#btw we all know that executive producers differ from one to the other right

[hislittleraincloud]

If you scroll far back enough to October 2023, you can see her reposts and where she stands.

I know you’re not a Percy fan, but this circles back to him and how people tore apart his alt account (that didn’t even have his actual name attached to it). Where are those people for this person? Since they love holding people accountable for their actions and words. The hypocrisy is insane.

Don't need to scroll back that far to be able to tell that she's a Zionist. One of those mealy-mouthed ones who say (and repost, like she did) stuff like this: "As an Israeli and a Jew, I want innocent Palestinians to have every freedom and dignity possible. But I will never accept anyone telling me Palestinian rights should or can be grabbed through mass murdering Jews." as if Israel hasn't been continuously fucking the Palestinians for decades since its inception (and is fucking it now, with 42,000 Palestinian casualties vs. 1,700 Israeli casualties).

I was far too old when I dove into the history of the region, but I did, after Rachel Corrie's death. While I studied some International Relations, Middle East/Gaza conflict escaped my modules, so I caught up after she was bulldozed by the IDF.

The war did not start on October 7, 2023, but people like to pretend that it did. It's never too late to learn about the atrocities, not just towards Palestinians. My Jewish friend/neighbor had no clue that Israeli officials admitted to giving birth control to Jewish Ethiopian (read: Black) migrants without their consent until I informed her of said fucked up fact this past spring. There's a lot of shitty things that state has done, and criticizing it should not be equated with anti-Semitism.

But back to Alpert herself. What exactly can those vicious little Wenclairs do? You know they're gonna watch W2 regardless (as will I...just to see how shitty it turns out to be, since it's really Millar & Gough's show and they don't know how to tighten up their stories). Alpert probably stayed on the team as both writer and EP; can't say that for certain, but given the nominations the show received (the bar really is very low*), I'd want to stay on as well.

*The bar is very, very low given their win for this:

when the special effects makeup for Wednesday and Thornhill/Gates at the end of the episode was utterly fucked and incongruous.

What will people do? They don't really give a fuck what their creators think or do, so long as there's an opportunity to virtue signal on an issue that makes them believe themselves to be free of moral blemishes, and it's created an atmosphere of vigilante discourse, where everyone's afraid to say any goddamn thing in fear of being canceled.

As for White, I don't think I said I wasn't a fan, I said I'm not a stan. I don't think I've even had the opportunity to become a White fan because I've only seen his work in Wednesday. Really want to see that craptastic romcom he made with Ortega, and My Old Ass.

To address the other shit, I simply cannot say anything either way, since one of the main defense articles I was sent was full of broken links to the accusers' accounts/deleted tweets (and the spam that Isis bombarded me with was irrelevant and nonsensical shit, save for her insistence on sending me the nudes and not comprehending what in fuck I was trying to tell her in her own native fucking language; escrevo um português muito básico, mas ela estava a responder como alguém gravemente subdesenvolvido neurologico 💀).

He was accused of some heinous shit, and as of today, October 8, 2024, there hasn't been a whisper or word that any cases are going forward with prosecution, or that these accusers are even standing their ground. Trump's accusers have always stood their ground. Weinstein's, Epstein's. Not a tweet or article rescinded or deleted. Hynes White isn't and has never been some kind of power player (despite being a nepo baby) in the industry and those girls have little to fear by standing their ground, especially when fucking Danny Masterson had the whole of $cientology and half of Hollywood supporting his shitty ass and he still got 30 to life because his accusers stood their ground.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable for asking for the truth of the accusations; not just whether or not he did anything that they said he did, but also whether or not they were just plain false. False allegations are always fucking bullshit, no matter who makes them and for whatever reasons. Firing someone because of false allegations is also bullshit (we saw that happen with Depp), and if they were indeed false, then the whole of Netflix and the Wednesday crew would owe White a huge apology...not that that would ever happen (the WB & Disney have yet to apologize to Depp, and the recast of Grindelwald was terrible).

Anyway. I feel like this kid was cast due in part to his type-similarity to White

(same height as White, lanky, pale, same weird, recessed eyes/slightly sunken in look) because you know that the non-chronically online people are going to be tuning in expecting to see Percy as Xavier but then they'll see this guy and be all, "Wait...is that supposed to be the kid from the last season? Why's he look different (and more attractive)..." and then when they realize that he's a whole different character they might wonder what happened (and Google for answers). This has been a thing in lots of shows, lots of soap operas in particular, and I feel like this is happening with W2. Shake up the cast, distract with whole ass non-continuity, et voilà...the audience is dumb and won't notice, right.

Honestly, I wish that it had just been a straight-on recast, because if Painter was the new Xavier, I'd go strong for Wavier again. He's much more attractive than White and Doohan.

Damn, that was a ramble. I did mention that it's hot in here and I can hardly think.

[theheightofdishonor]

Get To Know Your BL Mutuals

tagged by @telomeke-bbs (thanks for the tag btw!)

Simple, answer the questions. @ some people. Include the tag 'g2ky BL mutuals 2022' on your post so we can find everyone's answers!

What has been the BL that took you by surprise this year?

Disclaimer, I only started watching BL a couple months back and had to scrounging through my history and make a google doc just to figure out what I watched and which ones were from 2022.

Based on the stuff that was produced this year, I'd say Kinnporsche which I watched sometime during the middle portion of my hyperfixation and again, i wasn't well versed or versed at all in bl before and has only watched a couple bl leading up to it so yeah, it did take me by surprise. Especially because most of what i'd watched until that point were low heat GMMTV offerings and censored chinese bromances.

But Kinnporsche is a delight to watch and super easy to get swept up in, even if in hindsight, the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny and I wish it had been tonally darker. Overall though, it's a really good show and the pairings have great chemistry. Most importantly, it's a fun watch.

What has been the BL that you felt a bit disappointed with this year

Vice Versa, The Eclipse, Big Dragon

Vice versa's first couple episodes were so good. I loved the concept, I loved the whole 'each episode is a different colour' thing, I liked jimmy and sea, obviously ohm and nanon were in it but around like episode 3/4, it started to falter because I cared more about potential implications and consequences of the whole body/universe swap thing than the show did. And that was frustrating and dissapointing and I kept watching every episode hoping it'd go back to that magic it had in the first couple eps but it did not. Would still rewatch ep 2 again though, nanon was such a gem.

I put off watching the eclipse until it was complete but I had really high expectations for it based off of tumblr and the concept. Like enemies to lovers, opposite sides, rebelling against authority, high school setting, possibly supernatural elements, all stuff that's right up my alley. I thought it was a given that i'd love this show.

buuut I did not. I watched the whole thing but idk i wasn't all that into it? not terrible enough that i couldn't finish the show but it wasn't all that fun and i wanted it to be so.

And then, Big Dragon. This is another one I expected to like because toxic relationships are interesting to me but Big Dragon just fell flat. It's all the toxicity of tharntype but far less compelling. I ended up skipping a lot it and definitely would not rewatch.

What has been your favourite BL this year?

Semantic Error or Old Fashion Cupcake.

I didn't think a KBL would be on here because Korean BLs are my least favourite type of BL but i'm a sucker for a well done trope and Semantic Error has flawless execution. I'd even rewatch.

Old Fashioned Cupcake, I didn't think i'd like. I thought it'd be too slow paced and sweet but it was great- largely because i really liked the themes of the show. It was a kinda like a less cavity inducing Cherry Magic - ironic considering the amount of sweets in this show. I can't think of much to say about this show atm actually but know it was good and def worth watching and i'd even rewatch.

Favourite BL couples (not just of 2022)?

Patpran. They say save the best for last but I started watching bl with Bad Buddy and nothing has ever come close to this show and to patpran. I dare say they're unmatched.

Thai bls, in my experience, have an issue with chemistry where I have a really hard time believing they're in love. Like, 2gether. Bright's good but I could never convince myself that Win's character was in love with him.

singtokrist and early offgun both have this issue too though to be fair, Off gets more believable the longer he's been paired with Gun.

But Ohm and Nanon?? There's not a single moment in Bad Buddy. where you don't believe that they're in love. They match each other's energy and have more chemistry in one longing glance than a lot of couples do in an entire show. (They've got range too, their dynamic in vice versa in totally different to bb and yet still believable and interesting and im so mad there wasn't more of them and they're able to turn it off and on, you'd never believe they could go from blacklist to bb until you actually saw it) I hope someone convinces them to do another bl together.

Moving on,

Gao Shi Di and Zhou Shu Yi from We Best Love.I think i've talked this show well into a grave already but WBL is that girl and it deserves to be talked about. The chemistry between these two is perfect and their acting is really good and their kiss scenes are believable and they just deliver in every single scene they're in and play off each other so well. Oh, and top notch confessions too. You're the lucky one??????? And then the highway scene?? Gah, perfection.

Wen Kexing and Zhou Zishu from Word of Honor. I grew up in tumblr fandoms so censorship doesn't bother me and their romance is beautifully executed and they've got good chemistry and most of all, the writing is great fun to analyze.

I also liked ohm and singto in that ghost show they did, billkin and pp in i told sunset about you and all the kinnporsche couples.

Oh and the something in my room boys even if i haven't finished that drama yet.

If you had to suggest a BL for someone what would it be?

Bad Buddy all the wayyy. It's not too cliche but the tropes it uses are well done, good acting, good writing, emotional, not too sweet. What more can you possibly want?

If they're into romance, A Tale of a Thousand Stars. It's pretty much the most classic romance novel you can think of but on screen and with beautiful cinematography. Personally, that's not my thing but a lot of people eat that stuff up.

What's your non-BL favourite for this year?

I just got myself into that bl mindset. Pivoting genres is so hard, especially when I watch so many things. Um, I liked The Batman more than I ever thought I would. Pattinson catapulted to the top of my list as favourite live action Batman.

K.G.F. 2 babyyyyyyy. Literally who does it like South Indian movies. The soundtrack is spectacular. The costume design? Peerless. Like fine, the writing's still too melodramatic even by my taste and the love story somehow got worse (#let reena be unhinged 2022) and the misogyny jumped to a new high which shouldn't have been possible but atleast the theme song's a bop.

And i'm currently obsessed with May I Help You? which is still airing and has 10 episodes so far. The plot's starting to falter but I still have hope. Hyeri is also a captivating actress and i'm still not really a kdrama person but I might end up watching her entire filmography anyway because she's that good, y'all.

As for tagging, I genuinely am too new to bl tumblr to know anyone so i'm just not going to.

[heizerux]

Timetagger

This time around, in this newest episode we finally have TIMETAGGER (an episode I’ve been looking forward to for reasons)

My initial thoughts/theories for this episode was that this was an episode with future LB and CN potential. . . and well :)

LETS GET RIGHT INTO IT!

We start off with CONFIRMATION that the twins and Chris/Noel are indeed friends that hang out and play a lot. They’re The Three Musketeers you cant change my mind.

Then there’s #MarinetteforRapGod2019 . I stan.

Slim Shady better watch out

The fun gets cut short, of course, because of Mr. Pigeon, who keeps getting akumatized because he’s so attached to his pigeons. . . Pretty frequently it seems. Ladybug and Chat Noir can take out his akuma with their eyes closed. It’s nothing new. They even have an ice cream with him and have a one on one two? talk. Things were going so well and easily until. . . enter Timetagger.

This was “unforeseeable”.

Now let’s talk about this setup and why it matters (to me at least):

I know SW2 was meant to set up a halfway point to the show and demonstrate how things will change from then on. . . But I wanna talk about how this very episode executed what SW2 should have, and did a much better job in. In this episode we’re shown a villain from S1 who is now considered as “threat-less” when he once was a big threat. Even the people instead of getting to safety now stand close by as an audience. It’s far too easy now. Then suddenly enter a much more powerful villain from the future, and now they’re suddenly in for the big fight.

I just have to say that I thought that THIS was a good way to show that things will change (not a clipshow). You contrast a an old villain to a future one, which only seem to be getting more powerful overtime. Anyway that’s enough on that, moving on.

After the duo evades Timetagger and recharges, they run into Alix, and then marks the tying of some lose ends we had since Timebreaker (love the theme she has going with time btw. It’s a nice touch.) We learn:

The Rabbit Miraculous grants Time Jump powers. (I’m shook, like I really like it!)

The mysterious family heirloom wasn’t a useless high tech watch for its time, but a Miraculous in camouflage.

Alix doesn’t just get to be a holder, she’s been a holder the entire time. Right under our noses!!!

Bunnix most likely gave it to an ancestor to be passed down for generations as back up.

Seeing as the Rabbit Miraculous powers deals with time, it was a smart backup to do in the event her Miraculous was ever damaged.

Bunnix probably got herself trapped in the stone when her miraculous got damaged, Timetagger sent her back, and upon reaching the past she got frozen in time under a stone.

Alix is too awesome and “Minibug” hasn’t noticed yet. FACTS.

CONFIRMED ML LORE: The Miraculous can be placed in a camouflage mode.

Future Alix couldn’t give Chat Noir an answer on if they ever get together because to her they’re all over the place at all times. What I do gather from her answer, is that they’re so focused on hero work as heroes in the future that they most likely mastered keeping their civilian lives a separate secret.

On to facing Timetagger outside, Bunnix goes at it while using her powers for a lengthy time. Chat makes note of it only to be answered with “No, because she’s an adult.”

CONFIRMED ML LORE: Adult Holders don’t seem to require to recharge so soon after using their powers. Or maybe even don’t need to recharge?!?

(In other words it explains Hawkmoth being able to stay transformed.)

The fight continues but “Kitten Noir” gets impatient. He uses Cataclysm and almost destroys her miraculous a second time. Immature move, Kitty.

Lucky for us, Bunnix already saw it coming, and now we know how she got herself in the stone in the first place. Take this as a lesson, Kitty.

She managed to warp Timetagger back and things looked promising. . . Until her memory reminded her of a key point in time right before she “failed”. So Timetagger comes back and now our heroes are in an actual twist. . . Except Ladybug had an idea she knew would work in “the future”.

The Future:

Ladybug makes a false story that she’s sending an apology message to the future for failing and sends Bunnix back with a message. . . To an older Ladybug and Chat Noir who were already expecting it.

A plan from the past.

Side commentary: Adult Chat Noir? Nah. That’s BEEFCAKE NOIR for sure. Our boy probably picked up some workouts for photo shoots given that he’s still probably a model (or at least a celebrity of some kind.) Either way, he looks well. Ladybug also physically looks well. What doesn’t is that same basic costume, but you know, as this episode has said “the future isn’t set in stone.” I’ll just look past it for now. (They probably did that to clearly imply that it very much IS them as adults, any slight difference could only lead to thoughts that it’s different people, apparently lol.)

Back to our present day, Hawkmoth is finally living in the moment that he’ll get his wish in the future, only to be bursted with:

“There’s a Hawkmoth in my future. . But it isn’t you.”

(Mmmm, tea. Didn’t I say it would be interesting if Nathalie betrayed Gabriel and became the ultimate bad guy in the future to come on the last ML post I made? This cruelty tea is delicious btw.)

Hawkmoth is now the big sad to learn he won’t be in power for long.

Timetagger is close to getting the miraculous, but then the future duo steps in and helps out in disarming him. Victory once again from the past to the future.

Then we learn that the akuma was Chris/Noel the entire time, and has picked up rapping?? (My personal headcanon is that: Nino grew up to become a profesional DJ/music producer and his little brother helps him by providing any lyrics or vocals. It’s a cute idea, okay?) Anyways Bunnix is returned to her time and Paris is saved once again.

Meanwhile we catch up on Gabriel “the big sad” Agreste commenting how he’s not in power in the future and that he’s a failure now if only he recognizes that as a father. But then Nathalie comforts him that it’s probably not a failure. . . But perhaps a sign of victory. . .

(Nathalie, I’m on to you. I’m past “just thoughts” and am now full on theories with you)

Now on to concluding the episode, Mr. Remier is akumatized upset yet again and Marinette can’t babysit The Three Musketeers, instead Lila can.

Side note: If Lila wasn’t such a snake, she could actually be decent at story telling with kids and maybe even looking after them. Huh. Who knew.

Ladybug and Chat Noir have some more encouragement time with poor pigeon man and recommend he finds a new animal to look after. Pigeons just aren’t cutting it for him. After leaving they go over the wild villains they’ll face. . . Like Mr. Rat?

Who is that?!? Such a crazy name.

I wonder how that akuma’s origins even started. . .

Lol.

And that’s that.

Conclusion: This episode gave us Alix with a miraculous as well as explanation to her badass family heirloom, minor cameos of future Ladybug and Chat Noir, and overall some kind of progression. This is an episode I was looking forward to, and I’m glad it wasn’t handled as filler.

I give it a 9 out of 10 butterflies. Not bad.

[nicomoviewatchinpsychopath]

Sonic the Hedgehog Movie Review

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: VIDEO GAME BASED MOVIE IS FORMULAIC BUT OFFERS PLENTY OF FAST-PACED FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY AS WELL AS LONGTIME FANS! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: *** out of 4

The world’s fastest hedgehog hits the big screen in Sonic the Hedgehog

PARAMOUNT PICTURES AND SEGA

The blue blur (or Blue Devil as the movie calls him) makes his big screen debut in Sonic the Hedgehog, based on the beloved Sega video game franchise of the same name. Believe it or not out of all the video game franchises, my favorite is and always will be Sonic the Hedgehog and have been a proud supporter of the hedgehog since childhood.             

Granted, it wasn’t until after Sega became a third-party developer for consoles like PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo when I became a fan of the blue hedgehog, but ever since I got my hands on the Nintendo GameCube port of Sonic Adventure 2 as a kid, my Sonic fandom was pretty much instant. I’ve played many of the video games both old and new, watched all the cartoons, read the comic books published by Archie Comics at the time, and I owned several action figures, plushies, and other Sonic merchandise throughout my childhood…in fact I still have most of those even to this day.             

I’ve been clamoring for a Sonic the Hedgehog theatrical movie for years despite video game film adaptations usually being critical and/or box-office poison. But given the popularity of Sonic especially during the 90s when he was rivaling Nintendo’s Mario franchise who already had a theatrical film released in 1993, I’d assume one would have been made back then or at the very least in the early-late 2000s when Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, and Sonic Heroes as well as the hit Saturday morning anime series, Sonic X were released, I was so eager for a Sonic movie that a couple of friends and I got together and made movies of our own when we were kids (They sucked BTW!).             

After years of waiting and Sonic making a few big screen appearances prior in Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph movies and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, the beloved hedgehog finally gets a movie of his own which leads us to today. The film is directed by newcomer Jeff Fowler in his directorial debut, produced by Neal H. Moritz (Fast & Furious franchise, XXX, 21/22 Jump Street), and executive produced by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) and is a live-action/animated hybrid (Yep, just like Alvin and the Chipmunks and The Smurfs), which had me very worried when it was announced back in 2014 and was even more worried and disgusted when the first trailer came out last year which had an absolutely atrocious design for Sonic, fortunately they fixed it.

So, how does Sonic’s first movie hold up? Honestly, while I can’t call it the Sonic movie I wanted as a child, I had a fun time with it. It isn’t a perfect representation of its source material and the plot is pretty generic, but the charm of the film’s leads, humor, and subtle references to the games that inspired it are enough for me to overlook that flaw.             

The film follows Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz-Parks and Recreation, The Other Guys, The Walk), blue anthropomorphic talking hedgehog from another dimension with extraordinary speed who travels to Earth to escape from those who want to capture him and harness his power. However, when he accidentally causes a power outage while hiding out in the town of Green Hills (Get it?), Sonic is targeted by the government and the tyrannical mad scientist, Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey-Ace Ventura 1 and 2, The Mask, The Truman Show) who plots to use Sonic’s power for world domination.             

This forces Sonic to team up with Green Hills sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden-X-Men franchise, Enchanted, Westworld) who agrees to help Sonic on his adventure to find his missing bag of magical rings that have the power to get him home. Of course, while getting into all sorts of trouble along the way.             The film also stars Tika Sumpter (Ride Along 1 and 2, Get On Up, Southside with You) as Tom’s wife Maddie, Adam Pally (Happy Endings, The Mindy Project, Iron Man 3) as Wade Whipple, and Neal McDonough (Star Trek: First Contact, Band of Brothers, Justified) as Major Bennington.             

Overall, Sonic the Hedgehog probably isn’t the movie longtime fans wanted, but it still manages to be an entertaining and fun adaptation in its own right. It’s easily one of the best films based on a video game alongside Pokémon: Detective Pikachu and The Angry Birds Movie 2 and shows that we’ve come a long way since the dark days of Uwe Boll’s directing career.

As mentioned before, the plot is nothing special and rehashed from other kids’ movies however what sets this apart from things like The Smurfs or Masters of the Universe is that Sonic and Tom do have a strong chemistry together. It’s amusing to see them interact with each other on their road trip, cracking jokes, getting into trouble, and over the course of the film they learn more about one another thus making you care more for them over ANY Smurf or Chipmunk. 

While there are a few jokes that don’t quite stick the landing, the humor for the most part not only made me laugh but there were moments in this movie where I laughed hard. Whether the film was poking fun at the entire Sonicfranchise, a particular running sequence that’s obviously a reference to the Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men movies, or Sonic breaking the fourth wall similar to Deadpool, I was laughing while also admiring how clever some of these jokes are, and let’s not forget Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik, but we’ll get to him momentarily.

The redesigned Sonic is a lot better than what we could have gotten, he doesn’t have those ugly small eyes, questionable muscular arms and legs, or the terrifying human teeth anymore. Now, his appearance is more faithful to the source material recreating the hedgehog’s cartoony nature but is different enough to stand out from the rest of the character’s previous designs and be its own unique creation, this is a really good design for Sonic and had the filmmakers went with their original version, this movie would have crashed and burned even harder than Sonic ’06.

Besides Sonic being more appealing to look at now, he’s also just as entertaining to listen to, Ben Schwartz while he’s far from being a replacement for Roger Craig Smith, Ryan Drummond, Jason Griffith, or even Jaleel White, does a solid job providing Sonic’s voice and captures the cocky, arrogant, but good-natured attitude Sonic is known for having. He actually almost sounds like Ryan Drummond’s Sonic voice without sounding like a cheap impersonation.             Moving on to Sonic’s new friend that doesn’t have two tails, James Marsden as Tom, his performance is decent even though he doesn’t quite make as big an impression as Ben Schwartz’ Sonic and especially Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik. With that said, he gets some funny lines once in a while and as mentioned before has good chemistry with Sonic, so yeah, believe it or not James Marsden was partnered up with another CG animated character and this time came out with his dignity unlike his performance in Hop.             

Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik owns every scene that he’s in, he’s no Mike Pollock and is a radically different Robotnik than from the games, but Carrey’s energetic and wildly animated personality shines through and gives a million percent whenever the crazy evil genius is on-screen. He’s certainly a lot better than Dennis Hopper as Koopa from the Super Mario Bros. movie.

Hopefully, this movie will be a hit during its theatrical run because I’d love to see a sequel especially if it introduced other Sonic characters like Tails, Knuckles, or even Shadow. Don’t make this like the recent Power Rangers movie, I need my big screen version of those characters!

Whether a fan, newcomer, or just looking for something fun to take the kids to, Sonic the Hedgehog should make everyone happy. It’s not perfect but it has enough action, wit, and charm to make it worth checking out. You’ll be “Up, Over, and Gone” before you know it.

For more movie reviews please visit: https://moviewatchinpsychopath.blogspot.com

[sol1056]

hey im the anon who asked about how you knew the stuff, sorry i wasn't too clear on what. i just read the post explaining EPs and how the behind the scene stuff worked and i wanted to know how you knew all that, like are you involved in the industry? or just a nerd?

gotcha! Well, remember how back in S1/S2, people kept pointing out Hunk could be… awfully nosy? always getting into things, asking questions?

I was over here going, YES HUNK IS MY PEOPLE. 

It’s a hallmark of a certain type of engineer: insatiable curiosity, and never satisfied with only one answer, always sure there’s more to discover. Okay, we’re not all engineers — a lot of us are Russian Lit majors — but the key is our drive to discover. We take apart, put back together, connect dots close and far, turn things around and study them from a new direction. We’re those people who randomly show up in your part of the building, poke our heads in the room and say, “so, what do all y’all do here? what’s this do? hey, what’s that?”

Despite the fact that most of us seem to be (strangely) strong introverts, that doesn’t stop us. We’ve got questions for everyone. We’ll talk to total strangers all day if we’re on the trail of a particularly interesting idea. In a nutshell, we’re utterly shameless.

I did post-production back when NLE was relatively new and the compositing applications required massive nearly-mainframe computing power. I was mostly in the sfx/cg areas, but I weaseled my way into the color suite pretty regularly. I sat in on editing sessions and was a happy lunch-fetching lackey if it got me a chance to watch the compositing team. Any lull meant a chance to chat up directors, cinematographers, producers, etc. I totally took advantage. 

It’s been awhile since I did that – and since then I’ve been a roady, a mental health & substance abuse admin, a doorman, and even owned a bookstore, before going corporate. But for every wacky thing I’ve done, I’ve also kept in touch with people I met. Frex: the friend who got me the post-production job is now an executive producer. Yes, I do call him with questions. He’s used to it. If he doesn’t know an answer, he sends me to someone who does. (Another reason we’ve been friends for so long.) One answer is never sufficient, never a reason to stop there.

Meet one novelist, get introduced to six more, and three of them write for TV. Oh, that’s handy. Should save that contact, could be useful someday. It’s actually rare for someone to say no, come to think of it. idk, as long as I can get access, I can usually get the person to tell me something I can use. 

However, since my actual area of expertise applies across many industries, I’ve worked all kinds of places. A lot of it’s client-facing, and if you think that means I’m not wandering around the client site poking my head into rooms and cheerfully interviewing people on the spot, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Now that I work at a multinational corporation, I have literally thousands of people in my network, including everyone who’s moved on to a new place. You might be surprised how many people are fine with, “hey, I work at X with Y, and Y told me you’d know this.” Of course, everyone has a bias and a view limited to their own experience, so you can’t stop there. You can’t really understand a situation without knowing the agendas of all the players. You gotta ask a bunch of people, make sure you’re getting the most rounded sense of things. 

Not really a hardship for me. It’s kinda the whole point. 

People are people everywhere (outside cultural quirks), and it’s rare I’m ever researching a single person (I’m not an investigative journalist, if you were wondering). Most of the time, I’m looking for the industry-based cultural expectations. As in, “given X and Y, what would someone who does A generally think is a reasonable action, in this situation?”  

The key is to have a believable reason for asking, and being a writer definitely qualifies. “I’m researching for a story, and I have a character who do X. I wanted to know if it’s realistic for them to know Y. Who do you think would be the best person to ask?” I frequently cold-call, and I never ask “is there someone there,” I ask who they think is the best person. A lot of times it ends up being someone that the phone operator knows (personally or by reputation) who’s full of bizarre trivia and enjoys a chance to show it off. (Plus, it’s amazing what you can learn about a person from all the other subtle cues people are unaware they’re telling, when they’re focused on their area of expertise.)

That’s how I ended up interviewing the Director of the DEA about whether a non-US-university degree would satisfy the education requirement. His letter of introduction got me monthly lunches for awhile with the DEA director in my city. (Oh, the stories I heard.) It’s how I learned about sheep subsidies from one of the top execs at the USDA, and that there’s a single surviving Civil War widow still getting a VA pension. Going in person is even more fun. You could wind up talking to one of the very few artists in the world whose speciality is touching up pre-Renaissance books so the repairs aren’t visible. Or the art historian whose job is going through the nation’s attic and identifying century-old fakes. 

I’ve talked to embassy officials from five different countries, NASA biophysicists and astrophysicists, OSHA inspectors, Nobel prize-winning economists, police detectives, celebrity chefs, environmental lawyers, arena-level sound-people, race-car drivers, potters, opera singers, patent examiners, train mechanics, fire marshals, foley artists, and club DJs. I’ve interviewed fashion photographers, farriers, puppeteers, lighting designers, Catholic bishops, bioethicists, rabbis, fighter pilots, public radio personalities, newspaper editors, chemists, club organizers, war correspondents, Episcopalian nuns (yes they exist), textile artists, prison architects, midwives, cabinetmakers, tall ship sailors, haute couture seamstresses, and civil engineers. On and on and on. 

Don’t neglect official avenues, either. The Department of Labor, the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the Screen Writers’ Guild, the list is nearly endless — any organization, union, or federal/state dept that sets or guides policy. Everyone has a bias, so what people consider normal is sometimes… not. Or they just didn’t know (or saw no need to know, the fools) the reason for A over B. You have to check the rules, because a discrepancy between what you’re told should be done versus what people tell you is actually done… is also useful to know. 

(Labor practices are definitely one of those areas, since federal labor policy is something every company must observe. It’s the law. So when a workplace seems to be violating the law, it raises a lot of interesting questions.) 

And finally, of course, there’s traditional research. Textbooks written by people in an industry can be particularly interesting, especially if it’s a book meant for readers outside that industry (which usually means a lot of firsthand anecdotes to round out the gaps). Popular articles, academic essays, post-mortem white papers, TED talks, interviews. You need to do your basic homework, because there’s no waste of someone’s time quite like asking them a question that’s patently absurd once you get past common assumptions. 

I once explained the plot of a popular SF show to a NASA astrophysicist, and his response was simply, “Every word you used was English, but those words in that order make absolutely no sense at all.” Kind of a dead-end, there. You can’t come at a top-level expert with intro-level questions. 

Since I don’t always know who I’ll stumble over next, being an information sponge means I at least have a whole encyclopedia of analogies. If I can find  common ground (cars and houses are two of the best), I can at least get a basic idea of the person’s meaning. “Oh, so it’s like when you turn the key in the ignition, and the lights don’t come on because the battery is dead?” 

It’s asking the right questions, using an open and friendly approach, and having the right timing. Remember: there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there is only undervalued labor. That is, their time is also valuable, so be brief, open, and sincere. Treat every person as if they’re an authority in something, even if you haven’t figured out what that is. 

The world is a massively complex place, and contains more things than are dreamt of in our philosophies, all of it waiting to be discovered.

Or, the shorter version:

btw: I don’t actually recommend going in person to the Dept of the Interior, though. You’ll get lost. Like, instantly. That place is MASSIVE.

[emergentanimism]

Deadwater

In my last post, I said something that should have given you pause. When describing spirits of the dead, I said, “They can even be exploited if a magus is so inclined. If they can't learn to chill even after they're dead, fuck 'em.”

No one told you that being a magus makes you a nice person, right? There are reasons why necromancy is reviled by many cultures. Most of those reasons are bullshit based on fear and control. But being a necromancer does sometimes mean blurring some lines. If you as a magus decide you may need a weapon at your disposal, even just for self-defense… well weapons come at a price. A weapon is not an innocent thing, despite what the NRA wants you to believe. A weapon always requires you to compromise your innocence. A weapon symbolizes you are willing to do harm. A spiritual weapon can be a costly thing indeed.

The most powerful weapon in my spiritual arsenal? Without a doubt – Deadwater. What is Deadwater you ask? Lucky for you folks I know the leading expert. The number one source. I turn you over to the words of my beloved brother, Frater Yaramarud, the man who provided me with this amazing substance.

“My first encounter with Deadwater came nearly a decade ago. At the time, I saw it purely as a novelty and not something with the nearly boundless potential that I know today. Traveling down the road with my good friend Frater Dreadnaught, and an ex-partner of mine, the three of us had made a late night decision to stop at the next cemetery we found in order to waste time in a way that people in their early twenties are wont to do. When we finally found one and had parked the car, a light in the center of the cemetery had drawn our attention to a pump well gently illuminated beneath it. My initial thought was one of curiosity and bewilderment. What reason could there possibly be for there to be a well here? With this question unanswered, it dawned on me that the corpses surrounding us had, beyond any doubt, decayed and seeped into the table from which this well drew.

After jokes and general fucking around, we left the cemetery without even noting its general location. Though I had lost contact with my ex-partner, Fr. Dreadnaught and I remained close friends. During this time, he had enlisted in the military and left our home state for roughly 7-8 years. Though we often discussed the possible location of the Deadwater, the only thing that either of us could remember was the highway that it was most likely located on. With him gone for years and me being the only person that could feasibly find this place, I did all I could do in order to locate it. Driving up and down the highway proved fruitless, as did looking at maps of cemeteries along the route and cross-referencing them with Google. My last effort was to post an inquiry on a local genealogy group under the guise of searching for the grave of a relative. This too led to nothing. I was forced to give up, and so it was for about six years.

Last year, however, things changed. Fr. D had moved back from California and had spent some time living with my wife and I. It was during this time that we had become determined to find this Deadwater once again. As we had both evolved in our magickal practice, it had become less of a curiosity and more of a holy grail; here was a tool that had so much latent potential, and yet it was completely out of my reach. One night in September of 2017, we had decided that, since it was once again physically possible for us to find it together, we would do exactly that.

I'll spare you the details of the ritual itself suffice to say that Fr. D and myself had performed a Goetic invocation for executing our will. In hindsight, we had made a mistake. For our statement of intent, I had simply said, “It is our will to invoke XX to lead us to the Deadwater located along Highway XX.” It was during the ritual that I was mentally given a map of the county through which the highway ran, with a marker placed by the demon. With the image still firmly visualized, we pulled up a map of cemeteries in the county that this marker could possibly represent. After making a list with their corresponding addresses, we left in search of the Deadwater.

It was the middle of nowhere; we were surrounded by corn fields in every direction. After taking the final turn, still flanked by corn on either side, the GPS indicated that we had arrived at our destination: the first cemetery on the list. There was nothing. Just corn. As Fr. D was rechecking the address, I slowed the truck to a stop. Just before we had become entirely motionless, the field opened up to reveal the stones we were looking for, but they weren't familiar at all. There was no light in the center. It was just darkness. Despite this, we decided to look around anyway. After all, we had the entire night to look, and maybe the light had burned out, or our memory of the place was faulty.

We spent roughly 30 minutes wandering between the gravestones, splitting up to cover more ground. As we both began to lose hope and had called out that we should go to the next address on the list, I noticed a dim light in the distance. I called to Fr. D to meet me and we could explore this light together. Once we had reconvened, we started walking together towards the light. Not even ten steps from when we started, our headlamps simultaneously crossed, revealing before us a pump well.

This was not the same well. We both knew that, and yet a shiver ran down both of our spines. We tested it. It worked. The demon had shown us the way, though due to our lack of precise wording, it was not the same well we had seen all those years ago. We had prepared for this moment and filled several bottles with the water, water that contained the decayed remains of hundreds of bodies, water that was the distilled essence of the dead.

Since that night, I have utilized the Deadwater in multiple ways. The first ritual that we had done with it was a joint effort between Fr. D and myself. He had volunteered to drink a small portion of the water, and a ritual was formed around this primary action. Performed twice, we discovered through Fr. D's gnosis that he was able to visualize and speak to his own ancestors. Thus, not only did this water stand as an essence of the dead that I had discovered through my own later experimentation, it was able to form a link between their realm and our own.

Its apparent linkage to death and focal point of death have proven invaluable. Apart from the aforementioned use of contacting one's ancestors, I have used it as a method of simplifying my altar. Rather than having dozens of pictures of my ancestors for veneration, I find it just as effective to place a bottle of the water with an image of my family crest as a sort of condensed fetish. Another similar use I have found is mixing the water with the gravedirt of my grandmother in order to form an anointing solution that has a direct link to my lineage and those that came before. In using it as a kind of “essential oil of death”, I have found that it works with great success in “jinx” or “hex” work as a medium for freezer spells and the like. It has also worked equally well as an intensifier for other gravedirt workings and as a component for spirit work. Though these cover only my own current experiments with the Deadwater, I know that its potential has exceeded every expectation that I have had for it. As I continue to find new uses, it continually astounds and amazes me.”

 What’s the first lesson to be learned from this amazing story? Have a tribe! There are other awesome magi out there. You can find them. It will take hard work and dedication to actually work together. I travel thousands of miles a year just to be with my tribe. But it’s so damn worth it when you experience that love and are gifted with magical knowledge, and receive gifts like 750 ml of Deadwater.

Lucky you, you can buy it online from Frater Yaramarud at his most excellent store, Welcome to Tarotdise, where he and his wife sell some amazing hand-crafted occult products.

Back to the original point and my experiences with Deadwater. As far as I know I am only the second person dumb enough to drink some of it. I immediately tasted the earth and rot of the grave. My vision dimmed, and I felt myself slipping between the land of the living and the realm of the dead. All from one sip. BTW, I in NO WAY endorse drinking the Deadwater. It is not sold for consumption. If you get intestinal parasites or a fungal infection, that’s your problem.

Meditating on the bottle sitting on my altar has produced some interesting visions. You can literally see the angry spirits swirling around in the bottle. No, they are not happy to be there. And I get the feeling the Deadwater captured some of the most malicious spirits of that particular cemetery. Is it wrong to use them for my own devices? Probably. But a magus gotta do what a magus gotta do. I’ll talk some more about the nuances of such necromantic work in a later post.

In my opinion, Deadwater is essentially spiritual toxic waste. No other spirit I know likes to go near the stuff. I really don’t want to meet the spirits that would enjoy it. For example, I recently had an altercation with a certain Red Goddess who has been fucking with my love life hard. Of course, she laughed at my admonitions of her cruel little games. Until I threatened to pour some Deadwater over her statue. She shut the fuck up real quick after that. Is it truly a threat to a goddess? I don’t know, but I certainly got the impression she wouldn’t enjoy the experience.

As noted, Frater Yaramarud had somewhat different experiences. Maybe it’s the batch I got. Maybe it’s his intent when using it, or how he mixes it with other substances. Maybe those spirits just don’t like me for whatever reason. You don’t have to use it as a weapon.

Yeah, I know a lot of this sounds a bit crazy. But part of being a magus is learning to frame your experiences in a mythic context. As my hero Miguel says, “Write your own story. Live your own myth.” Be hardcore. Get yourself some Deadwater. Better yet, harvest some of your own. Be prepared to do a lot of banishing before and after you do something like that.

[preciouslypristinepanda]

Venting Frustration

... not that I know how to talk about my frustration let alone write it into proper words. I can’t write eloquent words, pfft.

But, idk. I’m just in the mood to randomly talk about my obsession with Bruce Greenwood... wait no, Theo! Wait that’s not right, I meant Kal! Ergh, no, no, it’s the asshole David Bell, right? Wrong, it’s totally about Harry - hold on a sec, Nessa, they’re basically sharing the same face claim! Damn. My obssession with Bruce Greenwood isn’t even funny 😭 Binge watching his movies/tv shows obviously isn’t making it any better - I kept coming up with so much plots based on the feels I get from all the characters, waaa 😭 #imagonecase

President Theodore G. Rutherford or Theo as he is affectionately called. God damn it, he’s my favourite out of the five, no wait, six, yeah six characters that I’ve come up with thanks to all my insane feels. He’s easily my favourite for the fact that he managed to ticked off literally everything from my dream guy to marry in a heartbeat list! I basically went crazy and just threw in everything for Theo, all the traits that I love and find sexy as hell, everything that Theo is made up of is solely to satisfy my personal needs, HA! I mean come on, Air Force Pilot who had to resign because of war injuries, Lawyer with a specialty in Constitutional Law though I prefer Criminal Lawyers but it doesn’t fit his plot so the next best thing will do! Bahah. Married a girl with quite a big age difference only because I want to marry an older man too, sniff. Just wants to leisure fly his plane but then his Presidential ambition damn it, loves his expensive liquor and nicotine plus occasionally cigar though it’s obviously unhealthy to finish three packs of cigarettes a day but hey he’s sexy smoking those imported cigarettes, ok!? Can’t even scold his daughter because he’s smitten and would never raise his voice at his little girl. Designs jewelry for his wife because simply buying whatever Cartier can offer is just not good enough! Has the most impeccable fashion sense because wearing tailored suits and well-fitted ivy league outfit is always a good idea for man of his standings... I rest my damn case, here Theodore, have my heart on a gold platter.

And then we have this asshole David Bell.

I stole his surname. In my defense I was drowning in the sea of feels, I had to save myself, ok!? 😭 Marathoning The Resident within a day was the best thing I ever did, well next best thing after creating all the characters #2k18youvebeensogoodtomyfeels AHEM. So, let me just briefly introduce you to one of god’s createst creation that is David Bell - damn I love pronouncing his name - and what makes him worthy enough to be mentioned in this magnificent post of mine, hah. He’s an asshole but a sexy asshole, if he isn’t I wouldn’t be talking about him now, would I? So, David was the preferiti of Perk-Azaria Hospital’s - legit amazing name I came up with, eh? - Chief of Surgery to succeed him way back when he first met his third wife aka the love of his life, Natalie. Yes, he’s a twice divorced man who ended marrying a girl twenty years younger than him, in simple words, he’s a damn craddle robber. But hey, David totally didn’t start the flirting, guy doesn’t even give a shit after the second time seeing his divorce lawyer, lol. Natalie, goodness Natalie, I want to be her in sense that she had the balls to start the flirting, you know? It doesn’t matter that she’s actually Perk-Azaria’s heiress - ok, I kid, it mattered a lot because if she wasn’t David would’ve just indulged and ignored her, hah. - who totally would inherit the hospital one day and being her husband would give so, so much benefit. Of course, her family opposed to it but she loved him and he did eventually fell for her, who would’t!? She’s the definition of perfection, any man would be lucky to have even an inch of her, David is needless to say the luckiest son of a bitch to have her whole. So they married, he got the post he aimed for, life was supposed to be so damn good for them, right? So, so wrong. Throw in affairs, miscarriages, insane ex girlfriend, a brief meeting with death... YEAH. I have one chapter written for DAVID AND NATALIE. Maybe, it’ll be made online, who knows.

Look at that adowable face. Stahp it, Harry 🔥

So, umm meet President Harrison Wyatt aka Harry. He is so damn adorable, I just can’t! I know, I love Presidential characters, I’ve always wondered if it could be considered as a fetish? Hmm. Ahem, anyways, so Harry, goodness Harry. Thank you, National Treasure Book of Secrets - yeah, Nic Cage’s movies suck big time but thank you casting producer for casting Bruce Greenwood as the nerdy President who studied Historical Architecture in Harvard. Sniff. Lemme marry him. Harry’s plot is just so damn interesting. If Theo’s loosely based on JFK, Harry has 9/11 which tbh I know, it’s quite insensitive but I was watching documentaries and I thought of writing something that’s sort of based on it but not so? To clarify, I mean no harm, it’s just that tragedies tend to help when you’re a writer? Maybe it’s just me. I was watching The President’s documentary when the plot came rushing in... I thought, what if, the President was in that tower when it happened? How insane would that be, racing against literally everything just to get him out to safety. And then I saw the 9/11 (2017) trailer - would never watch it probably cause apparently it’s a disgrace to the memories so uh, I’ll skip - and how they’re trapped in the elevator, well hello plot, cue in the President attending a summit held at Sky Tower (yeah, I created my own fictional tower) in NYC when two planes crashed into it, trapping everyone that’s everyone including other leaders attending the damn summit! So yeah, President and his Secret Service details stucked in the elevator whilst the ones outside climb at least twenty sets of stairs to reach the floor they’re stuck on before whatever shit happens and they loose their President. Then when he’s out, that’s when conspiracies and all the dramas start to unfold because guess what? It’s the Generals starting civil war because Harry’s not listening to them... I named the story The Enemy Within, get it, get it? Hee. Oh btw, Harry’s married to a badass wife called Ingrid who looks like Jaimie Alexander circa long hair and also has twin children, Harley Kai who looks like twelve years old Tom Holland in The Impossible and Chloè Rhea whose face I borrowed from my favourite girl ever, Elle Fanning. So yeah, will work on the script, Harry might be threatened to be given a public execution but he made his Secret Service detail promise that he’d kill him before the enemy gets him because no way will he let his wife and children witness him being murdered live on every damn media platform. Yeap.

I love astronauts especially YOU.

Alex Powell, that’s what I named him. Air Force + Astronaut = Nessa is resting in peace. Right, for this plot, his occupation is entirely useless as it’s a horror thriller and I just need to make his CV look super good, ha. Where do I even start!? I mean, it’s all about ancestors evil spirits wanting to kill his daughter by possessing his pregnant wife and making everyone’s life a living hell until help came, epic exorcism before everyone lives happily ever after... or did they not? Who knows.

So uhh... I feel good typing all that. Really good.

[twdmusicboxmystery]

Missing Scenes from S5 and Beyond

Good morning! So several people have asked me to do a refresher on the missing scenes from S5. I'm going to expand that a little and also talk about other times we think Emily may have been on set and filming.

The biggest and most obvious was in S5. Remember, this was something the spoiler site reported, not just something that TD made up. Emily was sighted filming in a little white cabin. 

They pulled a white, windowless van right up to the front porch so they were obviously trying to hide her. Immediately after the spoiler site spotted her (and posted about it) Emily tweeted that she was going to the movies with some friends. Even the spoiler site laughed about the obvious misdirection.

It’s important to note that we didn't see that cabin at all. It might've been different if we'd seen those cabin scenes with other characters, because in that case, Emily might have just been visiting the set in her costume, or it could be a mistaken sighting. Emily, Alanna Masterson (Tara) and Steven Yeun (Glenn) and later Lennie James (Morgan) were all seen there. To this day, we still haven’t seen this set in the show.

The man who owned the cabin (AMC rented it from him to film) said he was allowed to take pictures while they were on set, as long as he agreed not to post them until after those scenes aired to avoid spoilers. To this day, he has never posted those photos, which means AMC has not given him permission yet. I mention this because most people simply say the cabin sequence was cut and will never be in the show.

There are some major holes in that argument.

1) It was a huge chunk of filming in S5 that took place over several days. Cutting out a small scene, like the one from Slabtown where Beth visits Percy, or HERE from Coda is not a big deal. Each of those scenes probably took all of an hour to film, and they were in locations the rest of the episode took place in anyway. The production didn’t have to go out of their way to film the scenes and then cut them.

The cabin was a completely different location than anything we saw in the movie. It took a great deal of time and money to put together (think money to rent the cabin, time putting up set pieces, including large metal slabs over the doors and spraying them with blood, etc.) To cut that sequence would cost AMC thousands of dollars. It’s simply not something they would do.

2) If the cabin stuff had been cut, like those other scenes I linked above, it would've showed up on the DVDs as a deleted scene. It hasn't. The owner of the cabin would have been allowed to post his pictures by now if it wasn't going to be used in the show. He hasn't.

3) No part of the Grady storyline allowed for Beth to leave the hospital, go to the cabin for some time, shoot some scenes there, and then returned to the hospital. There's nothing in her Grady storyline that's does anything of the sort. There is no missing time that we've seen, at least not until after she was shot. It's always possible that at some point, they’ll go back and show some missing time they just didn't tell us about in S5, but either way, these are scenes that we haven't seen and what the show hasn't aired yet, but which they obviously still plan to.

4) It’s also important to reiterate that it’s not JUST Beth’s scenes that are missing. Morgan was seen there (details HERE) and we haven’t seen anything of him with that cabin yet.  It’s unclear whether Alanna actually filmed there, but she might have. And Steven Yeun posted a picture from inside the cabin, saying “Open the door…!” and then it was hastily taken down, and never explained. 

There was even a car chase scene reported somewhere around Terminus that took place at night with most of the main characters (Rick, Daryl Michonne, etc.—not Beth, though) that we never saw. So much mystery around S5.

It’s also more than worth noting that in Sam’s room in 6x08, was a drawing of a cabin with a red car parked outside that looks EXACTLY like the one of this cabin. That tells me this symbolism is still active and relevant in the show.

All these things point to the idea that they simply filmed this in S5, and still plan to air these scenes at some point. It may have something to do with those missing 17 days between Coda and WHAWGO, or perhaps it’s something we’ll see in the future in S9.

If AMC ever releases them as deleted scenes, I’ll stop harping about it. Until then, or until we get confirmation they will never air, I still hope of seeing them in S9.

More details HERE and HERE.

We had another suspicious incident during S6 filming. Emily posted a picture of herself from what looked to be the inside of a TWD trailer. 

We know what they look like because Norman and Andrew and even Steven had taken pictures and videos from inside their trailers before. It was very obvious that she was inside one, and had just woken up. 

For some reason, Emily was sleeping on set. If she was just visiting someone, I think they would've probably just told us. I'll be the first to admit that TD would've read into it what no matter what, but for her post a picture and then hastily take it down is always suspicious. Like she's hinting at something, but won’t admit it or answer any questions about it. Check out the details of this incident HERE.

The final thing I want to talk about is something that happened at the beginning of S8 shooting.

Remember when Norman posted a picture of a dog Daryl was supposed to get during S8? He called the dog Princess pants and said it was her first day of shooting. 

You can read all about the incident HERE and HERE and how it started with something Gayle Ann Hurd (executive producer) said, and people thought she was joking until they saw Norman’s tweet (which was swiftly removed again).

Even if it was just a joke and fans thought it was real, the fact that Norman called the dog “Princess Pants” is super suspicious to me.

Princess Pants is a derogatory name that the spoiler site gave Beth when she was still in the show. We all know the spoiler site hates Beth and Bethyl and Bethyl fans. They never showed her any respect. So why would Norman use that same name for the dog, especially if it wasn't real?

TD instantly jumped on that as a possible Bethyl thing. Another thing reported during S5 was that Emily might have filmed scenes with a Rottweiler. So, we thought it was interesting that Daryl might get a tiny little white dog (not unlike the one in Still) that would kinda be like Beth, while Emily filmed with a fiercer breed that might represent Daryl.

But this isn’t even just a situation where TD interpreted it wrong. There was no dog arc in the show at all. So what the hell was this all about?

Obviously, it doesn’t prove anything, but I think he was at least trolling the spoiler site and it maybe hinting that Emily was on set filming.

Might as well throw the Bethfoot picture in. 

This was taken during 5b filming when the group was at Alexandria. The only blond who should have been on set line was Alexandra Breckinridge (Jessie) who confirmed when someone asked that it wasn’t her. Meanwhile, other TD-ers found pictures of Emily wearing a coat almost identical to this. If you zoom in on this blurry picture, you can see what looks like blood in her hair exactly where Beth was shot. So pretty sure that even though she wasn't in 5B, she was still on set filming. And btw, this picture was taken after 5x09, so it couldn’t have been for that episode.

More details HERE.

So these are the weird and unexplained times we think Emily was on set after Beth was shot. I still wholeheartedly think that we will see these scenes in the show at some point. If Emily's not seen on set all this season and then suddenly pops up in the show, then chances are most of her filming was done beforehand. And not all at once either. There was S5, but I think they’ve brought her back several times when nobody was looking, so they can get things filmed without tipping fans off. Possibly those times Emily has disappeared from social media for a while.

That’s pretty much it. Anyone have anything to add?

[iamanartichoke]

^^ The other thing I wanted to write about but wasn't coherent enough was that, aside from Zawe and the Tonys, the main topic of conversation seems to be lots of fans expressing frustration that Tom's not doing more projects outside of Loki. They want him to stop playing Loki so that he can take other projects, or be more like Benedickle Cumberpickle (sorry I know that jokes about his name are probably over, but I'll never get tired of them) and balance Marvel with other, more serious roles. They want him to capitalize on his talent in a way that distances him from the MCU, so that he's not just known as "Loki" to the world at large.

I couldn't quite put into words why this bothered me so much last night (or, well, this morning) but after thinking about it, I realized that it's the entitlement.

That is, Tom is not lacking for anything. Fandom wank aside, Tom just headlined a major tv series for Disney that was overall wildly successful. He was given executive producer credit and was actively part of the development of the series (yes, yes, '95% of his ideas weren't used,' I'm pretty sure he was joking or deflecting bc that's what he does, he always goes out of his way to downplay his own accomplishments while lifting up his coworkers' but regardless, that's not the point I want to make), and the combination of those things, along with his series being the only one with a season 2, implies that he's in a decent position of authority with Marvel right now.

In addition to that, he's generally considered an A-lister. He has friends in high places. He's a collaborative worker, a professional, and a damn fine actor. None of this is news.

My point is, if he's not doing more projects, I very seriously doubt it's for lack of opportunity. He probably gets sent scripts on the daily. He could also do more theatre, or do some kind of passion project with one of his director friends.

There are tons of things that he could be doing, but he is choosing not to, and this seems to irritate his fans. I saw posts like "omg Benedecoration has this and that coming out, and so-and-so actor is doing three movies next year, I wish it were Tom! Why isn't he doing anything!"

It's definitely an entitlement thing. Tom needs to do more projects really means I want to see new Tom content. I want new pictures and press. Or Tom's taken enough of a break, it's time for him to go back to work now really means I want Tom to go back to work so that I, as a fan, have new media to consume. Or new pap pictures to look at. Even Tom should be utilizing his talent, he's squandering it while his peers are soaring means Tom owes his fans more content and better press and to be known for something besides Loki so that we don't have to feel embarrassed about stanning him instead of someone more successful.

These are all nearly word-for-word posts I saw, btw. And regardless of how you want to try to spin it, there is no reason to be salty over Tom's career choices aside from this person is not giving me enough of themselves to consume, and that is not fair.

And when you think about it that way, it's hard to not feel bothered bc it's like ... there's just something wrong with it that I'm not sure I know how to explain, bc I'm sure there's a counterargument here about how people who choose careers that put them in the public spotlight have to expect that kind of thing, and fans invest time and energy and emotion into their faves and just want to see some payoff, and so on.

It's just, I don't think you should look at a human being as a product to be bought and consumed, and it's almost like that's what's happening with these complaints. This is defective, I want a new one. That's what it sounds like to me when I see things like I really want to see Tom do something different, or Tom needs to be done with Loki bc I'm tired of that or even things like omg he's wearing that fucking blue sweater again like the fuck does it matter, as long as he's comfortable?

Anyway, I made this way, way more deep than it needed to be and sorry for the length, but I just wanted to try and work out these thoughts bc for some reason it genuinely bothers me to see "fans" act so entitled to Tom's life and career. He's successful. He's enjoying playing Loki. He enjoyed doing Betrayal for a year - and it even brought him love! He's financially secure, he's got his emotional support puppy, and he has the luxury of choosing his projects and/or has the ability to take as much time off (to spend with his girlfriend and his puppy) as he wants. He seems like he's living his best life right now and, as a fan, like, why wouldn't that make you happy for him?

Being a Tom Hiddleston fan can be the weirdest fucking thing, like - occasionally I wander over into the Tom side of the fandom (as opposed to the Loki side) and discover weird things, like that right now some fans are genuinely fucking distressed and going through the five stages of grief upon learning Tom is dating Zawe (and apparently it's not just a fake PR thing like why would it be?).

I mean ... one post I saw was like "people need to move from the denial stage into the acceptance stage, this has been going on for two years" like sorry, did I miss where Tom fucking died? The acceptance stage? Does accepting that Tom's dating someone really merit a whole stage? I just.

Aside from that, I also learned that Tom is nominated for a Tony award for Betrayal, I guess, so there's lots of posts talking about his chances of winning, speculating on whether or not he'll go in person or on Zoom, stuff like that and while there's nothing inherently wrong with that sort of engagement, I'm just sitting here like, shit, who cares? Like that'd be great for him if he wins, congrats, but also I kinda couldn't care less, personally. It's not like I don't know he can act. Everyone knows he can act. Awards are nice but they're only useful to the person actually winning them. I don't have the energy to get invested in that. Or whether he'll go in person or not - what difference does it make? Who caaaaaares?

^^ So the above is basically what I was thinking as I was going through the tag and like, then I remembered I went to see Betrayal and it was one of the best experiences of my life but it required me to spend a significant amount of money, do a lot of planning, take time off of work, and literally board a fucking plane and fly to New York City. It was that important to me that I have the opportunity to see Tom act in person and to possibly interact with him for .5 seconds at the stage door.

My point is ... I feel like being a Tom fan is just really bizarre for me personally, in that I'll get on a plane for that man but I won't turn on the tv and tune in to find out (and care) if he wins a significant award, or I won't get all in my feelings (the stages of grief, my god) bc it comes out that he's got a girlfriend.

Idk, am I even really a Tom fan, or am I a Loki fan? But I wouldn't be invested in Loki the way that I am if it weren't for Tom's performances and the way Tom speaks about Loki and so on. How do you define having immense respect for a celebrity, not only for their talent and intellect but also bc you recognize that they just have something magical about them and something about their energy just connects with you, but also you're not all that invested in them as a person or even as a professional, really, except when it comes to the one character they play that you're obsessed with?

Yeah, so anyway it's 4am and this is what I am up thinking about, thank god tomorrow is Friday.

[that-fandom-tho]

Fearless (Shawn Mendes)

Classy jazz music played in the background as people swayed on the dance floor in their gowns and suits, enjoying the night. I wasn’t one of those people. My parents had dragged me to this thing, knowing I wasn’t social and hated dressing up.

So here I sat, uncomfortable in a gown, alone as my parents made small talk that would supposedly further their business careers. I was used to it, though. They wanted so badly for me to be like them, social and successful, taking the world by storm. But I’m not, and I think they’re starting to notice that.

“May I have this dance?”

Startled, I look up to find a dude standing in front of me holding his hand out in an all black suit. A cute dude. He flashes a big bright grin as I look up. All I can do is sit there, paralyzed. His big brown eyes were friendly, but staring at me and putting me on the spot.

“Umm.. I, uh, I don’t really dance.”

“That’s a shame,” he said, taking a seat next to me. Oh God. “And why don’t you dance?”

What do I say now? “I-I just don’t.”

“Well there’s gotta be a reason,” he returns. “Maybe it’s the crappy music, or the crowdedness of the dance floor. Or maybe you’re just completely uncoordinated and really can’t dance. It could also be that you’re completely unstable on those heels, which I don’t blame you. I would be too. It could also be that you just don’t like me. So?”

For a second I just blink, taking in everything he’s said. “It’s all of that.”

“Except the last one?” he says with a hopeful smile.

I think about denying it for a second. “Except the last one.”

“Great!” he exclaims. “Then let’s go somewhere other than the dance floor,” he says, hopping up.

“Like where?”

“You’ll only find out if you come on.” There’s his hand again, just waiting for me to take it.

My parents will probably be mad if they come back and can’t find me, but who cares. As soon as our hands make contact, his clasps around mine and leads me out of the ballroom this thing is hosted in.

As we arrive back in the lobby he turns to me. “So what do you want to do?”

“You’re supposed to be leading me, remember?”

“Right,” he says, looking down in a way that makes it clear he’s thinking. “I really didn’t plan past this.”

“I can tell.” I say, as we just stare at each other wondering what to do. “Tell you what, I heard this place has one of the most beautiful gardens in the state.”

“You wanna go to it?” he asks.

“Well what would I mention it for if I didn’t?” He’s my only friend at the moment, who else am I gonna be sarcastic to?

“Good point.”

“Anyways, I think it closed at 7.”

“How much you wanna bet we can still get into it?”

I can already tell some part of this night isn’t going to end well. But does that stop me?

“Come on.” He follows me through the hotel to the double doors that lead to the garden. Immediately there’s a gate, connecting to the fence that surrounds it. The lock was a card scanner, only to be unlocked by I’m assuming managers and gardeners at the hotel.

Embarrassing as it is, I shoved my hand down the side of the top piece to my dress and dug around until I grasped what I was looking for. Shawn’s bewildered eyes said everything he was thinking as I held out the blank card that displayed only the hotel logo.

I waved it in front of the scanner and to my luck, it went green almost immediately. I quickly pulled the lock off and open the doors enough for us to enter.

“Where did you get that?” he asked. “Are you staying here?”

“No. My parents are good friends with the owners of this place. They told me if I ever need a place to stay to just ask at the front desk for an empty room and this would work for any of them. We just got lucky that it works on facilities too.”

We closed the door behind us but took the lock with us so we couldn’t get locked in. Immediately before us was a labyrinth of rosebushes and hedges and thousands of other gorgeous plants and flowers. All I wanted to do was look in amazement, but I was soon drawn out of my daze.

“Well?” he asked, looking down at me. “Is it everything you hoped?”

“Even better.” I began walking, slowly through the garden, passing roses and peonies.

He followed closely behind, reaching out and touching something here and there every once in a while. About halfway down one of the aisles I heard a bush shake behind me. I turned to find him behind me with a yellow rose in hand.

“A flower for my lady,” he said, on his knees.

All I could do was laugh. “You know yellow roses mean friendship right?”

His eyebrows furrowed and he turned and gently set it back in the bush, making me laugh further. He then plucked a new flower, a red rose, and returned to his original position and repeated his line.

“Thank you,” I said, wiping away a tear. “Where am I supposed to put this?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “in your hair or something.”

“How about we put it in your hair,” I say, heading up to him and sticking it into his fluffy curly hair. Suddenly I gasp. “I have an idea. Let’s make you a flower crown!”

“Oh gosh,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “Why not?”

“Come on!” We raced through, picking up flowers from bush after bush. “Don’t touch that one!” I told him, “It’s known to cause breakouts on open skin, won’t kill you but it isn’t pleasant.”

He quickly pulled his hand away and followed me, helping me carry all the flowers. We eventually made it to the end of the garden, where there was a huge gazebo lit up with fair lights. It reminded me of the scene in A Cinderella Story at the dance.

“We need a long, bendy stick to make it into a crown,” I told him.

”How about this?” He asked, pointing to some connected to the gazebo.

“No! If that one is broken the entire plant dies.”

“How do you know so much about these plants? I thought you’d never been in here?”

“I haven’t. But I’ve been studying botany since I was in middle school. It’s what I want to go into when I graduate.”

“Ah,” he nodded his head in understanding. “But I thought the party was for  people in the music industry?”

“It is. That’s my parents, Mr. And Mrs. Executive Producer. I’m not really a part of that,” I explain quickly, “Here it is,” I tugged a skinny wooden twig and tied it into a ring big enough to fit his head.

Together we stuck the flowers on it and I crowned him with it, smiling at the sight.

“You look beautiful,” I tell him, meaning it sincerely. It wasn’t the flower crown that made him, it was the wide smile and excited eyes.

“Why thank you,” he said, flashing a grin and adjusting his crown. He pulled out his phone and an unrecognizable slow song sounded out of the speakers. “Uh, I know in there wasn’t exactly your crowd, but now that it’s just me and you.. May I have this dance?”

“You know I don’t dance,” I told him again.

“Come on,” he said, clasping his hands together. “Please? For me? Do I have to get on my knees again?”
 I laugh, knowing he’s already won. “Fine, fine. Yes, I’d love to dance with you.”

One of his hands clasp mine and the other lands on my waist. Normally I’m uncomfortable with people touching me in any way, but it feels different this time. It feels right.

A voice is soon incorporated into the beautiful melodies and I recognize it almost immediately.

“Is this you?”

“Yeah. I wondered if you would notice.”

This night suddenly took a turn. It was always something else, never me. No one ever came to me because they liked me. I pulled away. “Look, my parents are the record producers. If you’re looking for recognition show them—“

“No,” he pulled me back, “this is a new phone, all I have right now is my own music. I’m already signed, if it makes you feel better.”

“Oh,” was all I could let out.

“Look, I really like you. You, okay? Not your parents.” He says, still swaying with me to the music.

“I like you too,” A half sigh, half laugh comes out of me. “And I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Shawn,” he finally tells me.

I smiled rest my head on his shoulder, rocking with the music.

“Feel free to tell me yours,” he says.

There he goes, making me laugh again. “Y/N.”

“Your name is just as gorgeous as you are.”

“You sound so corny.”

“But I mean it,” he said, gripping my waist a little tighter. Weirdest part was that I already knew he did.

The song ended and we took a seat on the bench, just talking about our lives, where we came from, where we were headed.

As we stood back up to find something else to do, my phone rang from inside my boob. It was slightly embarrassing digging it out of my chest but as soon as I did reality snapped back.

“It’s my dad, probably wondering where I am. I’ve gotta go.”

“Wait!” he calls out, holding onto my hand.

I turn and he brings me close, even closer than when we were dancing. He places his hand on my neck and and brings his lips down to mine firmly. I immediately feel the connection and can’t help but return his affection.

He moans a little as I wrap my arm around his neck and kiss him harder.

“Hey! Who’s back there?”

We both jump away from each other, hearing the quick footsteps of a guard or whoever called from the entrance. I leave the lock on the bench and grab his hand.

“Run!”

“I thought you said the owners gave you access!” He says, running behind me.

“Did I say me? I meant my parents.”

Masterlist

Prompt List - to be updated

Song Prompt List

—— A/N: Thanks for reading, hope you liked it! To the requester, I’m sorry this took so long to get up. I told you Thursday and it’s now Monday (technically Tuesday). It just took a while to configure an ending I liked, but it’s here, I’m satisfied. And as always, if you want a part 2, I’m open to making one. I have a couple more Shawn imagines t make, an one JG imagine that’ll be coming up soon. Btw this isn’t proofread, so if you see mistakes point them out to me!

Peace, that-fandom-tho.

[diaryofanangrynerd]

Truth and Justice

Justice League

 So as many of you may have noticed I stepped away from my tiny excuse of a review site and put my attention into other things. I did this for a couple of reasons, many of which came down to my displeasure with Hollywood and some of the decisions that they have made toward filmmaking and the things they produced. I strongly believe that if Hollywood were run by the fans, the films that we would receive would be DRASTICALLY different. But then again, maybe it is one of those ‘be careful of what you wish for’ moments, because fans of film go into film and my generation is the one running Hollywood right now…so maybe that is why we have what we have…I don’t know. Anyway, I have decided to return because I miss all of you and I just can’t keep my opinions to myself anymore. So what better film to come back for than the return of Sup...er…the Justice League.

But first, a bit of news...Jude Law (The Young Pope, Sherlock Holmes) will be joining the cast of the upcoming Marvel heroine film Captain Marvel with Brie Larson (Free Fire, Room) in the titular role. Apparently, Law will be playing the love/mentor Doctor Walter Lawson. Okay…um sure. Not really anyone I would expect to be in a movie like this, but at this point I think everyone we have ever seen on the big screen is going to be in a superhero movie. So…it’s whatever.

Second, Netflix has extended the hiatus on their hit show House of Cards. With everything that is surrounding actor Kevin Spacey right now, is this a shock? I’m sure that Netflix is going to distance themselves as much as they can from this (rightfully so, mind you) and try to push more of their other original content. I was on Netflix yesterday and they buried this show on their original content page and have a blurred image of Spacey. So don’t count on a wrap up on Frank Underwood’s time in political office anytime soon.

Lastly, as boring as subject to me is, box office numbers are in for the holiday weekend and Pixar’s newest entry, Coco, takes the top spot with today’s reviewee Justice League coming in second. I just thought that this would be a good lead into my review.

So with the DCEU being a virtual letdown, with the exception of Wonder Woman, I was very hesitant going into this film. Anyone who knows me personally knows the great distaste I have for the film named Batman v. Superman and just the poor execution that director Zach Snyder did with it. In his defense though, Snyder did a great job with the Batman scenes but not so much with everything else. Here we are, a year and a half later and I don’t really think that anything has changed. Ugh!

The plot of this film is extremely basic, so much so to the point that most of the film is filler to where and what the ‘team’ needs to do. The hastily assemble team of The Flash (Ezra Miller Perks of Being a Wallflower), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), Aquaman (Jason Momoa Game of Thrones), and Batman (Ben Affleck Argo) have to stop the villainous Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds Game of Thrones) before he and his Parademons destroy the Earth. The filler of this movie is wasted on very small subplots that go NOWHERE! Aquaman is an angry drunk for some reason, Cyborg taking over the brooding from Batman because he doesn’t look like the other kids, and Batman having a crush on Wonder Woman; all of this stuff just seemed like afterthoughts to what the filmmakers really wanted to get to.

As far as acting goes, everyone is good except for Affleck and Cavill. Miller is great as comedy relief, Momoa surprised me with his take on Arthur Curry, and Gadot shines has Diana Prince. Then there is Cavill and Affleck…then tent poles to this whole party. I’m going to write all of this off as studio tampering but Affleck’s Batman seems weaker and not has menacing almost like the death of Superman made him second guess who he is and what the Batman stands for. Affleck mentions that he has a new outlook towards everything because of what Superman stood for, but they toned him down almost to the point where I thought little comic bubbles were going to pop out every time he hit someone and Burt Ward was going to show up in his Robin costume. Along with Affleck, Cavill just seemed like he was somewhere else and the reverted his characterization of Superman too far to the left and it came across cheesy. I am glad that the writers heard our complaints of BvS, but this was too much. I wish they would have gradually toned it back so that the transformation wasn’t so obvious. With the exception of the digitally removed mustache on Henry Cavill (which look horrendous btw), the effects in the film where fine, but nothing of worth noting. I thought the choice of blue lightning for The Flash was an interesting choice. As a comic book fan however, there is a giant gaping hole as far as the team goes and that is with Green Lantern. The film does give mentions of the Lantern Corps, but no real mention on where they are for this particular fight. Last thing for my complaints is why is everyone in this movie shouting out every other person’s secret identity? Minor Spoilers: In the beginning of the film, Curry does it to Batman and in the middle of the film Lois screams out “Clark” as there are a few witnesses to Superman’s reawakening and he is flying around. I guess they don’t find it as important in the film universe compared to the comic universe.

As I read back over all of this, I do want to say that the movie wasn’t total garbage. I did enjoy the action sequences, the awe of seeing some of these new characters debut was partially worth it, and I did have a decent time with this movie.  I hope that DC and Warner Bros. find their Kevin Feige (head of Marvel Studios). I think that there is so much untapped potential when it comes to this universe and with rumors of Affleck leaving and The Flash movie being Flashpoint (where the Flash goes back in time to rest the entire DC Universe), I am hopeful that this is reset and done right the next time. Wonder Woman is the exception to the mess that is DCEU because it had remnants of Richard Donner’s Superman film and as corny as this sounds, of hope for the cinematic universe. DC and Warner Bros are so far behind in the Expanded Universe cinematic game that I can’t fault them for trying to catch up. They just need to learn from their mistakes better and maybe step away from the vision that Snyder started.

As always, if you have any comments or opinions you like to share please comment below…Thanks!

 The Verdict: Wait till Blu-Ray.

[thecrocsqueen]

Lady Jane Grey and Empress Matilda

  Ok, so, I am ready as ever to go through this rant. I graduated with a Bachelor's in European Studies, so I have studied a lot of the history and culture of Europe, I have read a lot about the Tudor dynasty, and recently watched a video that showed England since before William the Conqueror. It showed the kings and the lands they controlled. The video didn't include Matilda to my disappointment, but it did include Jane. And let me tell you- I have OPINIONS. The video was nice, so I don’t want to put it on blast or anything. It is just one of those things that I feel I have a valid opinion on and like to nit-pick because HISTORY IS MY JAM.

  And, sorry if I disappoint, but I don't think Jane should be considered an actual queen of England.

  It isn't because she was only "queen" for 9 or so days or because she didn't have a coronation. That doesn't grasp the whole story or clearly define how much she lacked legitimacy as a queen. My reasons are different than those, and really aren't original. A lot of the explanation is common knowledge to many, but for some reason the Lady Jane situation is still a debate.

  But anyway, to understand the situation we have to understand the situation England had concerning its government. England has had a very long history concerning the monarch and placing checks on their power. The Tudors were still very much absolute monarchs, but the Magna Carta of 1215 made the monarch bound to the laws of the land, and they could no longer make and take away laws at will.

  So, skip forward to Henry VIII. Everyone knows about him, how he had 6 wives, and how he REALLY REALLY wanted a son. With our 20/20 vision, we make fun of him because, HELLO, ELIZABETH I!!! But he had a valid reason for his concerns (his actions were awful- just his concerns over the succession were valid), but more on why that is in a little bit.

  Well, during Henry’s time, laws and taxes were decided by Parliament. Monarchs back then still had MASSIVE power over Parliament, so it still isn’t anything like what the UK has today but Henry could not just make the laws by himself.

  With the Parliament, he created 3 different Acts of Succession, the last of these being in 1543. In this last one, he put into place the line of succession for when he was gone. This act placed Mary and Elizabeth in line after their brother (if he didn’t produce an heir, of course). Henry was smart, and added the grandchildren of his younger sister onto the line after Elizabeth. This was supposed to ensure that someone would be in line if none of his children had children of their own. The ones after Elizabeth were the Grey sisters- Lady Jane Grey being the oldest of the sisters. Funnily enough, Henry did not legitimize his daughters when he had this law put through. He did not want to legitimize those marriages, I guess. In a way it would be admitting he was wrong before. Mary would legitimize herself through Parliament, and Elizabeth would let sleeping dogs lie.

  Well, when Edward VI became king, he seriously pushed for Protestant reform. Henry VIII was famous for the split with Rome, but he was still a Catholic in his private life. He was not as into church reform and new ideas as his son was. Edward was as strongly Protestant as Mary was Catholic. And that was a problem for Edward. Now, many believe that Edward and Elizabeth were not very close to Mary, but after the death of Elizabeth’s mother, Mary and Elizabeth grew very close, and both sisters were close to their brother. However, Mary would not convert to Protestantism and this infuriated Edward. He may have still had good relations with Mary at some level, but they clashed A LOT over the fact that she would not submit to him as king to follow what he believed to be the “true religion.”

  Now, Edward wasn’t the healthiest person. At some point, he and his moochers realized he was going to die. So, to keep the country’s progress towards Protestantism (and his officials wanted to keep the power and wealth they gained and drained from the poor monarch), Edward VI made a will booting both Mary and Elizabeth off the line of succession. Now, why would he boot off Elizabeth? Elizabeth was seen as a good, Protestant princess. She would have been a great successor! NOPE, Edward was not for women rulers. Actually, many Protestants were more against women rulers than their Catholic counterparts. In 1558, John Knox, a Protestant minister in Scotland that would later debate heatedly with Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote against the idea that women could rule, citing all the usual sexist ideas of the time.

  So, then, why Jane? Jane is a woman. Why was she picked? Well, his will at first specified her (and her sisters’) MALE HEIRS as his heir. So, her and her younger sister were married and they hoped for a male offspring, but time was not on Edward’s side. Once he realized he could not wait for the Grey sisters to have children, he fixed his will to say that Jane Grey AND her male heirs were next in line. So, why not just go back to Elizabeth? Why still go for Jane? He was SUPER close to Elizabeth and Elizabeth was SUPER Protestant.

  Even with her Protestantism, it was still a no. The main reason he used was not just his personal belief against women rulers, but also the fact that both were illegitimate. THAT was what knocked Elizabeth from the spot and placed Jane there instead, and it probably saved Elizabeth’s life. Well, remember when I explained the Magna Carta and how laws worked at this point? Edward did not have time to wait for a Parliament to ratify his will as a law. So, the law of the land said one thing, and the monarch said another. But the monarch was bound to the laws of the land…

  Once Edward VI died, the officials proclaimed Jane as queen, and Mary was TICKED. Mary had faced a lot of horrible treatment in her life, but THIS? This she would not let happen, and the people weren’t having it either. We think of Henry as horrible today, but the people LOVED HIM. The people also knew who he put in the line of succession, and they wanted his daughter as it was her rightful place. So, this is where an even bigger player than laws and the Magna Carta comes into play- BIG ARMY DIPLOMACY. No matter what, the person with the bigger army gets the crown. That is how it is no matter where you look, and Mary had it. She had the law on her side, and she had the military/people with her. Edward’s officials realized this, and turned on Jane. Her FATHER was the one who arrested her.

  Now, many think Mary immediately executed her, but this isn’t the case. Mary understood that she was being used by others, and had her imprisoned in stately rooms in the Tower. It was not until the next year after revolt in Jane’s name that Mary had her executed. (Still not cool, but I wanna share the facts.)

  Anyway, with all of this, Jane had no legal legitimacy to her claim. She was part of a coup, with the Protestant officials trying to grab power with a legally illegitimate queen. If she had the force, then she would have been able to succeed, she would have been able to enforce her legitimacy, but, ALAS. She will still go down in history as the “9 day queen” (depending on how you count), and she is a fascinating historical figure. She is also a victim, for she was used and then betrayed in order to help men in their pursuit for power. She, Anne Bolyn, Mary Bolyn, and many other women were sacrificed for the benefit of their male relatives. So, I don’t disagree with her being on any list for personal reasons. She is fascinating.

  But, what about Matilda? Didn’t I say something about Matilda? Well, when I saw that she wasn’t included in the list I was sad, but I wasn’t scoffing until I saw Jane. (Again, this was a nice video, and this is just me and my personal nick-picking.)

  I would say Matilda has a better claim as the first queen of England, but that is still...messy. And it is also why Henry VIII wanted a son SO badly. See, when Matilda’s brother died, she was the only legitimate child left from her father (or only child all together, either way). Her father, Henry I, made his barons and other officials swear loyalty to her as the next monarch, but, well, that wasn’t a real game plan for them. (There is also a story that a fight between daughter and father made Henry I relieve them of this promise, but who knows). And the reason they didn’t want her as monarch was because- WAIT FOR IT- SEXISM. YAY!

(Wait, no-)

  There was also no law in place to assure her legitimacy, and England’s line of succession was messy because it was really a free-for-all amongst the king’s children, with the eldest son having the largest advantage. Women were not really seen as monarchy types back then. So, one of her cousins, Stephan, was crowned as king while she was in France, and she was NOT HAVING IT.

  In 1139, she went from France to England to get the throne back. She even had Stephan captured at one point, and was going to be crowned in Westminster. However, she lost the will of the people and the aristocracy with her attitude she gained as Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. They wanted things from her, she would not give them. She was kicked out by the London crowds, and later she traded Stephan for an ally Stephan’s allies captured (btw, Stephan’s wife, also named Matilda, was pretty awesome too).

  So, it seems, according to this, Stephan had the BIG ARMY DIPLOMACY, even tho Matilda was supposed to be the monarch instead. So, Stephan wins! Ok, that question has been answered-

Wait.

But.

For years the “Lady of the English” (the official title she was given before she was to be officially crowned) controlled part of England. She controlled the south-west of England while Stephan held the south-east and midlands. So… she was KINDA queen of at least an area for about 7 years? If she had control over it would she technically be the queen? Her and her husband DID take control over Normandy, tho that had some struggles still (which was ruled by England at the time).

  In 1148, with Stephan and Matilda at a stalemate, Matilda left for Normandy. Her son, Henry, stayed in England in her place. He was starting to play a more and more increasing role in the conflict in the 1140s. Stephan, without an heir of his own, named Henry as heir.

  Henry recognized Stephan as king, became his adopted son, and was Henry II after Stephan died. Matilda held control over Normandy with trouble. She had been turning more attention away from England and more towards governing Normandy, so really she was cool with all of this. Henry II’s accession also helped calm down the craziness in Normandy for his mom to have an easier time. She ruled there in her son’s name, her son and her had charters issued in both of their names, and Henry asked his mom for advice a lot. She was a really cool lady who helped keep political peace within the government.

  So...was she queen of the small part of England for 7 years? She was sure able to get her son on the throne. I mean, she didn’t have a coronation, but Edward VIII wasn’t taken off the list of kings and he didn’t either. Really, a coronation is more of an event and spectacle. Elizabeth I was considered queen before her coronation. It is more of a symbolic thing. But, at the end of the day, these questions will be argued and debated. And this huge mess with Matilda and Stephan (it was really bad) scared Henry VIII, the son of Henry VII, the guy who ended the War of the Roses- another fight between families for the crown. Henry VIII’s worries and concerning made a LOT of sense in his time, and he was proven right with his son being a jerk and the major Succession Question during Elizabeth I’s life. So, concerns legit without 2020 vision, but actions were VERY messed up.

  My conclusion is that, if someone wants to include Jane in the list of kings and queens of England, then they have to include Matilda. If they include Matilda, they don’t really have to include Jane. Matilda has a better claim as queen than Jane does, even if it is decided to be wrong.

  However, I think we all would rather one of those and not have Mary I, Bloody Mary as the first queen of England. That doesn’t sound good at all, and gratefully Elizabeth I was beloved, and proved women capable (even if she was sexist too).

[tremendouspeachduck]

Five Great Lessons You Can Learn From Natural Gas Extraction

aka What do you Need To Know About NATURAL GAS EXTRACTION/Fracking - Most Americans like the idea, why?

DYK?  U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption are at the lowest level since 1994. Overall, carbon emissions from energy have fallen for five straight years. Natural gas, as the president pointed out, is having a direct impact as natural gas power generation is replacing dirtier coal power on a near 1-to-1 ratio. In addition to a big reduction in carbon emissions, the overall carbon footprint of natural gas extraction is becoming smaller.

DYK?  The manufacturing industry has announced more than 100 projects representing $80 billion to $100 billion in new investments thanks to fracking. The projects range from petrochemical plants to fertilizer manufacturers and are only possible thanks to cheap and abundant natural gas that's only unlocked by fracking.Photo credit: Chesapeake Energy.Fracking has fueled a 41% increase in energy-related jobs since the end of the Great Recession. The industry now supports 2.1 million jobs. It's expected to add another 1.1 million new jobs by the end of the decade.

On top of that, it's estimated that fracking has enabled the U.S. to add 530,000 manufacturing jobs since 2010 as companies took advantage of cheaper natural gas. Some analysts predict that another 5 million manufacturing jobs could be added to the economy by 2020 thanks to cheap natural gas that was unlocked by fracking.

DYK?  Over the course of drilling more than a million wells, the industry has continued to refine the process. Today's process of fracking is vastly improved from just a few years ago.

Halliburton is one of the companies leading the way to make fracking even better. The company has developed safer fracking fluids that are sourced with ingredients found in the food industry. The fluid is safe enough that Halliburton executives have even taken a sip at a conference.

Halliburton is also pioneering a water recycling solution that will enable it to frack new wells using water that is produced from other wells it fracked. The company hopes that by recycling it can reduce the freshwater usage in its fracking operations by up to 25% by the end of this year.

BTW - Please do your research – Was Civil War about freeing slaves – myth.  It was about taxation.  Were blacks in civil war times thought to be human – myth.  No, they were thought to be some sort of sub-species.  Did abolitionists cause a change in thought – True – But did it come from human decency or politics?  It came from North wanting South economy destroyed.  We need our statues and our history written as it was – as ugly as it might be – we never want it repeated, right?  This is how we learn from the past.

BTW -  Reparations?  Blacks, American Indians, Whites all bought and sold slaves, so who can we pin as the culprit? Of course we’re racist - from the Irish, Italians, Blacks and now Arabs and that won’t change.  We are human and fear other cultures and colors.  We can evolve with better ethnic education that will eventually lead to tolerance & admiring differences/abilities.When someone screams racist - I say yeah - so?  It’s a work in progress that NOT killing the target person or stuffing head in toilet is a great advancement.  Also, these feelings are coming from each race.  Maybe each race can tell tales about some other race and its unethical actions. The key to take home is that we are progressing.

Others are working on sustainable fracking initiatives. These will limit flaring, cut down on emissions, and reduce toxic chemicals used in fracking operations, as well as a whole host of other voluntary standards to clean up the process. That's in addition to stronger regulations that some states are placing on water testing and emissions. Bottom line: Fracking is getting a whole lot safer than many of its detractors realize. 

Many of the reasons the process is hated have either been disproved or have vastly improved over the years. That's why more Americans need to learn to love fracking, as it's doing a lot more good than many people realize. 

We should blame lack of education coming from Congress, right?

List of youngest members of the United States Congress!

What we have is a de facto House of Rep run by uneducated Democrats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What qualifications do you think would be proper?

We need women in both parties. Representation of only one type of American female identity is problematic.  Check it out: 

North Carolina Teen Accepted to 113 Colleges, Awarded $4.5m in Scholarships

A Greensboro teen’s hard work paid off in a big way. Jasmine Harrison, 17, was accepted to 113 colleges and universities and awarded more than $4.5 million in merit-based scholarships.

Who are our female Senators and young House Rep?

The youngest female Republican House Rep is Elise Stefanik - what’s she up to?

Republican Senators:  Susan Collins,  Lisa Murkowski,  Deb Fischer,  Joni Ernst and  Cindy Hyde-Smith

Joni Ernst was the first female combat veteran and  Cindy Hyde-Smith  is the first woman from Mississippi elected to Congress.  Cindy Hyde-Smith ran on reigning in Fed Bureaucracy and the shutdown helped her.  Joni Ernst is singing my song  - cutting down on money spent 

All GOP both men and women are concerned with the subject of rape.   STUDY DESIGN: A national probability sample of 4008 adult American women took part in a 3-year longitudinal survey that assessed the prevalence and incidence of rape and related physical and mental health outcomes. 

RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. 

We started off as twin baby girls but today we are both US Judges.

A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion. 

Republican John James will run again, this time against Sen. Gary Peters The Michigan businessman’s run could shape the presidential race in a key swing state. 

CONCLUSIONS: Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization. (Am J Obstet Gynecol 1996;175:320-5.)

If the victim is shy - there is still a way to conviction without evidence.   The GOP stance is victim accusations is not enough to convict - by itself.  Absolutely no crime can be substantiated with just an accusation.

Lastly, since most rapists are known to the victim, incidents go unreported and my fav solution is to shoot them evaporates - especially if a family member.

More and more women are coming around to this view.  Welcome to the GOP  or Republican Party!

A hero without a cape

Her name is Theresa Kachindamoto, and she is a senior chief - political leader of a region with a population of about 900,000 people.

She didn’t run for election; she was appointed, without her knowledge, while she was living and working in a completely different part of the country. She just received a call one day telling her to come back to her childhood home, because she was in charge now.

So she did; and when she arrived, she discovered widespread sexual abuse of children. She browbeat 50 uncooperative local leaders into accepting her decision to annul all the marriages. She then fired four of them when they continued to allow children to be married off in their areas. She still faces widespread opposition from parents who consider it their right to sexually abuse their daughters if they want to; but Kachindamoto very evidently does not give a fuck, and is continuing to use political and legal means to protect children in the region.

She’s not just an anonymous do-gooder; she’s an effective political leader despite incredibly difficult circumstances. Theresa Kachindamoto.

Child Bride World Wide Issue

The Noura Hussein Plea for justice

Arranged marriages are allowed and promoted in Islam as long as they are accepted by both the bride and the groom.

THE TRUTH – warning, may be brutal to your ears

DYK?  According to a 2016 census done by Global Slavery Index almost over 45.8 million live in slavery - nowadays.

Please leave message below, then Go To top, nav to previous or next

[krestmarketinggroup-blog]

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by  jaredgardner   “You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem.”

  That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say “efficiency” is a more accurate term than “efficacy,” but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there’s a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

  At RDI, we specialize in marketing services for mid to large enterprise clients with annual revenues of our ideal client ranging from $50M/year to $20B/year. The size of clients that we work with have 50+ person marketing departments, and some with more than 1,000. Implementing profitable and evolving SEO programs is much more difficult for non-agile companies and those with marketing that predates the internet. Despite having more resources and built-in topical authority, enterprise SEO can be much harder than SMB SEO — not only because the SEO challenges are greater, but because it introduces another layer of organizational challenges.

  What is enterprise SEO?  This same question was on a slide at a recent SEO meetup lead by  Ratish Naroor , Director of SEO at Overstock.com. Ratish’s opinion of what constitutes enterprise SEO differed from mine in a few areas. Ratish’s main qualification was that the site in question had one million organic landing pages. At RDI, we work with companies that drive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue through organic search. Often these sites have less than 5,000 pages, yet their digital marketing departments are twice the size of many marketing teams at e-commerce-first companies. In my opinion, there’s more to consider than just the number of pages. I like to focus on the organization itself and not the size of its site; organizations whose website  is  its product take SEO more seriously. E-commerce retailers like Overstock, real estate sites like Zillow, and travel sites like Trip Advisor or Expedia all invest heavily in SEO programs. Many times, “old companies” that have been around 40+ years will have “old management” stakeholders who are a little late to the digital marketing party and more resistant to change. Does this late adoption of SEO and digital marketing make the organization itself any less enterprise? I don’t believe so.

  If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

     Corporate team structure, budgeting, and approval process.  There’s no hard number here, but typically 20 or more people are involved in taking web pages from an idea to a 200 status code. Some companies are so lean it will blow you away, so think more than just the total head count. 

  Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business.  SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.  

  Unique and difficult SEO challenges.  This may include large page counts where scaling on-page changes and crawl control is important, competitive industries where search terms have high paid CPAs, or international SEO operating in multiple languages and countries.  

  How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?  When working with an enterprise organization, there are three major areas to address in order to minimize internal SEO challenges and to see real follow-through in implementing high-value SEO ideas, strategies, and tactics.  1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility  SEO can’t succeed in a silo. To get your strategies implemented, you will need full participation and cooperation with content producers, developers, legal, and department heads. It’s important to remember that companies of this size will have an established culture. Sometimes this culture is dysfunctional, and overcoming it will be an uphill battle.  Tom Critchlow recently described this culture as a “grain.”  The direction and depth of this “grain” is going dictate how much time you spend on this step, and the best way to get people involved is to keep your work visible to the decision makers:

     Automated reporting:  Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

    Dev teams:  Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like  DeepCrawl  for crawl reporting. 

  VPs and directors:  High-level performance reports like M/M and Y/Y traffic and conversions give them a bird’s eye view of the site and the effects of your SEO efforts. Tying this data to a dollar figure will help make your case. This can include simple analytics data from Google Analytics, or more advanced tools such as our favorite BI tool,  DOMO , or its competitor  Tableau .   

  Product owners/business units:  Keyword-level data and traffic to a specific site section  that a team works on. An enterprise SEO tool like  BrightEdge  or  Conductor  can make these reports easy to manage. 

   Pro tip:  Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions. 

     Trainings 

   Many marketers still think SEO is something you sprinkle on at the end of a content project, or “something our IT team handles.” It’s up to you to break down those assumptions and educate their team on the idea that that SEO is symbiotic with every marketing channel and department. These trainings can vary quite a bit, so find what works for the company you are working in/with. We have seen success with the following formats: lunch and learns, video recordings for SEO suites mentioned above, team-specific trainings focused on the area the team controls such as development or content research. While I’d love to say that we turned all the marketers into great SEOs, that’s rarely the case. What we typically see — and are thrilled when it happens — is an email from a product manager that says, “Hey, we are launching a new product next quarter and you mentioned it’s good to do keyword research for new pages; can you help?” 

     Open brainstorms 

   Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the “SEO Brainshare.” Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI. 

    2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

  As an agency, we have to be clear with our main point of contact: “You can’t change your SEO results without changing your site. We need you to be the driver of change at your organization. RDI will arm you with the ideas, rationale, and detailed instructions, but you have to get the people in your organization to act.”

  While my experience is very agency-focused, in-house SEOs will have to explain a similar scenario to their managers, and the managers of the content, creative, and development teams. The best way to enable yourself for success is make sure you have access to all the players needed for SEO greatness, and they each know what’s at stake and have a certain degree of ownership from their managers. If the product owner doesn’t have a KPI tied to organic traffic or conversions on their pages, it’s highly unlikely they will prioritize and take ownership of organic traffic to those pages.

  For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?” and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn’t been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn’t their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

     3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return  This is undoubtedly the hardest to nail. SEO results by nature are highly ambiguous. There is a constant flux of right vs wrong, causation vs correlation, and my least favorite, the best choice between two “good” options. I recently listened to  a podcast  where  Bill Hunt  (an OG of SEO, BTW) said, “If you can’t put a dollar number on it, you won’t get a dollar for it.” The hardest thing for me to do as I grew my SEO strategies from local businesses to enterprises was to eliminate SEO busy work. I needed to move away from tasks like updating ALT tags because a crawl tool flagged them as “errors,” and start focusing on projects that would have a monetary impact — like creating new site sections, reworking high-ranking titles for CTR, and consolidating competing content.

  There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

  (Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

  Now you need to see how many non-brand conversions you would get if you achieved the rank you feel is plausible (this is more of an art than science; I like to use the rank of the top competitor as “achievable”):  (Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

  Then run a  percent change for delta  for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

  Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

  =IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,’Rank CTR’!A:B,2,0)),0) 

  For this you’ll need to have a CTR curve table in a table labeled “Rank CTR.” We used the CTR table from  AWR for unbranded search , but feel free to use any CTR curve you feel is most accurate for your industry. You can even build upon your own data in Google Search Console.

     You will need to do this once for current estimated traffic and again after you have set your target rank numbers, then run a delta to get percent change. (The above formula and CTR curve can be found in the  Content Gap Analysis template  on our site.)

  Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our  Content Gap Analysis . Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

     You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

  They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the Content Gap Analysis we look at what competitors are doing, then measure the estimated traffic for a topic area. This kind of analysis looks for gaps on our client’s site where competitors have content and we do not.  We can examine the likelihood of us being successful in our next content endeavor and to put a number on the estimated traffic a competitor’s site section or page is getting. Once you find opportunities with a forecastable impact, prioritize them in content or site projects and try not to juggle too many balls at once — at least until some content projects have shipped. Don’t forget to quickly communicate the success of a project to accelerate the two factors mentioned above, even if it’s just a quick email with a screenshot from Google/Adobe Analytics.

  Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly  Enterprise SEO is great because it allows you the opportunity to work on sites with serious impact and serious challenges. Sometimes you must take the good with the bad, and in enterprise SEO the bad is typically the bureaucracy that comes with large companies. Focus on what matters, don’t piss anyone off, and don’t relent on the need for progress. Happy optimizing! Please share how you have conquered organization challenges in your work in the comments below!

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

http://bit.ly/2woAp9d

#articlewriting #digitalmarketing #blogpower #linkbuilding #socialmediamarketing #lagunabeachseo #bestlocalseo #contentwriting #seo #huntingtonbeachseo

[wickedbananas]

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

At RDI, we specialize in marketing services for mid to large enterprise clients with annual revenues of our ideal client ranging from $50M/year to $20B/year. The size of clients that we work with have 50+ person marketing departments, and some with more than 1,000. Implementing profitable and evolving SEO programs is much more difficult for non-agile companies and those with marketing that predates the internet. Despite having more resources and built-in topical authority, enterprise SEO can be much harder than SMB SEO — not only because the SEO challenges are greater, but because it introduces another layer of organizational challenges.

What is enterprise SEO?

This same question was on a slide at a recent SEO meetup lead by Ratish Naroor, Director of SEO at Overstock.com. Ratish’s opinion of what constitutes enterprise SEO differed from mine in a few areas. Ratish’s main qualification was that the site in question had one million organic landing pages. At RDI, we work with companies that drive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue through organic search. Often these sites have less than 5,000 pages, yet their digital marketing departments are twice the size of many marketing teams at e-commerce-first companies. In my opinion, there's more to consider than just the number of pages. I like to focus on the organization itself and not the size of its site; organizations whose website is its product take SEO more seriously. E-commerce retailers like Overstock, real estate sites like Zillow, and travel sites like Trip Advisor or Expedia all invest heavily in SEO programs. Many times, “old companies” that have been around 40+ years will have “old management” stakeholders who are a little late to the digital marketing party and more resistant to change. Does this late adoption of SEO and digital marketing make the organization itself any less enterprise? I don’t believe so.

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Corporate team structure, budgeting, and approval process. There's no hard number here, but typically 20 or more people are involved in taking web pages from an idea to a 200 status code. Some companies are so lean it will blow you away, so think more than just the total head count.

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

Unique and difficult SEO challenges. This may include large page counts where scaling on-page changes and crawl control is important, competitive industries where search terms have high paid CPAs, or international SEO operating in multiple languages and countries.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

When working with an enterprise organization, there are three major areas to address in order to minimize internal SEO challenges and to see real follow-through in implementing high-value SEO ideas, strategies, and tactics.

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

SEO can’t succeed in a silo. To get your strategies implemented, you will need full participation and cooperation with content producers, developers, legal, and department heads. It’s important to remember that companies of this size will have an established culture. Sometimes this culture is dysfunctional, and overcoming it will be an uphill battle. Tom Critchlow recently described this culture as a “grain.” The direction and depth of this "grain" is going dictate how much time you spend on this step, and the best way to get people involved is to keep your work visible to the decision makers:

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

VPs and directors: High-level performance reports like M/M and Y/Y traffic and conversions give them a bird’s eye view of the site and the effects of your SEO efforts. Tying this data to a dollar figure will help make your case. This can include simple analytics data from Google Analytics, or more advanced tools such as our favorite BI tool, DOMO, or its competitor Tableau.

Product owners/business units: Keyword-level data and traffic to a specific site section that a team works on. An enterprise SEO tool like BrightEdge or Conductor can make these reports easy to manage.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Many marketers still think SEO is something you sprinkle on at the end of a content project, or "something our IT team handles." It’s up to you to break down those assumptions and educate their team on the idea that that SEO is symbiotic with every marketing channel and department. These trainings can vary quite a bit, so find what works for the company you are working in/with. We have seen success with the following formats: lunch and learns, video recordings for SEO suites mentioned above, team-specific trainings focused on the area the team controls such as development or content research. While I’d love to say that we turned all the marketers into great SEOs, that’s rarely the case. What we typically see — and are thrilled when it happens — is an email from a product manager that says, “Hey, we are launching a new product next quarter and you mentioned it’s good to do keyword research for new pages; can you help?”

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

As an agency, we have to be clear with our main point of contact: “You can’t change your SEO results without changing your site. We need you to be the driver of change at your organization. RDI will arm you with the ideas, rationale, and detailed instructions, but you have to get the people in your organization to act.”

While my experience is very agency-focused, in-house SEOs will have to explain a similar scenario to their managers, and the managers of the content, creative, and development teams. The best way to enable yourself for success is make sure you have access to all the players needed for SEO greatness, and they each know what’s at stake and have a certain degree of ownership from their managers. If the product owner doesn’t have a KPI tied to organic traffic or conversions on their pages, it’s highly unlikely they will prioritize and take ownership of organic traffic to those pages.

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

This is undoubtedly the hardest to nail. SEO results by nature are highly ambiguous. There is a constant flux of right vs wrong, causation vs correlation, and my least favorite, the best choice between two “good” options. I recently listened to a podcast where Bill Hunt (an OG of SEO, BTW) said, "If you can't put a dollar number on it, you won't get a dollar for it.” The hardest thing for me to do as I grew my SEO strategies from local businesses to enterprises was to eliminate SEO busy work. I needed to move away from tasks like updating ALT tags because a crawl tool flagged them as “errors,” and start focusing on projects that would have a monetary impact — like creating new site sections, reworking high-ranking titles for CTR, and consolidating competing content.

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

Now you need to see how many non-brand conversions you would get if you achieved the rank you feel is plausible (this is more of an art than science; I like to use the rank of the top competitor as “achievable”):

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

For this you'll need to have a CTR curve table in a table labeled “Rank CTR.” We used the CTR table from AWR for unbranded search, but feel free to use any CTR curve you feel is most accurate for your industry. You can even build upon your own data in Google Search Console.

You will need to do this once for current estimated traffic and again after you have set your target rank numbers, then run a delta to get percent change. (The above formula and CTR curve can be found in the Content Gap Analysis template on our site.)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the Content Gap Analysis we look at what competitors are doing, then measure the estimated traffic for a topic area. This kind of analysis looks for gaps on our client’s site where competitors have content and we do not. We can examine the likelihood of us being successful in our next content endeavor and to put a number on the estimated traffic a competitor’s site section or page is getting. Once you find opportunities with a forecastable impact, prioritize them in content or site projects and try not to juggle too many balls at once — at least until some content projects have shipped. Don’t forget to quickly communicate the success of a project to accelerate the two factors mentioned above, even if it’s just a quick email with a screenshot from Google/Adobe Analytics.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

Enterprise SEO is great because it allows you the opportunity to work on sites with serious impact and serious challenges. Sometimes you must take the good with the bad, and in enterprise SEO the bad is typically the bureaucracy that comes with large companies. Focus on what matters, don’t piss anyone off, and don’t relent on the need for progress. Happy optimizing! Please share how you have conquered organization challenges in your work in the comments below!

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Cornerstone Content

Is all content created equal? Should one piece of collateral be prioritised over another?

Your knee-jerk response might be to say, “Of course, I love all of my content!” or “You monster, don’t make me choose!”

As digital marketers and content producers, we may feel a certain, almost parental, attachment to our material. How do you decide which you prefer over others?

But despite what our parents tell us, everyone has a favorite. Lisa over Bart Simpson. Marcia over Jan Brady. Randy over Mark Taylor. Ivanka over Eric Trump. Sean over Julian Lennon. I could go on.

Digital content is no different. Some assets inherently provide more value – or, at least have the potential to provide more value – than others. They’re more important and more visible to site visitors and sales leads. They encapsulate everything you want to convey about your brand and what you can do for your customers.

If you haven’t already guessed, we’re talking about cornerstone content, and if you don’t nail this stuff, you could be missing out on the chance to rank for your most relevant and competitive search terms and establish a solid foundation to build out the rest of your content ecosystem.

What is cornerstone content?

As the name implies, cornerstone content pieces are the foundational assets that clearly establish who you are, what your brand messaging is and what value you offer to customers. If you were to distill your entire business into a handful of overarching talking points and value props, then you have the basis for your cornerstone content.

So, we’re talking homepages and other landing pages here, right? Not necessarily.

In theory, cornerstone content can be just about anything: blog posts, videos, infographics or, yes, homepages. It’s not the type of content that distinguishes cornerstone content, it’s the message. That being said, as we’ll soon see, given some of the parameters of cornerstone content, written material is best-suited for these means.

Cornerstone content needs to be informative, yet engaging. It answers common questions someone might have about your business and also showcases how your products or services solve some of the most pressing problems facing your clientele.

So, product pages, then? Not quite, or at least, it doesn’t have to be.

Cornerstone content may cover topics that are related to your business practice but not necessarily specific or unique to your services. For instance, if your creative marketing team created the robotic process automation article to end all robotic process automation articles, that could very well be considered cornerstone content even if it never once mentions your brand.

It’s informative, it’s engaging, it establishes your business’ high level of expertise in this field and, since it provides a rich, detailed explanation of an emerging technology that gets a lot of search traffic, it’s all but guaranteed to be a highly sought after piece of content for years to come.

You’re going to be linking back to that bad boy just about any time RPA comes up in your blogs or on social media. It’s a digital marketing golden goose. Who cares if it’s not explicitly tied to your products or services?

Too brand or not too brand

For many businesses, though, cornerstone content will be brand-specific, detailing in no uncertain terms what they can offer their clients. This material provides basic, essential information that any potential customer would need to know about your brand, which you can then build upon with additional resources and content – hence, “cornerstone”. It can operate as a hub of sorts, with a solid foundation to connect related content that may not be quite as exhaustive in scope, but still extremely important and informative.

With that in mind, pages and material higher up in your site hierarchy lend themselves better to cornerstone content. Something can’t really be considered a pillar of your brand messaging and overall digital content strategy if it’s buried deep on your site, now can it?

In that particular case stated above, you’re dealing with content that naturally lends itself to “cornerstone” status because it’s bound to get a high level of search traffic. In most instances, though, creating cornerstone content will involve taking webpages, articles, videos, infographics – whatever material you feel best reflects your brand and mission statement – and optimising them for search. It’s about giving that content the best chance to be found online because that’s the material that communicates your brand’s value in the clearest terms possible. Once a potential customer finds that content, they’ll understand what you’re all about.

Why is cornerstone content important for SEO?

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that cornerstone content is a crucial piece of today’s digital marketing puzzle. We’re always talking about the importance of high-quality, informative content and how heavily weighted subject matter expertise and depth is in Google’s algorithms. Surface-level material won’t cut it, and the more your work digs into a particular topic without venturing into the bone-dry world of academic writing, the better your webpage will rank.

In that sense, anything that could truly be considered “cornerstone” should perform extremely well with Google and continue to pop up (hopefully) on the first page of search results for associated search terms.

Fielding your content dream team

There’s an equally – if not more – important reason to consider the SEO impact of your cornerstone content. This material is the very best your website has to offer. It’s Michael Jordan, Lebron James and Hakeem Olajuwon all rolled up into one. It perfectly explains your brand values, service offerings and mission statement. It tells your customers and potential customers everything they could ever want to know about your business. But none of that will matter if no one can find it.

Optimising your cornerstone content is essential so it doesn’t get lost in the depths of the internet. Otherwise, all of that fancy writing and painstakingly crafted messaging will be worth next to nothing.

When properly executed, cornerstone content hits on all the major criteria that Google considers when ranking content. Is it well-written? You bet. Is it informative? Oh yeah. Does it demonstrate authority and a depth of knowledge around a specific topic and related search terms? Abso-bleedin-lutely.

Cornerstone content in action

Having said all of that, what does a real-life example of cornerstone content look like? Over at Yoast (who seem to have made cornerstone content development a pet project of theirs, btw), their crowning achievement in cornerstone content is an exhaustive guide on SEO copywriting. When I say exhaustive, I mean exhaustive. Get a load of this thing. If and when you finish reading this bad boy, you’ll feel like an expert on the subject yourself.

But is it the sheer length of the article that raises it up to the rarified air of “cornerstone” status? There’s a bit more going on here. If I had to go out on a limb, I’d say the keyword they’re targeting here is “SEO copywriting”. Just a hunch.

Based on that one phrase, you can pull a ton of related questions that site visitors might be asking themselves:

What, exactly, is SEO copywriting?

What’s the best way to approach SEO copywriting?

Where do search keywords come into play?

Yoast’s article is essentially a very long and very complete answer to all the potential questions related to “SEO copywriting”. You would be hard-pressed to find a more fully composed breakdown of the topic.

That example provides a pretty reliable framework to follow when creating cornerstone content of your own:

Step 1: Find a target keyword

Step 2: Identify all common questions related to that term.

Step 3: Answer those questions as fully as possible.

Don’t sleep on your linking strategy

Really great cornerstone content – we’re talking earth-shattering stuff here – will find an audience with other members of your industry. They may even begin linking back to it on their own sites because you’ve covered a particular subject so well that they cite you as an expert source.

Cultivating inbound links from respected sources is great for your organic ranking and helps your site build its Domain Authority. This is a huge coup for your site ranking, so take the time to create content that’s so well-researched and comprehensive that your peers take notice.

The more informative and valuable your content is, the higher quality your backlinks will be. Build up those credible links and you’ll be sitting pretty as far as search ranking goes. Any way you slice it, good cornerstone content builds strong Domain Authority.

Then there are internal links to consider. Cornerstone content pieces are natural candidates for backlinks since they provide comprehensive coverage on specific topics. Any time that subject comes up in a blog, you can link back to your cornerstone content.

We’ve talked about how important linking – both internal and external – is to search ranking before, and cornerstone content sets you up to capitalise on both fronts. So, yeah, we’d say cornerstone content is pretty damn essential when it comes to site performance.

Why do search engines like cornerstone content?

Google’s algorithms are by no means perfect (not yet, at least. But we have faith that our search engine overlords will get there one day).

From time to time, they need help sorting the seemingly limitless webpages tackling the same topic and determining which ones are the most important and relevant to users.

Cornerstone content can help cut through all of that noise – even noise created by your own blogs and articles – and showcase material that meets all of the most important criteria for high-ranking webpages. By focusing on a half dozen or so core articles and ironing them out to perfection, you’re essentially telling Google: “this is the best, most informative content related to these search terms.” It’s a win-win for both you and Google. Everyone’s happy.

How do you create cornerstone content?

I think we’ve pretty well established that cornerstone content is a crucial part of any successful digital marketing strategy (one might even say it’s a cornerstone of content marketing best practices).

So, how do you actually go about creating the kind of high-quality content worthy of that moniker?

The ingredients of good cornerstone content don’t differ all that much from any other pages or assets hosted on your site. Let’s start with the obvious: It needs to be good. Not just good. Damn good. Both in terms of quality and depth.

You probably noticed we never listed whitepapers as a potential type of cornerstone content. Why? Setting aside that whitepapers tend to be gated and thus not ideal for these purposes, they also tend to veer a little much into dry writing territory. Are there engaging whitepapers out there? Of course. But the medium doesn’t lend itself well to this particular type of content.

If you’re planning to create some cornerstone content from scratch, you better channel your inner Faulkner, because that prose needs to sing, baby. It doesn’t matter how technical your topic is, the writing needs to draw in readers. If anything, it’s even more important to have engaging, accessible prose when dealing with subjects that may be daunting to the layperson.

When finished, your content should cover so much ground that it’s the de facto bible for that particular topic. You want your content to be tailor-made to be linked back to from a wide variety of sources. Whenever that subject comes up, your page should be relevant, no matter what angle it takes on the topic or how authorative the source is.

How can content marketing software help?

If you need help identifying what ground your content needs to cover, consider employing a tool like MarketMuse to review what you’ve written and provide feedback and suggestions on how to optimise it for searchability. We all have blind spots, even with topics we think we know like the back of our hands. MarketMuse helps bring those missed opportunities to light.

MarketMuse also helps answer the question of how long, exactly, your cornerstone content needs to be. Saying that content needs to be exhaustively informative is one thing, but how does that translate into raw word count? MarketMuse offers suggestions on content length, so you can target a very specific number of words.

That being said, don’t worry about hitting that number exactly. Treat it more as a guide, just as long as you cover each topic area and answer all related questions.

Yoast SEO is another content marketing tool that is pretty useful for creating cornerstone content. In fact, users can actually tag a specific webpage or article they’re working on as cornerstone content, and the platform will analyse the prose, format, media, subject matter and other criteria with a more diligent eye. Like MarketMuse, Yoast SEO offers a wealth of valuable feedback on your content so you can fine tune each piece to maximise its search ranking.

Of course, content marketing software can only do so much. You’ll have to get hands-on with your cornerstone content to add the kind of depth, authority and relevance that Google’s algorithms are looking for. A few crucial points to keep in mind there:

It should have a wealth of research to back it up. Creating great content with a long shelf life takes time, so don’t try to rush it.

Aim for evergreen content that can stand the test of time and continues to be relevant for years to come. Painstakingly research your content to comprehensively answer the most common questions your audience may have. Do whatever it takes to build that authority and credibility – interview internal subject matter experts, do your own independent research, etc. – even if it means delaying publication a little bit.

Remember that cornerstone content is not a static webpage. It must be revised and updated to keep up with industry trends, best practices, common customer questions and technological advancements.

The ultimate goal of cornerstone content is to have valuable, informative pieces that rank in SERPs, so naturally, in-depth keyword research is a prerequisite for success. Creating solid cornerstone content takes a lot of hard work, and you want to be sure that it pays off by ranking for terms that people are actually searching for.

Like any other optimised material, cornerstone content should be as media-rich as possible, without becoming distracting or too busy. Including custom images, infographic, videos, embedded tweets and other media formats in the body of your article – again, with a restrained hand – helps craft a more compelling piece of content that’s more likely to be shared and linked to on other sites.

Cornerstone content takes a lot of time and effort to get right, and there really isn’t a way to speed up the production process without sacrificing the quality and depth of knowledge that this material requires. This isn’t assembly-line content that can roll on to your site ready to grab a few eyeballs and quick wins. It’s in it for the long haul, establishing your brand’s credibility and expertise, building your site’s Domain Authority with quality links and establishing a launching pad for other website content.

Is that worth the extra effort? You bet it is. Well-crafted cornerstone content puts you in a better position to rank for even highly competitive search terms. So, roll up your sleeves, queue up the “Rudy” soundtrack and get to it.

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