#but when it comes to basic features as well as hypothetical function it may have served I would call it a much later venues:)

[artstfuff]

woman figurine, terracotta, 3600 bc s

[cheffox134]

Nintendo Switch Ps Remote Play

Future Publishing/Future/Getty Images

Back in December, Sony Interactive Entertainment President Jim Ryan told Game Informerthe company had no plans to manufacture another handheld console, saying matter-of-factly, 'it’s a business that we’re no longer in now.' Even with the launch of PS5 looming, that came as disappointing – if not wholly surprising – news to fans of the PSP and Vita. Yet gamers who want to take their favorite PlayStation games on the go might have a new reason for hope.

A post from user YouRedditHereFirst to the PS4 subreddit detailed a recent email survey they received from PlayStation. Developers and hardware makers send these kinds of things around to registered users now and then to get feedback on games and services. On the surface, there's nothing out of the ordinary going on here. However, dig a little deeper and there are some pretty intriguing questions being asked here.

The spiciest meatball of the bunch? Using Remote Play to use PlayStation games on a Nintendo Switch. Now that's something we never expected to see.

The current functionality of Remote Play is pretty limited: it basically allows you to use your PS4 games on a second screen elsewhere on your home Wi-Fi network. However, most of us have pretty lousy home Wi-Fi networks with loads of devices, so playing Sekiro in the bathtub hasn't exactly become a massive trend.

Nintendo Switch Ps Remote Play

Hi, this video shows some interesting things on the Nintendo Switch. Some do not work well but you can see the possible potential. At the moment you would be. For Nintendo Switch on the Nintendo Switch, a GameFAQs message board topic titled 'Remote play could come to Switch'. What if Sony did a collaboration with Nintendo to add a PS Remote Play app to the Nintendo Switch? It would work for both PS4 and PS5 games and they could both work together and make a little profit off it (Nintendo would probably get a boost in sales for the switch) the only problem with this might be that the buttons on the switch are.

The survey also mentions 'offline' Remote Play, but it's not totally clear what form that would take, and whether you'd need a Wi-Fi tether to your console. In a subsequent edit to the post, the user also clarifies they were asked about using Remote Play with an Xbox console as well. Old-school gamers will likely find the prospect of easier access to PS1 and PS2 titles pretty enticing as well.

However, it's the Switch's portability that makes it the most eye-catching hypothetical of the bunch, particularly if we take Sony at its word and assume they aren't building a new piece of handheld hardware.

The Switch already has a formidable library of games, but who wouldn't mind taking God of War or Marvel's Spider-Man on a long plane flight. Hell, even if those games wouldn't work on, there are dozens of hours of fun to be had rediscovering past-gen titles like the Suikoden series, or Persona 3 and 4.

While this might sound like a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, it's not totally outside the realm of possibility. Xbox Live is accessible via Switch, Android and iOS. While there's no Xbox Games Pass functionality for Switch, it's been a long-rumored possibility. Perhaps we could see Sony roll out a subscription-based service for past-gen games, which would also be playable on mobile devices and even competitor consoles. It wouldn't be the first time the two rivals teamed up on a big project: the original PlayStation grew out of a collaboration to make a CD-ROM drive for the Super Nintendo in the late 90s.

Then again, Sony's carved out a reputation for itself as being a holdout when it comes to cross-play functionality with competitor platforms. It's also no secret that Nintendo's had a barnstorming 2019, with sales of the Switch already outpacing the Xbox One. The long-rumored Switch Pro seems to have been put on the back burner to allow Nintendo to keep riding its current high; perhaps the company wouldn't feel the need to team up with its biggest competitor.

Then again, it would enable Sony and Nintendo to ward off competition from Microsoft and Google Stadia, so it's not totally outside the realm of possibility. Given the fact-finding nature of this survey, we're likely a long way off from hearing anything definitive about this hypothetical venture.

The PlayStation 5 is set to be released later this year.

Sony's considering expanding its functionality for PlayStation Remote Play, according to a new survey shared by one of its random recipients. The survey in question asks a range of questions about how people feel about certain potential PlayStation Remote Play features. One, in particular, is an exciting possibility. The question asks whether fans would find PlayStation Remote appealing on different devices appealing, including the AppleTV, Android TV, and more interestingly the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.

According to Reddit user YouRedditHereFirst, Sony sent them a survey titled 'Give It to Us Straight.' The survey focused entirely on the PS4 Remote Play feature and hinted at a variety of interesting possibilities. Streaming to competing consoles like the Nintendo Switch and the Xbox One could be the most interesting question, but others are compelling, too. For example, one question asked about streaming PS1 and PS2 games. Another asked about a Remote Play controller that's slim and portable just for on-the-go play.

RELATED: PS4 Update 7.0 Releases This Week With Upgraded Features

It bears repeating that just because Sony is asking about prospective Remote Play features, it doesn't mean Sony is either working on them or even seriously considering them. All it says it that Sony is interested in how its current PS4 Remote Play users would feel about certain features. Using that information, Sony can better design or market the features it really is working on, as well as think about what comes next. But it's not common for survey questions to turn into supported features.

That said, there's certain to be some changes coming to PlayStation Remote Play with the transition to the next generation of consoles. Nothing has been said about the PS5 and its support of Remote Play up to this point. Yet if the survey is any indication, it's possible that Remote Play will receive an upgrade alongside all of the other major PS5 steps forward.

There's no doubt that Sony's Remote Play for the PS4 is a valuable feature. Sony released Remote Play support on iOS devices in May 2019 and then expanded to all Android 5.0 devices later in the year. It's unclear how many users actually take advantage of the PS4's Remote Play. It's likely less than many expect. But for those who do use it, it's likely a lifesaver. It's like having a handheld device like the Nintendo Switch, but for PlayStation games. Any expansion of the PlayStation Remote Play feature will be well-received.

MORE: Playstation 5: Six Features We Want To See

Nintendo Switch Remote Play App

Source: Reddit

How To Remote Play Ps4 On Switch

The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs to Explain One Long-Running Mystery

[crimsoncondor]

Kakegurui: Psychological Analysis of Yumeko Jabami (Anime)

This is a description of the ENTP personality type:

https://www.16personalities.com/entp-personality

Pathological gambling presents itself in ways akin to Yumeko's derangement:

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/psychology/a-study-on-pathological-gambling-as-an-addiction-psychology-essay.php

(Note the latter source is theoretical. It is possible psychosexual and nurture-related factors contribute to gambling addiction.)

The neuroscience behind pathological gambling directly aligns with Yumeko's mindsets and functions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3858640/

Color Symbolism Theory:

https://bloodorangesangria.tumblr.com/post/162532139590/kakegurui-color-theory-yumeko-jabamired

Footnotes:

Yumeko is Kakegurui in the form of a character. The series itself is tailored specifically towards her. She is the essence of gambling, addiction, and the combination of both. She symbolizes a myriad of different concepts such as capitalism and Christianity. While Kirari embodies God, she represents Satan. This is implicated in the first opening theme, which is fittingly titled "Deal With the Devil"; this "deal" is the agreement to gamble with Yumeko. She and Kirari appear in the track encompassed by fruit and fish. The former alludes to the serpent's enticements in the Adam and Eve anecdote while the latter refers to Ichthys, a fish-shaped acrostic deemed sacred by the early Church. Because Kirari often compares the order she has established to an aquarium, let us assume the fish is her insignia. The fish may also insinuate the duo are manifestations of Yin and Yang, which is reasonable considering their black and white designs, but this is less likely. In addition, a shot where Midari shoots a girl whose head is a strawberry is featured --- after shooting, a banner stating "Heaven or Hell" appears. In terms of roles and actions in the series, Yumeko carries the debts of others, disrupting the system, and Kirari maintains the debt system itself. This symbolism also exposes some undertones of Christianity, as Yumeko and Kirari are not the polar opposites people perceive God and Satan to be. The color schemes of their designs differ entirely. Black is a prominent color in Yumeko's design, signifying darkness, and Kirari's design is primarily white, representing light. However, these can also represent other notions. Black is associated with mystery, rebellion, sophistication, elegance, formality, aggression, evil, power, strength, seriousness, and authority. Kirari is the authority of the school despite this representation, but Yumeko is gradually climbing up the hierarchical ladder, nevertheless. Given Yumeko's well-kempt, 'yamato nadeshiko' appearance and courteous dialogue, the messages of formality, elegance, and sophistication are valid. However, this design is also reminiscent of many symbols in Japanese horror such as Tomie, Enma, and Sadako. It implies she is a mixture of both and further reinforces her duality. Her breaching of Kirari's system is rebellious, and her largely unenumerated background is mysterious. Regardless of these alignments, darkness suits her as well. Elementally speaking, red and black are respectively affiliated with fire and water, further reinforcing the notion Yumeko has duality. Meanwhile, Kirari's white color is incredibly contradictory, but this is not an analysis of her, so I shall not digress. I will probably analyze her in the future.

Regarding capitalism, the gambling den which serves as the setting of Kakegurui and each of its ties comprise a purely capitalist society. Money is the key to both power and caliber. Yumeko passively defies the system, which exemplifies her alignment: Chaotic Neutral. Kirari and her accomplices such as Runa, Sayaka, Midari, and Yuriko are the government; they perpetuate the class system. The -bami clan has politics of its own and can torture and rampage as much as it wishes due to the money and authority it possesses. Yumeko is a member of this clan but seems to be quite disinterested in its affairs. Many of her relatives are or were dedicated gamblers, so it seems to have become second nature to her. For example, her older sister lost her sanity after risking everything in a clan conflict, resulting in hospitalization. Yumeko's parents died of allegedly unknown causes, insinuating their demises were concealed by the clan and involved them.

When asked by Mary if she was familiar with any of the -bami students, she hesitated and then answered dismissively, which was clearly fabricated. She seems not at all bothered by this baggage, meaning she either suffers from self-induced denial or genuinely does not care. Rei, who had a pleasant relationship with Yumeko's sister before her hospitalization, took her apathy personally, inquiring about whether she felt any guilt towards those she has obliterated via gambling. Yumeko's response was the epitome of addiction: she claimed to feel guilt for not feeling guilt. When Rei unintentionally walked into Yumeko's sister's hospital room while Yumeko was visiting, she saw little sympathy in her eyes. She adds the following inquiry: "Do you know what it feels like too? When a person sinks into despair?" The manner in which she phrased this refers to both her sister and herself. Given Yumeko's circumstances, she most likely "sank into despair" and coped through gambling. However, referring back to "feeling guilt for not feeling guilt", this guilt could have consumed her. The powerful possibility exists she and her sister were in similar situations, but it could also be quite the opposite, resulting in disconnection and therefore apathy. This apathy may be innate as well.

This leads to the core of my theory. Yumeko was born into a gambling family and conditioned into valuing it. She was likely born detached from others and genetically more susceptible to addiction due to the family's customs, but her current state was probably ignited by conditioning as well. The Jabami family was a lower-tier party in the -bami clan, and the capitalist theme of Kakegurui comes into play here, as they possibly gambled for a higher position in the clan --- or simply for the thrill like Yumeko. It would also be psychologically plausible for Yumeko to have experienced trauma due to the clan's harsh and violent ways. Torture was commonplace in several branches of said clan, and Yumeko may have witnessed some of it due to the loss of her family or the natural process of living in this environment. Being poisoned in Season 2 did not seem to affect her greatly; she may be emotionally numb to these acts due to past experiences, or she could have merely been born this manner. She never reacted to Rei's enrollment in the academy either, meaning she was either apathetic or unsurprised. Her relationship with Rei before the events of the story is unknown but most probably meager and distant, founded solely on external observations such as those acquired during the two's mutual visit to the hospital or the auction gamble towards the end of Season 2. The girl has a photographic memory and excellent analysis skills but nonetheless resorts to hunches to shake gambles up; were these characteristics attained over time because of her experienced past in gambling, were they present at birth, or are both the case? Notice my repetitive usage of the terms "either" and "or"; much of this is hypothetical. It is ultimately an enigma whether nature or nurture was the dominant factor contributing to her instability, but both seem to have played a role. Some people are born like Yumeko, others obtain her identity over time, and some are the result of a mixture. Another aspect of her identity implying sheltering and isolation is her lack of familiarity with basic popular culture, but anhedonia and hedonism may have lead to a general absence of interest in the most simplistic of hobbies, which is similar to Midari's situation and another reason the latter empathizes with her.

Yumeko is aware of her gambling addiction, and she is obviously correct, but has she been formally diagnosed? She may have been evaluated when her sister was hospitalized to ensure she would not meet an identical fate; this is not evident, however. It was practically a given for her to be a gambling addict due to her lineage. When push comes to shove, nobody will risk anything they cannot afford to sacrifice. Yumeko has absolutely nothing worth living for and resorts to gambling because it is the final shred of her identity remaining despite her loss. Since it is her lifeline, she assigns different purposes and emotions to it such as lust. Nothing else will satisfy her, so she must force this fetish on herself. Many other members of her clan deal with the same issue because of filial traditions. Gambling preserves and defines her being rather than the loved ones she does not have, so she never quits. She associates the thrills of gambling with those of intercourse to cope with a lack of affection, which is additionally a habit of Midari's and the main reason Midari resonates with her. Despite her fixation on gambling and disregard for those she harms, she does not gamble for the purpose of hurting others, and she seems to possess a morsel of kindness. She wishes for everyone to experience the same thrill she does but cannot comprehend the fact they lack her passions and mindsets. She is also shown to have some level of integrity, as she never cheats and seldom bluffs. This enhances the experience of the game to her, but it may also be a sign of "guilt for not feeling guilt". In Yumeko's unfinished game with Midari during Season 1, she plainly stated she is incapable of feeling fear. Is this natural for her, was it acquired through intense suffering, or are both the case? I honestly believe Yumeko gambles partially due to her "guilt for not feeling guilt". She wishes for someone to strip her of everything she has as punishment for her apathy or any past errors she committed in regards to her late and incapacitated relatives. While she claims she cannot feel fear, one reason other than addiction which motivates her to try whilst gambling is fear of being defeated and having to face herself. She lacks the courage to accept it on her own. Paradoxically, she is utilizing her addiction to scold her for her addiction, and she is risking what she does not need because there is nothing else to sacrifice. She has lost everything.

Why does Yumeko abhor Midari? Their desires are very similar, but Yumeko prefers an intellectual challenge rather than a game of chance. I hypothesize Yumeko relates to Midari in a way which causes insecurities and "guilt for not feeling guilt". Essentially, Midari hits too close to home and is a more impulsive, minimalistic, dramatic, blunt version of her minus the clan controversies.

This character is the subject of the show and is considered a foil; instead of independently developing, she contrasts with others like Yumemi and Sayaka to facilitate their development . . . thus far. This is one of she and Suzui's only similarities.

On multiple occasions, Yumeko is compared to a Joker. As aforementioned, Yumeko has duality, and Jokers are very versatile in a deck of cards depending on the game one employs them for. In Wicca, the Joker is represented by the number zero, a character which includes the meanings of all or nothing, stoicism and comedy, wisdom and idiocy, and delight and despair. The message a joker brings is cryptic, disguised, and mysterious. There are typically two in each deck --- dual jokers. Playing cards have been in existence for more than a millennium, but jokers were added fairly later; the system Kirari established thrived for quite some time, but Yumeko appeared and challenged its rules, much like the Joker.

"Yumeko" translates to "dream child"; at first glance, she seems too good to be true as if she came out of a dream, but in truth, she is diabolical and sly as if she came out of a nightmare. Her surname contains several meanings. The translation "heavy drinker" alludes to her addiction. "Snake", "serpent", "bite", "eat", "drink", and "receive a blow" are other potential solutions. The idiom "snake in the grass" applies to Yumeko and may be one reference appended to the translation; she "thirsts" or "hungers" for gambling. In "Deal With the Devil", she is shown removing Suzui's tie with utensils, preparing to "consume" him with her nature. Her eventful and detrimental background may have “taken a blow” to her sanity. Most importantly, "serpent" may relate to the Adam and Eve tale, making the fruit in "Deal With the Devil" a symbol of her. She succumbs to her desires and encourages others to do the same. Kirari, Rei, and many other characters in Kakegurui are also members of the -bami clan, so "bite" is a section of their names' translations as well, but "snake" is not, making this biblical reference uniquely her own whilst "bite" originates from the nature of her clan.

Yumeko's personality type is easily ENTP. Her extension is A, and her alignment is chaotic neutral. Laws matter little to her, but she is not particularly invested in specific platforms either. The woman's insecurities are subtle to the extent of nonexistent, she is very straightforward and simple-minded, she is able to maintain conversations and presence in given situations, and she is largely separated from reality, which is mostly by choice. Her manipulative rhetoric in tense situations would be quite resourceful in a debate, and since ENTPs are frequently referred to as Debaters, this is sensible. Kirari is an ENTJ-A, which further defends my argument about the two being similar despite representing God and Satan. Hence, her acronym stands for “Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Prospecting, Assertive”. The enneagram is highly controversial, so it shall not be applied to Yumeko.

"Insanity is repeating the same action again and again whilst expecting different results." -Unknown

[washnut45]

Liquid Peptides

Sarm Lgd

Content

Does Dermalogica Utilize Biomimetic Peptides?

Peptide Synthesis.

Imuscle Pile Device, Hulked, Pct.

Hydrogen Bond.

Since it has mild androgenic activity, it offers the opposite result and also really decreases any bloating existing. Although these side effects are short-term, if they are still a worry, as suggested earlier, a 5-on 2-off method, where S-4 is utilized for 5 days followed by a 2 day break would certainly be the suggested research study dosing technique. Andarine (S-4) does not bring many negative effects, yet there is one negative effects typically related to usage. It sounds much more severe than it really is, so a deep understanding of it is required. Many researchers commonly report night vision issues when using S-4. Basically, a metabolite of S4 binds to the receptor in the eye, triggering a yellow tint to appear when switching from dark to lighted locations, which is particularly prevalent in the evenings.

Cary supplement company, Apex man plead guilty to illegal distribution of unapproved drugs - CBS17.com

Cary supplement company, Apex man plead guilty to illegal distribution of unapproved drugs.

Posted: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

This indicates that body builders who resort to healthy protein supplements, instead of merely eating protein-rich foods, might be wasting their money. Healthy protein powders, offered as trembles, bars as well as pills, are one of one of the most preferred muscle-building supplements. Healthy protein is an important part of our diet plan as well as key to structure and keeping all types of body tissue, including muscular tissue. These drugs are meant to be used as a future replacement for testosterone, which can have many different adverse effects as well as are dangerous at high dosages. A lot of the research study on SARMs is in pet designs as well as also then some rather significant side effects have been kept in mind-- in spite of the intent for SARMs to prevent the negative aspects of testosterone usage. SARMs have similar effects to reduced dosages of testosterone, yet to a lesser extent.

Does Buy SARMs Online Utilize Biomimetic Peptides?

LGD 4033 a SARM like Ostarine however 12 times as powerful at just 1/3 the dosage! Just as with AAS, stacking is common with peptide hormones; competitors typically blend and also match a mixed drink of representatives.

This is a non-peptidic, by mouth energetic and discerning agonist of the development hormone secretagogue (secretion-boosting) receptor. It simulates the action of ghrelin in the belly, elevating growth hormone and IGF-1 levels, yet does not affect cortisol levels. In a research study performed at Boston University, healthy guys that were provided 1mg of LGD day-to-day gained about 3 pounds in 3 weeks typically. No medically considerable changes were kept in mind in liver function tests, PSA (prostate issue/function examinations), hematocrit or ECG (electrocardiogram tests, made use of to inspect the heart's rhythm and electrical activity).

Peptide Synthesis.

The testosterone-induced muscle hypertrophy is generally due to a rise in satellite cell and also myonuclear number, as well as boosting the amount of protein synthesis and also hindering protein degradation. An additional among the major benefits of SARMS is that, unlike testosterone, a lot of them do not obtain exchanged 5α-DHT. On top of that, they do not appear to undergo aromatization right into estrogen which might decrease the occurrence of negative effects such as gynecomastia. At the very least in animal researches, SARMs have shown to partly achieve this, with substances such as S1 and also S4 binding to androgen receptors with high fondness and also showing tissue selectivity.

Normally, a progressively raising dose of several AAS is taken several months prior to competitors-- a procedure called 'piling'-- with a decrease in dose a month or two prior to an event. This last technique is an attempt to minimize the chances of discovery, while the benefit to the cyclist's performance continues. The medical uses of AAS are concentrated on therapy of glandular or endocrine problems, including disease of the adrenal glands and weakening of bones in ladies. Men can be treated with a testosterone by-product as replacement therapy following recuperation from testicular cancer.

Imuscle Stack Machine, Hulked, Pct.

However, they still do not appear to be just particular to the target receptors, and also unintentional biding to outside receptors is still apparent. Particularly, SARMs are produced to affix to receptors in skeletal muscle as well as bone to trigger pathways associated with skeletal muscular tissue hypertrophy as well as bone regeneration. Such direct sarms’s free online support can hypothetically serve at changing testosterone usage in medical settings, which comes with lots of unfavorable negative effects. Fundamentally, they are an adjusted kind of testosterone utilized in hormonal agent replacement therapy and steroids. SARMs are a shortened term for discerning androgen receptor modulators.

Bodybuilders were switching from anabolic steroids to Andranine as they thought there were less side effects.

Steroid may disrupt the other hormonal agents, however SARMs focus on just muscle as well as tissues without disrupting other crucial physical feature.

Both of these stopped working to get governing approval for the lawful supply chain.

Professor JT Dalton entered into collaboration with a pharmaceutical firm to develop a course of medicines called" SARMS" Careful Androgen Receptor Modulators.

Andranine developed in the 1990s was found to have an amazing effect on muscle mass development.

However, for those of you that are wanting to boost your progress in a safe and all-natural means make certain to maintain reading, sarmking supplements. While the lengthiest ester in Sustanon-250 is that of Decanoate, Omnadrens last ester is Caproate dosed identically at 100mg; yet really mild difference there is nothing worth keeping in mind regarding Omnadren, sarms results lgd. Qualifying planet as being the best rely upon genuine individuals evaluations, pictures, as well as independent lab tests results, sarms results youtube. SportsMeds.co.uk is a UK firm offering premium quality SARMs as well as other sports supplements developed to the optimum dosage for the bodybuilding as well as athletic area.

Hydrogen Bond.

These traits make Nutrobal stick out amongst various other chemicals that attempt to work in the very same manner but carry these undesirable side effects. DNP is thought to be specifically preferred among bodybuilders, who are attracted to its guarantees of quick-fix quick weight reduction. If you're stressed or you have actually experienced negative effects after taking any type of supplements, particularly any type of that you have bought online, make a consultation to see your GP. " Structure strength takes years, not weeks or months. It's an act of self-control as well as should be gained through commitment to hard training as well as a great diet regimen." " If you're not sure, ask your GP to refer you to a signed up dietitian for recommendations. Healthy protein supplements are not suggested for children due to the absence of research right into long-lasting impacts."

The ordinary cycle length is 6 to 10 weeks at a dose variety of 10mg to 25mg. Ibutamorenis non-hormonal and also consequently needs no PCT after the cycle mores than. It is best used in at the very least a 3 month cycle with dosage boosting each month. The ideal application time for MK 677 goes to evening straight prior to going to sleep. If you ought to wake up with numb or tingly hands, do not fret.

Among the major benefits of Ostarine use is its recovery benefits. These advantages convert into anabolism of the both the bone as well as skeletal cells. Research has shown that these results allow it to be used in a range of methods, most notably in the therapy of osteoporosis as well as muscle mass wasting. It is likewise a strong praise to various other treatments thattreat bone density reduction.

What you need to know about SARMS: Are 'safe steroids' really that safe? - 9Coach

What you need to know about SARMS: Are 'safe steroids' really that safe?.

Posted: Wed, 01 Aug 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]

POSSIBLY the most notorious group of agents made use of by professional athletes, these are a combination of artificial and naturally occurring representatives, which have a selection of intricate physical results. many benefits can be really serious without a doubt and also generally associate with dose and also duration of use. Large doses of caffeine can induce convulsions and stress and anxiety strikes.

S-4 was developed to treat a number of extreme clinical conditions, such as, muscle mass losing, weakening of bones and also benign prostatic hyptertrophy, using the non-steroidal androgen villain bicalutamide as a lead substance. In order to capitalize on the extremely considerable bulking effects of LGD4033, a dose of 5-10mg should be taken daily for 8 weeks. Many sight LGD as the strongest and most anabolic SARM out there. LGD can add large quantities of size without lugging the threats and also prospective adverse effects associated with steroid usage. LGD has the ability to bind to the AR with an incredibly high fondness. LGD is usually identified as an ARligand that is tissue careful.

Does Vitaminhoppe sell SARMs?

SARMs are drugs and they are not dietary supplements. Using the internet one can easily find SARMs for sale. The bigger retail stores like GNC and Vitamin Shoppe do not carry them, but the smaller independently owned supplement stores are notorious for distributing SARMs.

It was originally created to treat muscle mass throwing away in cancer clients, age-related muscle loss, as well as severe and also persistent disease. The range for guys is mg, with the higher dose being utilized by guys over 200lbs that are bulking.

They therefore simulate the action of these hormonal agents in controlling a number of crucial physiological processes. Given that these representatives actually change how a whole range of genetics work, it's probably not surprising that the potential adverse effects from lasting AAS use are considerable and significant. This implies that lasting users are at much higher threat of experiencing a heart attack or stroke. Unlike energizers, AAS are taken persistantly since they do not have prompt medicinal impacts. They have to be taken over a fairly extended period in order to produce considerable impacts on performance.

It is impossible to gauge if/when/how it binds and how poor the result might be. Some hardly experience it in any way, while others can locate it harder to handle. Andarine (S-4) is categorized as a SARM as well as a study chemical.

MK has extremely strong benefits when used for injury rehabilitation. MK gives REAL healing in contrast to approaches that serve as a band aid, giving momentary alleviation and also just masking the injury. Secretagogues generally lug the concern of prolactin boost. Nevertheless, researches with MK677 did disappoint any type of boost in prolactin degrees.

Throughout an occasion they might additionally supplement this routine with an energizer. Nonetheless, the pattern of management adopted by somebody seeking performance-enhancing benefits implies that the degree of the medication in the blood is practically continuously elevated. This means that they are damaged down by the acids in the stomach, in similar means as proteins in food during digestion. This means that they have to all be administered by shot, normally right into a muscular tissue or under the skin. These agents are relatively brand-new on the cycling scene, with EPO specifically having received much limelights recently. All of the instances provided here are made as synthetic replacement for hormonal agents that occur normally in the body.

[davetheshady]

may I politely request ⭐dealer's choice director's commentary⭐for pretty much any part of Love is All You Need to Destroy Your Enemies?

Did you mean: infodump about Chapter 5?

We start off in medias res during Pteranodon Attack-Gate from Episode 4: PTA Meeting. Since most of the fic runs parallel to WTNV’s storyline for the first ~two years, the way I narrowed down which events to feature was to read through the transcripts and take note of which ones had Carlos, which ones featured science/magic/time travel-related elements, which ones had weird discrepancies or unsolved details that could be explained by Carlos/science/magic/time travel/all of the above, and which ones I just liked a lot. 

Incidentally, Cecil issues a correction that the winged reptiles in question were actually pterodactyls, not pteranodons, which was then promptly forgotten by the showrunners lol.

"—And then Kelly pulled her hamstring while they were doing the Fixing of a Nail position. I'm trying to convince her that she and Joe should do yoga together, I think it would really cut back on minor injuries and also they both look great in yoga pants. Anything new with you, Carlos?"

"Nothing that compares to... hamstring injuries," says Carlos, from his position on top of the Sciencemobile.

"All right," says Kate, adjusting an enormous pair of mirrored aviator shades. "Then describe the Barstow formation."

Since literal character doubling was such an important part of the plot, I had a lot of fun with thematic character doubling, too. Carlos and Kate (and the other grad students) are actually pretty close in age, and here we see her willing to put herself into danger to get the job done while casually chatting with her colleagues. Also, there’s a nice dose of karma for the books in Carlos having to deal with someone else oversharing details about their relationships, compounded by the fact that unlike his all of Kate’s are actually true. (In nicer doubling news: Kate is the one who gets her degree in science, has functional romantic relationships, AND continues to work in Night Vale, which are all eventually Carlos’ hashtag life goals.) 

"Maybe it was future you," asks Julie, who does not sound appropriately concerned for the potentially diverted course of the Currents of Time. Or for the potentially diverted course of the already unlinear life of Carlos.

This is the first conversation where she’s ‘Julie’ in his mental narration. I enjoyed having her be hilariously unsympathetic to his concerns here, because her priorities are still very different, but it also sets up a baseline. She doesn’t bother worrying about hypotheticals from the weird shit, but actual hard data (like, Carlos not sleeping and having minor breakdowns in her lab) is what prompts her to share reactions besides SCIENCE! and snark.

His stomach roils at the thought of more time travel. "Some kind of illusion is more likely," he says: some person or creature temporarily assuming his form, probably for sinister purposes. He reluctantly adds those weird doubles from the sandstorm to his list of possible suspects, though his dissolved right in front of him in the middle of next March and there haven't been any sandstorms recently.

oh hey haha what’s that

One of my biggest pet peeves in fiction is when allegedly intelligent characters ignore obvious plot points so the writer can railroad the story in their chosen direction. On the other hand, it is genuinely difficult to avoid spoiling your plot twists if your main character is actively trying to figure them out. I leaned heavily on “the character has all the basic details… along with so much other information they can’t realistically narrow it down”, combined with some red herrings: an obvious one (illusion magic) and hopefully a more convincing one (time travel as the only relevant plot: it's DEFINITELY involved, but its presence is obscuring another facet of the plot altogether).

There's always a risk that astute readers will figure it out, but, like… so? That just means instead of shocking plot twist reveal, they get an “I KNEW IT!” reveal, which is equally satisfying in a different way. As long as the characters have convincing reasons for not figuring it out, it's hopefully still enjoyable to follow along with them as they wander around in the dark. 

(And just for clarification: that was Doppel-Carlos crashing the town hall meeting when he and Dr. Raith were testing out time vortices.) 

Andre hands him a copy of the Night Vale Daily Journal. “’Look your best to face the void. Smooth-chinned souls are most enjoyed’,” reads Carlos. “‘Burma-Shave.’”

"No, below the ads," says Andre.

1) ‘character reads wrong piece of information in paper’ is a classic goof (“There’s a sale at Penney’s!”) and I found it very amusing to repeatedly attribute it to Carlos, since he’s genuinely trying to locate the important information. Unfortunately for him, he lives in Night Vale and no longer has a filter for “useless nonsense”, because even the nonsense has proven relevant and/or kinda murdery before.

2) Burma-Shave! This was passed down to me as part of our Great American Roadtrip Family Lore (I come from a long line of roadtrippers) and it’s definitely the kind of kitschy 50s detail that fits so well in Night Vale.

"Oh!" says Cecil. "What were you studying?"

"Bioremediation for contaminated pit lakes via sulfur-reducing bacteria," says Carlos truthfully.

Why? Because I edited one of my friends’ papers on it, that’s why. (Birds kept landing on it and dying, which is also a very Night Vale detail.)

When he returns, he finds Cecil standing by the record player with his back against the wall, staring fixedly at Carlos’ vinyl copy of Ixnay on the Hombre.

One of the DF books (I think White Night) had a hilariously high number of characters showing up wearing band t-shirts, and Carlos’ was for The Offspring. (The original file name for this fic was Original Prankster, back when I thought it would be three chapters long.)

“It’s about a wizard stranded in a strange, uncharted desert territory,” [Cactus Judy] says serenely.

Cactus Jane! I decided to make her a recurring character because 1) she’s in a time travel episode (Episode 18: The Traveler), 2) both she and TMITJ had the detail where no one can remember their real name, which seemed significant, and 3) WTNV itself did not have very many recurring female characters at that point. She’s into Shakespeare because I personally knew a lot of relevant Shakespeare quotes, but also as a hint that’s she’s a lot older (and thus a lot more supernatural) than she seems: Shakespeare was a HUGE part of pop culture in the 19th century, particularly in the southwest. Theater companies used to make more money going on tour through states with precious metal mines than they did during their whole season in the big coastal cities, probably because jaded city folks never threw gold nuggets on stage to show their appreciation.

If life is a contest between good and evil, Cecil would be one of the people handing out stickers just for participating.

This is one of my favorite lines.

My plan is fool-proof! It's sheer elegance in its simplicity!

Look, if you enjoyed this fic, WTNV, and/or The Dresden Files, you should probably go watch The Middleman. Yes, I know it’s not streaming, do it anyway. Load up on antivenom and go rent it from your local library.

“Could you [create a time vortex]?""Oh, for sure," says Carlos. "All I'd need would be a couple years to do nothing but work on a highly illegal spell and figure out a way to steal an entire ley-line's worth of power and excise my sense of morality and self-preservation.”

And WHAT are the odds of THAT

It's not that Carlos doesn't like him. It just wouldn't be fair to lead him on when Carlos wouldn't actually—

Well, Carlos wouldn’t mind asking but he doesn’t normally go for—

Okay, Carlos could definitely make an exception for Cecil and—

And—

oh NO he accidentally used logic to make himself admit he has FEELINGS

One of the reasons I love this pairing is that you have Cecil, who is incredibly emotionally open (all the time, on public radio) as a distinct contrast to Carlos, who is so used to putting up a very specific facade that he even does it to himself and then struggles when he doesn't have it to rely on. It creates conflict, but it also means they have very different perspective they can share with each other. 

"Did the earth move for you, too?" says Cecil.

"Bwuh?" replies Carlos.

"At the monitoring station," says Cecil, because right, they're talking about science and not about how Carlos may or may not have accidentally developed a tiny, tiny crush on Cecil, who is standing right in front of him and looking extremely interested in what he's saying and will commit his words to memory and lovingly repeat them for all the world, or at least all of Night Vale and anyone else who received the same odd death curse as Carlos, to hear.

"Oh. Hmm – unh," replies Carlos, then shakes his head. Not talking, that's the way to go. That way he won't accidentally say something he doesn't mean, or worse, something he does mean but probably shouldn't say. Cecil can ask him science questions and he can shake his head yes or no, and maybe refer him wordlessly to supplementary materials, and it will all be very professional and—

"Where did you get your shirt?" asks Cecil. "It fits you so well."

"I'll look at my notes and computer models and see if I can figure out what's going on," Carlos blurts out, and practically runs from the room.

One of the reasons I started writing this fic (SEPTEMBER 2013, BABY god I feel old) was because we all knew Carlos was immensely important to Cecil, but had relatively little information about him, and ALL of it was filtered through our unreliable narrator. So… I just kind of ran with that. 

But on top of the obvious unreliability of “didn't notice Carlos was a wizard from a different series”, I wanted to do it on the smaller scale, too, and put a different spin on the touchstones of their growing relationship that everyone was already familiar with. So this interaction is now a crisis for both of them, and for dramatically/hilariously different reasons. 

“If you’re worried about going native, I’ve got bad news for you, buddy, because you do more chanting than anyone I’ve met.”

Another one of my favorite lines.

“I’ve had to hunt down people I know before, and trust me, it’s not a fun date night!”

Between Molly and fanon interpretations of Cecil, Carlos��� type is apparently 1) weird tattoos, 2) unusually-colored hair, and 3) can kill him

There's a brief hiss from the TV's speakers, and then Cecil says, in a small, forlorn voice, “I don't know if he listens to me, sometimes.”

Carlos puts his head down and laughs bitterly.

I LOVE IRONY 

But even though I wanted to subvert the surface meaning, Cecil DOES still have a point. He got a good look at Carlos’ soul when they first met and still fell in love instantly, but Carlos has a difficult time hearing that because at this point he fundamentally does not believe he’s worthy of that kind of love. In order to truly believe Cecil, he also has to start learning to love and accept himself. (It’s very much a work in progress, but nobody’s perfect.) The title isn’t just meant to refer to romantic love – self-love, friendship, familial love, and unconditional love for the humanity of his trash fire town are equally important, because they all support each other.

hmu for more dvd commentary!

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

There’s nothing like a national election to illuminate the complex and slippery nature of bias at work in the country today. Just ask Pete Buttigieg. Always something of an underdog in the Democratic primary, Buttigieg has started to poll well in Iowa and New Hampshire relative to his national numbers and has proved to be a formidable fundraiser. But as his profile has risen, murmurs about how his sexual orientation might affect his bid have gotten louder and louder.

There are plenty of reasons, of course, why Buttigieg might struggle to gain traction among more voters. His lack of statewide or national political experience is one potential stumbling block. Voters of all races may also balk because he has faced criticism for his handling of the predominantly white police force in South Bend, where a white officer recently shot and killed a black man, and for implementing economic policies that some feel ignore or harm communities of color. And another scapegoat has emerged: Last month, a leaked memo described the results of a focus group conducted by Buttigieg’s own campaign in July, which found that some black voters in South Carolina were uncomfortable with his sexual orientation.

It’s hard to know how much that discomfort truly matters — even a number of the skeptical focus group voters were still open to supporting Buttigieg — and to the extent that it exists, it’s certainly not confined to one group. But regardless of the reasons behind his depressed support, Buttigieg’s candidacy is a case study in the dilemma facing gay and lesbian candidates running at all levels of office today. It’s remarkable, in one sense, how little Buttigieg’s sexual orientation has come up in the primary so far, considering that only 10 years ago, the election of a lesbian woman as Houston’s mayor was enough to make national headlines. Voters’ willingness to support gay and lesbian candidates is at an all-time high, and multiple studies by political scientists have suggested that Democrats are especially unlikely to discriminate against candidates like Buttigieg. “If anything, there are some subgroups of Democrats who would be more likely to vote for a gay candidate,” said Gabriele Magni, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Stop there, and you’d have a pretty rosy electoral prognosis for Buttigieg — focus group skepticism notwithstanding. But it also isn’t the full story. Some Democrats haven’t moved as quickly to the left as others on gay rights issues. And a substantial chunk of Republicans are still comfortable saying they wouldn’t support a gay candidate. As ever, it’s difficult to know what actually keeps a voter for pulling the lever for a particular candidate, but Buttigieg’s sexuality could be a sticking point for some. Experts like Magni said Buttigieg might find it tough to draw support from the most conservative or religious corners of the Democratic primary electorate, not to mention Republicans in the general election. And in a primary driven by voters’ concerns about how electable the candidates are, the perception that a significant slice of voters would never support a gay candidate might be an even bigger hurdle than the reluctant voters themselves.

Just a few election cycles ago, a debate about the electoral impact of a gay candidate’s sexual orientation would have had a clear answer — because being gay was a dealbreaker for almost half the country. As recently as 2007, only 55 percent of Americans said they would vote for a gay or lesbian candidate for president, which is only slightly higher than the share who currently say they would vote for a socialist. But many voters’ qualms about the prospect of a gay or lesbian president evaporated over the following decade, and 76 percent of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — now say they wouldn’t have a problem supporting a gay candidate for president. That’s still not the near-uniform level of hypothetical support the same polls show for a female or black candidate, but it’s also not obviously disqualifying. After all, only 63 percent of Americans say they’d vote for a candidate over the age of 70, which describes the three top-polling candidates in the Democratic primary.

There are plenty of signs, too, that a Democratic primary is particularly friendly terrain for a gay candidate. Political scientists have found in studies and interviews with candidates that gay and lesbian candidates overwhelmingly run as Democrats, in part because Democratic voters don’t seem to penalize candidates for their sexual orientation. A recent experimental study co-authored by Magni found that voters who identify as very liberal and nonreligious were more likely to support a gay candidate over a straight candidate.

The impulse to size up the electoral landscape and run where their support is strongest can partially help explain why gay and lesbian candidates often don’t find their sexuality to be a serious barrier. “When you talk to gay and lesbian candidates, they’ll generally tell you their sexual orientation didn’t matter much in their race, and that’s in part a function of the fact that they tend to run in more liberal areas, like cities,” said Donald Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas and the author of “Out and Running: Gay and Lesbian Candidates, Elections, and Policy Representation.”

But there are still pockets of the Democratic electorate where voters’ views of gay people aren’t as liberal. And that poses a few potential problems for Buttigieg, who has to run a national campaign. A significant chunk of his base is composed of white college-educated Democrats; this is also a subset of voters where his sexual orientation is highly unlikely to be a roadblock, given that several decades of data from the General Social Survey shows that people in this group are especially likely to say that homosexual relationships are never wrong.

But as my colleague Nathaniel Rakich wrote recently, Buttigieg has some fierce competition from Elizabeth Warren for white college-educated voters. And while the groups with whom he might be hoping to expand his support — like religious voters or whites with lower levels of education — are certainly not uniformly opposed to gay candidates, they are groups where his sexual orientation might be more of an issue. People who attend church frequently are much less likely than non-churchgoers to believe same-sex marriage should be legal, according to the Pew Research Center. Likewise, lower levels of education tend to come with lower levels of support for gay marriage.

Voters’ feelings about gay candidates could show up in more nuanced ways as well. The specter of electability, for example, could turn out to be a bigger roadblock for Buttigieg than outright hostility toward gay people. For instance, a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that voters were basically split on whether the country was ready for a gay or lesbian president, and only 26 percent said that their neighbors were ready.

To be clear, several experts told me these electability concerns don’t have a lot of evidence to support them, although that may be partially because there hasn’t been a lot of research on how gay candidates perform in real-life elections, and candidates may also avoid contests — like Republican primaries — where they’re all but destined to lose. But discomfort with gay marriage or homosexual relationships won’t necessarily stop voters from ultimately supporting a gay candidate. And Haider-Markel pointed out that the people with the strongest prejudices against gay people are also highly unlikely to vote for any Democrat, which means that in a general election, Buttigieg’s sexuality would probably matter less than the “D” next to his name. Dislodging gut-level intuitions about electability can be tricky business for a candidate, though. That’s particularly true when significant chunks of the electorate — including almost 40 percent of Republicans — are still perfectly comfortable telling a pollster they wouldn’t vote for a gay candidate. It’s hard not to assume that a neighbor’s stubborn opposition to gay marriage will shape their vote in some way — even though in reality, the forces that influence our choice of candidate are far more complex.

This complexity makes it nearly impossible to say for certain whether it’s Buttigieg’s sexual orientation — rather than his age, or his political inexperience, or his policy positions, or some ineffable combination of factors — that has kept him from rising further in the polls. And that will also make it hard to assess, when all the ballots are cast and the Democratic nominee is chosen, just how much Buttigieg’s electoral chances were affected by his sexuality.

But it also means that even if some voters are being held back by Buttigieg’s sexual orientation now, other parts of his biography, like his military service or Christian faith, could still change the way they think about him. The good news for Buttigieg is that there are months to go before the primaries begin, and he has plenty of cash to spend on introducing himself to voters who might currently know next to nothing about him. “At a very basic level, Buttigieg could reduce some bias just by getting voters to see him as a gay man who was also in Afghanistan and goes to church on Sunday,” Magni said. “Sexual orientation is less likely to play a role in vote choice when people move past the stereotypes they have in their mind about who gay people are supposed to be.”

[myfriendpokey]

promissory notes

Complete satisfaction OR your money back!!! - is something I don't think anyone in videogames has ever willingly said,so maybe it doesn't make sense to talk of anything as stable as a "guarantee". Maybe it's more like a system of overlapping promises, designed to contain the idea that a videogame exists in at least some kind of provisional relationship to human happiness,  even if the rate at which the two could be converted is never quite nailed down. We have the promise the game will work on a given system or set of minimum requirements, the hazier assurance it might at least resemble the screenshots on the box, the genre assurance that it formally and hence experientially resembles some other game you like. The assurance, in press leading up to release, of passion and artistic intent rattling around in there somewhere as well, the assurance that the game will have x y and z new features and scope. Press and external reviewers can so to speak cosign a guarantee or write their own more ambivalent one on the basis of their reputation. Storefronts as well can tacitly endorse some promise - that this thing exists, functions, falls into the category of "entertainment" - when they put it on their shelves, virtual or otherwise. There's the promise of personal reputation, that the people involved wouldn't want to associate themselves with a bogus product, and the promise of monetary interest - this game obviously had a fair bit of money put into it, they're expecting  to make that back, therefore we can expect some moderate fidelity to customer expectation and the sort of general polished feel that comes with being able to hire lots of people to create bark textures.

Most of these institutions aren't specific to videogames, but I do think they have a greater prominence there, owing both to the higher amount of fussy technical variation in the format (it's hard to imagine a book, say, refusing to boot or secretly installing a bitcoin miner in your head) and also to its historical novelty. The idea that something called a "videogame" exists, is an entertainment format, is linked to some kind of prospective emotional value - all these have to be rhetorically insisted upon, particularly as the format moved from spaces with immediately visible analogues (pinball tables, mechanical amusements) to a more diffuse place  alongside the family television or home computer. They had to insinuate, and to an extent still have to insinuate, the exact role they played in everyday life. And the shift from being a sort of weird, garish, once-off toy into an ongoing home-improvement project, with new games and consoles to choose between and new add-ins to improve your machine, had to be accompanied by the emergence of institutions that could offer some reassurance this ongoing investment wouldn't be a waste.

So you can maybe glibly think of videogames as a form of currency, built on the premise that they can be "exchanged" at any time for some measure of enjoyment, where this exchange rate is underwritten and co-signed by various institutions. And as having something of the abstraction of currency, as well. If one videogame is a moment of enjoyment then 6000 videogames are in principle 6000 moments of enjoyment - never mind that you may never have a chance to play all those discounted games in your Steam library within one lifetime. Think of it as saving them up for a rainy day. And I suspect that as this relationship between possession and affect grows more abstracted and tenuous, institutions take on a correspondingly more important role in confirming that the central exchange relationship still holds true. A bit like debt rating agencies - it's not so much about actually untangling the complicated sale of good, bad and nonexistent debt packages from one financial institution to another, it's more the promise that at some point this untangling COULD occur, that all this imaginary money still bears some kind of distant relationship to actual human needs.

I wonder if the paranoid style in videogames culture stems partly from this sense of underlying contingency. It's not that games are just experiences, which can't be taken away - they're more like deposits on hypothetical experience, and those deposits can indeed depreciate in value if not turn out to be worthless from the start. Bad reviews, spoilers, the general reputation of a game can all cause it to drop in expected value. The fuss that happens every time a new GTA game gets below 9.5 on IGN or wherever is not so much that the game might really have problems so much that having those problems flagged from the start can marr the sense of occasion, the I-was-there-ness and anticipated retrospective value that's part of the package being sold. And of course the consistent anxiety around corrupt reviewers, incorrect press releases, "fake games", all those other things that could adulterate the currency...

And maybe we could consider the current anxiety around "asset flips" on Steam in the same light. After all, who's really playing these things - besides Youtubers doing so ironically? They're easy to spot and easily refunded and even if some kid really does buy "Cuphat" or "Battleglounds" by accident, well, the worst that could happen is that they develop the same misplaced affection for exploitative consumer garbage as everybody else who grew up playing videogames. And indeed the fact that nobody really buys them is part of the critique - what's unsettling is the fact that they seem more connected to the shadow economies of cheap bundles and trading-card-store manipulation (which is so easy and widespread that PC Gamer could publish a how-to guide with no apparent pushback from anyone). You can easily unpick the specific arguments about what constitutes an asset flip versus a game that just uses premade assets, or how to tell a "scam" from just a regular bad videogame - demonstrative sincerity?? Producing cynical knockoffs with premade asset packs is not necessarily the act of poorly-funded fly-by-nights, as witness the recent news about Voodoo recieving $200 million from Goldman Sachs. But of course they're the chief source of anxiety around the issue, and the ways in which that anxiety manifests is often weirdly racialised - the automatic bad faith extended to the Global South, the fear of nameless hordes overrunning our valuable, exclusive institutions, even a sort of weird variant on the “welfare mother” imagery - the asset flipper with 100 interchangeable games, driving a cadillac... Leaching off the accumulated value stockpiled by the Steam brand, devaluing our libraries and the institutions that have been telling us they're worth something...

I don't really have a lot of sympathy with the asset-flip discourse, both because exactly the same anxiety has been rolled out in the past to Unity, walking simulators, visual novels, Game Maker, Twine, and basically anything else that lowers the barriers to entry around making videogames; and also because I love many games I think those anxieties would try to exclude ("The Zoo Race", GoreBagg games, the Johnny series, even Limbo Of The Lost is as close as Oblivion ever came to being creatively exciting), and I think the calls for hard work and sincerity and so forth function as just so much evasive kitsch. We already HAVE a ton of games like that; and that's maybe the real problem. Why is there so much anxiety about discovering good games when, say, people are complaining about having to choose between the two different, polished, labour-of-love, years-in -the-making narrative platform games being released the same week? Doesn't this just mean the "enjoyment standard" of the videogame promissory note is just by now so abstract and intangible that it's basically just an empty convention, useful for nothing but perpetuating itself - perpetuating the idea of an unadulterated good-game-ness, stretching aimlessly into space like a 1950s radio broadcast.  It's a convention which is basically exclusive, which works by trying to put a cordon around the vast swathes of human culture it thinks it's safe to ignore.

Which is maybe fine - nobody can pay attention to anything, and some "rating institutions" are presumably less pernicious than others (the advice of a friend? a critic you enjoy? your own intuition?). There are obviously a lot of critiques that can be levelled at the existing one for videogames, including in particular the assumption that anything that cost a lot of money is worth at least checking out. But there's also something more generally sad about this kind of enforced, perpetual scarcity in a time of abundance, about a model that just pines for less shit so that it can start to feel relevant again, about one that can think of nothing to do with the sheer volume of things being made and rabbit holes being burrowed than wish they didn't exist and try to shut them out entirely.

More people being able to make things is good, and hard to get to; it can also be unnerving and disorienting and also push against some of the happier ideas we might have had about the democratization of art-production (for example, that this wouldn't co-exist with monopolies of arbitrary unaccountable control of the kind exercised by Youtube, Steam, the App store, Google, etc...), it can be a space to view some of the weirder machinations of capital as they leave traces through the culture (money-laundering $9000 books on Amazon and viral Pregnant Spiderman youtube vids). I don't think continuing to defend the value of the medium will help think about these, or become anything but more and more paranoid and quixotic over time.

[humongouschildtheorist]

10 Things You Need to Do Before Hiring a Web Development Company

Choosing a web development company is not a simple task, but if you want a brilliant website for your business, you have to do it. Your website otherwise called your internet storefront and digital face of your business is how you will introduce yourself to the entire world. The whole world is soon going to be introduced to your company through this website. Hence, you do not want your website built by anybody. You need to hire the right web design agency to help you with it.

Your company is ready to go, you’ve got the conventional marketing and advertising materials, including business cards and brochures, and now it is time to confront the digital barrier: your website. Here are ten things you need to do before hiring a web development company

1) Google search for web design talent

There are many web designers globally who could help you make a website. If you can not find someone nearby, or you do not mind hiring someone remotely to build your website, Google search can get you the best web design talent. You can tap into Google’s web designer pool to obtain a fantastic match. You can use the power of tools like Skype and Zoom to make remote working possible.

So how do you find the right talent with a simple search? Google needs the right keywords to show you the relevant results, so a simple search like “web development company in Bangalore” or “web designers in Bangalore” will guide you towards businesses that you can contact for your web development project.

If you have a particular website that you like and would like to hire the website design services of the same person who built that website, take a look at the bottom of the website. Most web designers leave a bit “Designed by ” link in the bottom of websites they’re proud of!

2) Be clear with the objectives, priorities, and goals of your website.

Before engaging with a web design agency in any way, ask yourself: will your website sell services or products, or can it exist only to offer advice?

If you are looking to sell products online, you need an ecommerce website development company. Some website development companies do not specialize in the design, and if that is the case, it would be better to look for web design services separately. Ideally, it would be better if the same web development company could provide both services.

Look on the internet for websites you prefer and ones that may represent your business. Determine why you would like a website in the first place. You could use that as a starting point for your project.

3) Create a vision board for your website

Vision boards are not only for 20-somethings that are unsure precisely what they wish to do for the rest of their lives; they also help new and small business owners determine how their website should look and function.

It should consist of things like colors you want to be integrated, preferred font options, phrases or slogans, and images you would like to use when promoting your organization. If this intimidates you, do not worry, most web development services come with these features, and they will help you with it, but it is always better to be prepared.

4) Get a design wishlist done.

This will help you focus on producing and executing a vision while also enhancing the existing one. If you do not have a website already, create a listing based on your study and eyesight, including the number of pages, headers, links, menus, or other visual components you would like to include on your website. Also, include any social networking switches or brand icons. Remember, you will have to market yourself online. You can share your design wishlist with the web development company, and they will get back to you with how much it would cost to build something similar to what you seek.

5) Budget

Building a site is similar to building a home: it costs more than you expect. Do not let this frighten you; be ready!

The best source to understand how much it would cost to build you a website is to ask other business owners who have recently got one done. If you like a particular website, write to the business, leave a compliment, and ask them how much it cost them to build it.

If not, you can call up a few web development companies in your region and ask them an estimated price. A simple Google search like “web designers in Bangalore” or “web development services” should provide you a list of web development companies in your region.

6) Ensure every page of your website has an objective

What’s the objective of each webpage? This is the question you want to ask yourself before meeting with a web designer who will probably charge you by the hour to assist you in answering these queries. Yes, your website will be a fluid advertising channel for your small business, which means you can upgrade or make changes to it anytime you want.

Remember that adding pages, changing the structure, or creating any substantial design changes to your website will require extra design work. Web design services will cost you more money, and it is not wise to update your website’s design often. The purpose of identifying the webpages object is to produce a baseline website that you could readily upgrade with information and does not require structural alterations.

7) Keep the text content written and ready.

You may be surprised to hear this, but you ought to have the words for every page prepared to go ahead. It makes it a lot easier for your designer’s web design agency to start work on your website. These are not simply ideas; you want the ultimate polished ideas for your website.

It would help if you handed this to the web development company in the very first meeting. This will help them build a design around your ideas. You will also save a lot of money because the web developer and designer need not waste time coming up with ideas and showcasing them to you. It’ll help accelerate the procedure all around.

8) Set a creative procedure before the meeting with the web designer

Since simple online collaboration is crucial when dealing with a web design agency, make a folder on the internet to drop all the information. You can use tools like Google Drive or Dropbox to do it. Collect your ideas and keep critical pieces of advice in the folder to help the web designer know everything about your project.

When it comes to the text of your website, a shared file is an excellent way to produce a draft backup for numerous individuals to review concurrently. This may be the perfect way to accelerate the creative procedure. Ensure your graphics, pictures, and images are ready, and share them with your designer as well.

Build a sitemap for your website. This is precisely the strategy you want when planning your website. Each subset of the simple sitemap should include the page title and other basic details.

9) Create a web design arrangement and contract

When designing your website, you and your designer must be on the same page, especially when it comes to expectations. As you hire a designer, odds are your understanding of website design is not equivalent to theirs. Accept you might not grasp the time required with designing a website.

You might believe that it should take a couple of weeks for a web design company in Bangalore to complete your project. The truth is the design procedure can take a few months, depending on the intricacy of the website. This should not just include the timeline and budget but also the hopes of communicating. Do you want advance reports every day or even weekly? Is text or email the very best approach to correspond? Placing expectations can help alleviate any administrative pressure the undertaking may cause. It maintains the focus on creating an excellent website.

10) Come up with a launch strategy

After your hypothetical site is prepared, what is your strategy?

Before you begin designing your website, you need to think about how you will use it to your benefit upon its completion. Many business owners make an event by launching their website to create some buzz about their brand. Other folks line up their very best customers to provide testimonials on their brand new website via video or copy content so that they, and such clients, have something to say and discuss on social networking.

As soon as you’ve considered these ten factors, you are ready to hire a web development company to get your website built. They will have the information they need to look at, and you’ll get exactly what you need: a unique website for a reasonable price.

[aion-rsa]

Baldur’s Gate 3 Character Creator Test Reveals Generic Player Creations

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

In a post on the game’s Steam page, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios revealed that many players don’t seem to be taking full advantage of the game’s extensive character creation options.

It seems that the team at Larian combed over the character creator analytics in order to create a new character based on the most popular selections for individual categories. This was what they ended up with when the process was finished:

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“Congratulations, you’ve basically made the default Vault Dweller,” Larian notes in regards to the results of this experiment. “What the hell guys. We gave you demon eyes, horns, and even tails. We are sorely disappointed. Go crazy. We worked hard on this!”

Opinions will vary as opinions are want to do, but it’s somewhat odd/vaguely amusing that early Baldur’s Gate 3 players have seemingly chosen “Steve the Protagonist” as their hero despite the fact that the game offers players the chance to not only choose between several exotic fantasy races but a suite of special options that allow you to come up with some truly unique creations. We’ve seen many of those creations across various social media accounts, so it’s not like the potential of this game’s character creation system is hypothetical.

So why is it that so many people seem to be settling on a factory manufactured local politician when gifted such an array of options? Well, it feels impossible to rule out the likelihood that many players attempt to create a version of themselves in any game that lets them customize their characters. Given the results of this test, we’ll let you make of that what you will.

It’s also certainly possible that the results of this test are being impacted somewhat by early players’ desire to just jump into the beta and not necessarily fuss with the character creator. Anyone who wanted to just try the game out and maybe focus on a character build later may have just settled on a basic creation with the idea being that they’d eventually revisit the character creator and produce something a little more exciting.

Finally, it should probably be said that the above character is fairly representative of the leads in many popular fantasy works over the years. While there are naturally numerous exceptions to that insinuation in various genre works, even Baldur’s Gate 3‘s early trailers featured a human protagonist with features relatively similar to the creation above. Your interpretation of that data is, again, subject to opinion, but be sure to really explore the limits of the game’s character creator and test your own creative abilities.

The post Baldur’s Gate 3 Character Creator Test Reveals Generic Player Creations appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lINCCN

[calloftheancestors]

(Lengthy but well worth the read. I agree wholeheartedly with the Heathen Ranter on this one. If you haven’t even bothered to read the Asatru Edda and just make assumptions according to someone else’s opinion, you are missing out on the opportunity to expand your mind. Heathenism is an ever evolving spiritual tradition. It is ironic that many voice dismay at this edition of the Edda, yet have no problem taking Heathenism and mixing its traditions and rituals with other pagan traditions (Wicca comes to mind). It smacks of hypocrisy. It takes a level of sophistication and spiritual maturity to open one’s mind to exploring all ways of thinking, especially those that have something of value to offer. Frankly, if you have not read the Asatru Edda, what say you? Sidenote: Please read entire post, before making informed responses. I am new to the Tumblr Heathen community, but not to Heathenism. I am in no way part of the Norroena Society. The Asatru Edda just happened to be on my long list of must reads. I am dismayed by the frivolous dismissal of such a work of scholarship. Unfortunately the only ones actually in serious discourse and dialog on the subject of Heathenism around here are the Neo-Nazis:( But there sure are nice pictures repeating themselves over and over again on my dash. Perhaps I am expecting too much.)

Review : The Asatru Edda Norroena Society,

The Asatru Edda : Sacred Lore of the North

, iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2009.

“This is a work of tremendous care, and labour of love. Its meticulous compilation of source-texts into a coherent epic form has been accomplished, for the most part, with grace and with dignity. There is a rhythm and a pulse to the work that slows down the mind and lends a meditative quality to the verses and rich language quoted and flowed in to the well-laid pathways and grooves. These pathways are evidently the result of many great summonings of rede.

There are positively beautiful moments, and interpretations. Take the stunning yet instantly evident interpretation that the Llosalfar are in fact that tribe of elves in Dagr's line who prepare and accompany the daily pageant of Sol across the skies. "At each horizon of Jormungrund there are horse-doors, which the Ljosalfar ride through on their journey to and from the sky. Near the eastern horse-door lies Dellingr's hall, in Alfheimr, where he gives aid to Natt and her kinsmen. Near the western horse-door is Billingr's domain, who does the same. Dellingr is the jarl of the Ljosalfar and lord of the dawn. Billingr rules over twilight." (p. 18) This explains Snorri's positioning of the Ljosalfar in the various heavens as Sol parades across the skies.

There are little gems like these sprinkled throughout the book, making it a treasure trove. It's important to emphasize that these interpretations are not the result of random "Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis", as it is sometimes called in the heathen community, in which individuals, often without much grounding in the lore at all, and without making the effort to piece together what remains in fragmentary form, simply pull out of their hat the first thing that sounds good to them, and assert it as some kind of truth. The UPGs, as they are often abbreviated, ought not only be called "unsubstantiated", but more importantly, undigested. Intuition was very important to our ancestors, and developing personal feelings and theories about the lore was certainly seen as valuable. When the gap between one's personal feelings, and the larger community was bridged, however, one was expected to present fully digested information that related to the experiences of others in a way that enhanced them.

Here we may receive edification at the toolshed of some Havamalverses. Havamal 26 : Ósnotr maðr þykkisk allt vita, ef hann á sér í vá veru; hittki hann veit, hvat hann skal við kveða, ef hans freista firar, "The unsophisticated man thinks he knows everything, if he stays to himself in a corner [or, in his cabin ; vá can mean both] ; he knows not that which he shall answer, if he is tested by the folk." Freista, "tested", here means "examined", "scrutinized", and even (although not a technical legal term) "cross-examined". It means being subjected to critical thinking from multiple points of view. Anyone can think themselves smart when they stay at home. But do their thoughts stand up to scrutiny when they are in the company of the sophisticated?Havamal 30 : margr þá fróðr þykkisk, ef hann freginn er-at, "many seem wise, if they are not asked questions." It's the answering of questions over time that deepens our insights. Havamal 5 : at augabragði verðr sá er ekki kann ok með snotrum sitr, "he who has nothing to teach becomes a twinkle of the eyes when he sits amongst the sophisticated." Ekki kann may also be translated as "knows nothing", or "does not search or explore". The latter suggests that a person has taken the time to search something out and really investigate it. That, after all, is the basis for teaching something. Someone who has nothing substantial to offer, or whose speech remains puerile, undeveloped, undigested, and unsophisticated, is going to be taken as insignificant, because truly what they have to offer is simply a flash in the dark or a twinkle of the eyes. It has developed no depth, no root, and thus is taken as the passing fancy of a child, rather than something which ought to be taken seriously. The Norroena Society, under the tutelage of Mark Puryear, has something substantial and sophisticated to teach, and it is the result of careful investigations.

What differentiates lore from unsubstantiated, undigested personal gnosis, as these Havamal strophes illustrate, is gnoses that have passed from hand to hand over time, and become refined. They are like gems that have become polished in the tumblers of time. Lore is the result of the folk. It may be brought together by those with special skill and poetic talent, but it is not "made up" by untested, unreflective flashes of momentary insight. Many times the brilliance of a moment becomes a flash in the pan. What perseveres?

Puryear's structure is based upon a careful and lengthy study of Viktor Rydberg, one of Sweden's most talented poets, and a gifted folk-scholar who devoted over ten years of in-depth study scrutinizing every surviving remnant of lore. Beginning with no preconceived notions, over time, Rydberg began to sort certain patterns that began to emerge in his studies. He noticed a rough story arc in the Poetic Edda that was greatly enhanced when it was filled in with a careful study of the mythological elements to be found in Saxo's Gesta Danorum. It is commonly, and quite erroneously assumed that Rydberg simply equated separate divine persona according to his personal whimsy. On the contrary, his analysis was quite akin to the practice of modern scholars who study types in folk stories, and gather together variations. Rydberg's in-depth studies brought together variants of the same story that commented upon each other in mutual ways, and when enough elements converged to constitute structural and functional identity, then, and only then, did he recognize the different names in the variants as polynyms for the same figure. Polynymity is a recognized feature of mythic traditions that stem in part from poets' love of devising new praise-titles for their beloved deities and heroes, and in part from name-divergence in communities as they differentiate geographically over time.

Like an immense jigsaw puzzle, Rydberg began collecting together the pieces and variants that obviously fit together, until he had discerned a basic structure that tied the various story-arcs together. Because of the fragmentary nature of some of the sources, and the corruption inherent in some of the texts due to distortion under Christian recording, there were gaps in the assembled jigsaw puzzle. But even with gaps, so long as they are not too large, one may get the entire picture of a jigsaw puzzle, and sometimes, it is even easy to fill in the blanks based on inference, and connecting the dots from known Point A to known Point C. Rydberg was always very deliberate in annotating his inferences and speculations regarding hypothetical Points B, and differentiated them from that which had solid grounding in the sources.

In the process, Rydberg came to some conclusions that startled him, yet which became confirmed again and again upon further investigation. Some of these conclusions have continued to startle or baffle modern heathens who haven't taken the time to really investigate Rydberg. Rydberg took over ten years to do his investigations, and they do represent really solid research based on meticulous examination and synthesis of the original sources in the lore, but I'd estimate that in order to fully examine and confirm their validity, an open-minded but reasonably skeptical mind would have to take several years to closely study his investigations and confirm his sources, which is precisely what Carla O'Harris and myself have been doing, along with the folk-scholar and translator William Reaves, for many years now. I can report that although Rydberg is not correct 100% of the time (who is?), his hit-rate definitely ranks in the 90th percentile, which is pretty damn impressive.

Puryear has taken the time to both understand this epic structure Rydberg uncovered, and to meditate upon it, and then he has allowed the ancestral voices themselves to tell the saga, through often seamless compilation and dexterous, light-handed editing of the ancient sources, to create a whole that is impressive, and functions as a veritable tome. My only suggestion in this regard is that it ought be available in a regular sized format --- Bible-sized would be excellent, actually --- and in hardcover, leather-bound, rather than its paperback 8 by 11 format, because a work of this sort truly merits a form that is as lasting as its content. Even if that substantially increased the cost of the book, given its value, it would still be worth the extra cost.

Some minor critiques : Puryear occasionally flows in elements from the Oera Linda Book, a book he feels contains some genuine elements of lore amongst its obvious corruptions and modernisms. I am not so convinced. Oera Linda seems far more convincingly a nationalist forgery of the 19th century than it does any genuine compilation of lore, and the consensus of scholars agree on that. (Such consensus, in and of itself, says little, because knowledge is hardly a democracy, but it matches my intuition when I read this book.) It is not impossible that in this work of fiction, seemingly composed by one man, there might have been integrated some folk-elements, but that is far from conclusive. Nevertheless, whether fiction or no, there are some beautiful passages that Puryear quotes to benefit, and certainly no harm, as for the most part they in no way impede, and occasionally enhance, the more well-founded surrouding structure. Indeed some have a charm of their own. My only complaint here is their flimsy (in my honest opinion) grounding in anything approaching genuine lore. But Puryear is quite conscientious about footnoting precisely which elements come from Oera Linda (as indeed he sources all of the material), thus allowing the reader to decide which elements of charm and meditation to take as authentic. They do not make up a substantial part of the book, which sticks to the more commonly acknowledged sources of genuine lore.

Nevertheless, this is not contradictory to Puryear's stated aim. I quote from the enjoyable, rede-filled introduction : "The purpose of such a massive undertaking, which is the culmination of over ten years of work, and thirty years of combined research between several scholars, is not to develop a strict authority on what Asatru lore should and should not be. Although it was put together to be a sacred text, rather than just another "mythology" book, the sanctity of the work is in re-establishing holy storytelling traditions in the form of the Teutonic epic. Like a great puzzle, the fragments of lore have been pieced together, cleansed of Christian elements, and presented as a source for Asatruar to enjoy as part of our legacy. Before the age of Bibles and Korans, tales of the worlds' religions were shared over hearths or near children's beds. The lore was not a concrete rule of divine law that had to be maintained, word for word, at all costs. Rather, it was a vibrant, fluid development that constantly changed and evolved, while keeping in life with what had come before. Although the stories themselves are sacred, what's more important are the lessons one walks away with, the true inspirations of the Gods and Goddesses. The inspiration is the holy experience in reading or hearing the lore, and remains so to this day." (p. xiv)

Indeed, so long as the skeletal structure and sinews which are founded in studious linkage and investigation of the original sources are adhered to, there is no reason why minor flourishes cannot be taken from artful, modern sources that stay true to the internal spirit of the lore. Puryear here selects from Oera Linda ; there are passages from Tolkien, for example, especially in The Silmarillion, that are so true to the Northern spirit, and so stunningly beautiful and lyrical, that they might well be flowed in to passages where they fit. As Puryear points out, the lore did not have "to be maintained, word for word, at all costs". Whatever the retelling, what matters is the way it keeps the integrity of the tradition alive through the generations. And it is certain that once a substantial segment of heathenry has assimilated the structural integrity of this work, lore will be regenerated from the heart and the living, poetic imagination (odr) into a new renaissance of lore that will be as old and as new as that which springs from the Well of Wyrd itself.

Another minor critique is his inclusion, although to his credit, he brackets it off as a separate appendix, of a text called here The Hugrunar, but originally entitled The Meditative Paradigms of Seidr, a bizarre, modern prose-poem written in chunky and clunky pseudo-archaic, hardly grammatical speech. I will not say that there are not some interesting insights in the piece, although the strange grammar often makes me feel that I am following the insights of Yoda. What makes it particularly odd is its fusion (one might say "con-fusion") of separate genres and diction into one piece, at times having the voice of some cryptic, Havamal-mimicking speech, while at other times, taking on a fairly self-conscious (and to my ears, even awkward-sounding) modern voice of meditation. I am not entirely familiar with the provenance of this piece, but there are some stains in here that definitely enshrine racist thought, in ways that are both disturbing and eccentric. To wit : "Once we were all of flax and heather ; that was in grandmother's days. Then came from the east in father's time, making the half-dark. Now dark with flax and either with half-dark till neither wood duck nor goose remain." First of all, what the hell does that mean? Secondly, this contrast of hues opposed between the native and the foreign most certainly smacks of racism, and if there were any doubts, a few more quotes ought to dispel them : "Dark was the storm in the east. Dark were the riders ... Where now they trade and farm, are heads like hares, short, swart like elves -- beware. Look only to the light of us, the fair browed, whose brows do not meet ... Though some be comely too, the dark with dark belong as geese by feathers nest else all is confused." Right. Certainly one may always find mead amidst dregs and drivel, as Odin had to go down into the mountain amongst the monsters to retrieve, and Puryear does admit that "The origins of this writing as an authentic, ancient tradition are questionable at best", but if it is going to be "offered" as "a brilliant modern addition" to the lore, perhaps its most obnoxious elements might be bracketed or edited, because while remaining embarassing, if they weren't so laughable they would be downright shameful. My advice would be to eliminate this from the next edition of the book and make it available in its own book, perhaps as a critical edition with commentary, and leave it out of what remains genuine lore, even as an appendix. Such a worthy tome is undeserving of such unnecessary stains, and after the corruptions of lore bred by nationalist romanticism, especially in its more virulent racialist strains, it behooves every heathen to be on extra guard against any smuggling of a racism that never belonged to our ancestors into the lore. On this point, of respect and curiosity for the traditions of others, Puryear is quite clear and illuminating. From his introduction : "Our people were great explorers and adventurers who tread upon almost every land on earth. Their admiration and desire to learn of other cultures was a staple of their way of life, exemplified by certain rites of passage where youths would set off to see the world. Long before such tolerance and acceptance of others became a trend of modern society, Northern sailors traveled from one end of the globe to the other, without leaving any trace of imposition or disrespect towards those they encountered. Archaeological evidence shows them to have been peaceful traders among the nations they fared, though their fierce defense of their homelands was legendary." (p. xiii) Given that, let's keep a worthy, well-made tome of lore in keeping with that spirit, and not allow in modern prejudices that are quite unworthy of our Gods.

One of the beauties of the book is the way Puryear flows in elements from other Indo-European traditions, such as Avesta and Rig-Veda, when their forms are cognate and amplify our tradition in ways that do not amount to invention, but reinforcement and supplementation. This is selectively and sparsely done, only when necessary, but adds to the gravitas of the work, and is an important stimulus to that great project of reaching out to our Iranian and Hindic brothers-and-sisters-in-faith, with whom we share a common mother heritage. Puryear also tastefully sprinkles in insights from marchen and popular traditions where relevant, and not in a haphazard or structural way, but as icing on an already scrumptuously-baked cake.

Asatru Edda includes fifty pages of annotation, for those who wish to check the sources, and a very nicely-put together glossary of over seventy pages that illuminates the meaning of various Icelandic names, a necessity in getting at the meaning of various passages in the lore. This alone is a noteworthy addition to modern heathenry.

"...[T]he idea is to take the reader on a journey into the hearts of our forefathers to find greater wisdom and understanding in the lore and poetry they passed down to their descendants. We study diligently the heritage of our past and take what we will from it, learning the inspirations of the divine." (p. xv) Asatru Edda has succeeded, in my opinion, in these goals, and will become a tool of meditation, picked up again and again for further study and insight, by every heathen who takes the time to make it his or her own.”

[holytheoristtastemaker]

Git is a powerful tool I use every single day. Up until a few months ago I only used the bare minimum to get my job done. When I moved to a different company, with a much larger team, I quickly figured out there was so much of Git I didn’t know about and wasn’t using.

Nowadays I feel much more confident and I’ve learned a bunch of helpful new things! While I won’t go into the basics of Git, because there are many great resources out there to help you with that, I’d like to show you five commands that I think are very useful and may save you a few headaches. They certainly saved some for me.

Let’s dive in!

Amend: changing the commit after committing

You commit something and you immediately realize your commit message isn’t clear enough or doesn’t adhere to the commit message formatting rules of the project. Maybe you realized you needed to add one small change, like removing that silly little console.log(), or maybe you forgot to add a new file.

Does any of the above sound familiar? It definitely sounds familiar to me and has happened a few times! Luckily, there is a way for you to change, or rather update, your latest commit before you push it using --amend.

There are two parts to a commit that you may want to change, the first one is the commit message and the second one is a file. Let’s start with changing the commit message.

Changing the commit message

In it’s most basic form, the command to change your commit message looks like this:

git commit --amend

This will open your configured code editor for Git and allow you to change the commit message. You can, however, change the commit message without opening the editor:

git commit --amend -m "Your updated commit message"

Adding the -m flag, followed by the updated message in quotes, allows you to change the message without opening the editor.

Amending a change or file

Let’s say you notice a rogue console.log() after you’ve committed and you want to remove it. Edit the file and stage it like you normally would for a commit. Then run the following command:

git commit --amend --no-edit

This will amend the file to the commit. The —no-edit flag allows you to do this without changing the commit message.

⚠️ Caveat

Using —amend doesn’t change the commit. Instead, it replaces the commit with a brand new one. As such it is incredibly important you don’t amend public commits. Your local commits are perfectly fine.

Checkout: reverting a single file

Recently I did a pull request for a new feature I was working on. Part of my work was to remove some old styling in a legacy file. When I deleted the 8 lines of styling and hit save, I automatically ran prettier because that’s how I’ve set up my IDE.

The result was a little over a thousand changes making it impossible to figure out what it was that I actually changed myself. I completely missed this had happened and joyfully opened a pull request ready for review. Oops 😅.

I had to revert that file, make sure prettier wasn’t running, make my changes, save it, and commit it to the branch so it could be reviewed properly. Luckily git checkout comes to the rescue!

To revert a single file back to a previous commit, you run the following command:

git checkout <commit_hash> -- <path/to/file>

First find the commit that holds the changes you need to revert to, this is most likely 1 commit before the commit you need reverting, then figure out what the path to that file is (easiest way is to copy the relative path in your code editor).

Your file is now reverted to what it was on the commit you picked out. In my case: before I removed the styling and ran prettier. Phew, crisis solved 🥳.

Remote: add another remote repo

I’m going to outline this part with a hypothetical situation based on real events.

Imagine you are currently working on a new feature and you’ve got a co-worker, let’s call her Kate, who’s working on something that you need to integrate into your feature. You are both working in a fork of the central repository of your team and you need to pull in the latest changes Kate has made on her fork.

When you cloned your forked repository to your system, Git automatically created a remote connection named: origin. You may already know this, but did you know you can add Kate’s repository as a remote connection as well? This is great for when you want to pull in changes Kate made without her having to push to the central repository.

Let’s look at how to add Kate’s repository to your list of remote connections, we’ll go into fetching her changes in the next section. Here’s how to add her repository:

git remote add <name> <url>

The name can be anything you want. I usually stick to using my co-worker’s names or Github usernames. The url is the URL to her repository, for example: git@github.com:Kate/acme-fork.git. Putting that together:

git remote add kate git@github.com:Kate/acme-fork.git

If you run git remote, which will list all of the remote connections, you’ll see Kate’s remote repository.

Remote: fetching a branch from the remote branch

To fetch a specific branch from a specific remote, you run the following command:

git fetch <remote> <branch>

In the previous section we talked about adding Kate’s repository to your remote connections. Kate was working on something in a branch called new-feature. Using the above command, that would look like this:

git fetch kate new-feature

Running the command will fetch Kate’s branch and save them locally in kate/new-feature. What’s going on here is that remote branches you fetch are available using <remote-name>/<branch-name>.

To merge Kate’s changes into your branch, you have to git checkout your branch and then merge the branch you just fetched:

git merge kate/new-feature

Kate’s branch is now merged into your branch 👍.

Checkout: creating a branch based on another branch

I was recently working on rewriting a feature using a different library than the one in use on production. Aside from rewriting the code, new functionality needed to be added as well. I tackled this in two steps:

Rewrite the feature as it currently works in production and have my code reviewed to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Add new functionality.

For step one I created a branch for the rewrite called feature-rewrite. Well it was a little more elaborate than that, but you get the point! You may be familiar with doing this from the CLI, but if not this is how you’d do that:

git checkout -b feature-rewrite

The -b flag tells Git to run git branch feature-rewrite if the branch doesn’t exist yet before checking out that branch, pretty neat 😄.

While I was waiting for the code to be reviewed, I continued with adding new functionality. This had to be done based on the rewrite I just did. In other words: I had to create a new branch based off of the feature-rewrite branch. Here’s how to do that:

git checkout -b new-functionality feature-rewrite

The checkout command takes a second parameter to let Git know what branch to base the new branch off of. To give you a clearer picture of this:

git checkout -b <new-branch> <existing-branch>

Final words

Over the past few months I have learned a lot of new things about Git and how you can use it to your advantage. The commands outlined in this post are by far the most useful and have been a real lifesaver for me.

Thank you for reading this post and I hope it’s been helpful!

[shadowporcupine]

Eras don’t have an attitude.

Time travelers have an attitude towards eras.

It’s actually amazing how many problems in the world trace back to people trying to think like time travelers. I noticed awhile ago that lots of people seem to think we should be “further along” than we are now, in the apparent progression of the human condition. Obviously all the things we want to think we’re capable of aren’t actually things we’re capable of yet, or we’d have done them by now. Bills, jobs, time to interact. Whatever it is in life that stops us from contributing to that evolution, stops us. History couldn’t have happened any sooner than it did, and our concept of privilege is nonsense. Every moment in history is the most complex moment in history. Everything we do leads to the social processes and social progress that ultimately makes the world a better place for future generations. Every step in the process has to occur, or you end up with equality and resource gaps that send us right back to our worst natures and revive the perils of their corresponding time periods.

What is wrong with us? Where does this tendency to see a complex multiphasic global process as a singular polity that's somehow supposed to be able to intercommunicate optimally with all its disparate inner parts come from? No government in the history of time has ever had that quality. No religions has ever been nearly that consistent. No ideal has ever been set up to embrace the idea that you can’t treat us all as one singular optimal omnipolity. Everything and everyone seems to want to treat us all as one thing, when it’s obvious, at least in retrospect, that we aren’t.

But that’s exactly where that type of thought process comes from: The future. A retrospective analysis of history. It’s too large and too complex to just teach it how it really is, so we end up writing short executive overviews that end up assuming history somehow is a conscious and intentional process on the part of all the peoples of all moments of the past. Maybe there’s a causality to this. Maybe there’s a right way to learn about remote regions that has been universally corrupted in the human psyche. Except I know it hasn’t.

Rumors of native tribes that have a word in their language for the mental illness of the white man are enough. Even if the rumors were pure fabrication, it’s conceptible. Many Western philosophers have noted a profound sickness in modern man, or perceived society. The idea that there’s something wrong with us on a level we can’t quite perceive is by no means a new one. But it’s more than that. I can see it. I can see the causality of our bias, where it’s thickest, why it happens. Who wants it the most. It’s visible, apparent, obvious, and uniquely Western. It’s the reason we fought against the rise of Communism and the Nazis. We perceive agency whether it’s there or not.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, but anything that can think can be given a name, and we can imagine that anything can be made to think.

Even now my language tends in an agent direction; the patterns and agency we see in history are difficult to discuss in terms of pure philosophy. A true discussion would necessitate bringing up all the intimate details of the peoples of the times thus criticized, and I legitimately believe that people can’t process the applied logic of Communism without turning dictatorial and controlling in all the regular abusive ways. If this is the cost of living together, if your willingness to go to war over mere ideals is so high, then maybe that’s not a cost I want to pay. (And before you ask; no. I won’t seek refuge from the perils of human life in any human religion.) I mean it’s a good idea; the people who actually perform the labor should be recognized as the true owners of the means of production. Up to a point. Everything changes when the factory produces weapons. Now it doesn’t seem like such a bright idea for one type of worker to own the means of production and its corresponding military might. We go to war, half of us, for that exact reason: To stop weapons factories from spreading the ideals of the people holding the weapons.

There’s something I like to do with dystopias. I like to immerse myself in these hypothetical worlds and ask myself what I’d do to change it, if it really is not to my liking. (ie., if my ideals are actually real and could even apply to such a world.) In this instance, if I were forced to work at a weapons factory, I’d sooner die than create a weapon for someone else. Simple. I wouldn’t want to exist in such a world, so if that world wants to reject my existence from within it, then everyone is happy. This is not to say that there aren’t valid reasons I would make a weapon or could be made to participate in that process voluntarily, but I would never blindly produce something without some inkling of understanding about how it’ll eventually be used. In the end I always have sole control over the shape of the cog I’d take in any given system. The world being able to function without me is a feature, not a bug.

It seems as if abstract, but it really isn’t. There are people out there who would want me to be a weapons manufacturer or designer. I’m sure they would do anything in their power to get me on their side, but it all ultimately comes down to that: They don’t have any real power. Short of mind control, you can’t force me to pick a side. I’ll always search for the peaceful resolution, the chance to talk to the right people to get our differences straightened out in a mutually beneficial manner. Everyone else might feel like picking a side is the easiest thing in the world, (or else the easiest thing in human society) but I can’t. Give me access to the right people and I’m sure I can make them feel like picking the side they’re currently on is the hardest thing in the world.

I don’t want to have to talk everyone down, but more to the point: I don’t have that power. I can only wield my command of absolute neutrality, and spread it like a virus to the people around me. Anything else makes me a murderer by proxy, at least by my own standards. But that’s not realistic. (I’m lying; it really is. Beware my all-consuming neutrality. It’s coming.) The world is entitled to its own cultural premises and ideals, and that’s ultimately what I love about it. It’s not the best thing to acknowledge, but if we mean to examine history in its actual context, it must be accepted at all times. Anything else invokes executive bias.

I seek to divide myself from the equation wherever possible, but many times I find that I just can’t. I’m human, same as anyone else, and ultimately I write these posts for a reason. But an analysis of history shouldn’t be some personal essay on how I live my life among other people. Or maybe that’s exactly what it needs to be, to be relatable or relevant or emotionally charged. Something that makes it bind in the mind and will never be forgotten once it’s heard.

It’s awful, it really is. I can’t stand the fact that I have to make this decision. I’m writing this for the sake of all humanity, or all cultures, at all times and all places. I want to believe in humanity, but it scares me. It’s potential for evil, as well as its penchant for causing evil while seeking what it considers “good.” The only constant in all of this is that the larger a group of people becomes, the more dilute its capacity to practice its principles without becoming hypocritical and betraying its most basic values. Even Confucius stop saying things eventually. It’s my decision to make, what I’ll say, what impact I want to try to have. I know this essay will have an effect, but to what degree? And most importantly, why?

I can’t decide to speak out because I believe in humanity. That’s not good enough. Whatever scale my ideals grow to, that’s not enough. I’ll have to look the crying wives in their eyes as they curse my name over their dying children. The impact my words can have cannot be overlooked. My decision isn’t to have an influence, but to delegate and defer the decision itself; I write what I write so that you may use it however you wish. For whatever good or evil cultural means you people seek to seek. I will expose my knowledge and perspective to the world only in that I recognize that it was the world’s decision to make, not my own. What evils and weapons I spawn by my pen, I take responsibility for only in recognizing that it was not my responsibility to control everyone’s perception of history. Then, only then, can I look her dying child in the eyes and say, “This was my fault.” Because I’m only human. As human as the rest.

I guess this is what I takes to overcome that bias. I, as you will, have to accept all that has come before and all that will come after. I cannot consider it my place to judge the peoples and cultures of the world as worthy or unworthy, or evil or good, or misguided or competent. Each person has that power of decision on their own, apart from what I do or influence, and my sole capacity is to ensure with maximum clarity that you will be able to see those decisions and their corresponding actions in their true context. Their real context.

I’ve decided, I want to see that. I want to see the world where our perception of history becomes uncolored, and all the good and evil and perils that follow from it. I want to see the world though non-executive eyes, as it comes to see itself through non-executive eyes. I want to see the world where everything happens because the people doing the things they did were informed and aware. I want to see the truth of human nature, not this cloudy, polluted atmosphere of agent bias. I want to see humanity in all its complexity, whether its nature is diluted or compounded by my message. I want to have seen and known how it all played out in the end. I want to see history.

I want to see the anger, bitterness and hatred, sorrow and pain in your eyes when you reach for that weapon after the last breath of life leaves your child’s body.

If that were the truth.

No, it’s all so twisted. That’s really just my ideal. No, the truth of this world is that you’ll send your sons off to war because they welcome it. You’ll grieve for your daughters, but honor your sons. Whatever politician misspoke, whoever is responsible for starting it, whoever felt slighted or outcast. All the authors with all their pens, none will be held accountable. You’ll never see the pain. I’ll, never see your pain. It is all taken for granted, and when it’s taken from you, that, too, is taken for granted. The sorrow of the world is in never seeing what you’ve done to it.

The truth is, I haven’t killed anyone. I won’t be held responsible. Whatever I did, even if I were to confess my sins to you, you either wouldn’t understand or would readily forgive me because my blame, my fault is so low in comparison to all the others who had a hand in what happened. You grieve for both, but you honor your sons because it is perceived that your daughters didn’t need to volunteer to fight alongside them. I would have you not have to grieve, if I could, if I had so much power, but I can’t, I don’t. Your choice, their choice, all choices, are their own. I can’t choose for everyone, near as I often wish I could.

We’re all accountable, so none of us are. We’re all human, so none of us are. We all have so much to offer, so none of us can. We all have everything we need, so we need for nothing. While others starve. Because we’re not all in this together, and our poetry itself becomes a weapon. Skewing our perception in hopes of a unity we can never reach. I am not responsible, much as the Basilisks of the world would hope to some day hold me to.

It is by my own profession that I say: That’s not good enough.

Eras do not have an attitude; time travelers have attitudes toward eras.

How much does your attitude color your perspective? How much does your perspective color your attitude? How much of your attitude reflects in those who do not understand how your perspective is colored? How much of the attitude your observe is your own perspective colored back at you? How much color, can you really see?

I am a time traveler, but not the kind everyone wants me to be. I travel history in a purely observational sense; I look, without transmitting. I see, withing visiting. I know, without watching. I observe in my mind, in ways that would sooner sever the soul than acknowledge what really exists. I see through introspection, through what I would or could become, in another time and place, and what kind of person really exists there.

But you can’t see me, see me.

See me, seeing you.

The time travel I do can never be observed, unless I choose to speak about it. Only I can record my observations, because only I can see inside my mind. Only I can see into my soul.

But that you would listen.

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Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO – 1 Million Reasons Why Ahrefs Is Better [Updated for 2018]

HUGE NEW UPDATE! If you don’t have time to read this post terminate your Majestic account immediately and take out the Ahrefs trial without hesitation.

Back in 2013, I conducted an experiment to see which is the best backlink checker.

Long story short, Ahrefs won…

This really upset the Majestic team at the time and sparked a lot of controversy, but they did make some valid points-

The test was done with 3 of my personal sites I would not disclose That makes the entire test biased in Majestic’s opinion The data set was very small with just 3 sites analysed and compared The results could not be independently verified

And they were right!

So then re-conducted the experiment on an altogether BIGGER scale (1 million domains vs. the original 3). Ahrefs won again.

Now it’s 5 years later.

So I thought it would make sense to re-run the numbers this year for all 1 million domains AND compare the functionality of the tools.

But…

I’m also going to reveal how Majestic essential cheat on backlink counts (you won’t believe this one!)

Ahrefs vs. Majestic SEO – Huge New Update

Before we get to the experiment, let me talk about my data source.

For those that don’t know, the Majestic team publish what is called the Majestic Million.

The Majestic Million is a list of the top 1 million website in the world, based on the number of referring IP’s found for that domain in their Fresh index.

So with this, Majestic SEO are outright telling us these are the sites they know the most about in terms of backlinks.

You can download a copy for yourself free of charge and it will tell you the total number of linking subnets (RefSubNets) and the total number of linking IPs (RefIPs) for each domain in the top million.

To compare Majestic SEO with Ahrefs, I’m going to look up the total number of linking subnets and IP’s for all of the domains in the Majestic Million.

To give you an example with this blog-

Majestic SEO – This report shows 3,533 IP’s & 2,475 subnets Ahrefs – This report shows 3,214 IP’s & 2,438 subnets

So in that specific instance, Majestic wins the test.

But:

Now imagine doing the same – but for 1 million sites.

That is the test I have done based on what Majestic say are the top 1 million sites in the world in terms of links.

This is what the CSV data looks like in its raw form-

And you can download a copy of the data that is used in this test.

The Results

Before I get to the results, I need to mention that both Majestic and Ahrefs maintain multiple indexes.

Majestic have two indexes: Fresh and Historic indexes.

Ahrefs have three: Live, Recent, and Historical.

You can learn more about these indexes here.

But for the sake of this article, I’ll be comparing the following indexes:

Majestic’s Fresh index vs. Ahrefs’ Recent index Majestic’s Historic index vs. Ahrefs’ Historical index Majestic Fresh Versus Ahrefs Recent Index

Let’s start with a comparison of the Fresh vs. Recent index.

With such a huge amount of data, I decided to split the results into 10 groups of 100,000 URLs (by Majestic GlobalRank) and then compare those groups.

This is what the group numbers look like (refer to by_groups.csv in the data pack)–

GlobalRank Ahrefs Wins (IP) Majestic Wins (IP) Ahrefs Wins (Subnet) Majestic Wins (Subnet) 1-100,000 85,228 14,762 86,095 13,896 100,001-200,000 69,953 30,029 72,114 27,860 200,001-300,000 74,074 25,902 77,035 22,928 300,001-400,000 78,264 21,709 82,075 17,904 400,001-500,000 74,708 25,264 79,389 20,582 500,001-600,000 66,252 33,710 71,124 28,846 600,001-700,000 75,530 24,427 81,426 18,512 700,001-800,000 76,733 23,221 81,346 18,583 800,001-900,000 79,243 20,705 85,624 14,279 900,001-1,000,000 79,261 20,687 85,696 14,187

Just looks like a bunch of meaningless numbers right?

What about now-

Wins By IP Address (Majestic Fresh vs. Ahrefs Recent)

Wins By Subnets (Majestic Fresh vs. Ahrefs Recent)

Pretty brutal to look at if you are a current Majestic SEO customer right?

Now might be the right time to switch to Ahrefs – click here to claim a 7-day trial account.

But before you do let’s look at the totals-

Total Wins – Majestic Fresh vs Ahrefs Recent

It’s worth noting that Ahrefs has actually pulled even further ahead of Majestic (by ~7% for IP wins, and ~11% for subnet wins) since 2013. Which is when I first ran this experiment.

So those are the results of the Majestic Fresh vs. Ahrefs Recent index comparison, but what about Majestic’s Historic vs. Ahrefs’ Historical?

Majestic Historic Versus Ahrefs Historical Index

This test is particulary interesting because-

Well:

It presents an altogether different story.

GlobalRank Ahrefs Wins (IP) Majestic Wins (IP) Ahrefs Wins (Subnet) Majestic Wins (Subnet) 1-100,000 15,424 84,555 14,789 85,187 100,001-200,000 20,320 79,606 19,873 80,047 200,001-300,000 18,081 81,855 17,613 82,309 300,001-400,000 13,645 86,317 13,177 86,770 400,001-500,000 11,990 87,976 11,675 88,275 500,001-600,000 9,186 90,778 8,973 90,976 600,001-700,000 11,219 88,674 11,003 88,870 700,001-800,000 11,167 88,627 9,120 90,819 800,001-900,000 10,515 89,433 9,857 90,036 900,001-1,000,000 10,796 89,139 10,346 89,580

I think the results become super clear when displayed in graph format:

Wins By IP Address (Majestic Historical vs. Ahrefs Historical)

Wins By Subnets (Majestic Historical vs. Ahrefs Historical)

Based on this data, Majestic absolutely crush Ahrefs when it comes to the historical index test.

This is even more apparent if we look at the totals-

So, Majestic clearly wins the historic index comparison.

But what does this really mean?

Well, historic indexes serve as records of the backlinks that have existed in their respective tools index at some point in the past, but aren’t live today.

When you take this into account, it comes as no surprise that Majestic won this test.

They’ve been saving (probably) links to their Historic index since they launched in 2009.

Ahrefs, on the other hand, has only been saving dead links to their Historical index since 2015, so Majestic has a 6 year head start here!

Bottomline: Majestic has a larger index of dead links than Ahrefs.

That’s all I’m going to say about that one.

I’ll let you decide which index is more important to you.

A Few Potential Flaws with this Experiment

My methodology for this experiment is far from perfect.

So I thought I’d briefly explain what I see as some potential flaws with this data.

Flaw #1 – “Wins” != Absolute Numbers

The graphs above show the number of “wins” rather than absolute numbers.

Because of this, the difference between the bars on the graphs is not really indicative of index size.

I’ll try to illustrate what I mean with an example:

Let’s say we have two sites:

Site A: 100 Ref.IPs (reported in Majestic); 101 Ref.IPs (reported in Ahrefs) Site B: 100 Ref.IPs (reported in Majestic); 200000 Ref.IPs (reported in Ahrefs)

(Yes, it’s an extreme example, but bare with me!)

Ahrefs “wins” for both of these sites, but it’s clear that there’s a much larger difference between reported numbers from each tool for Site B.

With Site A, Ahrefs only wins because they report one extra Ref.IP.

This means that the “number of wins” doesn’t give any insight into how much bigger one database is than the other.

So what does “number of wins” tell us?

It tells us that Ahrefs finds more links for any given website than Majestic, and that it’s rare for Majestic to show links than Ahrefs (links = IPs/Subnets).

FYI, if you’re wondering why I chose to compare IPs/Subnets over links, check out this article co-authored by Dixon Jones from Majestic.

Flaw #2 – Each Tool Picks Up Different Links

It’s important to remember that we’re dealing with two totally different indexes here.

Which means that some links that Majestic reports may not exist in Ahrefs’ Index, and vice-versa.

Once again, let me offer an example.

This time we only need one hypothetical site, for which we’ll assume that both Ahrefs and Majestic report the same number of links: 3.

Here are the three hypothetical links reported by each tool:

Ahrefs Majestic domain.com/webpage domain.com/webpage domain.com/webpage2 domain.com/webpage2 anotherdomain.com/webpage someotherdomain.com/blog

Do you see my point?

Just because we have the same number of reported links from each tool doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the same links.

You can see in our hypothetical example that only two of the links are common to both indexes.

This brings me on to an important point:

If you desperately need a full picture of your link profile, you’ll have to pay for both tools and cross-reference data.

BUT!

And this is a BIG BUT!

Even if you do that you need to understand that Majestic’s backlink stats are almost always inflated.

Why?

Because of the absolutely absurd way Majestic count and report backlinks.

I am going to talk about that more in the next section, but seriously – make sure you are sitting down for this one because I am going to show you how Majestic essentially cheats on backlink counts.

Ahrefs VS Majestic: Comparing Features & Functionality

Now we’ve talked about backlink data and whatnot, I want to make an important point:

Majestic and Ahrefs are VERY different tools.

Majestic is essentially one tool: a backlink checker.

But Ahrefs is a suite of tools. Alongside Site Explorer (for checking backlink data), they also have:

Site Audit Rank Tracker Content Explorer Keywords Explorer Alerts

Another big differentiator is the addition of “Competitive intelligence” in Ahrefs, which is basically search traffic data.

In other words, you can see how much traffic any domain or website receives from Google, and the keywords it ranks for.

See my full review of Ahrefs here.

How Majestic Cheat On Backlink Counts

But let’s get back to backlink data for a moment…

It’s important to realise that index size means nothing unless you’re able to extract actionable data and insights from it.

Both Majestic and Ahrefs do have an API for doing this at scale (this is what I used for this study), but most of us don’t pay for access to that.

So, let’s quickly compare the on-site backlink research features that exist in Ahrefs and Majestic.

Let’s start by plugging this same URL (the beginners guide to SEO from Moz) into both tools to see what kind of insights we can get from them.

NOTE. I’m using the “exact URL” setting, because I only want to analyze backlinks pointing directly at that URL.

A few comparable metrics right off the bat:

Backlinks: 628,437 (Majestic) vs. 111,000 (Ahrefs) Referring domains: 1,840 (Majestic) vs. 11,300 (Ahrefs)

So Majestic reports more backlinks in total, but Ahrefs reports (a lot) more referring domains.

That’s a win for Majestic, right?

Not so fast.

(This is something I really feel the need to highlight!)

Majestic’s backlink stats are almost always inflated because of the absolutely absurd way they report backlinks.

Let me illustrate by going to the Referring Domains tab in Majestic.

Majestic is reporting 370K+ backlinks from just one referring domain.

That accounts for nearly 60% of all reported backlinks!

Let’s see how many backlinks Ahrefs reports from this domain-

Just 4!

So why does Majestic report 373,004 backlinks from that domain while Ahrefs only reports 4?

This happens because Majestic fail to strip URL parameters from URLs, which results in the same backlink being duplicated hundreds, sometimes even thousands of times.

This also happens when you export the data from Majestic.

Take a look at this backlink export from my blog and you’ll see that digitalphillipines.net is linking to me nearly 700,000 times-

But when we export the data and look at the links, you’ll see they are mostly duplicate links with different UTM parameters on the end-

For example Majestic counts the below as 4 separate backlinks-

domain.com/page/ domain.com/page/?utm_source=twitter domain.com/page/?utm_source=facebook domain.com/page/?utm_source=pinterest

But the reality is they are just one backlink – but Majestic is reporting them as 4.

In my opinion, this is total madness.

Especially when the vast majority of the 700,000 links coming from digitalphillipines.net are duplicates.

Ahref’s on the other hand, only counts 17 links-

Why?

Because Ahrefs understands that those additional URL parameters do not make them all unique links so filter them out accordingly.

Here’s Another Mad Thing!

If you go from the Summary page in Majestic to their Ref.Domains and Backlinks reports, you’ll notice that the total numbers of ref.domains and backlinks that you just saw on that “Summary” page now completely disappear.

That’s because these reports are limited to 30k rows of data – 600 pages, 50 results per page.

This makes every report in Majestic somewhat useless because you can only see a sample of the data!

Sure you can view the first 30,000 rows – but after that, they cut you off.

That is a huge limitation and I feel like it really goes against the grain of Majestic’s core mission.

What’s the point of building a huge database of links if you are going to limit access to it?

It’s the same when you try to export this data too – it defaults to a max of 30K rows.

However you can export more than 30k rows if you request an “advanced report” by clicking the tiny link highlighted in the screenshot below:

But even when you click this, you’re taken to quite a puzzling page where you seemingly have to tick a bunch of boxes in order to do what you want to do.

So bottomline-

You can export more than 30K rows from Majestic – it’s just not a fun experience All of Majestics reports are useless if you are working on a site that has more than 30,000 backlinks And thats assuming the backlink numbers arent inflated, it could have 4 links but Majestic counts 370K+

In comparison, Ahrefs shows full data in both their Ref.Domains and Backlinks reports.

And exporting FULL DATA is super easy – just hit the “export” button.

Much nicer!

However, one downside of this is that reports sometimes load slower in Ahrefs than Majestic, especially when analysing big sites.

This is because Ahrefs has to work to pull all data, whereas Majestic just has to show a cached sample of 30K pages/ref.domains.

To be honest:

Any further comparison here makes no sense because Majestic’s on-site tools only works with a sample of data whereas Ahrefs lets you work with FULL data.

However, I do want to compare and highlight a few things in these reports.

But first, I want to talk a bit about indexes.

Majestic Indexes vs Ahrefs Indexes – What Do They Mean?

So you may have noticed that Majestic has two different indexes for you to choose from, while Ahrefs has three.

Majestic: Fresh, Historic Ahrefs: Live, Recent, and Historical

You may have noticed in the screenshots above that Majestic defaults to their Fresh index, whereas Ahrefs defaults to their Live index.

Let me try to explain the deal with all of these indexes.

Ahrefs Indexes Explained

So Ahrefs Live index is updated every 15 minutes, and I know they put a lot of effort into re-crawling all links in their Live index pretty regularly.

But as Ahrefs recrawls links, they naturally come across some that are no longer there.

Like, sometimes the page will still be live, but the link will be gone. Or maybe the actual linking page can no longer be found.

In this case, Ahrefs removes the link from their Live index, but it remains in their Recent index, where this backlink stays for 90 more days. Quite often the pages disappear because of server downtime, so when Ahrefs next re-crawls the page, they may see that the link is still there.

If this happens, it gets moved back to the Live index.

If Ahrefs don’t see the link going live again within 90 days of it being moved to the Recent Index, it gets moved to the Historical index. This is basically a graveyard for all backlinks that they’ve once seen as live, but the subsequent recrawls confirmed their death.

To summarise (for Ahrefs):

Live = All links that were live during the most recent re-crawl Recent = Live + links that were “lost” within the past 90 days Historical = Live + Recent + all links that were ever seen to be “live” Majestic Indexes Explained

Unlike Ahrefs, they don’t maintain a Live index. They only have their Fresh index, which is kind of the same as Ahrefs’ Recent index as it contains all links that were seen live in the last 90 days, regardless of their status at the present moment.

They also have their Historic Index, which is comparable to Ahrefs Historical index. However, it is vastly bigger than Ahrefs’ Historic index because they started saving deleted links years before Ahrefs did.

To summarise (for Majestic):

Fresh = All links that were seen as live during the past 90 days Historic = Fresh + all links that were ever seen to be live

Having used both tools on and off for a good few years, I know that Ahrefs only started adding links to their Historic index around mid-2015, whereas I’d say Majestic has been doing that for at least 5 years.

That’s exactly why Majestic’s is bigger right now.

Either way, these tools historic indexes are essentially graveyard of links, so most of the links in both Majestic and Ahrefs Historic indexes are no longer live.

But anyway, now we’ve tackled the technicalities, I can move on to some features.

Before I do that, I want to stress something:

I much prefer Ahrefs over Majestic.

So most of the stuff I discuss below will be reasons why that is the case.

But let’s start with a brief comparison of the summary/overview reports in Ahrefs and Majestic.

Summary / Overview Report Comparison

To start, I’ll highlight a couple of super useful graphs that I absolutely love on the Overview tab in Ahrefs Site Explorer: Referring Domains and Organic Traffic.

These show how the number of referring domains and amount of organic traffic has changed to a site (or URL) over time.

Here’s the referring domains graph:

Here’s the organic search traffic one:

Unfortunately, Majestic have no such graph for backlink data, and they don’t have any data on search traffic at all.

They do show you two graphs that they call “URL backlink history” and “Referring domains” – but these are entirely different.

In Majestic’s own words, these charts show “the number of Referring Domains [or backlinks] reviewed every day.”

So this graph mostly refers to how fast Majestic crawls the web, rather than showing how fast your target acquired backlinks.

As a result, these graphs don’t tell you anything about how a target’s backlink profile has changed over time, so I don’t really understand why they’re useful.

If anyone does happen to have a good use case, feel free to let me know in the comments!

And it’s also an image, it’s not an interactive graph. So I can’t hover my mouse over a specific date and get the precise number, like I can in Ahrefs.

As for the other numbers that you can see in Ahrefs “Overview” report and in Majestic “Summary” report, they’re more or less comparable.

Pretty standard stuff, no striking differences there.

I’d say the only major difference is the fact that each tool shows their proprietary metrics.

In Majestic’s case, these are TF/CF.

And in Ahrefs these are UR/DR.

Comparing them is a different story, so I’m not even going to attempt that but I do use both sets of metrics to evaluate expired domains.

Let’s move on to the referring domains reports.

Comparing Referring Domain Reports

Majestic has quite a few data points in their Ref.domains report, so they had to introduce a few different views.

Here’s the one they default to: Links.

For me, the most useful data points here are:

Trust Flow / Citation Flow Backlinks Referring domains

I think it’s really cool how they include the number of ref.domains and backlinks to each ref.domain – that’s something Ahrefs doesn’t do.

I also like their Geo report.

This shows things like the domain language(s), TLD, IP, IP location (cool!), TF/CF.

In fact, a lot of these reports are quite cool – I recommend playing around with them.

But what about filtering and sorting options?

Unfortunately, these don’t really exist (I guess their different reports kind of count of filters?) but they do have “Order by” and “Then” sorting options, which are quite confusing.

I think the biggest letdown here is that many of these reports end up being kind of pointless, simply due to the fact that Majestic only lets you work with sample data.

Sure, you have 30K rows to play with, which admittedly is plenty for most sites. But for some sites it just doesn’t cut it.

Here’s another thing:

Although Majestic have a column with a number showing the number backlinks, they don’t differentiate between dofollow and nofollow links.

This means it’s only possible to sort by the number of backlinks from a ref.domain – you can’t sort by the referring domains with the most dofollow backlinks, for example.

Ahrefs, on the other hand, absolutely shines when it comes to filtering and sorting.

For a start, there’s a column highlighting dofollow/nofollow links, and it’s easy to sort a list of referring domains by that metric.

And once again, Ahrefs will sort the entire list of ref.domains – not just a sample of the data like in Majestic.

Here’s another notable feature Ahrefs has in this report:

You can easily filter referring domains by the backlink type, and can instantly see how many referring domains of each type there is.

So if you want to export dofollow ref.domains only, simply filter and click export. Easy as that.

Back to Majestic, it looks like the domain with the most backlinks to this Moz guide is ryangum.com.

It has almost 378K backlinks. Let’s click on that number and see what they are.

Aaaannnndddd… I see only 10.

Useless.

It’s a completely different story in Ahrefs, as they show everything – it’s even downloadable.

And again, I’ll reiterate the point I touched on earlier – some of the backlink numbers are absolutely crazy in Majestic thanks to the duplicated backlinks with URL parameters.

Case in point:

Majestic shows 376K backlinks Ahrefs shows 4 backlinks

(I guess Majestic doesn’t care about URL parameters?)

But anyway… let’s move on.

Ahrefs vs Majestic Backlink Reports

Let’s start with Majestic.

In the Ref.domains report, there was at least some sorting options – here there are none.

All they give you is option to show/hide deleted links and display 1/3/10/all backlinks per domain.

I can see how one backlink per domain is useful, but three and ten… c’mon!

It almost feels like someone was desperate to come up with some kind of useful functionality here, but failed miserably.

Regardless, none of these restrictions matter anyway because this report (like the rest) only shows a sample of 30k rows out of almost 100k. That means Majestic are hiding 70% of the links they know about from you.

Luckily, things are more logical in Ahrefs.

First things first, their Backlinks report doesn’t show sampled data – it’s full data.

You can also choose to show either Similar links, One link per domain, or All links.

This report defaults to Group similar links. This makes sense, as it groups sitewide and duplicated links, but still shows unique links from unique pages of the same domain. Which is pretty cool.

Is this report perfect? No. I’ve seen a few bugs here and there, but the usability and convenience of this filter still beats Majestic’s useless “3/10 links per domain” filter by a wide margin.

You probably already spotted those other filters too – Link type, Platform, and Language.

I recommend playing around with these – they’re really cool!

There are also some sorting options, including:

Sort by DR Sort by UR Sort by number of external links on the page

Combining sorting AND filtering is when you really start to do some cool stuff.

For example, you could filter by dofollow links only, from English sites only, and then sort by DR.

Seriously, play around this this report – you can do TONS.

Here’s one final report I want to briefly highlight (this one is specific to Ahrefs):

The Best Report That Majestic Doesn’t Have…

Ahrefs is MUCH MORE than just a backlink checking tool. They have world-class search traffic data too.

Yes, there are other tools have one of the two (e.g., Majestic with their backlink data) but Ahrefs does an amazing job of merging backlink and search traffic data together.

I don’t think there’s a better example of this than in their Top Pages report.

This shows the “top pages” on a domain by search traffic.

But this report is super cool because it also shows:

The percentage of all search traffic that goes to that page Referring domains Top keyword (the keyword that drives the most search traffic to that page) The search volume for the top keyword The current ranking position for the top keyword

There’s also a keywords dropdown which unveils ALL the keywords each page is ranking for.

Majestic has nothing like this, so there’s nothing to compare here.

Where Else Do These Tools Shine?

I mentioned earlier that Ahrefs is much more than a backlink checking tool.

It’s actually a suite of SEO tools.

Content Explorer is one tool I want to highlight here – this is a database of almost a billion web pages complete with backlinks and traffic data.

Basically, you enter a keyword and it’ll return any content containing (in either the title or body of the article, depending on your selection).

Here are the results for “SEO”:

The highlighted region shows some of the cool data that Content Explorer shows for each and every results – there’s Domain Rating, referring domains, and organic traffic.

I’m not aware of any other tool that can do this and honestly, it’s super-useful! And let’s not forget the “who tweeted” button which is useful for any content marketers out there.

But what about Majestic? Where does that shine?

Well there are some cool things that I like, such as their Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics.

If you’ve read my guide to finding expired domains, you’ll already know that I look at a ratio of these two metrics to find decent domains.

I’m also a fan of Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow metric, which is super useful for getting a sense of how relevant a backlink profile is.

However, I’ve found that this isn’t always particularly accurate.

You can see in the screenshot above that mythemeshop.com (a website selling premium WordPress themes including my theme) falls into the ‘Health’ category when looking at Topical Trust Flow.

That doesn’t seem right to me.

So as you can see, the tool that’s most useful for you will depend on the kind of data that you’re trying to access.

I have to be honest though:

For me, Ahrefs is my go-to tool for almost everything these days. I’d say Majestic does maybe 10-20% of what Ahrefs does, and that’s being generous!

Ahrefs VS Majestic SEO Conclusion

Irrespective of opinion, bias and discreditation – the data does not lie.

The data never lies, its why I love working with data so much. Want to settle which design is better? Test it.

Want to see which is the best backlink checker? Test it.

Data does not lie.

Ahrefs is clearly the winner here by a huge margin – a much larger margin than my initial test with just 3 domains highlighted.

In the Wins by IP test, Ahrefs finds 216% more than Majestic SEO. They are winning on ~76% of domains compared to Majestic SEO’s ~24%.

In the Wins by Subnets test, Ahrefs is also the clear winner finding 306% more links than Majestic SEO. They are winning on ~80% of domains compared to Majestic SEO’s ~20%.

So quite clearly, the best backlink checker is Ahrefs. PERIOD.

Even if the source data is Majestic SEO’s very own Majestic Million – Ahrefs still knows more about them than Majestic does.

Unless you only care about who has the biggest database of dead links of course.

And let’s not forget about all of the other awesome tools Ahrefs has – it is so much more than a backlink checker.

BONUS – How To Verify The Data For Yourself

In an effort to be unbiased and transparent, I have 2 seperate ways for you to independently verify the data yourself.

All of the data used in this test is available to download here.

Verification Method #1 – Easy

This is the easiest way to spot check the data.

Download the source data Open the by_domains.csv file Select a line at random Enter the domain from column A into the search box at Majestic SEO and Ahrefs For Majestic SEO look at Referring IP addresses and Referring Class C subnets: For Ahrefs look at Referring IPs and Referring subnets

You can manually spot check these at random!

Verification Method #2 – Hard

What if you want to verify the data for all million domains though?

Well for that you will need a linux server with shell access, an Ahrefs API key and these files.

WARNING: Before you do this be aware that 1,000,000 API credits with Ahrefs costs $10,000.

For full transparency’s sake Ahrefs gave me an API key with 1,000,000 credits so I could run this test.

If any established bloggers want to confirm these results themselves and publish on their blog then please get in touch with me.

Anyway here is how to do it-

Download this & you will find 2 files, get_stats.php and load.sh Open get_stats.php and update it with your Ahrefs API key on line 3 Download the Majestic Million CSV Upload get_stats.php, load.sh & majestic_million.csv to your server Make sure all of the files are in the same folder Connect to your server with an SSH client and execute the load.sh script Wait a few hours This will output a file called by_domains.txt, rename to by_domains.csv Wrapping It Up

Remember folks regardless of all of the controversy the data does not lie.

The simple fact is Ahrefs knows 216% more about Majestic SEO’s Majestic Million than they do (compared to 57% when I first ran this test in April 2013)

And if you haven’t checked out Ahrefs for a while you might be surprised, because it has evolved from a simple backlink checker to a complete SEO tool.

You can sign up for a free Ahrefs account here to check it out for yourself.

Next time you see this topic in a forum – feel free to use this post to instantly win the argument.

Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO – 1 Million Reasons Why Ahrefs Is Better [Updated for 2018] was originally published on Matthew Woodward

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[sillyanimegamingroad]

Why Android OS on PC not successful

In early 2016 installing Android on the PC suddenly made sense. Not thanks to Google, but to a small company called Jide Technology that announced Remix OS. That operating system, based on Android 5.1.1, turned Google’s mobile platform into one that could also make sense on the desktop. Why Android OS on PC not successful.

That project died, but today we have some alternatives that try to show that this convergence between mobile and desktop is possible. Samsung DeX and the desktop mode of Huawei phones have become striking options. There was even rumored a possible official desktop mode on Android, but everything has remained in borage water and many do not (we just) understand why .

Around with the convergence

The idea of ​​convergence is not new. Several companies have tried this in the past and failed . Canonical did it with Ubuntu Touch, Microsoft did it with Windows 10 for their mobiles (or those of HP, with its Elite X3 ) and universal applications and others like Samsung and Huawei have remained in a curious proposal but that does not just grow. Those proposals seemed to pale before Remix OS , an operating system derived from Android that mixed the options of this mobile platform with elements typical of a desktop operating system. The window manager and the behavior of the interface itself invited us to think that we were facing a system that could rival Windows 10, macOS or Linux. It did not. At least not at all. Why”desktop mode” and raising an Android for PC seems a lost opportunity for Google

Android on Windows

In early 2016 installing Android on the PC suddenly made sense . Not thanks to Google, but to a small company called Jide Technology that announced Remix OS. That operating system, based on Android 5.1.1, turned Google’s mobile platform into one that could also make sense on the desktop.

That project died, but today we have some alternatives that try to show that this convergence between mobile and desktop is possible. Samsung DeX and the desktop mode of Huawei phones have become striking options. There was even rumored a possible official desktop mode on Android, but everything has remained in borage water and many do not (we just) understand why .

Around with the convergence

The idea of ​​convergence is not new. Several companies have tried this in the past and failed . Canonical did it with Ubuntu Touch, Microsoft did it with Windows 10 for their mobiles (or those of HP, with its Elite X3 ) and universal applications and others like Samsung and Huawei have remained in a curious proposal but that does not just grow .

Those proposals seemed to pale before Remix OS , an operating system derived from Android that mixed the options of this mobile platform with elements typical of a desktop operating system. The window manager and the behavior of the interface itself invited us to think that we were facing a system that could rival Windows 10, macOS or Linux. It did not. At least not at all.

For starters, not all applications were prepared to take advantage of these benefits: some opened in non-resizable windows that weighed down the experience and confused users, while other powerful options on desktop systems lagged behind. Remix OS had somewhat limited performance , and its native applications and multitasking options were also worse than those of current desktop systems.

At Jide Technologies they tried to go further and even created teams based on this proposal. Even Acer and AOC launched into the adventure, but that proposal did not work and the company ended up abandoning Remix OS as such to focus on companies . Since then we have heard little or nothing about a project that has been disappearing from the map.

Samsung and Huawei try, but timidly

The Remix OS approach fell by the wayside, but it applied a curious concept contrary to that adopted by Microsoft and Canonical. They tried to adapt a desktop operating system (Windows, Ubuntu) to one that would work well on mobiles. That didn’t work, but the opposite idea of ​​Remix OS – bringing Android, a mobile platform, to the desktop – did seem to make more sense. We have seen how it is in fact what both Samsung and Huawei have applied��with their technologies to be able to have a “PC mode” : when we connect the mobile to an external monitor, a mouse and a keyboard, the device detects it and allows us to change to that desktop mode and work as if we were doing it more or less with a desktop PC. The features are still not those provided by conventional desktop operating systems, but for light work sessions these systems can be surprisingly valid and also allow us to enjoy the applications of our smartphone with keyboard and mouse – which is sometimes very convenient – instead of with the touch interface.

Samsung even went a step further and came to offer Linux on DeX , turning their mobiles into small computers in which to work with a basically 100% functional Ubuntu . The idea was great, but it suddenly ceased to exist: Samsung announced two years later that it no longer supported such capacity, in part because of somewhat more limited performance than expected.

Since then there have been updates to support for these features, but none particularly notable. Samsung is the one that is investing the most in it and since the last version allows Windows 10 and macOS to coexist with the Android applications of their mobiles, in addition to supporting a wireless DeX that no longer needs cables.

That DeX mode actually makes special sense in Samsung tablets, which thanks to this option become alternatives to the laptop by connecting a keyboard with touchpad, an accessory that makes them compete with Apple’s iPad or Microsoft’s Surface , but with its own software proposal. Huawei and its desktop mode is also striking, although the company does not promote it as much as Samsung.

Apple is mixing iOS with macOS slowly but inexorably

While all this is happening, Apple, which seemed not to want to move a tab and has always defended the validity of its dual model (on the one hand iOS and its mobile devices, on the other macOS and its Macs) has been bringing both extremes closer and closer.

The “iosification” of macOS and the “macosification” of iOS (or rather, of iPadOS) have been evident for years: features such as the Dock or the iPadOS file explorer (not to mention the mouse support) and the new macOS BigSur widgets and interface demonstrate those mixed transitions. Those processes could go further, especially now that Apple abandons the Intel chips in its Macs to move to its own chips based on the ARM architecture. Those future machines are going to be based on macOS, but there will be several tools (such as Catalyst, virtualization or Rosetta 2) that will allow that hardware transition to be smooth.

Android OS on PC

The question is whether all of this is leading us into a future where an iPhone can become a Mac. The concept is partly a reality with iPads, which were born with the sanmbenito of being a “big iPod” and have ended up wanting to be much more with the iPad Pro and its new approach to productivity. The iPadOS operating system is perhaps the best indication of that possible future, but at the moment it seems difficult that Apple is going to take such a radical step.

Why is Google not moving tab?

And while I come across a Google where desktop mode seems like an idea that comes and goes . There was a lot of talk about how it was going to be implemented in Android 10 , and we even saw terminals like the LG V50 that implemented that option.

That option ended up being hidden from users, and the subject has not been discussed again by Google, which has other news in Android 11 prepared . This platform will officially reach some terminals in the fall, but again without seeming to have references to a hypothetical desktop mode.

What is the reason that there is no support for that option? It is true that Google has an alternative to Windows 10 or macOS in Chrome OS , but it is so in a very limited way, not very accessible outside of the manufacturers that offer it. It’s true that anyone can actually install it via Chromium OS or commercial offerings like CloudReady , but again it’s not a particularly widespread option.

windows 10

What is widespread is the use of Android: its global market share is overwhelming, so why doesn’t Google take advantage of that inertia to have a “desktop Android”?

The thing makes even more sense if we consider that with Apple’s movement, other proposals based on ARM microphones may end up trying to propose alternatives to the “Wintel” world. It does not seem difficult to think of an alternative world “ARMdroid” that takes advantage of all the wealth of the Android catalog at the touch of a mouse and keyboard, so the question remains:

What are you waiting for, Google?

The post Why Android OS on PC not successful appeared first on Technoeager.

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[glenmenlow]

How Narratives Improve Ideas And Decisions

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. ~ George Bernard Shaw

How do Amazon’s leaders decide what to do and what not to do? How do they develop ideas and rationalize them? Much the same way they hire the best people. They use the narrative process to answer these questions and to capture and explain their ideas.

The Killer Feature: Clarity

Michael Porter, Harvard professor of strategy, has stated that “strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” By developing clarity and simplicity in what you are doing and not doing, you are improving the ideas, making deliberate decisions, and gaining shared understanding in the organization. The fundamental mistake leaders make in developing digital strategies is not seeking clarity, especially regarding the customer experience. What will delight the customer? What operational model supports this experience? What data and technology support the operational model? How will we measure?

Achieving clarity can be uncomfortable. It can disrupt. People tend to want to avoid conflict, be collaborative, and basically accept all the ideas and all the wording. This tactic does not demand the best thinking and avoids the sensitive topics in the spirit of “getting along.” A well-written narrative, on the other hand, demands rigor on exactly the right wording, compels getting to the heart of risks and sensitive topics that have to be addressed to achieve the goal, and requires straight and simple language to ensure that everyone understands the key points. A well-written narrative and the process of writing it will force teams to get beyond being polite and get to insights.

An Amazon leadership principle is to “Invent and Simplify.” Driving toward clarity of thought through a written narrative is a key operational approach to get both invention and simplification. “Almost every meeting which involves making a business decision is driven by a document,” says Llew Mason, an Amazon vice president. “One of the great things about a written document is that it drives a lot of clarity in the process.” Ah, clarity in thinking. Clarity on what you decide to do. Clarity on how the idea will affect users and the business. A longtime business partner of mine who worked with me both before and after Amazon has told me many times that what he sees me doing with my clients, which he has seen to be tremendously helpful, is that I’m always trying to simplify and clarify the communication. I learned this at Amazon.

What Is A Narrative?

At Amazon, leaders write narratives for all plans, proposals, services, and investments. PowerPoint is not used (insert applause). Much has been written about how PowerPoint dumbs down an organization or puts it at risk. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote, “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. We write narratively structured six-page memos,” Bezos continues. “We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’ Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.”

Narratives at Amazon are two-or six-page documents written in complete sentences. A narrative must be expressly tailored to the situation based on the topic, the timing in the initiative, and the audience. It must flow in a way that makes sense relative to the topic and audience. It is verboten to dump excessive bullet points or slides into the narrative. Data, charts, and diagrams can be included, but they must be explained in the narrative. Appendix material is also allowed. I believe that the discipline of writing out ideas is at the heart of Amazon’s innovation process and can be replicated to the same effect. As explained by Greg Satell:

At the heart of how Amazon innovates is its six-page memo, which kicks off everything the company does. Executives must write a press release, complete with hypothetical customer reactions to the product launch. That is followed by a series of FAQs, anticipating questions customers, as well as internal stakeholders, might have.

Executives at the company have stressed to me how the process forces you to think things through. You can’t gloss over problems or hide behind complexity. You actually have to work things out. All of this happens before the first meeting. It’s a level of rigor that few other organizations even attempt, much less are able to achieve.

The Process Of A Narrative

Why do programs and projects take too long, go over budget, become bloated, and fail to deliver according to expectations? Execution and project management technique can be reasons, but the biggest root cause is failing to accurately define the end state at the beginning. Teams want to launch quickly and start designing, building, and testing. Taking the time to write a narrative will dramatically improve the definition of what needs to be done, plus make it as small and concise as possible, so it can be done faster, cheaper, and with more agility. But writing narratives takes time, so they are done when they are done. It is difficult to predict how long it will take and how much effort will be required. It is completely reasonable to create a deadline. “You have one week to write a narrative” might be appropriate.

Narratives can be written by one person, but it is often a group effort because multiple people and teams contribute to the idea. Forcing people to own the narrative jointly has huge benefits in both getting the best ideas on paper and building shared understandings and relationships through authorship. Part of Amazon’s practice on narratives is not to include the author’s name or names on the narratives. This sends the signal that the narrative is a community activity.

When the narrative is done, think through the review meetings and decision-making process. Who needs to deeply understand and agree with the narrative before a decision is made? Who are the key decision makers? At Amazon, review meetings tend to be 60 minutes long. They start with 10 to 15 minutes of silence to deeply read or “grok” the proposal and vision. This is followed by a discussion debating the merits, options, appropriate next steps, and decisions.

The process of authoring, reviewing, and deciding must be carefully considered. It must be rigorous. It must take time and effort. It is done when it’s done. What do narrative writers do wrong? They don’t spend enough time on their writing. As Bezos wrote: “They mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! . . . The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. . . . The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope—that a great memo probably should take a week or more.”

The Structure Of A Narrative

A narrative must be constructed of complete thoughts, complete paragraphs, complete sentences. You may include charts, numbers, and diagrams, but those items must be explained in the narrative. Other than that, there are no rules on structure, and the structure the authors choose will depend on the topic, the timing in the discussion cycle, and the audience.

The first sections of the narrative are typically customer focused. “Who are the customers? What benefits are we bringing them? What problems are we solving for them? Why would this idea delight them?” Sections after that might include what the customer experience would be, dependencies or requirements, metrics to measure success, business case, and key risks.

A Sample Narrative

By now you hopefully understand the importance of writing ideas out completely and clearly. For your projects, investments, strategies, and executive topics, ditch the PowerPoint presentations, and force teams to put their ideas and plans in writing. Meetings start with 10 to 15 minutes of silence to read the narrative. Phones and computers are left outside. Then debate the merits of the narrative. Don’t be afraid either to ask that the narrative be improved or to write a follow-up related narrative.

Make no mistake. Creating narratives takes skill, experience, commitment, and patience. You can’t rush great narratives because you can’t rush great thinking and communications. It takes practice. Writing is less an artistic exercise and more a practiced skill. It’s less of a spontaneous combustion and more of a methodical construction—like building and rebuilding the perfect birdhouse. Do you have the discipline and commitment to write in plain English your most important ideas and proposals?

Other executives and big companies are recognizing how writing as a forcing function to create clarity is key to innovation. JPMorgan Chase, whom I have had a chance to talk to about many of these ideas, is using narratives as one of the ways to try to be literary, more like Amazon. “Mr. Bezos notoriously banned slide presentations to keep Amazon in startup mode as it grew, instead asking employees to craft six-page documents complete with a press release and FAQs. Over roughly the past 18 months, JPMorgan has started a similar practice in its consumer businesses under Gordon Smith, the bank’s co-president and co-chief operating officer.” Are you able and willing to commit to hard habits like writing narratives to change culture, speed, tempo, and innovation?

Writing ideas and proposals in complete narratives results in better ideas, more clarity on the ideas, and better conversation on the ideas. You will make better decisions about what to do and how to do it. The initiatives will be smaller and less risky. Writing narratives is hard, takes a long time, and is an acquired skill for the organization. High standards and an appreciation for building this capability over time are required.

Questions To Consider

1. Do your ideas and plans suffer from incomplete thought? 2. Do your projects get bloated with size and unnecessary complexity? 3. Do your executives understand and influence the details of a proposal sufficiently to make a well-informed decision?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: John Rossman. Excerpted from his book, Think Like Amazon, 50 1/2 Ideas To Become A Digital Leader (McGraw-Hill)

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change through online strategy workshops. Please email us for more.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

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[joejstrickl]

How Narratives Improve Ideas And Decisions

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. ~ George Bernard Shaw

How do Amazon’s leaders decide what to do and what not to do? How do they develop ideas and rationalize them? Much the same way they hire the best people. They use the narrative process to answer these questions and to capture and explain their ideas.

The Killer Feature: Clarity

Michael Porter, Harvard professor of strategy, has stated that “strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” By developing clarity and simplicity in what you are doing and not doing, you are improving the ideas, making deliberate decisions, and gaining shared understanding in the organization. The fundamental mistake leaders make in developing digital strategies is not seeking clarity, especially regarding the customer experience. What will delight the customer? What operational model supports this experience? What data and technology support the operational model? How will we measure?

Achieving clarity can be uncomfortable. It can disrupt. People tend to want to avoid conflict, be collaborative, and basically accept all the ideas and all the wording. This tactic does not demand the best thinking and avoids the sensitive topics in the spirit of “getting along.” A well-written narrative, on the other hand, demands rigor on exactly the right wording, compels getting to the heart of risks and sensitive topics that have to be addressed to achieve the goal, and requires straight and simple language to ensure that everyone understands the key points. A well-written narrative and the process of writing it will force teams to get beyond being polite and get to insights.

An Amazon leadership principle is to “Invent and Simplify.” Driving toward clarity of thought through a written narrative is a key operational approach to get both invention and simplification. “Almost every meeting which involves making a business decision is driven by a document,” says Llew Mason, an Amazon vice president. “One of the great things about a written document is that it drives a lot of clarity in the process.” Ah, clarity in thinking. Clarity on what you decide to do. Clarity on how the idea will affect users and the business. A longtime business partner of mine who worked with me both before and after Amazon has told me many times that what he sees me doing with my clients, which he has seen to be tremendously helpful, is that I’m always trying to simplify and clarify the communication. I learned this at Amazon.

What Is A Narrative?

At Amazon, leaders write narratives for all plans, proposals, services, and investments. PowerPoint is not used (insert applause). Much has been written about how PowerPoint dumbs down an organization or puts it at risk. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote, “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. We write narratively structured six-page memos,” Bezos continues. “We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’ Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.”

Narratives at Amazon are two-or six-page documents written in complete sentences. A narrative must be expressly tailored to the situation based on the topic, the timing in the initiative, and the audience. It must flow in a way that makes sense relative to the topic and audience. It is verboten to dump excessive bullet points or slides into the narrative. Data, charts, and diagrams can be included, but they must be explained in the narrative. Appendix material is also allowed. I believe that the discipline of writing out ideas is at the heart of Amazon’s innovation process and can be replicated to the same effect. As explained by Greg Satell:

At the heart of how Amazon innovates is its six-page memo, which kicks off everything the company does. Executives must write a press release, complete with hypothetical customer reactions to the product launch. That is followed by a series of FAQs, anticipating questions customers, as well as internal stakeholders, might have.

Executives at the company have stressed to me how the process forces you to think things through. You can’t gloss over problems or hide behind complexity. You actually have to work things out. All of this happens before the first meeting. It’s a level of rigor that few other organizations even attempt, much less are able to achieve.

The Process Of A Narrative

Why do programs and projects take too long, go over budget, become bloated, and fail to deliver according to expectations? Execution and project management technique can be reasons, but the biggest root cause is failing to accurately define the end state at the beginning. Teams want to launch quickly and start designing, building, and testing. Taking the time to write a narrative will dramatically improve the definition of what needs to be done, plus make it as small and concise as possible, so it can be done faster, cheaper, and with more agility. But writing narratives takes time, so they are done when they are done. It is difficult to predict how long it will take and how much effort will be required. It is completely reasonable to create a deadline. “You have one week to write a narrative” might be appropriate.

Narratives can be written by one person, but it is often a group effort because multiple people and teams contribute to the idea. Forcing people to own the narrative jointly has huge benefits in both getting the best ideas on paper and building shared understandings and relationships through authorship. Part of Amazon’s practice on narratives is not to include the author’s name or names on the narratives. This sends the signal that the narrative is a community activity.

When the narrative is done, think through the review meetings and decision-making process. Who needs to deeply understand and agree with the narrative before a decision is made? Who are the key decision makers? At Amazon, review meetings tend to be 60 minutes long. They start with 10 to 15 minutes of silence to deeply read or “grok” the proposal and vision. This is followed by a discussion debating the merits, options, appropriate next steps, and decisions.

The process of authoring, reviewing, and deciding must be carefully considered. It must be rigorous. It must take time and effort. It is done when it’s done. What do narrative writers do wrong? They don’t spend enough time on their writing. As Bezos wrote: “They mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! . . . The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. . . . The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope—that a great memo probably should take a week or more.”

The Structure Of A Narrative

A narrative must be constructed of complete thoughts, complete paragraphs, complete sentences. You may include charts, numbers, and diagrams, but those items must be explained in the narrative. Other than that, there are no rules on structure, and the structure the authors choose will depend on the topic, the timing in the discussion cycle, and the audience.

The first sections of the narrative are typically customer focused. “Who are the customers? What benefits are we bringing them? What problems are we solving for them? Why would this idea delight them?” Sections after that might include what the customer experience would be, dependencies or requirements, metrics to measure success, business case, and key risks.

A Sample Narrative

By now you hopefully understand the importance of writing ideas out completely and clearly. For your projects, investments, strategies, and executive topics, ditch the PowerPoint presentations, and force teams to put their ideas and plans in writing. Meetings start with 10 to 15 minutes of silence to read the narrative. Phones and computers are left outside. Then debate the merits of the narrative. Don’t be afraid either to ask that the narrative be improved or to write a follow-up related narrative.

Make no mistake. Creating narratives takes skill, experience, commitment, and patience. You can’t rush great narratives because you can’t rush great thinking and communications. It takes practice. Writing is less an artistic exercise and more a practiced skill. It’s less of a spontaneous combustion and more of a methodical construction—like building and rebuilding the perfect birdhouse. Do you have the discipline and commitment to write in plain English your most important ideas and proposals?

Other executives and big companies are recognizing how writing as a forcing function to create clarity is key to innovation. JPMorgan Chase, whom I have had a chance to talk to about many of these ideas, is using narratives as one of the ways to try to be literary, more like Amazon. “Mr. Bezos notoriously banned slide presentations to keep Amazon in startup mode as it grew, instead asking employees to craft six-page documents complete with a press release and FAQs. Over roughly the past 18 months, JPMorgan has started a similar practice in its consumer businesses under Gordon Smith, the bank’s co-president and co-chief operating officer.” Are you able and willing to commit to hard habits like writing narratives to change culture, speed, tempo, and innovation?

Writing ideas and proposals in complete narratives results in better ideas, more clarity on the ideas, and better conversation on the ideas. You will make better decisions about what to do and how to do it. The initiatives will be smaller and less risky. Writing narratives is hard, takes a long time, and is an acquired skill for the organization. High standards and an appreciation for building this capability over time are required.

Questions To Consider

1. Do your ideas and plans suffer from incomplete thought? 2. Do your projects get bloated with size and unnecessary complexity? 3. Do your executives understand and influence the details of a proposal sufficiently to make a well-informed decision?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: John Rossman. Excerpted from his book, Think Like Amazon, 50 1/2 Ideas To Become A Digital Leader (McGraw-Hill)

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