buy a funnel builder.

Features

The first and most important thing to consider is, of course, the features.

You’re purchasing the funnel builder to essentially build your business, meaning it should at least meet your needs.

You should think about this, as the capability of the software you’re going to be using has a direct impact on your revenue.

Will the features help you to achieve your goals more easily?

Will the features help you to scale your business?

Do the features warrant the price?

Community

Something less obvious that I recommend you consider when is the community behind it. Believe it or not, this is quite important. Why?

First of all, you can always get help from members of the community. Secondly, it can open up networking opportunities with other business owners.

Even if networking isn’t something you’re interested in, it wouldn’t hurt having a group of fellow users available to you.

Pricing

Lastly, you also want to look at the pricing. Funnel builders can be costly, so make sure to choose one that is in your budget.

That being said, the price shouldn’t be your primary concern. If you’ve chosen a good funnel builder then the features should help you generate more revenue. If this is the case, then there isn’t any reason not to pay a little more compared to some cheaper alternatives.

What Is GrooveFunnels?

GrooveFunnels is a relatively new funnel builder that is still evolving, but it is doing so at an incredibly fast rate.

Just like some of its competitors, GrooveFunnels aims to be an all-in-one marketing platform. Groove does this by taking a range of different SaaS tools that most businesses need, and combining them into one, convenient dashboard.

This is quite similar to the promise that ClickFunnels makes, but as you’ll see later on, GrooveFunnels has considerably more features.

What’s also intriguing about GrooveFunnels that most of the other funnel builders do not have, is a free plan.

Most of Groove’s competitors, including ClickFunnels, start their pricing around $97 per month.

Having a free plan is a great way for beginners to start using the software. It also gives people the chance to try it out to the point where they can actually get results with it, and not be limited by a trial period deadline.

I think this is one of the main reasons why GrooveFunnels has become the fastest-growing funnel building platform.

If you want to put this in perspective, Groove opened the doors on their Beta version in April 2020. In just 6 months they already have over 75,000 members, and they are officially due to launch in October 2020.

This is even more impressive when you realize that one of the market leaders, ClickFunnels, first launched in 2014, and they now currently have around 120,000 users.

Who Is GrooveFunnels For?

GrooveFunnels has such a long list of features that will appeal to almost any type of online business.

While the software suite can certainly be used by pretty much any business that has a presence online, the main target audience of this product are:

E-commerce Stores

Agencies

Marketers

Affiliates

Service businesses

Info-product vendors

Brick and mortar businesses

If you’re looking to increase your sales, stay connected with your customers, scale your business revenue, and be part of a like-minded community, then this platform might be a good fit for you.

Get A Free GrooveFunnels Account Here

Who Created GrooveFunnels?

The four founding members of this platform are:

Mike Filsaime (CEO & Co-founder)

John Cornetta (President)

Mattijs Naus (CTO)

Matt Serralta (COO)

Mike Filsaime

Mike Filsaime has worked on some very successful projects like WebinarJam, EverWebinar, and Kartra and is the CEO of GrooveDigital.

John Cornetta

John Cornetta has run several successful e-commerce stores that do over $300,000 per month. He also works on a lot of the educational material which we’ll talk about later on in this review.

Mattjis Naus

Mattjis Naus is a world-class software developer and the main person behind the technical parts of this company.

Matt Seralta

Matt Seralta is the Architect behind GrooveKart which is an E-commerce platform included with GrooveFunnels. I’ll go into more detail on this later on as well.

What Do You Get With GrooveFunnels?

With GrooveFunnels, you get more features currently than with any other funnel builder on the market.

Here’s what’s included:

GroovePages

GrooveSell

GrooveMember

GrooveAffiliate

GrooveMail

GrooveBlog

GrooveQuiz

GrooveKart

GrooveVideo

GrooveWebinars

GrooveDesk

GrooveCalendar

GrooveSurvey

GroovePages – For Shopify

GrooveFunnels Support & Training

GrooveFunnels Community

Get A Free GrooveFunnels Account Here

GrooveFunnels Features

As you can see from the above list, GrooveFunnels completely raises the standard in terms of features offered.

Before we take a closer look at the features, I would like to point out that not all of the features are currently available. Some are due to go live later on in 2020.

The apps that are still to roll out are as follows:

GrooveWebinars

GrooveBlog

GrooveCalendar

GrooveDesk

GrooveQuiz

GrooveSurvey

Everything else is already available inside of the platform now.

When I first heard that there are still a few features that are not yet live, and looking at the impressive list of features that they already have, I did have concerns if these additional apps would actually go live at all.

However, considering the people who are behind the software, I do have confidence that they will live up to their promises, and will actually be able to deliver. Afterall, these guys have proven track records for creating successful software products, and, of course, their reputations are also on the line!

Mike Filsaime was behind Kartra, WebinarJam, and EverWebinar which are also great platforms that have brought people a lot of success in their businesses.

Anyways, let’s now take a closer look at each of the features.

GroovePages

The first core feature is GroovePages, which is the page builder application.

When you first get inside GroovePages, one of the first things you will notice is that it comes with a variety of good-looking templates that you can use.

After a little play around, I was pleased to see that you can easily customize these templates through your drag and drop editor.

GroovePages and Page Load Speed

Something I particularly like about landing pages built with Groove is that they actually load pretty quickly. This is because they are uploaded to the web as an HTML file.

For this reason, the pages you create will load faster than if you were using other platforms like Kartra or ClickFunnels. 

This feature alone can actually make a big difference for your business for two reasons.

Firstly, if your pages load fast then your potential customers will not get frustrated waiting for your pages to render and decide to leave your site.

Secondly, earlier in 2020, Google made page load speed a core part of their algorithm. This meant that slow-loading pages actually started to see a demotion in organic search rankings.

Since sites built with GroovePages can rank in Google, you will stand a much better chance of reaching the top of the search results.

Impressively, you can use GroovePages to create a fully functional website complete with checkout options, or just a simple squeeze page.

If you are on the paid plan, you can create unlimited pages and sell unlimited products, while the free plan has a limit of 3 for each.

That being said, you can still connect custom domains, even on the free plan which is pretty nice too.

This feature combined with GrooveSell also lets you create:

One-click Order bumps

One-click Upsells

One-click Downsells

Features like these help you increase your conversions significantly, as they make it much easier for your customer to purchase additional products.

If you think about why big companies like Amazon are so successful, it’s because they make everything as convenient as possible for their customers.

Using the one-click order bumps upsells and downsells you can do something similar to help you generate even more sales.

With beautiful templates, fast loading pages, and an easy to use editor, GroovePages gives you pretty much everything you need to maximize your conversions.

Plus, the fact that this feature is available for free is pretty crazy when you consider the pricing of other tools.

I would say that GroovePages alone is quite comparable to Unbounce, which starts at $80 per month.

Fun fact: You can connect more custom domains with the free version of GroovePages, than the $80 per month plan of Unbounce.

Get A Free GroovePages & GrooveSell Account Here

GrooveSell

GrooveSell is another big feature that this platform has to offer. It’s a sales and affiliate platform that you can use to process payments and create checkouts.

As I mentioned in the GroovePage description, these features go hand in hand. One lets you build your pages, the other lets you sell your products.

GrooveSell also has very nice analytics which shows you the following:

Profit

Net profit

Revenue

Initial Sales

Rebills

Commissions (If affiliate)

Projected Sales

And more

Just like GroovePages, this feature is also available in the free plan. However, this may change in the future which is why you’re probably best to sign up for GrooveFunnels now if you are thinking to do so.

Besides the analytics, you can also connect a variety of 3rd party payment processors like Stripe or Paypal without any additional fees.

Alternatively, you can also use their payment processor, GroovePay which stands as its own entity and isn’t a part of GrooveFunnels. However, they work well with each other, as both are created by the same company.

GrooveMember

GrooveMember is another great feature that this software has to offer, as it lets you build your membership site.

Like the other features, inside of Groove, it doesn’t disappoint.

It’s pretty much like any other membership site builder, such as Thinkific and Kajabi.

GrooveMember has:

Different levels of access for your members

Drip-feed content options

Ability to create free and paid courses

Just like everything else inside of this software, GrooveMember is constantly evolving. It is also set to have certification options available, once it is fully developed. Still, even now it can compete with other membership site platforms.

And, if you for some reason, you don’t want to use GrooveMember, it will also natively integrate with all the most popular membership site platforms on the market.

GrooveAffiliate

Similar to the ClickBank marketplace, GrooveAffiliate is a marketplace that all the Groove users will have access to. It is known as the GrooveMarket.

With this also comes the affiliate management, so you can use it to recruit affiliates, track their stats, and even pay them directly from the same dashboard as all your other apps.

Again, it’s pretty nice having your affiliate management platform, in the same dashboard as everything else. It makes managing your business convenient and allows you to run everything smoothly using just one piece of software.

GrooveMail

If you run any type of online business, you’ll know how important email marketing is.

GrooveMail removes any need for an external autoresponder and helps you follow up with your list to make more sales.

How good is it?

At the moment, the Groove email feature is still in beta, but the folks behind this software solution are aiming for it to be on par with other well-known services such as ActiveCampaign and the GetResponse autoresponder.

Until that time though, we will have to wait and see.

Once it fully rolls out, it is supposed to have comprehensive automation features, tagging, email templates, and even SMS gateway functionality.

You’ll be able to use an extensive number of triggers, or “conditional splits” as they are called inside of GrooveMail. And, there are also several tagging options available.

As of right now, the full list of triggers is not yet available, but they will be in the coming months, which I am looking forward to seeing.

There are basic triggers that you can use already such as:

If lead is subscribed

If lead is not subscribed

If lead has tag

If lead doesn’t have tag

But, GrooveFunnels say there will be many more triggers coming to allow for advanced automation sequences.

However, GrooveMail is one of the latest additions to the platform. It only just launched in September 2020, so it still has a little way to go in its development.

GrooveBlog

GrooveBlog is the blogging platform that will allow you to run a responsive blog that will also be Google-friendly.

It’s probably going to be fairly basic in comparison to WordPress, but if you only need a simple blogging platform then it might be all you need.

If you need something more advanced, or if you already have an active blog set up on WordPress then GrooveFunnels will also integrate directly with this popular content management system.

That aside, GrooveBlog is there if you want to run a blog from within your Groove dashboard and you don’t need all the bells and whistles that WordPress provides.

For example, if you have an agency or coaching website, you might decide that a blog should be part of your strategy.

This is where you can use this feature to start a blog. The pages created with GrooveBlog will be SEO-friendly, fast-loading, and fully customizable.

Even though it won’t have anywhere near as many plugin options that WordPress does, Mike Filsaime has announced that there will be a plugin store like the one WordPress has where 3rd party developers can upload their plugins.

This, therefore, may also provide a unique opportunity for developers to create and sell plugins on the Groove platform and earn additional revenue. However, I am just speculating about that.

That being said, it will take years of development to reach the level of WordPress. It’s a nice feature that most other funnel builders don’t have, nonetheless.

GrooveQuiz

The next feature is GrooveQuiz, which as the name suggests lets you quiz your audience.

Quizzes are a great way for you to engage your audience and lead them through a sales process.

The ability to use quizzes will also help you to gather valuable information about your customers to help you serve them better, and ultimately for you to make more money.

GrooveKart

GrooveKart is a stand alone E-commerce platform that is comparable with Shopify. The main difference is that it has the most popular Shopify apps included… for free.

If you’re a Shopify user then you will know that this can save you hundreds of dollars on additional apps that you will no longer need to pay for.

Although on the official GrooveKart website, the use of this platform starts at $99 per month or $497 per year, you can actually get free access to it with the paid membership of GrooveFunnels.

If you are into E-commerce, this is an absolute steal when you consider the pricing of some of their competitors like Shopify.

It also has a range of unique options for Print-on-demand and shipping that would normally cost additional fees with any other platform.

If you want to see GrooveKart in action then check out the video below.

GrooveVideo

Most online businesses nowadays will need to use videos. Whether it’s a video sales letter on your landing page, or you need to create lots of videos for a paid membership area, ordinarily, video hosting costs can soon add up.

One alternative is to host your videos for free on YouTube. However, the problem with this is, if a site visitor clicks one of your videos then they will leave your landing page and be taken to YouTube.

If this happens then you’ve potentially lost the sale.

This is why a lot of marketers pay for a video hosting service like Wistia. However, this can set you back an additional $99 per month.

However, GrooveVideo lets you host all your videos inside your account, for free.

It’s another feature that will save you thousands of dollars in annual fees.

GrooveWebinars

GrooveWebinars is the webinar feature of the all-in-one tool.

The Groove team have aimed to make GrooveWebinars on par with both WebinarJam (live webinar software) and Everwebinar (pre-recorded webinar app).

Given that Mike Filsaime was also a founding member of the two webinar platforms named above, I think we can also expect this feature to be pretty damn good.

GrooveDesk

Another feature I particularly like is GrooveDesk, which is Groove’s support desk app.

Good customer support is critical to an online business, especially if your business model involves selling your own products.

If you need to use a support desk then GrooveDesk will save you hundreds of dollars on a 3rd party support app like ZenDesk.

Since GrooveDesk is located in the same place as GrooveSell, you can directly, and easily manage sales actions like refunds, from the same dashboard which is always nice.

GrooveCalendar

GrooveCalendar is a calendar app that is similar to Calendly.

This app lets you book appointments with your clients, collect payments (through GrooveSell), and manage all your meetings in one place.

Again, having this feature inside of the whole Groove eco-system is also cool as it eliminates the need to use dozens of different software applications.

GrooveSurvey

This feature allows you to send surveys to your audience and collect valuable data from them.

Running surveys will help you get a deeper understanding of the problems our audience is facing, what exactly they are looking for, and even what they think of your business!

You can then tailor your products to solve these problems and increase your conversions.

You’ll be able to run surveys as separate pages which you can send via email, or combine with anything you build in Groove.

GroovePages For Shopify

Something that I find quite cool is that you can also integrate GroovePages with Shopify using a separate app.

This could be useful if you already have a successful E-commerce store on Shopify and don’t want to move it.

When you buy GrooveFunnels, you get access to this app for free, in case you have a store that you don’t want to move to GrooveKart.

GrooveFunnels Support and GrooveAcademy

GrooveFunnels also comes with fantastic support and the GrooveAcademy.

In terms of support, it has:

Live Chat Support

Email Support

Ticketing Support

193+ articles

The only thing that might be missing is phone support, but other than that it has everything.

Besides the help and support that GrooveFunnels offer, you also get access to a considerable amount of training material from Mike Filsaime and John Cornetta themselves.

The cool thing about this is that they don’t only teach you how to use Groove. These expert and highly seasoned marketers also teach you how to get traffic and improve your conversions.

This is pretty awesome, as it’s something that a lot of people struggle with, especially beginners.

So, with Groove, you aren’t just getting an all-in-one funnel builder and business marketing tool. You also get free access to courses and knowledge that is worth thousands.

GrooveFunnels also hold regular webinars to help you get the most out of the platform.

GrooveCommunity

Last but not least, one of my favorite things about Groove is the community behind it.

The Facebook group has over 100,000 active members which also include Groove developers, Mike Filsaime, John Cornetta, and the other founding members as well.

This is great because you will be able to tap into a large group of like-minded people who can help and support you on your journey if you need it.

If you have questions about the platform, you can ask people in the group and they will be happy to help you out. You can also ask for tips on funnel building and marketing if you are looking for extra insight.

GrooveFunnels Pricing

GrooveFunnels have 4 pricing plans.

As I mentioned earlier, GrooveFunnels are one of the only funnel builders to offer a free plan.

Here is the pricing for each plan:

Groove Base – Free

Groove Silver – $99 per month

Groove Gold – $199 per month

Groove Platinum $299 per month

Below is a screenshot of the 4 pricing plans, and what you get with each.

Get A Free GrooveFunnels Account Here

From the pricing table above, you will see that you get 20% recurring commissions if you are promoting GrooveFunnels as an affiliate and you are on either the Base, Silver or Gold plan.

If you are on the platinum plan you will get 40% recurring commission as well as an additional 10% tier 2 commission.

GrooveFunnels Lifetime Deal

Depending on when you are seeing this review, there might still be time for you to get the GrooveFunnels lifetime deal.

If you’re interested in Groove then this is a great offer.

If you go for the lifetime deal, you will get full access to the Platinum level account for life as well as any upgrades and additions that are made to the software for a one time payment of $1397.

This is a special promotional deal and is only available until GrooveFunnels officially launches in October 2020.

To check whether The lifetime deal is still available, just follow these steps:

Step 1: Join GrooveFunnels for free here (No credit card required)

Step 2: In your dashboard, hit “upgrade”

Step 3: Scroll through the page to see any available deals

This deal is meant to stop early October, so if this option is still available when you are reading this, I highly recommend you consider it if you would like to have access to a funnel builder and the above listed features.

To put all this in perspective, below is a comparison table of how much all the GrooveApps would cost if you were to pay for them separately.

Get A Free GrooveFunnels Account Here

GrooveFunnels Pros and Cons

Like any other funnel builder out there, there will, of course, be some pros and cons to the platform.

Hopefully, if the platform’s good then there’ll be more pros than cons!

Here is my pros and cons list for GrooveFunnels:

Pros

Easy to use platform

Lots of very useful features

All-in-one business tool

Can integrate with a huge number of other software applications

Will help you save money on 3rd party services

You can track everything from the same dashboard

You can manage everything from the same dashboard

GrooveFunnels is helpful for a variety of business models

They have a free plan

They have a lifetime deal (only available until October 2020)

Has a rockstar team of highly successful and well-known marketers behind the brand

Training provided

Cons

Still in beta (at the time of writing this article – Official launch 2nd Oct 2020)

Some tools are not available yet

There’s a bit of a learning curve

What Others Say About GrooveFunnels

As you may have seen throughout this GrooveFunnels review, the platform is pretty awesome. I just wanted to show you what others say about GrooveFunnels as well to give you a better idea.

(Insert Screenshots)

3 Testimonials from Upgrade sales page – (https://groovefunnels.com/upgrade)

Facebook somebody saying they love it: (https://www.facebook.com/groups/GrooveDigitalOfficial/permalink/932335377191170)

User’s client very happy with Groove landing pages that look great: (https://www.facebook.com/groups/GrooveDigitalOfficial/permalink/997497984008242)

Based on my research, they are pretty happy with the platform.

GrooveFunnels FAQ’s

Q – How Long Is The GrooveFunnels Lifetime Deal Available For?

Answer: The GrooveFunnels lifetime deal is a special offer that is available up until the official launch in early October 2020.

The lifetime deal will give you full access to GrooveFunnels’ Platinum account for life for a one-time payment of $1,397. This deal also includes all future upgrades and additions to the platform.

Q – Is There A GrooveFunnels discount or Coupon Code?

Answer: Not at the moment. Currently, you have the option to get a free Base account or take advantage of the lifetime deal.

Q – Does GrooveFunnels Provide Free Hosting?

Answer: Yes, GrooveFunnels will host all of your funnels, landing pages, and videos for free. You get an unlimited amount of storage and bandwidth.

Q – Is There A Limit To The Number Of Custom Domains?

Answer: No, you can have an unlimited number of custom domains associated with your account.

Q – Can I Share Funnels With GrooveFunnels

Answer: Yes, you can share any of the funnels in your account with any other user. This is similar to the share funnel feature in ClickFunnels.

Q – Does GrooveFunnels Support A/B Testing?

Answer: Yes, you can run A/B split tests on any of your pages in your account.

Q – Does GrooveFunnels Integrate With Other Autoresponders?

Answer: Yes, GrooveFunnels is fully compatible with most of the leading autoresponder platforms including Aweber, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and more.

Q – Can I Request Feature Additions?

Answer: Yes, if you would like to make a feature suggestion then you can submit your requests here https://feedback.grooveapps.com.

Q – Is There a GrooveFunnels Affiliate Program?

Answer: Yes, GrooveFunnels have a great affiliate program. If you have a free Base, Silver, or Gold account then you will receive 20% recurring commissions on every active referral who signs up through your link.

If you have a Platinum account then you will receive 40% recurring commissions as well as an additional 10% on tier two affiliate referrals.

Q – Where Can I Get GrooveFunnels?

Answer: To get a GrooveFunnels account you first need to sign up for a free account here. Then, you can upgrade to a paid account at any time from within your dashboard.

GrooveFunnels Alternatives

After reading this GrooveFunnels review, you might have found that GrooveFunnels is or isn’t for you. Either way, I would like to show you 3 alternatives that may be better for you.

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is probably the most popular alternative. It has over 120,000 customers who love its ease of use, its features, and its vibrant community.

The features don’t quite stack up like GrooveFunnels’ do, but they do have:

Funnel/Page building features

Membership sites

Email automation

Affiliate management

Extensive marketing training

These are the core features, but it also has a lot of education material and a big community behind it. If you’re looking for a more finished product, instead of one which is still being developed, ClickFunnels could be a good choice for you.

You can try ClickFunnels free for 14 days here.

Kartra

Probably the closest comparable product to GrooveFunnels on the market, Kartra is another all-in-one marketing platform. It promises to have all the SaaS tools you need in one convenient place.

Mike Filsaime was also a founder of this software product but left it to create GrooveFunnels.

Just like ClickFunnels, it’s a bit more of a finished product, meaning you won’t be waiting for any features.

That being said, it doesn’t quite have as many features as GrooveFunnels will have, once it’s fully developed.

Some people say they prefer Kartra, others say that GrooveFunnels is an improved version of it.

Something cool about Kartra though, is that every pricing plan has all features available (apart from the Agency feature), so you can enjoy all of them, no matter which pricing plan you’re on.

The main differences between Kartra and GrooveFunnels as of right now are:

Kartra has better marketing automation (as of right now)

All Kartra’s features are fully developed

GrooveFunnels has faster-loading pages

GrooveFunnels has more features

If you would like to try it out, you can get a 14-day Kartra trial for $1.

SamCart

The final alternative you may also prefer is SamCart.

SamCart is a lot more focused on checkouts as the name may suggest. It has a page builder too, but it doesn’t have all the other features that GrooveFunnels has.

Although it does win in terms of analytics and, of course, the shopping cart features, it does lack in a lot of other areas when compared to Groove.

We took an in-depth look at this platform recently so if you would like more info about it then you can check out our SamCart review here.

Alternatively, if you want to take it for a test spin, you can get a SamCart free trial here.

Final Thoughts

As necessary as they are nowadays for online businesses, SaaS tools can get pretty expensive.

As we saw in the comparison earlier, you could burn through thousands of dollars per year. With GrooveFunnels, you get access to pretty much everything you need to build a profitable online business for much less than it would usually cost.

However, bear in mind that GrooveFunnels is still in beta, and some of the features are still yet to be made available.

Personally, I do think it is worth investing in GrooveFunnels, but I would recommend you try the free version first to see if you like it.

If you then decide that GrooveFunnels is right for you, then I highly recommend trying to upgrade to the lifetime deal as this will save you thousands of dollars over the months and years to come.

If you would like to check out Groove for yourself, you can click here to join the free version. If you would like to upgrade, you can once you are inside.

Get A Free GrooveFunnels Account Here

Disclaimer: Please be aware that I may receive commissions when you click some of the links in this article and then decide to make a purchase. If you do follow one of my links and purchase a product, thanks! It means a lot to me, and any commissions I do make from this blog enables me to continue to provide you with all this awesome, free content. However, any commissions I do receive does not affect my reviews and comparisons. If I think a product is sub-standard I will either say so in the article or I will not feature it on my blog. I try my best to keep things fair and balanced, in order to help you make the best choice for you.

[charlieharry1]

Dispelling the myths of search engine optimization (what you actually need to agree with)

In relation to search engine advertising and marketing, there’s a load of records available (even for us). Growing an seo method has in no way been more essential, however you need to navigate the good from the horrific. Search engine advertising offerings have changed plenty through the years. In reality, that’s a real understatement. There are, regularly, more than one updates a year from google and, as a end result, you need to retain adapting your search engine optimization method. Search  Digital Marketing Company in Newcastle engine optimization myths come hand in hand with these updates, such a lot of marketers are unsure as to what is previous, crucial and what is going to paintings. So, we’ve pulled together the maximum not unusual myths to debunk them and set you at the proper direction. Search engine optimization is a scam

Read Also:-  Pros and Cons of “Kajabi” Content Management Tool

excuse me? Seek engine advertising is, most simply, now not a rip-off. With the right digital advertising and marketing method, you can see vast boom in visitors, purchaser retention and sales. The under graph is a screenshot of the development possible in just one year whilst investing in an seo method. It isn't inconceivable to double your visitors in only 365 days – in particular in case you target the proper seek phrases and bring applicable and in-intensity weblog posts, maintaining your internet site often updated. Unfortunately, many agencies were approached by means of agencies promising search engine advertising offerings, however supply not anything. If you’ve paid £a hundred for one month’s paintings, and the organization promises to place you on the pinnacle of google, then that may be a rip-off. Top seo content material marketing and virtual strategies take time and studies. It’s not a one length fits all industry, however one that takes extreme patience and commitment. If you have that, a very good search engine optimization approach can prove extra rewards than greater traffic. We did it once

you may have executed it as soon as – two years in the past – however your digital advertising and marketing approach requires constant attempt. Google likes to throw an update into the pot each couple of months, and the evolving search engine algorithms could spell horrific information for a brand now not up to date with search engine optimization. Once accomplished and left seo strategies fall way underneath the mark, and could negatively have an effect on your enterprise. If you don’t always improve your search engine advertising approach, you are liable to:

 link rot (terrible backlinks and pages that now not move everywhere)

your competition entering into better positions in the search engines like google

outdated and not valuable content

 the above graph is one such example of a retailer’s site visitors present process a steady decline due to the shortage of a regular advertising method. The general customers have dropped from 10,444 to a outstanding 5,959. Key-word stuffing gets me to the top of google

it gained’t. Google is rapid turning into greater adept at analyzing natural language, and also you need to roll with the times. Stuffing key phrases into your text and turning it into a barely readable format is a large no-no. You wouldn’t visit dinner together with your friend and shout ‘restaurants newcastle’ every  minutes, so don’t do it to your blog. Likewise, google will see thru the ones people still hiding their phrases at the back of a white font…

 write as though you will speak to a human. Of route, use keywords however permit the item waft – you’ll then start to pick up long-tail keywords clearly, hence improving your site visitors. Plus, it’s possibly your bounce price will go through the roof in case your readers don’t understand what you are saying due to the sheer volume of keyword stuffing. The results are instantaneous

as an seo content material advertising and marketing and virtual enterprise, trust us while we are saying this would be a dream. Unfortunately, it’s no longer, and a very good search engine optimization strategy takes time and staying power. At glide, we love to spend the first month updating and making sure your technical seo is on point, before transferring onto the juicier obligations in month two and three. Month three is when you’ll begin to see the variations, and upgrades, in visitors and the adjustments applied. Likewise, if you have been looking at inbound links and virtual pr, it’s probably you’ll see the updates to your domain authority inside the ones  to 3 months. It’s now not immediately and there can also also be times you don’t see as plenty trade as you was hoping, but you'll reach that quit goal. As you could see from the above graph, the website started out with very few site visitors in april – from 320 to 3586 in 12 months. It takes time for the search engine optimization changes to take have an effect on, however it's going to pay off ultimately; that we are able to promise. Hyperlink building is lifeless

who began this hearsay? Hyperlink constructing isn't useless, but a treasured device to get your business in the front of the proper humans, at the proper time. We will understand why people may be wondering link building offerings – particularly as google’s john mueller stated he wouldn’t location to a whole lot recognition at the seo technique. But, this comment changed into misinterpreted and plenty of took this to mean google will penalise you for obtaining inbound links. They received’t. Not anything has modified inside the way google makes use of hyperlink authority of their search rating algorithms. White-hat hyperlink constructing has in no way been greater famous. John became, probable, regarding the extra black-hat techniques – purchasing 1,000 links for simplest £10 kind of component. This kind of non-applicable link constructing need to be avoided at all charges, and will see your website drop down in the search engines. But, constructing herbal hyperlinks is one of the greater a success sem offerings and will see your site visitors and area authority grow. Hyperlinks we have built 2018

P. C phrases will assist you rank organically

at the same time as there may be no denying that bidding on unique terms you want to rank for, optimising the page and enhancing your great rating will have an elevated impact on search engine optimization typical. But, bidding on those terms and doing genuinely not anything of value on your internet site, and customers, is awful. Very terrible, in fact. You’ll no longer see any signs and symptoms of improvement organically, and it’s probable your competitors will start to rank above – mainly in the event that they look at website optimisation and the like. You could manipulate google

no you may’t. A few days, it'd feel like google hates your internet site and seo in standard, but there’s no getting across the seek engine. Google states that seek engine advertising and marketing can ‘probably improve your site and save time’, and it’s quality to get in early with an search engine optimization corporation. However, attempt to control google and you’ll be sorry. You realize the form of digital advertising; tricking your clients into believing false reputation and relevance. You may nearly clearly be penalised in case you appoint black-hat techniques. Linking out loses site visitors

in case your content is useful, realistic, in-intensity and applicable on your audience, they will constantly come back – even in case you do link out to different web sites. Glaringly, linking out will send your traffic away, however that doesn’t mean your web site will no longer be successful. Far from it. Many excellent and popular web sites are so famous because of their linking to treasured assets. Don’t be afraid to percentage a link, as you may even get a reciprocal link in the close to destiny. Quantity is better than best

arrggggghhhh. It is not. There are websites, nowadays, that only have some pages on their products and services. However, they rank a lot higher in the search engines than those with hundreds of pages, and it’s due to the fine. Create pages and weblog posts in the event that they upload cost in your website and purchasers, however don’t just do it for the sake of ranking. At the same time as google does favour clean content material – and you have to ensure your blog is often up to date – posting normal on the same challenge will start to dilute preceding content, and also you’ll probable observe a drop in site visitors. Don’t worry about cell

there’s no getting round this factor – cell is vital. Google has been active at rolling out cell-first indexing, however what is it? Basically, cell-first indexing method the cellular model of your web site is google’s beginning vicinity to index. In case you do not have a mobile-pleasant site, the computer version will nonetheless be covered in the index. You’ll need to make certain that page velocity and cargo time are prioritised and, if feasible, improved. Take into account that your target audience are likely on their phone extra than ever before, and possibly even their number one approach for getting access to your web site. The number of mobile customers is persevering with to develop, heading for an predicted 5 billion in 2019 – those are numbers you can not ignore. Cellular optimised vs cellular responsive

i most effective want https on checkout pages

over 4 years in the past, google said it might shine a light on those websites with unencrypted connections. Google chrome is following thru with this promise, and calling out those web sites that aren't comfortable. You must have https implemented throughout all pages, not simplest to reassure those touchdown on your homepage, however it is the future of the web. Likewise, it protects the privacy and safety of your customers, subconsciously building accept as true with among your emblem and customers. In the long run, there are lots of seo myths on the internet nowadays. If you’re now not updated along with your virtual advertising and marketing approach, we propose studying up on the to be had resources – there’s plenty of data out there. However, if you would like to speak about our seek engine advertising and marketing services – you could get in contact with our crew via the contact shape below. Dan

dan

dan is a self-taught developer who has created hundreds of websites over the past 9 years. Right here at flow, he builds  Digital Marketing Agencies Newcastle websites to client specifications and facilitates hold present patron structures using his know-how of hypertext preprocessor, html, javascript and css. Whether or not the problem is huge or small, dan will find a approach to get a assignment returned on track.

Follow US:-  Facebook,  Twitter,  LinkedIn , YouTube

[jbkreviews]

VidSite Pro Review – 1-Click Plugin Creates High Converting Video Sites That RANK, Get you TRAFFIC, BUILD your LIST, and make you SALES

VidSite Pro *Review & Bonus Page*

Hi there, Are you interested in buying VidSite Pro? If yes, DON’T BUY VidSite Pro WITHOUT MY CHECKING OUT MY HUGE BONUS OFFER on this page. Keep on reading! as I share with you why VidSite Pro is a must-have product in your arsenals, then to give you more value for your money, I include my massive custom bonus offer when you make an order.

What’s better than free traffic? What’s the best way to drive traffic to your website? Content! Let’s face it, it’s not easy churning out content on a frequent basis to keep your website fresh and update.  INTRODUCING VidSite Pro!

VidSite Pro Overview

Сrеаtоr:  Lucas Price Рrоԁuсt:  VidSitePro Lаunсһ Dаtе:  04 Apr 20 Lаunсһ Тіmе:  09:00 EDT Оffісіаl ѕіtе: CLICK HERE Frоnt-Еnԁ Рrісе:  $17 Воnuѕеѕ:  ҮЕЅ, НUGЕ ВОNUЅ Rеfunԁ:  ҮЕЅ, 30 Dау Nо Qеѕtіоnѕ Аѕkеԁ Money – Back Guаrаntее Nісһе:  Video Ѕuрроrt:  Еffесtіvе Rеѕроnѕе Rесоmmеnԁеԁ:  Ніgһlу Rесоmmеnԁеԁ

VidSite Pro Review – What’s VidSite Pro All About?

VidSite Pro is a powerful new WP platform that creates traffic-generating video sites that RANK & PROFIT – all with just 1 click.

VidSite Pro is a fantastic WP plugin that builds you 1-click video sites like never before. It’s got high-quality templates, the most advanced video curator on the market and fully responsive design, all based on its breakthrough architecture.

What makes this stand out is that you can “lock” each video and force your visitors to sign up to your list, click ads or share it on social media before they can see the videos.

On top of that, it adds 100% unique content below each video by curating the audio and converting it to text (it’s insanely efficient at getting easy rankings)

This means you can setup entire sites that get them viral AND SEO traffic, build your lists on autopilot and gets you sales. It’s a true all-in-one money-making system.

Benefits & Features of VidSite Pro

⇒Groundbreaking 1-Click Autopilot Money Making Sites

⇒Best video curator on Earth automatically adds videos that CONVERT

⇒100% unique content SEO-optimized created for you

⇒Lock any video and ask visitors to perform certain actions (like, share, subscribe, click ad)

⇒Get viral traffic & sales with the push of a button

⇒Built-In Lead Generation System Builds Your List On Autopilot

⇒Sell ANY product with beautiful banners

⇒Fully integrated with Amazon

⇒Professional Stats + Reporting Inside The Admin Panel

⇒SEO Built-In Turning Your Site Into a #1 Ranking Beast

⇒Mobile Responsive Design

Top Qualities of VidSite Pro

♥ Incredibly Newbie Friendly

♥ BEST support to make sure you are 100% happy with your purchase

♥ Complete Training

♥ Results-oriented, guaranteed to achieve results

♥ Easy to get started 

♥ Massive bonus offers included

♥ 30 days money-back guarantee

VidSite Pro Review – Demo Video & How It Works

You will realize that with the RAW power of VidSite Pro it takes 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Select a niche and keyword Step 2: Auto-generate a complete SEO-enabled video site Step 3: Sit back and enjoy organic traffic AND a hungry list of subscribers

That’s correct – this setup has an in-build lead gen module that builds your list while you sleep.

SEE IT IN ACTION

Price of VidSite Pro

Frontend: VidSite Pro – $16.97

OTO1: VidSite Pro Elite – $37 Tons of extra features including drip feed capabilities, developers license. analytics and a brand new system of getting guaranteed #1 rankings.

OTO2: VidSite Pro White Label – $57 Get WHITELABEL license to VidSite Pro. Keep 100% of what a customer pays when you refer them to our website. Use all our marketing pages, our amazing high converting videos and our sales copy to make all your sales.

OTO3: Mega Membership – $89 Lifetime Membership to my Make Money Mega Membership that includes 60 WordPress Niche Blogs. WP Plugins, eBooks and Training Videos with Resell Rights. Apps, Software, Training Videos & More. Plus new products added every month

  VidSite Pro Review – MY CUSTOM BONUS OFFER

Bonus #1

Bonus #2

Bonus #3

Bonus #4

Bonus #5

Bonus #6

My Unannounced Special Bonus Offer

FREE BONUS #1: Amazon Affiliate Profits

Finally! A Simple, But Proven Way To Cash-In Huge With Amazon! Stop Chasing Tiny Affiliate Commissions, This is How You Make 6 Figures with Amazon, The Easy Way!

FREE BONUS #2: Amazon Affiliate Profits Video Upgrade

Amazon.com is the number one ecommerce retailer, visited by over 250 million people in any given month.

Becoming an Amazon affiliate will only take you about 5 to 10 minutes of your time. There is an endless number of products to promote and you can earn high commissions that add up with each sale.

But trying to profit from Amazon is extremely difficult if you don’t know what you are doing.

With this video course, you will learn how to become a Supper Amazon Affiliate so you can finally achieve your goal of working from home, doing something that you really love, and making lots of money in the process.

Topics covered:

What’s Amazon.com all about?

How do you make money with Amazon as an affiliate?

Why Amazon Affiliate Marketing is your best choice

Picking a Hot Amazon Niche

Selecting some Hot Products to Promote

Creating an Amazon Affiliate Website

Creating Product Oriented Content

Creating Your Amazon Associates Account

Linking your Amazon Affiliate Links

Promoting your Amazon Affiliate Website

Building an Amazon Affiliate Empire the Right Way

Amazon Native Shopping Ads

Embedding an Amazon aStore into Facebook

Other Amazon Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Consider

FREE BONUS #3: Commission Overdrive Video Guide

Follow A Complete System For Gearing Up A High-Speed Affiliate Campaign That Generates Nonstop Profits!

If you wish to make thousands if not millions online, affiliate marketing is a good business model that you can get started fast.

Now if you have been in the industry for a while now and you want to speed up your commissions in no time, learning these advance affiliate marketing campaign strategies inside is essential.

FREE BONUS #4: Diet Plans Video Site Builder

With this powerful software, you can build your own professional looking site in just 2 minutes! Site is built automatically – just fill in a short form with your details and your site is built instantly, ready to upload to your web host.

Features included:

120 videos sourced from YouTube. When you use the software, it fetches the latest selection of the most popular videos for this particular niche. So when you build your site, you can be sure it will be fully up to date with the very latest videos.

Content provided by extracting random snippets from a set of 20 private label articles, ensuring that your pages are unique and contain niche-targeted content. (Most other video site builders scrape the content from YouTube, so the pages are just duplicates of the YouTube pages and rated as worthless by search engines).

Optional Adsense ad units, featuring your Adsense ID, on each video page.

Optional custom text ad units (instead of Adsense ad units) on each video page. You can advertise anything you want (such as affiliate links). The custom text ads are entered just by editing a simple text file.

A large Amazon ad unit, featuring your Amazon ID, on each video page.

Video site search box, allowing your visitors to search video titles for a particular word.

Randomly generated cross links on all pages to make the site structure different to that of any other website – and to ensure full search engine spidering of your site.

Professional looking home pages, featuring thumbnails of each video.

And much more!

FREE BONUS #5: Ebook Jackpot Video Course

This 9-part video course will teach you how to build your backlinks by utilizing PDF files and uploading them to high authority sites. Also, it will teach you how to convert that traffic into sales using a successful long-term conversion SEO strategy.

Some of the topics covered:

Choosing Your Attack Plan

Creating Your Content

Types of Hyperlinks

Things You Need To Gather

PDF Conversion Softwares

Advanced Hyperlinks

Backlinks

FREE BONUS #6: Email List Secrets Video Tutorial

Now You Can Get Instant Access To 10 HOT, Over-The-Shoulder, Step-By-Step Video Tutorials. Download And Start Playing These Videos Tutorials Right From The Comfort Of Your Home!

How to Promote Your Mailing List? This would be some of the questions that most internet marketers and bloggers are asking successful internet marketers. With a Blog Probably the most common way to promote and grow a mailing list is through a landing page. This is a single page on your website that will be dedicated to selling the merits of signing up.

It will detail what the new subscribers can expect to get from signing up and it will provide the opt-in form where they can go ahead and enter their email address and name. But while this can work well, it’s important not to overlook one of the other most effective ways to grow a mailing list: through your blog.

The first of these things is that a blog is well-suited to gaining more traffic via Google. Google brings people to websites based on the content. This is what people are searching for in the first place in most cases and it is what you use in order to provide value for your readers.

Simply by blogging regularly, you can get more people to actively look for the page where your opt-in form will be and this is something that you wouldn’t have been able to accomplish as easily with a landing page – seeing as that will only have a small amount of copy focused on promoting the list.

FREE BONUS #7: Internet Cash Genie

Discover How You Can Quickly And Effortlessly Uncover An Exact Roadmap To Systematically Conquering Any Niche Market You Want!

The information you’re about to receive is nothing short of priceless, ultimately putting you in a position where your competition will no longer matter.

Not only because their business will be virtually irrelevant, but because your business will be so secure you won’t have any serious competition. How is it done? Actually, it’s quite easy… Inside these pages, you’ll find specific strategies, ones that will allow any type of business to stand above everyone else in their customers’ eyes. And by implementing these strategies, your business will be seen as the only possible source for your products.

Most importantly, you can start experiencing that kind of success within minutes of completing this book. In fact, you’ll probably even get your first “eureka” moment within the first few pages!

Before you begin, though, make sure you grab a pen and paper. With so many new ideas and how to apply these tactics to your business, you’re definitely going to feel the urge to take notes.

FREE BONUS #8: Internet Marketing Fast Money

Learning All About Internet Marketing Instant Money Can Have Amazing Benefits For Your Life And Finances!

Have you discovered yourself in an unforeseen financial situation wanting to get your hands on some extra revenue in a hurry? You’re not alone!

We’ve all been confronted with out of the blue troubles that call for income; your car needs service, you need to replace the leaky roof on your home, or you’ve opened your mail to find the utility company was undercharging you and they’ve slapped you with a big bill. Whatever the cause, spots like these may fast put you in a state of terror.

Luckily, among the great things about having an online business is that there are a lot of ways to increase your revenue within your own business. You don’t have to resort to half-baked schemes and bizarre business opportunities in an attempt to get the finances you need, as a matter of fact, all the income you require is already available; all you have to do is tap into it.

This book will furnish you with a number of easy techniques you’ll be able to put into action at once to pump up your cash flow! Internet Marketing Instant Money Hands down the fastest cash generating methods on the Internet!

Below are the things that you are about to learn:

Have A Sale

Incomplete Items

Boost Value Of An Existing Product

Contests

Write Reports

Past Buyers

Webinar

Sell Domain Names

Coupons

Hit The Warriors

And so much more…

FREE BONUS #9: Internet Marketing For Newbies

Unveiled At Last! Get traffic and maximize earnings!

WHAT IF YOU FIND A BETTER WAY OF ATTRACTING MILLIONS OF VISITORS TO YOUR WEBSITE? WHAT IF YOU WERE ABLE TO INCREASE YOUR CUSTOMERS AT THE SNAP OF A FINGER? SOUNDS INTERESTING, DOESN’T IT?

Leverage on some brand new internet marketing tactics to drive traffic and multiply your profits!

Have you spent months of hard work on unravelling cyberspace methodologies? Are you deploying the newest trends to boost your profits but to no avail? Have you attempted to use Facebook to attract traffic, yet results elude you? STOP! It’s time you learnt some new gimmicks.

FREE BONUS #10: Internet Marketing For Newbies Deluxe

Upgrade Today To Become An Expert At Internet Marketing And Get Better Results… Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible!

There are two main approaches to internet marketing. One of them works. The problem is that the vast majority of people who start out are going to get the wrong advice and they’re going to start off with the other type of internet marketing.

Just take a look at one of the big marketing forums like Black Hat World or Warrior Forum and you will quickly learn the predominant attitude toward internet marketing. A lot of people view this as a system that can be hacked, as something that you can win at through sheer volume and spam.

And that’s what results in some very low-quality websites making their way onto the web. You will have encountered the sort. These are the sites that are covered in adverts and that are shameless about promoting affiliate products. These are the sites that are filled with near-illegible writing, written in pidgin English and filled with repetitive keywords. These are the sites that don’t have any brand to speak of but rather just a title that also happens to be the keyword.

FREE BONUS #11: Internet Marketing Lifestyle Video Upgrade

Upgrade Today To Become An Expert At Internet Marketing And Get Better Results… Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible!

Being an internet marketer is an amazing job in many different ways. This is a type of work that allows you to work from home, to be your own boss and to enjoy the incredible sense of accomplishment that comes from making money through a business that you own and create.

You can work from anywhere, explore the world and potentially make a lot of money without having to work all that many hours. But while all this is true, there are also a number of pitfalls and challenges associated with working for yourself.

One of these is the simple fact that you might end up with a little too much freedom. You may find yourself struggling with the discipline required to make sure you go to bed on time every day or wake up on time to get the maximum work done each morning!

Likewise, you might find yourself struggling with the urge to procrastinate or the soul-destroying feeling you can get from doing the same work day in and day out.

And then there’s the health side of it – the mental and physical health implications of working from home and facing the kind of stress that comes from running your own business and having clients demanding your time and effort at all times of the day.

In this guide, we’re going to take a brief look at some of the health challenges associated with internet marketing, as well as some of the psychological stresses that you’ll face.

Ultimately, we’ll see how you can manage your work-life balance and protect your health so that you can enjoy feeling fitter, healthier and happier than ever before – all while getting more work done!

FREE BONUS #12: Pin Your Way to Power

Increase your Pinterest Power Today! How Much Do You Know About Pinterest? It’s Time to Discover How to Explode Your Business With The Power of Pinning!

If you’re a marketer and you’re not on Pinterest, then you’re missing out on one of the biggest and the most flexible/powerful platforms out there. Pinterest may not be quite as big as Facebook in terms of pure users but it’s actually not as far behind as you might think. What’s more, it has a ton of unique features that present excellent opportunities for the savvy marketer.

The main problem that brands seem to have when it comes to Pinterest is that they don’t see how they can get it to relate to them. Pinterest is very visual and creative, it’s made up of images that people pin to their ‘boards’ and that others can then comment on or ‘re-pin’.

Thus it clearly lends itself to companies that have an artistic, trendy, stylish or visual side. But how can this possibly be useful for a company that sells life insurance? Or for a blogger who is promoting the ‘work online’ lifestyle?

And seeing as Facebook and Twitter are so much bigger, does it really matter?

Well, the first thing you should get out of your head is the idea that Pinterest isn’t that big. In fact, Pinterest currently has 100 million users which are really pretty massive – and a subset of the market that you just can’t ignore.

Below is a few of the information that you are about to learn inside:

Why is Pinterest So Powerful?

Pinterest Basics

Popular Uses for Pinterest

Marketing With Pinterest

The Pinterest Interface

Your Strategy

Advanced Techniques

How Businesses Use Pinterest

Your Pinterest Plan

And so much more…

FREE BONUS #13: Pinterest Traffic Pulsewave

Learn The Secrets For Using Pinterest To Generate Hordes of Viewers To Any Page You Want!

If you’re a marketer and you’re not on Pinterest, then you’re missing out on one of the biggest and the most flexible/powerful platforms out there. Pinterest may not be quite as big as Facebook in terms of pure users but it’s actually not as far behind as you might think. What’s more, it has a ton of unique features that present excellent opportunities for the savvy marketer.

The main problem that brands seem to have when it comes to Pinterest is that they don’t see how they can get it to relate to them. Pinterest is very visual and creative, it’s made up of images that people pin to their ‘boards’ and that others can then comment on or ‘re-pin’. Thus it clearly lends itself to companies that have an artistic, trendy, stylish or visual side. But how can this possibly be useful for a company that sells life insurance? Or for a blogger who is promoting the ‘work online’ lifestyle?

And seeing as Facebook and Twitter are so much bigger, does it really matter? Well, the first thing you should get out of your head is the idea that Pinterest isn’t that big. In fact, Pinterest currently has 100 million users which are really pretty massive – and a subset of the market that you just can’t ignore. Also interesting is that 85% of those 100 million users are female.

This is quite unique for any social network and provides you with a great way to reach a female audience – something that a lot of blogs and brands could stand to do a little more effectively. 42% of all adult women in the US use Pinterest which is massive – and actually 13% of males do which is still rather significant.

While Pinterest has a ton of users, it also has the advantage of being a platform that visitors can enjoy without signing up. That means that your potential reach is in fact much larger than you might at first have thought. Pinterest is also one of the fastest-growing platforms and is expected to acquire another 47.5 million users in 2015. So you need to be on Pinterest and this is especially true once you realize that there are plenty of ways you can succeed on the platform even if your niche isn’t terribly creative or visual.

FREE BONUS #14: Rule Reddit

Discover The Ultimate Way To Go Viral And Have Your Traffic Explode! Learn How You Can Manipulate Reddit To Drive Unlimited Traffic To Your Site With Precision. What Are You Waiting For? This Is Free Traffic!

When it comes to digital marketing and promoting websites and businesses online, a lot of attention is given to Google and to conventional social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While those are all important and powerful aspects of an online campaign, they are far from the only options available to you and it may just be that there are easier and more effective ways to get a lot of eyes on your business and to increase your sales and profits.

One such alternative avenue, for instance, is Reddit. Reddit is a site that can get you thousands and thousands of hits from a single post if you get it right and that gives you a direct route to market and an easy way to find a highly targeted audience.

Put simply, Reddit is potentially just as powerful as Facebook or Twitter and possibly even more so depending on your niche/industry. This is something you can’t afford to ignore.

Read on and look in-depth at how Reddit works and how to make the absolute most of this incredibly useful platform. You might just find it’s the ultimate way to have your traffic go viral and to truly explode.

Below are some of the important information that you are about to learn:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Identifying Your Audience

Chapter 3: Planning a Successful Post and Strategy

Chapter 4: What Type of Content Thrives on Reddit and Gets Shares?

Chapter 5: Making Self-Posts

Chapter 6: Advanced Techniques and Conclusion

And so much more…

FREE BONUS #15: Sales Funnel Playbook

Get Instant Access To A Practical Hands-On Video Course With 17 Over The Shoulder Video Tutorials Showing You HOW TO DO IT!

FREE BONUS #16: Sales Lead System

Do you find it difficult to find all the leads that you need for success? Discover The Secrets To Getting More Leads And Have A Massive Boost In Your Business!

Network marketing advertising is an important way to attract the right kind of leads for the business campaign as in most cases generating the desired revenue cannot only come from the focus on the sales aspects of the business.

The network marketing advertising tool can be used to generate the prospects that might have some inclination to actually undertaking to do the business if they are able to be convinced of its merits.

However, from the very beginning of the campaign, the development programs for recruitments should be done with the highest levels of honesty and integrity elements in place. This will help to give the prospects the confidence in the venture as there has been a lot of bad press linked to network marketing in the past.

Inside this eBook, you are about to learn the most essential information about this technique:

Network Marketing Ad Basics

Blogging

Article Marketing

Video Marketing

E-mail Marketing

Pay Per Click

Banner Ads

Social Marketing

Brochures And Direct Mail

Face To Face Marketing

And so much more…

How to claim your bonuses

1. Click on the buy now button above or any of my affiliate links/buttons on this page. 2. Go through the order process successfully. 3. After completion of your order, access your bonus offer from the product’s access page on JVZoo or WarriorPlus. Downloading the bonus offer above is automatic and instant.

For Clickbank products, please forward your ‘Purchase Receipt’ to admin@marvyreviews.com to receive your bonus.

4. That’s it. You get your bonuses automatically when you order IM products from marvyreviews.com. We give you 100% honest reviews plus our massive bonuses, giving you value for money.

VidSite Pro Review Conclusion – Why I Highly Recommend You Buy This Product

You would like VidSite Pro and I highly recommend it because VidSite Pro Builds Instant 1 Click Seo Optimized Video Sites That Get You Traffic Build Your List And Make You Sales. Completely Done For You High Converting Video Sites In 60 Seconds Flat.

VidSite Pro

VidSite Pro is a fantastic WP plugin that builds you 1-click video sites like never before. It's got high-quality templates, the most advanced video curator on the market and fully responsive design, all based on a breakthrough architecture.

Product SKU: VidSitePro

Product Brand: VidSitePro

Product Currency: USD

Product Price: 17

Price Valid Until: 2020-04-11

Product In-Stock: 1

Editor's Rating: 9.8

from JBK Reviews https://www.jbklutse.com/reviews/vidsite-pro-review-bonus/

[littlewalken]

Jan 9

The heads came in but there’s no decent natural light scheduled for pictures. Brushing Barbie hair is a great way to spend rainy days.

The whole doll is another Durham Charly, marked on her back.

Whitney just needs a brushing and Francie’s hair is pretty good, Wendy’s I am 50-50 because the part on her head is pretty crappy but the ponytail is okay for her age.

Found out I had bought a much better conditioned and pretty nice haired tan lines skin cancer skipper some time ago, so everyone here will get rerooted. Haven’t decided if Stacey will go with the Titian (tih-shen) shade of red nylon I have or something else. 

Petite’s hair needs a brushing, she has yellow lips so she might be a disco version. PJ’s hair is great. SIndy’s will be reassessed after a brushing. Miss America just needs a brushing. 

I’m not a vintage doll collector but I know enough that if her original hair is doable than she can keep it. So all in all Stacey will probably get her original color matched and I’ll do what I can to style it authentically but it’ll be obvious she didn’t come with it. If we ever part ways I don’t want anyone getting fooled.

Lance’s girlfriend Cool Tops Courtney is a same as she came with reroot. It was bad late 80s falling out from too much loving. She could have had any color she wanted but I can’t see her with anything else but that shade. A couple more of the Courtneys could use a touch up and I might do some of the Skippers in fantasy colors. The only ones who will take their bad home perms to their graves are the Pet Pals girls.

Bodies wise for the vintage girls do you know how fun it would be to have jointed Fashionistas for them? Francie would be Petite, Stacey would be Tall, and PJ would be Curvy. 

I was thinking I could see if one of the Pivotal girls (hit a sale on some damaged box collectors Barbies years ago) would fit Francie’s clothes without blowing out the bust then I remembered they came with outfits no one else will fit. From what I saw of Francie’s torso the smaller bust Tall or Petite would do better but I’d have to fight wanting joints between matching skin tones. 

There will be a trip to Toys R Mine, possibly the Mattel store but why pay full price, and perhaps the junk store but I’d rather go TPC matching skin tone Fashionistas than loose 100 poses non matching won’t fit the stuff. 

Or in other words doll shit. 

To add to things where ever those vintage Francie clothes came from, I’m assuming a junk run, there’s a Miss America dress for that blonde Barbie too. She’s the closest in age to that vintage Barbie case. Still though I think I’ll just sell off the two vintage cases, I have Memberberries with the double wide and 80s pink one. 

The Whitney is a weird one, her individually painted hairs painted eyebrows helped ID her. I have the Jewel Secrets Barbie paper dolls, they were $1 as opposed to real dolls being $10, and I think her big dress skirt was also a drawstring bag. However it was she’s big in to Sapphires and looks like she’s meant to wear a lot of silver and blue. Her native body would be a bent arm TnT but aside from a couple of for reference models all of my Barbies are upgraded to some form of joints.

Now if matching skin tone worse comes to worse Disney Princesses come in pale and I can just pop over to a Disney Store and be done with it. Still though the excuse to get a Tall and Curvy is there. Nothing says Miss America and Whitney can’t be...

I had momentary hopes the Juku could fit the Bratz clothes and I’d put the Bratz in storage storage and let the Juku have their case. Then I got reminded I did get enough Bratz stuff to already fill that case and there wouldn’t be room any way. 

I’ll figure out something for them, there’s got to be an Engrish inspired thing somewhere for them. It was a spot of luck to find all 4 of them and all 4 outfit packs on sale on Boxing Day, only took 2 Targets because someone else wanted something else that was an exclusive. They aren’t going anywhere or getting any make-overs, they’re adorable and FRUiTS magazine subscribed as they are. How the hell can they have better joints than Barbies? 

Must not call them Davina, Fletchin, Martina, and Alana... If you can’t tell the one in the pink skirt has green eyes. 

I’m thinking about other stuff too but dolls and arranging the closet better so I can arrange the room better have been at the forefront, along with a lot of Ignoritall. 

I have been wondering if there’s a follow up to The Hardly Blokes but sometimes like a wet jumper contest you must let perfection stay as it is. Not everything need a sequel. Unless it’s a tidy wrap up to a couple of the supporting characters in The Last Unicorn by the original author because he realizes how much other people care for these characters too. If you’ve watched it take the time to read it.  

All that’s keeping me from finishing what might be the Last Monster is old fashioned eyestrain. I’m old kids, I’d really like one of those magnifier ring light things to be at the store when I’m there with my money. 

[eldiscriminado]

Stream upgrades Ezra

Gaming keyboard with mouse Link of the Top Sold was not working.It had 1.1k sold but first two pages had shit reviews, I think one of the products above was the same IIRc. This one seemed to have better reviews. Not sure why there were a lot of shit reviews and 1.1k sales but that’s neither here nor there. I’ll be using this with the Lenovo and if I could get a better gaming laptop I’ll use these too. I’ll use this so I won’t wreck my Lenovo for more peripheral-intensive games.

Table

Cheapest misting fan I could find no reviews but cheapest and worth a try. I have to pour icewater on my shirt since I can’t stream shirtless, and even then shirtless won’t mean I won’t feel hot. I’m working on getting both air conditioning in my room and moving to a new apartment with air conditioning, but this is the next best thing

Another misting fan. from Priciest-Cheapest but obviously more quality is guaranteed. This one has tubes in front of the blades

Industrial misting fan probably the best option since I remember this in my school and it was like the North Pole when we were in the gym doing mass–not religious, but it was hot, which was the point

Audio splitter Likely my best and cheapest option to get a proper microphone and make you not hear fan noise. I already did the settings on this video on my OBS, so having this is a good upgrade.

USB audio splitter Worth a try.

Microphone with shock mount, arm, clam, wind muff, and funnily a pop filter which I somehow overlooked best way to remove the fan noise

Surge protector Searched top sales, realized I’m in a 3rd world country so cheap can’t always be good. ESPECIALLY with stuff like these. So I went with Shopee Mall top sales.

Cooling fan for laptop 

24/7 PC I have a feeling I have to get this built. I also kinda want it easily upgraded. Still looking for a place to get it + the price. Might end up being a gaming PC that’s used for streaming too then get another dedicated streaming PC (I think for chat too).

Table I don’t think it would be bad to get one. Plus I kinda need it for my PC if I’m going to upgrade it. I don’t think this table will do. 

Update 30/12/2019 12:12 AM:

Experimental gaming chair

Seat cushion for experimental gaming chair

Something like Jordan Peterson’s chair

Exactly what I envisioned a gaming chair would be

Same as above but actually has a video (this is a cheaper version)

Table above wasn’t working (link dead). So I found a new one

2:44 am

Bigger fridge Ansons link 

Update Jan 02, 2020: Moved Ezra PC upgrades post to Stream upgrades Ezra

I actually looked for a PC in PC Express, but it didn’t include a streaming PC so I decided to do my research first and it resulted currently in a custom PC with streaming PC and gaming PC plus cable management. It would need a new table and probably some place to put my other stuff since I would probably end up wanting it clean. I’ll only mainly do this so I don’t wreck my Lenovo laptop because of how heavily I use it,

Components:

Table (it’s in my other wishlist)

Cable management service

PC building service

PC parts

Cooling

Peripherals (by the you’d know I’d cheap out until I move to another country and I wouldn’t have to worry as much about these people trying to destroy me since I speak a different language and like different stuff)

Capture card (have a feeling might need this)

Streaming PC

Gaming PC

Monitor

I’ll actually leave this in Ezra even after I move to Avida. I would want to “oscillate” between all my places so I don’t feel overwhelmed all the time. Which means I’ll work on getting place-specific setups.

I’ll be adding these as soon as I can, so check back often if you are curious.

Side story: the PC Express PC had Razer headphones, Razr mouse, I think a BenQ monitor, I think that’s it. Plus the PC was pre-built I think. Obviously the headphones are immaculate to me so I won’t tarnish them in this country.

[annakie]

In Cars, Part One

Like a lot of kids, I didn’t get my own car when I turned 16.

My older brother got one. He got an old, even for 1990, Chevy Malibu.  It wasn’t a great car, but it was a car, that ran, that up to 6 teenagers could fit in, so it was pretty great anyway.

When I turned 16 a year and a half later, my parents said I could use his car, and mom’s car, and if I need to, the Chieftan.

I mostly had to share mom’s car, a 1985 Oldsmobile Delta 88.  But sometimes, if all the other cars were in use, I got to drive the 1955 Pontiac Chieftan, which my parents had lovingly restored themselves a few years earlier.  It didn’t have power steering, or AC, or great breaks or... seatbelts.  The radio only worked some of the time and only on the strongest signals. But it sure as hell looked cool to drive. Sometimes I even got to drive it to school, and boys who otherwise wouldn’t know I existed would crowd around the car and ask to see under the hood.

Best memory: Waking up late for my SAT’s, having a bowl of ice cream for breakfast because we were out of just about everything I could quickly eat, and driving to the other side of town way, way over what speed dad told me it would be OK to drive to make it there on time. I walked in with seconds to spare.

When I went off to college, my grandma gifted me her 1985 Cutlass Sierra.  She’d named it Pierre, and naming the cars I loved became sort of a thing with me.  It also didn’t have (working) AC, and had questionable power steering and only a working radio but no tape deck, but I mean, it was mine.  I usually kept my jambox in the passenger’s side seat to actually listen to music I wanted to listen to, and with most of my college friends not having any car at all, it was way better than nothing.

Best Memory: there was some dumb legend in a town nearby the college about a ghost out on some road and if you flashed your car lights the ghost would flash back.  It was something to do, so many nights I’d load up the car with friends and drive out there, hang out and talk, just to have something to do.

The college I went to for my freshman year was a private school, and crazy expensive. My parents told me that if I came home and went to UTEP, that they’d buy me my own, decent car.  With AC.  And a tape deck.

Ever since Saturns had been introduced a few years earlier, I really wanted a Saturn, more than anything else.  I knew it was out of reach for awhile, but once the idea of having my own car was planted, I held my breath and dutifully test drove many cars my parents suggested until I broached the idea of a Saturn.  They were sure it’d be too expensive to get a new one, and we hadn’t seen any used ones that whole time, but really, to humor me, we went to the Saturn dealership.

The lowest-end model was just at the top of the price range they were willing to spend.  But there was a hitch.  It only came in standard.  I didn’t know how to drive standard.

The sales guy had been keeping an eye on my face, though I had been trying really hard not to beg and look too hopeful, and threw a set of keys to my mom.

“Take this one home overnight.  Teach her to drive standard on it.  If she learns, and you like it, when you bring it back tomorrow we’ll talk.”

So I drove my mom’s car home while she drove a 1994 blue-black Saturn SL to our house.  Once I was parked, I hopped in the driver’s side of the Saturn and my mom explained how to use the clutch and gear shifter.  We did a few practice runs with air-pedals and then started the car.

I couldn’t get it to go.  It stalled out every time.  Three or four times, until I noticed the shit-eating grin on mom’s face.

“What?” I asked.

“Check the gear shift.  It’s in third.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You want to start it in neutral.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before!?!”

“Because now you’ll never make this mistake again.”

She was right, I didn’t.

Within about 20 minutes I was driving stick shift like I’d been doing it since birth.  I quickly learned that I loved driving a standard car.

The next day, the car was mine.  

It had AC, and a tape deck with the upgraded stereo system and absolutely no more other non-standard features.

My grandma was sad to see the Sierra go, for real this time.

I LOVED that Saturn.  So much.  It was my favorite thing.  I washed it three times a week, I always offered to drive.  I learned to change the oil.  I treated it with loving care for several years.  I moved to Dallas in that car, after filling it up with most of my worldly possessions.

I named it Nicholas James Kenneth Zacary Nolan (because of the letters and numbers on the license plate), but just called him Nicky.

Best memories out of many, many:

1) In college, realizing that a guy who I knew liked me, who I’d only been thinking of as a friend for awhile, was a really awesome person and I should give him a shot, after all our friends arranged for us to drive back from a camping trip alone.  We talked, and laughed, and he fell asleep for awhile, and I looked over at him and my heart leaped and I just thought. “Oh.  I’m dumb.  He’s great. Let’s give this a shot.”  A few weeks later, we were together, and he’s the one who got away. (That’s way too long of a story here.)

2) Teaching my friend Stephen how to drive standard in that car.  He was doing great, but then he lost his footing, the car rolled forward out of a parking lot, into a street and came within inches of smashing into a parked car.  Stopped juuuust in time, and we still have a good laugh about how horrible that would have been.

I drove that car for like 7 years and 100k miles before too many things started going wrong with it (Saturns, especially earlier models, were not known for their reliability).  I had, luckily, by then gotten a decent job, and once my parents agreed, I went and traded it in one night for not a lot of money, and got a green 2002 or something Kia Spectra.

Ah yes, the Kia Spectra.  That certainly was a car.  I recall how it had gray interior and uh... oh a sunglasses cubby hole in the ceiling and uh... how it did have air conditioning and a tape deck, even though cars were starting to have CD players by then.

Look, I barely remember that thing.  I had it for like, idk 2 or 3 years.  I couldn’t go over 70 in it.  It was a standard.  It ran well while I had it.  I got out before it wasn’t running so well.  Early Kias were also not know for reliability.  I hear they’re way better now.

Best memory: Uh, that was the car I had when I bought my house.  So.... that, I guess?  God, I have practically blocked that thing out.  It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t notable, in any way.  I think the only picture I have of it is really a picture of the garage while the car happened to be parked in it.

Part two, wherein I fall in love all over again, tragedy strikes, and many years of mediocrity happen before a triumphant finale (for now).