#by re-giffed i mean that after searching for video this came from and only finding one of really crappy quality

[jinkieswouldyoulookatthis]

[zoe-oneesama]

I'm sorry if this seems rude, but your treatment of Alya makes me very uncomfortable. This isn't something you're entirely to blame for, as a good chunk of the fandom treats her very poorly (with either ignoring her or reducing her role to "ships the lovesquare"), but the amount of comics and posts you've made about punishing Alya feels a little extreme to me at this point. I understand the salt after chameleon, but everyone was ooc in that ep. Also it's been over a month. (1/2)

I will start by saying thank you for coming to me with your complaints in honestly the nicest way you possibly could, I really appreciate you taking a very calm and critical tone in approaching me with a genuine concern.

I will also point out I can’t think of any comics I’ve made attacking Alya or punishing her, so I’m not sure what you mean by that, but maybe I’ve re blogged someone else’s comic and it’s not coming to mind right now. But I also try hard to tag stuff so people can block the rants they don’t want to see. I guess the probelm is I use the #alya salt tag instead of #anti alya.

And I can agree that Alya’s characterization has gotten out of hand in the fanon vs canon, particularly when we had that long hiatus so fanon Alya bled into the consciousness and confused what actually is canon Alya.

However I won’t apologize for being critical of Alya. I will try to explain my own reasoning for you though so maybe you can understand where I’m coming from. 

My two main criticisms of Alya are 1) She’s not a good journalist and 2) She disregards Marinette’s feelings even though she’s her best friend.

The Good Journalist is something that I personally think is a fanon idea. Her being an ethical, searches only for the truth reporter who has integrity about the facts came from the hiatus, and my position on this is supported in canon.

When Marinette’s identity, the secret she holds most dear, is in jeopardy, because it’s Alya who is making the claim, she is unconcerned. If Alya was a threat to her identity (i.e. someone who often had evidence to support their claims) she would be worried, but instead she brushes it off. Like it’s not the first time Alya’s pitched a theory from left field at her. Even Nino laughs right in her face.

Volpina backs this up with her posting an unverified video of Lila claiming to be best friends with Ladybug without getting any sources or evidence that it could be true. In doing this, not only is she reducing her blog to a gossip column, but she is directly endangering this girl by blasting her relationship with a Superhero where anyone could see it. Because her scoop is more important that truth.

There’s also her crusade to find out Ladybug’s secret identity, something that, having established she’s a huge superhero comic fan, she should know the repercussions of. Endangerment of self, friends, and family in the face of a very dangerous super villain. It continues to prove where Alya’s priorities are.

But I actually want to make something clear: Being a bad journalist is not something I hate Alya for. She’s a young, immature girl. She’s wrapped in the excitement of magic and superheroes and is riding the hype to it’s conclusion. It’s partially Ladybug’s fault for indulging in Alya and being biased towards her friend that Alya has the platform she has and the belief in her abilities. And Alya does put a lot of hard work into her journalism, she just needs to do more growing and get a better understanding of what ethical journalism is.

I’m just critical of it because of the fanon warping her into this amazing journalist when she’s just a kid with no self preservation and tenacity. 

The Bad Friend thing is what imagine you mostly came here for. And I want to make it clear here as well: I don’t think Alya is a terrible friend. Most of the time I don’t think she’s even a bad friend. But what happened in Volpina, Heroes Day, and Chameleon hit me in a bad way.

In Volpina, we see Marinette express concern about Lila hanging over Adrien and Alya dismisses her to gush over her blog.

I didn’t have a problem with this when it first came out. Marinette knows Lila is a liar only because she is Ladybug and so she knows Lila is lying in her interview. Marinette has a problem with liars AND a jealousy problem that has gone unchecked by Volpina. But from Alya’s perspective, Marinette is being unreasonably possessive and is prone to over reacting. She has no obligation to interfere with Adrien and Lila just because Marinette is feeling territorial.

This only becomes an issue in addition to the other two episodes. 

In Heroes Day we get this gem of a line, which is really irritating, esPECIALLY because as a series finale it had to come after Frozer, which proved that Marinette has made great strides in overcoming her jealousy. As her best friend, Alya should be giving Marinette the benefit of the doubt, not Lila. But instead, she doesn’t ask what Marinette’s problem is with Lila she just assumes it without opening discussion about what could be bothering her usually kind and accommodating best friend. Compound it with her dismissal of Marinette in Volpina, and I’m beginning to get weary. 

But then Chameleon. Ooooooh Chameleon. Let me count the ways Alya specifically failed as a friend:

1) Kicked Marinette out if her seat without asking

2) Replaced Marinette as her seatmate with her boyfriend without asking

3) Pushing Marinette to the back row seat alone without asking

4) When Marinette claims Lila is lying, Alya asks for Marinette to prove Lila isn’t telling the truth instead of investigating if Lila is telling the truth.

5) Pulls that not apology apology that puts the blame on Marinette for getting upset about the situation. 

(gif by @oui-ladybug)

That last on is subject to interpretation, but look at it closely, There’s no “I’m sorry for putting you in that situation without your consent.” No “I’m sorry for not taking your feelings into account.” 

This throw away line is like someone saying “I’m sorry YOU got upset.” Like you overreacted. Like it’s your fault you got hurt.

You may say I’m reaching, and I’ll admit my interpretation is probably not a universal one. I’ve made no secret of it in past posts. I have a personal issue with how Alya acts in regard to Marinette’s feelings. 

I had a best friend from the age of 5 to 20. Looking back I can find a lot of flaws in our friendship but at the time I thought it was great, mutually supportive and filled with love. Until she started dating. She had a boyfriend her last two years of high school and up to around the time we stopped being friends. She was attached at the hip to him, spending all her free time with him instead of me and bringing him to outings with us without asking me first. I tried to hide my discomfort because I had already almost lost her friendship by throwing up a fuss over her dating him - because he was my ex (first!) boyfriend. But I put my feelings aside because she was really into him and I valued our friendship more than this dumb guy. But apparently I was the only one.

Things went downhill fast when we graduated high school. She and her boyfriend stayed at home and went to a local college (no shame there) and I went to a university 3 hours away. We weren’t going to see each other near as often obviously, but we had always been very good at texting and calling each other so I wasn’t worried. But she didn’t text me anymore. She never called. All contact I had to initiate first. She never made the drive up to see me unless she needed something (she stayed at my place when she wanted to go to the Renaissance Fair nearby my college). 

But what hurt most is when I would drive down to see her. I’d drive the three hours, having made plans weeks in advance to make sure it worked around our schedules, only for her to cancel last minute on me. Because she wanted to hang out with her boyfriend instead. The same boyfriend she saw LITERALLY everyday. And it happened multiple times.

She didn’t care what I did for her. She didn’t respect my time or effort or feelings. She assumed I’d be fine with it. She assumed I wouldn’t mind or if I did I’d “get over it” like I always do (get over it as in grin and bear it). She made decisions for me and without regard to what I thought. She just wanted a cardboard cutout to call Best Friend without actually putting in any of the work.

There are plenty of other things that started to bother me about our friendship, but because this is what ultimately ended it it’s what bothers me the most. So I take personal offense with Alya making assumptions about Marinette’s feelings and justifications without asking. I have issues with Alya making decisions for Marinette without asking. And I especially have issues with Alya choosing her boyfriend over her best friend because that hits me personally.

I know Chameleon was OOc for the characters…for MOST of the characters. But Alya? This has been building up. It’s not the first time. It’s just the most egregious time.

And a bonus it’s really annoying that Alya assumes Marinette is crazy jealous when a few of Marinette’s craziest moments are a result of Alya’s insistence or pushing OR Alya tries to steer her away from making mature decisions.

Marinette stealing Adrien’s phone?

Marinette making an elaborate scheme to separate Adrien from his bodyguard to go on a date with him?

Marinette tries to be realistic and help Adrien on his date while simultaneously letting him go?

Alya was one of those cases where one event made me think back really hard about her role as Marinette’s best friend and just what kind of hand she’s had in shaping Marinette’s behavior, and honestly? She’s not the amazing friend I remembered her as in Season 1. Which sucks! Because I lOVEd Alya. A sassy mom friend who takes no shit and gets shit done? A gorgeous POC that pushed her friend to make things happen for herself?! Yes please!

So I still hate on Chameleon, not just for the episode, but for the wakeup call I DIDN’t ask for!!

p.s. the reason I’m still salting on it is because the episode totally failed to resolve Alya’s issues in this episode. i.e. being a hypocrite.

[spnfanficpond]

July 2019 Pond LiveChat Recap

We had a great time chatting with @crispychrissy today! Thank you so much, Chrissy, for joining us!

This month, to make up for not having a chat in June, we chatted for two hours about some issues related to posting your works on Tumblr. Chrissy talked to us about making our own gifs, we discussed giving credit to gifmakers, how to make a Keep Reading cut, and much more!! A rundown of the chat, as well as general Pond news, is below the cut!

[Editor’s Note: For ease of understanding, the tags you put at the bottom of a post with a # will be called #hash-tags, while the tags you use to notify another Tumblr user that you’ve posted something will be called @mention-tags.]

Q: What programs do you use to make gifs? Are they free, or do you have to buy them?

Chrissy: Well, there is a free one I used back when I started called GifCam. It's easy to set up (it's just an exe) and there's a little learning curve, but it's easier than what I do now. I currently use a screen capture program that came with my $1500 graphics card along with Sony Vegas. If anyone wants GifCam, I can send it to them.

Q: And are you watching via Netflix or some other way?

C: Yes, I use Netflix. I have the first 6 seasons on DVD along with 12 and 13, so for bloopers and deleted scenes I have to use the DVD's. For current episodes, I have YouTube TV, and use the screen capture option with that. Tumblr has a 3MB limit on file size, so it’s really hard. The amount of frames you can fit in a sub-3MB gif depend on so many factors. Colors in the scene, movement, FPS (frames per second), and length. A low FPS gif looks pretty choppy, while a high FPS gif is smooth as butter.

Q: So that's why some gifs seem to go on forever, and others are quick things.

C: Yes. I can make a really long gif of something that's really really tiny, but if you want it to fit into the pixels of a Tumblr post, it limits how long they can be.

Q: And I guess that's also why some gifs I find from Google and try to put into a post won't animate right. If they're too big, I guess Tumblr stops them?

C: Yes. Tumblr just freezes the image instead of animating it. When you save it, check the file size.

C: So this is an example of the brightness and colors of a gif affecting the size. Since there's so much brightness and color, the more the gif has to render, meaning the bigger the size. This worked out to be only 35 frames, which is like... really small, but the gif itself came out to be 2.83 MB.

Q: Are websites that come up when I Google "gif maker" worth my time and effort?

C: Only if you don't mind a stupid watermark from the company.

Q: About giving credit to gifmakers....any thoughts?

C: Well, all my gifs have "cc" in the bottom right corner, that's how I give myself credit if they're used. Not everyone knows the "cc" gifs are mine, but I do. I offer my gif making services to anyone if they need a specific gif made for a story or otherwise, not limited to SPN. I've made porn gifs, ones from YouTube, and from other shows. If it exists, I can gif it. Tumblr's search feature is... well, it's not perfect, but it'll help give you a quick gif and give credit to the author. When someone uses a gif I've posted, it gives me a notification, which is awesome, but annoying if it gets reposted a crap ton. It also links the person back to the original post and who posted it.

Q: Some folks seem to think that if they grab a gif from Google, just saying they found it on Google is giving credit. I know this isn't the case. (I mistakenly thought that pasting the link to the image would allow folks to click through to where I found it, but discovered last night that's not the case.) If I found a gif on Google that was yours and used it, and provided a link to the page where Google found it, would that be enough, do you think?

C: Sometimes a reverse image search can be helpful, but it mostly doesn't work with gifs. That would be fine for me. Like I said, I have "cc" in the corner so that's me marking the gif as one of mine. I can't control where someone reposts them or uses them. There's a difference between reposting it to a site like Pinterest or using my gif on a LiveJournal post and saving it and reuploading it like it's yours and without giving me credit. One is malicious, the other isn't. I have a problem with the latter.

Q: I started looking at where Google finds gifs last night, and noticed that sites like gfycat have whole pages of gifs, and just citing that page might not be enough. (And trying to find where Google found them many times leads to a Tumblr blog that’s now gone.)

C: Google finds gifs all over the place. Someone can take my gif from Tumblr and reupload it to a bunch of different websites, all which would show up in a Google search. It's hard to find the original poster when it happens. Yeah, people delete their pages, but the gif stays. If you get to that point, just say, “Gif found on Google, unable to find original post"

Q: Speaking of finding gifs, how does the search function work on Tumblr? Is it just whatever the post was tagged with or the first 5 tags like regular searches or something else entirely?

After some discussion, we all decided that the gif search uses whatever #hash-tags are on a post where a gif is used, and then makes that gif searchable by that #hash-tag. So, if you make a post about chronic pain and use a gif of the Winchesters hugging, that gif will then show up in the gif search under #chronic pain. Also, popularity of the gif ensures it shows up at the top of the search. As people stop using a gif, it eventually falls out of the search results.

Q: Going back to file sizes...Do the dimensions of the source video (like watching Netflix/YouTube in full screen vs in a smaller window) impact the size of the gif, specifically with GifCam?

C: Now, that's a HUGE reason why I switched the way I make gifs. Netflix has a set streaming rate, which is only optimized at full screen. So the smaller you make the window to get it to fit into the size of the gif, the more degraded the image is. (Some confusion was expressed, so she continued to explain it further.) Netflix likes to run as big as possible. It wants as many pixels it can get to show you an image. If you minimize the window, it kind of freaks out and has to quickly scramble to make everything smaller so the video keeps playing. It does that by squishing everything down, making the image look weird. It might not be too noticeable when you look at it, but when you make gifs, they're gonna come out lookin all wonky.

Q: So, you have to make the Netflix window smaller in order to capture the images with the gif-making software? The gif-making software can't capture full screen?

C: GifCam will record the gif based on the window size. You gotta squish the window down to make it a reasonable size to fit on Tumblr. Other programs, which you might have to pay for, might be able to capture full screen and do the squishing for you. (Side note: during this discussion, Chrissy gave us some examples, and in showing them to us, revealed that a good gif size for Tumblr is around 410-430 wide, 230-250 high.)

After that, we moved on to other topics that had been brought up in the Pond survey a while back. 

How to make a Keep Reading cut and when you should use it.

Note: Although this worked for one person on the app, it doesn’t seem to work for all, and we’re not sure why. There are too many variables to determine the root cause for why it doesn’t always work. 

Q: "When should I give someone credit for being a beta (for example: I bounced ideas with someone for a minute or two but they didn’t technically beta read it; I can’t decide between X and Y (with no context), pick one)"

A: Always mention anyone who helped you. You don’t have to say they beta-read your story, but at least mention that they helped, even if they didn’t know it! Gratitude is always a good thing!! Writing takes a village, and being thankful for help is courteous, kind, caring, and helps you to make friends that will be the same right back to you.

How do I add my masterlist for my blog description?

Note: Chrissy pointed out that if you change your bio by hitting “edit appearance” instead of “edit theme” the link will break, so be careful where you add this! These things and more can be found in the Pond FAQ list!!

Q: The facts on search issues (re: links, tags, and anything else that keeps a fic from being “searchable”)

A: A lot of testing and research went into trying to figure this out, and we still probably don’t have it all figured out, but we learned some interesting things!

Most importantly, since we have a lot of smut writers, if you use the #hash-tag #NSFW on your post, your post will NOT show up in any searches!!

Adding an external link should not cause your post to be unsearchable, but that’s not guaranteed. According to Tumblr’s own help pages, “some links may cause posts to be hidden from recent search results.” Since spambots use external links in their posts, this will always be something that could possibly interfere with your post being searchable.

According to Tumblr: “Blogs that have been either self-flagged or flagged by us as “explicit” per our old policy (before December 17, 2018), will not show up in search. Users under 18 are still not allowed to click through to see the content of these blogs. If you think your blog has been erroneously marked as explicit, you can file an appeal by following these instructions.”

When you are searching for your post, make sure you are looking at Most Recent posts, not Most Popular! 

Some things to know about searching:

There are two ways to search a blog. If you use the search box at the top, then your results will have a URL like this:  https://spnfanficpond.tumblr.com/search/big-fish-chat

However, that is not the only way you can search your blog. If you look at a post, and click on one of the tags on that post, your results will have a URL like this: https://spnfanficpond.tumblr.com/tagged/big-fish-chat

The first search will look through all of the text in a post to find the words you’re searching for. The second search will only look for posts with that specific tag. If a blog doesn’t have a search box in its theme, you can type these searches in manually, and they will still work.

You can also do these searches manually through all of Tumblr. Keep this in mind when you’re doing your general Tumblr search and check the URL of your results, because... “search” & “tagged” look at #hash-tags differently!

(This is so confusing, we know.)

“Search” will look through 20 #hash-tags. “Tagged” will only look through 5 #hash-tags. So, put your most important #hash-tags in your first 5!!

Q: Can you talk about xkit?

A: xkit is awesome and we should all bow down to the xkit guy because he fixes things when Tumblr poops on the carpet. Seriously. It’s only for use on desktop, but it makes Tumblr so much easier to manage.

xkit is an extension for your browser. Look for New xkit, and download that. Once you have xkit loaded, click on the xkit icon near the top right of your screen. When the xkit window pops up, click on Get Extensions. We could suggest a list of the best extensions, but they’re all seriously awesome. Blacklist seems to be the most common, as it filters out posts you don’t want to see based on tags and text. Auto Tagger, Activity+, Outbox, One-Click Postage, and Quick Tags are all ridiculously useful for everyday blogging. The whole thing is super easy to learn and use, and you can’t break anything while you’re learning. Some extensions, like Blacklist, may slow your computer down when you’re surfing your dash because they essentially surf it ahead of you and manipulate it. If you start seeing problems, you can disable any extensions you decide you don’t want to use, anymore.

Seriously, it’s freaking awesome.

Great talk, guys! If you have ideas for topics, please let us know!!

General Pond Updates and Reminders

What we’ve got cooking up next: 

We’re working on setting up the discord server. We’re still learning the ins and outs and all the options available. More options means more discussion among the admins and decisions to be made, so please be patient! We’re getting there!

Reminders:

Angel Fish Award nominations are accepted all month long! No need to wait to tell us how much you liked a fellow Fish’s work!  IF YOU HAVE SENT IN A NOMINATION, BUT HAVE NOT RECEIVED A PRIVATE MESSAGE CONFIRMING WE RECEIVED IT, WE DIDN’T GET IT. Be sure to use Submit instead of Ask!

Don’t forget to submit your stories to be posted to the blog! When your stories are on the blog, then they are easier to nominate for Angel Fish Awards!

SPNFanFicPond Season 14 Weekly Episode Challenge - Now that the season is over, we will be reposting each prompt list through the summer months! Remember, there’s no deadline for submissions!

Say hi to June’s New Members!

Check the Pond CALENDAR to see when Big Fish will be in the chat room and other Pond and SPN events are happening! Know of something that’s not on the calendar, send us an ask or submission with the deets info details!  The calendar offers a lot of features, such as showing you when things are in your own timezone! Since we’re an international group, that’s a definite plus!!

We don’t have a topic or speaker set up for August’s event, yet, so if there’s something you want to talk about, or someone you want to talk to, LET US KNOW!

[duckling-duck-duck]

Midnight Sun Review, Chapter 1: First Sight (Why am I doing this?)

Hello people and welcome to my side blog specifically dedicated to my thoughts, feeling and opinions on Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer. It’s not like I have anything better to do at the moment (studying for exams, a semester to prepare for, friendships to cultivate) so let’s get to it!

Before I get started on informing you of said thoughts, feelings and opinions, here are a few disclaimers and other things you should probably know to follow my thought process and that will likely have an influence both on my reading experience and view of this book. For my inspiration for this undertaking, you all can thank both Hannah Lee Kidder for her excellent rewrites of the first book on YouTube (she is awesome, go check her out) and Strange Aeons for her video review of Midnight Sun, which I would also highly recommend.

When I heard that Stephenie Meyer (from now on referred to as SM, yes) finally was going to publish this mysterious thing that was circulating when I was barely a teenager and just starting my Twilight phase, and still seriously interested in the books, I was both over the moon and very apprehensive. And I knew immediately that I was going to buy and read it, no matter how bad or good it was going to be.

This YA fiction series was a huge part of my early formative years. At the time when I first read it, I was still too young to thoroughly grasp some of the more problematic concepts of the story, which has since changed. It got me into vampires, to an obsessive and, frankly, unhealthy amount. I subsequently read literature that was NOT for the eyes of a thirteen-year-old at the time and at the same time much worse fanfiction.

Another probably important thing is that I did not read the original Twilight series in English, but rather in German, which means that some things I may remember differently due to translation. I included this because the way Germans translate English in books is atrocious. I have never re-read the books after I read them for the first time, only watched the movies a couple of times since, mostly to make fun of them, this time in English. When the fourth movie came out, I was already mostly over Twilight again and just went to the theatre with my best friend for the hell of it. The only characters I was invested in at this point were the side characters, like Jasper, Rosalie, Leah Clearwater and, basically, anyone and everyone that wasn’t Edward, Bella and Jacob (mostly because everyone else had a much more compelling storyline). So please bear that in mind when I rip into this book. I will also probably be biased in favour of these characters.

This brings me to my last but probably the most important point: I had no interest in Edward and Bella and mostly wanted to know what kind of mess they ended up in this time. I made fun of them a lot. The older I got, the more of the unhealthy tendencies I recognized. So, this is my official warning for everyone who is genuinely interested in this book and wants to read it for fun and came across this post by accident: It will not be nice. I will probably not be kind. I like sarcasm and am not afraid to utilize it to get across exactly how dumb, deranged or practically pointless I think something is. I like to think I can give credit where it is due, but this is probably not the blog or post for you.

I will include trigger warnings if necessary, but if I miss anything please do not hesitate to let me know and/or stop reading immediately if it makes you uncomfortable. I am open to discussion and criticism, but please remain civil. And now that introduction has gone on for far too long, so please enjoy.

Chapter Summary: What happened?

We start with Edward in class having an existential crisis which seems to be his default state. He comments on his siblings, reducing them to absolute tropes which anyone who has read the original series later knows is not at all what and/or who they are. Practically anyone is more interesting than him, though that is not a high bar. Then we have lunch period (still wild you have that) where everyone else is thinking of the new girl who is still nothing amazing to him. Edward spews some vapid comments about everyone else in school (the word “children” comes to mind and is frequently used) and is very amused that particularly the female population, except for Angela, seems to be interested in him. After that, we get the famous biology scene from a whole other point of view and boy is it enjoyable! We end the chapter with Edward going to Alaska because otherwise he may or may not break into Charlie’s house to kill the daughter of the chief of police. (I rewrote this summary like, five times and still cannot make it less sarcastic. I apologize.) (#sorrynotsorry)

Warnings: Swearing, a lot. Explicit language. Too many parentheses. Slight description of violence. A lot of talk about murder.

It took me two evenings getting through this first chapter (25 pages total) and I am not going to lie: On the first one, I barely managed to make it 5 pages in before I had to stop and lie down and mentally prepare myself for the things that were to come. And lord, did they come!

If you thought being stuck in Bella’s mind was exhausting, welcome to a new level of it. Because Edward is even more self-deprecating than she is. He literally describes his basically vegetative state as purgatory because high school is just that boring. Granted, it sometimes is, but why even is he in high school then? As mentioned later he has 2 doctorate degrees. Could you just not go to university and study something that you haven’t learned yet? If Rosalie, Emmett and Jasper can pass as seniors (and you have to excuse me, but I know practically nothing of the American school system) then I am sure you can pull some kind of ‘gifted’ scheme to put Edward in either advanced classes or have him skip a few years. And fake a High School diploma. Another question: if he has two doctorates, why doesn’t he do something with them? You could apply your mind and focus on other things, like research, furthering humanity, curing cancer! (On that note: why has Carlisle not tried to do that? Just because you need to fly under the radar? There has got to be something you can do, both with your excessive money and apparently brilliant mind, that would benefit all of humanity that you so desperately try not to hurt. And if not personally, you can damn-well fund it or nudge someone in the right direction.)

But this doesn’t just tell us that Edward is bored out of his mind, it also tells us that he is probably unhappy with his non-life as well. In the first four sentences, we have already set the tone for the entire novel and I am contemplating a descent into alcoholism. It is gonna be excruciating to follow this dude’s mind for 756 pages because that is 755 pages too long. His entire existence revolves around making Carlisle proud and proving he still retains some of his humanity. While he sometimes talks about the love he has for his siblings, that seems more of a farce he upholds for his adoptive father (read: god) and mother, which in her case is more of a ‘can’t deal with her disappointed look’ (we all know the one), because besides Alice his opinion of them is basically ‘couldn’t be bothered to give a shit’.

(I wanted to use a gif of her but this was the first thing that popped up when I searched "rosalie" and ngl, it fits his perception of her perfectly)

Rosalie, in his opinion, is shallow, self-obsessed, and superior the everyone (“her mind was a stagnant pool with few surprises”). These two do not get along whatsoever and while this may have been my initial impression of her in Twilight it changed over time. She is more than that and it is baffling that Edward thinks of her that way even after all this time. They are familiar with each other’s stories and I find it hard to believe that he would do anything nice for her based on the initial impression we are presented within this book. Or maybe she now has almost everything she wants: a loving partner, a family, a comfortable life. Why is it so bad? She seems to be comfortable and even happy. Can Edward just not accept that other people might not despise this life as much as he does?

Emmett gets away slightly better than Rosalie, but not much. The impression I got of him from reading his paragraph is that he is an overgrown, glorified child. He has no problem with Edward reading his thoughts, specifically because he carries his heart on his sleeve and if he has something to say, he will say it to your face. He seems to be Edwards second favourite of his siblings.

His absolute favourite is Alice, because “it wasn’t easy, being the freaks among those who were already freaks.” If Bella and Jasper weren’t in the picture, those two would be a couple, I swear! They are the extra special snowflakes (derogatory) among the already special snowflakes (derogatory) (So sorry!). They look out for each other; I can already tell you that they will present a united front concerning anything and everything and ask each other favours (like Alice wanting Edward to keep an eye on Jasper to make sure he doesn’t go on a murdering spree because he’s hungry).

Coincidentally, Edward is pretty mad at her for focusing on her husband/boyfriend/SO and his trip down the serial killer lane in a public high school that she, later on, doesn’t catch a glimpse of Edwards violent fantasies and his possible future with his fangs in Bella’s neck. He seems to be pretty salty about that. I get that for Edward this is probably pretty damning, especially since this is not a regular occurrence, but has the thought crossed his mind that, right now, she has other priorities? Or that this future simply will not come to pass and that is the reason she hasn’t seen it? I am not familiar with how it works in the books (like I said, ages) but in the movies sometimes she gets the visions automatically without focusing and they are dependent on a person’s intent.

Back to Jasper then. And oh, Jasper. They did my boy dirty.

Well, technically not, because he has a much harder time living among humans than the others. But SM did not have to write Edward so dismissive of his struggles. To quote: “And Jasper was … suffering. I suppressed a sigh.” If this is so hard for him, why does he have to be there at all? They can’t always count on Edward and Alice to monitor him like a toddler. It would be far more efficient to just keep him away from humans. Also, and this is something that I have snapchatted to my friends several times and no one has yet come up with a concrete answer for me: You know how half the population is female? And how there are art-classes and PE and probably a school nurse? Accidents happen (I cannot tell you how often my friend had a spontaneous nosebleed in the middle of history class) and PMS is a thing. There will be a girl on her period when Jasper hasn’t fed in a long time. He’s not gonna avoid it by any stretch of the world by being in school. Have him stay home with Esme and work more in smaller steps.

“Why flirt with disaster?” If you can say that in response to Jasper having fantasies about drinking the blood of one of his classmates which starts with what is an exhibitionist-inclined make-out, why can’t you stay away from Bella? Because let me tell you: the best scene in this chapter was Edwards’s mind working out how to best kill his entire biology class just so he can rip open the new student and afterwards he doesn’t take his advice and cannot stay the fuck away. To his credit though, he tries. For like, half a chapter.

Until that point, where he smelled her, Bella was entirely mundane and uninteresting. He’s seen her in the minds of other students and the cafeteria and the most remarkable thing about her is that he can’t read her mind. He is very dismissive of it: “Not that I would find anything worth listening to.” So yeah, she doesn’t particularly strike his fancy or frankly, his interest.

But then she steps into the airflow that full-on blows her scent into his face and I have no words, except damn! And from that on we get the seven and a half most enjoyable pages of this chapter (dare I say the whole book?), the murder fantasies. What does it say about this book that this is the best scene so far? I found it quite well written to be honest. How he changes his second plan midway through the first because there are too many instances of the others screaming for help or alerting everyone else and, most importantly, Bellas body would grow cold while he snaps about 19 necks in 5 seconds. He is, for a monster without control, very methodical in his imaginary attempts to murder his class. Him thinking he has to destroy evidence, figuring out how he could best and most efficiently go about it, ultimately not relishing the killing but seeing it as the removal of an obstacle – I am getting some serious Hannibal vibes.

Of course, the thing holding him back is Carlisle and how Edward knows that his adoptive father would forgive him for this, because “he thought I was better than I was”. Only Edward being a stubborn bitch and wanting to prove something to Carlisle keeps around 20 people alive that day.

While I think the scene is incredible, it still rubs me the wrong way in a particular aspect: Edward has a raging fang-boner (pardon my French) for Bella and has the gall to judge Jasper simply because for him that is a permanent state of being. If anything, it makes me have a lot more respect for Jasper (and we can get into the confederate army major thing another time, I am aware of that) because he hasn’t ripped open someone’s bowels. But that isn’t where I was going with this. Edward only takes an interest in Bella because she smells like ecstasy to him. Because his instincts attract him to a meal so scrumptious, he’s never gonna forget it again. What a great start for a relationship! Also, he hates her because of her scent and this somehow keeps him sane. I either do not get boys in general or Edward Cullen specifically. Probably both.

It also takes him waaay too long to stop breathing. (And I know that he uses the phrase “sinking my teeth through that fine, thin, see-through skin to the hot, wet, pulsing-” to describe her neck, but I have read too much horribly/well-written E-rated fanfics on AO3 to not think of a vagina when I read this.)

And even after he has resolved to not abduct and kill the new student, he still fantasizes about doing it. Like I said, reading his fantasies is pretty enjoyable, but why did SM have to give them to us in the first chapter? Nothing in this book is gonna compare to this description ever again and I am sad about it. I know, who’d have thought?

Then we get to the part where he thinks about following her to her house because to kill her there is “the responsible way to deal with this”. Excuse me? Oh man, still really enjoyable to read, but now I am genuinely scared for Bella!

Because this is not just very detailed, but also very thought out. I am not sure if SM decided to ramp up the fear-factor for Edward because while everyone theoretically knows that he could snap a neck with his pinkie, the thirst was very much real about a decade ago and everyone just kinda glossed over the fact that Edward is a killing-machine. Not sure if Bella wouldn’t take Jacobs concerns regarding sex with a vampire while she was still human a little more seriously if she knew that was how her husband thought about her when they met. Is this supposed to entice me or turn me on? Not that it ever could in general, because Edward, but after that description, I am very much turned off, actually, and not at all receptive to this dude and want to tell Bella to run for the hills or La Push and never come back. This is, good writing aside, disturbing!

After class, he heads out in his car and listens to calming music, which he does a lot. I’ll keep tabs on how often and keep you posted. And this is where he gets angry with Alice for focusing on Jasper instead of him. To quote: “Was she so absorbed with watching for trouble with Jasper that she’d missed this much more horrific possibility?” Well, maybe because her boyfriend has a much harder time with basically every student in the school rather than just one and is much more likely to flip his table in English and jump the teacher (and not in a fun way). And that her life doesn’t revolve around you!

As I said, the chapter ends with him speeding off into the night, because that is the only responsible choice. If you fell you it best to remove yourself from the situation, do it. But maybe stay consistent afterwards.

Good things: The description of Edwards methodical nature when planning the murders. Very well written, as well as his portrayal as a ruthless monster compared to the amped-up teenage-heartthrob-thing we got from Bellas point of view. The danger surrounding a vampire never really came through, but now it did. I actually fear for her. Very impressive writing.

Bad things: How easily and nonchalantly he tries to manipulate his way into a higher-level science class was very disturbing. How dismissive he is of almost all of his siblings and their problems or their happiness. The fact that the first feelings he had towards Bella are ambivalence and hatred.

This is gonna be unbearable, isn’t it?

[hotdoghasashi-blog]

Video Editing Jobs for February 2020

How I Came To The Dog

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Present your event in such a way that your audience feels something and your video will be a great encouragement for them. Give your viewers a unique and humorous interpretation of the gossip to make your videos more memorable. Share the things you do every day that improve your quality of life and show your viewers how they can benefit as well. Let people know what makes you tick by creating a daily routine video. The daily routine can affect your eating habits, your daily routine, your exercise program, etc. Of course, you should own the rights to them, or rely on royalty-free audio files. Then she noticed that you need to fix something. The normal approach back then is to delete the video, re-editing with offline tools and then reload it again. It also changes the ID of the video, which means that the previous embed will no longer work. With us you will find a great, friendly and dedicated community that can offer high-quality content, helpful tips and insider knowledge. Watch the video below for more tips on video search engine optimization. Now select the uploaded trailer or enter the URL of the video that is to be played here. First, make sure that the "Customize channel layout" function is activated. Be sure to set a primary goal for your video at the start of your production process so that you can tailor the script and your strategy accordingly. Teenagers can use it to earn more quickly than their parents. In return, the algorithm used by YouTube to suggest videos to YouTube viewers or reward videos is an eternal mystery, even for experts. In the summer of 2017 there was a flood of videos in which content creators openly railed against changes in the YouTube code. We recommend uploading your own custom thumbnail. If you have a slider or steadicam, you can bring a little movement into play. It is enough to swivel the camera slightly from left to right, or to bring the object closer for a short time to make your video more interesting. After all, you want your viewers to focus on the content of the video and not on the shaky camera work. It is therefore better to use a tripod for static pictures or to place the camera on a flat surface. It is the only video on Karim's channel, but the founding father of YouTube has almost 600,000 subscribers. Long before Netflix, YouTube changed viewing habits forever. It all started with a banal video from the zoo.

[cisco-fics-4-all]

Believer

So I’ve had this request since well before Season 3 ended, but I felt it was a good fit for expressing some post S3 feels, so here we go! A request for: “Could I request an angsty/fluffy piece where Cisco and Reader get into a heated argument but then reader starts crying and Cisco immediately feels like shit and just holds her and snuggles her?“ I was a little heavy handed on the angst, and not so much on the fluff...oops? Enjoy!

(^ gif made by me, from this video)

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“Ow!” You cried out, flinching away from Julian, as the former field medic did his best to bandage your wounds.

“My apologies Y/N,” Julian replied with a frown, “but it might help, if you stopped fidgeting so much, and let me get this business over with?”

You frowned guiltily. “Sorry,” you apologized softly, “I just...I was hoping to get out of here before Cisco came back, y’know?”

Julian nodded, though the look on his face told you he disapproved. “Y/N, you’re going to have to face him eventually,” he reminded you, resuming his task of wrapping a bandage around your arm, “he is, after all, your superior technically speaking, Barry left him in charge when he...well when he left.”

“That he did Julian,” you agreed quietly, gritting your teeth against the memory of that night, and the pain it had brought with it.

Iris had been nearly inconsolable for a week, living in their shared apartment on her own hadn’t much helped her either. Cisco, bless his heart, had taken to leading the team like a nervous substitute teacher, unsure of himself in almost every decision but determined to man his post no matter what. Cynthia helped him, or at least tried to, but being an outsider herself in a way, she kept her guidance of Cisco to a minimum, not wanting to begin her new life on a new earth being seen as a puppetmaster to a man she reluctantly, but deeply cared for. Joe and Harry adapted to this new chain of command quite well considering, being the two most senior members of the team in regards to age, they became rather like the resident dads of Star Labs. They had their hands full with five children between them, but they performed as all father’s do, stoic and fiercely protective under pressure, happy to console, or in Harry’s case, gruffly affirm a difficult decision when such reassurance was needed.

Wally’s replacing of Barry as Central City’s Flash proceeded without much notice of the general public, there were one or two stories in the papers, asking where the savior in red had gone, but the questions were soon forgotten, and it seemed almost as though Wally had always been the only flash there was. He still called himself Kid Flash in private though, he still put his suit on a different mannequin, leaving Barry’s red one in the prominent place within the cortex, like some silent memorial that nobody spoke of, but looked to in times of difficulty.

You were probably the only one who still spoke of Barry as though he were still with the Team, refusing to shunt his existence to that of a mere memory. Everyone said they would find a way to bring him back, they were working on finding a way every day they said, searching and scanning and planning with every spare moment they had...and yet they treated him as though he were dead. You supposed that him being trapped in the speedforce as he was, it was easier that way, starting with low expectations after so much heaping disappointment, meant that proceeding with seemingly no progress didn’t sting quite so bad. But Barry was alive, and you would respect his sacrifice by remembering that fact, and behaving accordingly.

That was what had gotten you injured. Working with Tracy’s abandoned and re-configured speed bazooka, you had miscalculated a few things, leading to a rather spectacular explosion that thankfully hadn’t hurt anything but your pride, your arm, and your desk. Julian had found you rummaging in the med lab for bandages, and now here you sat, perched on the edge of a gurney while the medic worked to patch you up, ears trained towards the hall for the sound of the angry footfalls you knew would be coming eventually.

“There we are,” Julian finally declared, pressing lightly on a strip of gauze tape he applied to seal your bandaging, “you should be alright in a week or so, try not to get that wet though, and if you do, change the bandage or it will-”

“Thank you, Julian!” You called, ignoring the rest of his words in favor of making a run for it, hoping that if you scurried back to the workshop fast enough, you could fix your miscalculations before Cisco found out. But Cisco practically lived in that workshop, so it was really no surprise at all that you found him standing over the charred remains of your desk, waiting for you to return.

“Was is a burn or a gash?” he asked without turning around, his foot nudging a blackened piece of desk debris on the floor.

You glanced down at your arm, the bandage stark white against your skin, the pain underneath it down to a dull burning sensation. “Both,” you replied hesitantly, “but it’s alright now, Julian patched me up, see.” You brandished your arm towards his still turned back, nerves churning slowly in your stomach in the suspense, wondering if you would see anger, or disappointment in his eyes when he finally turned to face you.

“Both,” he repeated with a nod, tucking some hair away from his face, “well then I suppose it’s a good thing that it was only your arm, and not your chest, or stomach, or head,” he turned then, facing you with not anger, not disappointment, but oddly enough, sadness. “You really should be more careful Y/N,” he went on, approaching you slowly as he spoke, “I know that you wanted to keep this little project secret from me, but I’m sure Harry would have helped you, at the very least he’d have gone over your calculations for you,” he stopped just in front of you, reaching out a hand to inspect your arm.

You stared at him, watching the furrow of his brow as he examined your bandage, watching the way his eyes flickered from the bandage to the trails of soot across your clothes, the way his jaw clenched slightly before he met your gaze. This was not like him, this was too reserved, too closed off, this was...this was how Harry dealt with things. “I’m fine Cisco,” you assured him plainly, “Julian patched me up, and I know what I did wrong, I don’t need help to fix it,” you gently pulled your arm back from his grasp, “and it wasn’t a secret project, I was doing it out in the open, in our shared workshop, how is that supposed to be secr-”

“Y/N,” he cut you off, his jaw clenching a little more while his eyes hardened as he looked at you, “working on it in the open doesn’t mean it wasn’t a secret,” he turned to his own desk, lifting his tablet from its surface to show you what it displayed. “Tracy’s plans for the bazooka were locked in a folder on my private computer here, the readouts from the night we faced Savitar were too, and so were the plans that I drew up after getting back from Savitar’s lair where I reconfigured it into a skeleton key,” he scrolled through the folder that had contained the information he spoke of, each file you had systematically hacked and copied to your own personal device so as to keep your work secret. “I know you hacked my computer, and I know you’ve been trying to cannibalize the reconfigured bazooka into something that can get Barry back, so if you could please not lie to me, I would really appreciate it,” he set his tablet down again, the hard look in his eyes becoming anger.

You swallowed thickly, caught in your lie with no way out. It wasn’t that you didn’t want him to know what you were doing, or perhaps it was just that, you didn’t want him to know that you had taken to starting your own reconnaissance efforts because you believed his work was coming too slowly. You didn’t want him to see your lack of faith in his ability to bring Barry back because Cisco was your friend, and with everything else weighing so heavily on his shoulders, you didn’t want him to see this as just one more thing he was doing wrong.

“Is it pointless to apologize?” you asked quietly, looking down at your feet for a moment, “would you believe me if I said I’m sorry?”

Cisco scoffed, turning from you once again. “That depends Y/N, what are you sorry for?” he asked, “are you sorry for keeping this secret from me, are you sorry for hacking my computer, or are you sorry for telling me without words that you think I’m not working hard enough, because all three of those things were pretty low of you, but I suspect you’re only sorry about one of them.”

“Cisco, I-” you began, but he wouldn’t let you finish.

“I’m trying Y/N!” he finally burst out, “I know I’m not everyone’s first choice to lead, hell I’m not even my own first choice to lead, but I am doing the best I can, and it sucks!” he kicked the chunk of desk he’d nudged earlier, sending it smacking against a wall across the room. “Wally is running around out there with no backup, Cyndi is here trying her best to settle into this life that I’ve dragged her into, Iris is waiting with bated breath for any update on bringing Barry back, Harry and Joe keep on keeping on because it’s all they can do besides stepping in and taking this authority that’s been thrust upon me, Julian is tip-toeing around me, trying not to bring up Caitlin, and all of that, every last god awful detail of this mess that I’ve inherited, is just perfectly punctuated by the fact that you decided to work on your own to bring Barry back, because I’m not working fast enough!” Here was the anger you’d anticipated, the frustration, the break...but somehow you found, that you were the one in tears.

Cisco didn’t deserve any of this. Cisco didn’t deserve to be under so much pressure alone, without Barry, without Caitlin, and by your own stupid doing, without you. You had been avoiding the truth for a month now, telling yourself that this was helping him, your secrets were only secret because you didn’t want to burden Cisco with your plans, you wanted to take this thing off of his shoulders, and give it back to him light as a feather. But that wasn’t true, Cisco was right, you had lost faith in him somewhere along the way, and here you were with an injured arm, a charred up desk, no closer to bringing Barry back than Cisco was. “Cisco, I’m sorry,” you choked out, your face burning with tears now, “I know you’re trying, I know you’re overwhelmed, and overworked, and I know you’re working as hard as you can to bring Barry back, and I shouldn’t…god I shouldn’t have been so stupid,” you were sobbing so hard you could barely speak, your breaths shuddering out of you violently before you gasped them in again. You wanted to go on, to explain to him how sorry you were, how awful you felt, how horrible it was that you, his friend, had lied to him about something so important.

Arms enveloped you then, a firm chest pressed against your face, hands cradled your head to a warm and familiar body, with long dark hair tickling your forehead. “Y/N,” Cisco’s voice seemed to surround you like his hug. “I know you’re sorry, I know you didn’t mean for things to get like this, and I forgive you,” you let out a particularly forceful sob at that, but he went on, “Y/N I’m sorry I yelled, I’m sorry I snapped at you like that, but I think we both knew it was coming.” His arms tightened around you, and yours, in turn, snaked around his back. “You’re the only one I’ve got left Y/N,” he reminded you softly, “You’re the only one, who’s been here since the beginning, you’re the last friend I’ve got who knows just how far this team has come. Joe and Iris know, but not the whole story, not the way we do, they’re not...” he trailed off, a slight tremor in his voice just before he took in a deep breath and said, “you and me, we’ve been here since the beginning, so it’s our job to keep this team going, to keep this thing alive until we can get Barry back.”

You nodded against him, your breaths finally quieting into soft little hitches, your tears now drying against your skin. “I’m sorry,” you said once more, “you’re right, we’ve got to stand together or this isn’t going to work.” You pulled away from him then, looking up into his brown eyes, the same ones that once glittered with optimism, but now appeared aged beyond their years by responsibility. Those eyes hurt to look at. “Cisco,” you said his name in a near whisper, “I believe in you.”

Those beautiful brown eyes pinched at the sides and for a moment the smile that caused it almost reached them. “Thank you, Y/N,” Cisco replied quietly, a bitter laugh accompanying it before he added, “one of us ought to.”

[drycerealthief]

6 Months and 1550 Miles

Written (partly!) for @phanfichallenge​ “Week of Fics” Challenge Day 5.

AO3 Link Fic Masterlist - Similar events feel very different, depending on whether you can edit stuff out before the audience sees it...

Chapter 1 - London, December 2017. “-JOB SIMULATORRRRR” he finishes, exaggerating the end of the words somewhat dramatically, before Phil quips something about “being on the naughty step down here” He rolls with it, turning at least partway towards him, hoping he’s brandishing the controller in the right direction as he plays along, telling Phil and their audience “You’ve been very bad, you’re getting nothing but coal next week!” He’s already pressed START and figures he may as well make something of the warning displayed inside the headset, so he reads it out for their audience’s benefit, swinging his arms as he does so to demonstrate the point.“Are you clear of things you might bump into?” He can’t hear Phil clearly, but he thinks he’s jokingly drawing attention to the fact he’s sitting within reach, but Dan’s aware of his general location, just behind him to his right, and he might swing his arms around to get a reaction, just to be a bit dramatic, but it’ll be funny - Phil won’t let anything happen - “Please don’t punch me in the- “ “ALL CLEAR!”   SMACK “OHH! FUCK!!” It takes a moment for what’s just happened to register. He stands frozen, arms and elbows drawn in tight, before yanking the headset up from over his eyes, to see Phil hunched over turned away from him, both hands covering his mouth and jaw. “Are you okay?” Silence. “Phil… Phil, look at me please” This isn’t funny. The camera is still recording, but this isn’t going to be uploaded. His hand stings where he’s just hit Phil, but he’s certain being backhanded square in the face will have hurt a damn sight more, especially if he also caught him with the controller too.He drops to his knees in front of Phil, and gently tries to pry his hands away from his face, in order to see what he’s done, what he’s caused to happen in all his stupid put-on exuberance. He’s expecting bruising, maybe some blood, but he’s just hoping there’s no missing teeth, because it’s late at night and he doesn’t know where to find an emergency dentist and- Phil turns towards him and makes eye contact, after what seems like an eternity to Dan, caught in a spiral of worry and self-recrimination. There’s tears in his eyes, but he shies away from Dan when he goes to wipe them away, instead blinking them away as he lifts his head. Slowly, oh-so slowly, he lowers one hand, then the other, allowing Dan to see, finally. And it’s nowhere near as bad as he’d feared, especially as Phil quips, albeit shakily “So, what’s the damage? Do I have an excuse for all that plastic surgery to turn me into- “ “Shush a minute” Dan interrupts, noticing a small smear of blood on Phil’s lip, leaning in close to try and see where it’s coming from before directing Phil: “open your mouth for a sec?” Phil obliges, wincing slightly as Dan carefully rolls his top lip away from his teeth just enough to see a tiny cut on the inside of his lip. It’s already stopped bleeding, probably thanks to the pressure Phil’s hands on his face put on it, and it seems to be the only damage, but he keeps checking, keeps examining Phil’s face closely until Phil seizes his hands, removing them from his face and trapping them together between his own gently. “Dan, it’s ok. I’m fine. I’m alright, really.”He inhales shakily, avoiding making eye contact. Despite the words, he still expects Phil to be angry, he’d deserve it if he was, after what he’s just done, he could so easily have really hurt Phil, what would he have done then, and- “Hey. Dan. Stop. Look at me.” Without him realising, suddenly their positions are reversed and it’s his own face being cradled in Phil’s hands, and a couple of previously unnoticed tears being wiped gently from his cheeks. The words, and the gentle tone of that voice he knows so well, along with the careful physical contact abruptly shut down the negative thought spiral he’d trapped himself in, and frees him enough to follow the simple command Phil’s given him. He opens his eyes, barely having known up until that point that he’d shut them, and makes eye contact. “There you are. Love, stop worrying, Please. I’m fine, you’re fine, it was just an accident, you couldn’t see me- “ “Phil. I’m sorry. I-I- “ “Shhh love, I know. You didn’t mean it. It’s ok. Deep breaths now, come on.” He’s so relieved that Phil really isn’t mad, and seems instead to be worried about him all of a sudden that he can’t help but barrel into Phil’s midsection, worming his arms tightly between Phil and the back of his chair, eliciting a surprised “oof!” from his partner at the impact, before he feels his arms come up and wrap around him securely. Suddenly everything really is ok. He hadn’t realised how upset he’d gotten, how worried, until he starts to relax, feeling the tension gradually ebb from his body, and his mind quieten. “’m sorry I’m an idiot” he mutters into Phil’s shirt. He’s not sure if he’d be able to hear it, but he feels the need to say it anyway. Phil chuckles softly, before shifting, and moving one hand upwards, stroking up his back, tickling the back of his neck just a little before starting to gently play with Dan’s hair, picking a single curl at random, and pulling slightly, before letting it ping back towards his scalp. “You know we can film this another day if you want?” he suggests, quietly, obviously not wanting to disturb the moment but it serves to remind them that the camera is still presumably recording, has been the entire time, so if they do want to keep recording, they need to get on with it at some point. Dan releases his grip on the back of Phil’s shirt, and sits back on his heels, looking up at Phil with a bashful smile, taking the opportunity as Phil looks down at him to- “Stop staring at me like my face is in danger of falling off you spoon! I’m fine.” They both burst out laughing, and it takes a while for Dan to ask if Phil wants to keep what they had recorded, or if he wants to start fresh. “I don’t know. It was pretty funny, to be honest, and it’s nice to have not been the clumsy one for once. What do you think?” he asks in return, frowning slightly, clearly unsure if Dan is comfortable with sharing even part of what’s just happened. And to be honest, he is mulling it over carefully, before replying as he gets to his feet and stretching: “OK, let’s carry on with me apologising. We can always cut it out and re-film the intro if it’s- if we- ” “Sounds good” Phil cuts him off, smiling comfortingly up at him. And it is good when the video is finally finished. With an added slow-mo of the impact that still makes them both flinch whenever they see it, even after editing the video carefully, it’s easy to disguise what would be a blatant jump-cut, followed by their slightly shaky, slightly over-emphasised interactions as they restart filming. It's okay.

Chapter 2 - Moscow, June 2018. Dan stretches his arms up above his head, relaxing on the freshly made hotel bed he’s been lying across ever since they got back to the hotel. It’s late, and they’re tired, but it’s been a good few days, busy, but everything thus far has gone better and more straightforwardly than they’d perhaps expected. Phil had headed straight for the shower once they’d ordered room service dinner, promising to be quick enough that Dan can have a quick rinse at the least before the food arrives. Dan suspects, based on years of experience however, that he won’t actually get to shower until he goes back to his own hotel room later. Alone, because they promised to adhere to all the advice they’d had drummed into them on the run-up to this section of the tour. All of it. It feels especially jarring, given the reactions of their fans who came to the shows, and the Meet and Greet sessions, so whilst they felt more relaxed during tonight’s performance, they’re still on full “best platonic behaviour” mode, and he’s 99% certain just his presence here in Phil’s room would give some members of their team an aneurysm if they knew. Also odd is the fact they handed over all their devices before flying into the country, as advised, and since then have been using old handsets they packed specifically for these few days, carefully reset to factory settings with burner SIM cards and iCloud accounts, and virtually no apps installed. They’ve also avoided signing into any of their online accounts, so have effectively shut themselves off completely from social media, something they’ve literally never done. Not completely. It’s been weird, but they’ve spoken about how they can both see the appeal, if they weren’t so reliant on it for their career. It’s for this reason that instead of just checking his mentions, he is reduced to searching a few different terms in order to gauge their audiences’ (both in person and online) reaction to tonight’s show, along with their continued absence online, but what he finds initially confuses, then horrifies him. Not least because it’s something he doesn’t even remember having happened. Yet there it is, full video evidence with muffled audio. In silent gifs that play over and over as he scrolls past. All over Twitter and Tumblr both, complete with joking captions and comments, crowding out any reviews, spoilers or comments about the actual show. And he doesn’t remember it. But what if Phil does? What if Phil was expecting an apology? What if he was expecting them to talk about it, if not right there and then, but maybe in their dressing room after the meetup but before the show, during the interval, or afterwards. Any point up until when he shut the door to the bathroom behind him. What if Phil’s angry? And he hasn’t noticed that either. Not that it’d be the first time Phil had kept quiet, let it fester under the surface with Dan oblivious, gotten and stayed angry about that too, then suddenly exploded, leaving Dan temporarily blindsided, then feeling like a complete shit? He can’t let that happen. Not now, not here, and not during the tour. They can’t get away with doing this show if they’re not on good terms, it’s not scripted enough, and the last thing they’d need is if it were obvious to their audience that something was wrong between them. This is bad enough, they don’t need that as well. He needs to sort this, have it out with Phil now, but he’s in the shower, and his mood won’t be improved if Dan interrupts or drags him out of there now, but the food’s on its way, it’ll be arriving soon and he doesn’t want to sit eating in stony silence if Phil really is mad, but what if- “Dan..? You okay love?” His thoughts come to a shuddering stop, and he freezes, not that he was moving anyway, instead lying curled in on himself, caught, as if he was being attacked by some external force, not from within his own mind. “Hey...” Phil says quietly, sitting down on the edge next to his feet, shrugging off the towel draped round his shoulders and reaching out to lay a hand gently on Dan’s thigh; “What’s wrong? What’s happened?” Dan can feel himself cringing as the silence stretches, hating himself for not having the nerve to sit up and speak to Phil, instead hiding himself away and no doubt worrying his boyfriend, but he just can’t. Which makes him feel worse, Phil will have yet another reason to be mad, as if there weren’t enough already, but what if he decides he’s too much trouble, what if he decides enough is en- “Dan. What’s got you upset love? Please tell me. I-I don’t know what’s wrong but- “It’s the worry clearly audible in his voice that frees some of Dan’s muscles up enough so he can nudge the phone, lying face-down on the bed. It’s less the vicious kick that he wants to give it, send it smashing into the wall or onto the floor, but he manages to nudge it with his knee, pushing it away from him slightly - enough for Phil to take the hint and snatch it up with shaking hands. There’s a long pause, whilst Phil unlocks the phone, then scrolls through what Dan had last been looking at. Dan’s curiosity gets the better of him quickly, and he sneaks a glance up at Phil, still concentrating, absorbed on the phone screen. Or so the thinks, right up until Phil looks down at him, making eye contact that Dan immediately shies away from. “Oh no you don’t...” Phil starts, standing up briefly, just enough to flop down back onto the bed on the other side of Dan, before rolling onto his side so he can face him on his level - if only he wasn’t still avoiding eye contact, or even looking at him, Phil’s choice of words having done nothing to soothe his fears that they’re heading towards a massive row. “Hi.” Phil begins, reaching over and poking Dan gently right between the eyebrows. “I hope you’re listening to me, cos I’m about to start listing in reverse order every stupid, daft, clumsy, utterly unimportant thing I’ve done that you’ve ignored or forgiven me for starting with the fact I just dropped the conditioner in the shower and wasted half the bottle…” Dan frowns, listening as Phil continues; “…fairly sure I left my tour hoodie at the venue yesterday, so that makes five…” This… It doesn’t make sense. He hit Phil in the face. He could have really hurt him, because he wasn’t being careful and- “Oi.” Phil interrupts, and it’s enough to derail his thoughts, stop them hurtling again. “You’re supposed to be listening to how terrible I am…” “‘m sorr- “ “Nope.” Phil immediately interrupts. “Nothing to be sorry for. We’re two lanky uncoordinated giants stuck in a tiny screened-off bit of a crowded room with loads of other people and I know however annoying I might get on a daily basis that you’d never actually try and hit me. So, no apologies, and no beating yourself up about it either. Else I will get annoyed, hear me?” “But-“ He tries to argue the point, because- “Yeah, I know, they know. And we know they know. But the only one taking this seriously that we need to take seriously is you.” “Phil. They- “ “Will have found something else to keyboard smash over by tomorrow.” he responds firmly, before his voice softens as he continues. “Dan… I’m not angry. I promise. And they’re… well, most of them are joking. I mean - it does look quite funny. Did you see my face when it happened?” He can’t help but chuckle quietly as he finishes, smiling at his boyfriend, reaching across to take his hand when he sees the aborted movement it makes. He’s relieved to see a smile, however tentative, appear on Dan’s face almost immediately. It’s at that point that there’s a knock at the door. Dan’s up in a flash, Phil barely has time to sit up before he’s yanking the door open. It takes him a little longer to reappear from the door of the room, but Phil assumes that’s due to the fact he’s carrying a large tray with their food balanced carefully when he does return. They sit next to each other on the bed, leaning against the headboard as they eat.  Phil thinks nothing of the silence that descends on the room, until he looks up when he’s about three-quarters done with his food, no longer ravenous, to find Dan has barely eaten anything, and instead of eating, he’s frowning down at his plate as he swirls his fork through the food. Phil places his plate back on the tray, and gently takes Dan’s out of his hands. When he turns back to his boyfriend, he finds him frowning at him, instead. That doesn’t change, even when Phil reaches out, gets his arms round his shoulders, and pulls Dan down with him as he shuffles down the bed. He’s lying somewhat comfortably, with Dan’s head resting on his shoulder, but he’s almost painfully aware of how stiffly Dan is lying, immobile, obviously still replaying the events of earlier in the day and punishing himself over it. This won’t do. He squeezes Dan in his arms tightly, and presses a line of kisses in his hair, to his temple, across his forehead and finishes on the end of his nose, huffing amusedly at Dan, frowning and cross-eyed as he watches him pull away to rest his head back on the pillow. Seizing his chance, he mouths “I. Love. You.” and as Dan raises his own head to press a kiss against his jaw, he smiles contentedly. “I love you too” he replies, lying back down, immediately curling into Phil’s body and tucking his face into his neck as he gets comfortable, before he finally, relaxes. Phil feels like cheering, like it’s a victory, but he’ll settle for the quiet moment and enjoy the intimacy whilst they can have it, as Dan’s arm creeps across his chest and gently tugs them that bit closer together. “I wanna stay…” he whispers, so quiet Phil feels it almost more than he hears it. He doesn’t blame him. He wants Dan to stay too – for them to spend the night curled together like this, rather than them separate in different rooms, and for Dan to be alone with his thoughts tonight. “So stay.” He replies, just as quietly, refusing to loosen his hold on Dan when he goes to move, to force himself to sit up; “Dan… just… please. Just a bit longer.” “Phil… I’m going to fall asleep and then-” “Shhh. Just a bit longer love.” He’s got a plan. And he’s determined to make it work. Sure enough, after another quiet period, Dan makes another two failed attempts to get up and leave, before he relaxes fully and Phil waits until his breathing evens out completely before he slowly and carefully slides out from under Dan’s body, then gently wraps the duvet around him, smiling as Dan immediately rolls himself over before settling. He retrieves Dan’s phone, plugging it into the charger and putting his own in his pocket, and finally brushes a kiss on Dan’s forehead before grabbing a change of clothes, his hotel room key and his trainers, before making for the door, closing it gently behind him. He’ll bring down a change of clothes for Dan in the morning.

[ks-caster]

A Story is Just a Lie You Fancy

Fandom: Once Upon a Time

Characters: Belle, Rumplestiltskin

Notes: I was real heckin’ disappointed when OUAT revealed who the writer was/how they characterized him (the original one) especially because I had thought from the start of that plotline that it would turn out to be Belle - it would explain her obsession with books and why, once in Storybrook, she never seemed to do anything to impact the plot. Below the cut is what I’d written so far for that idea.

Prologue: A New Dark One

The Beginning…

The Dark One was a problem; on that much, we could all agree.

Of course, none of us could agree whose problem, exactly, he was. Some said he ought to be left alone to wreak havoc in the world of his origin—we were record-keepers, not history-makers, and librarians don’t get to censor what they collect. Others reasoned that since his power came from us, to begin with, we had the responsibility to ensure that he didn’t misuse it more than he already had. 

Most argued that at least whatever complete numbskull actually created him ought to be the one to deal with him, but unfortunately, no one had any idea who it was. It might’ve been someone from R&D, piloting a new concept, or else someone from the Character Stockpile going a little overboard. Maybe an Editor or someone from Graphic Design, trying prove that they, too, could do things and affect outcomes. No one knew for sure, and no one was fessing up, which put the whole discussion back to square one, and while we argued and argued and argued, the Dark One’s power grew exponentially stronger with each successive host.

Who are we, you might be wondering? We, who have the power to accidentally create a creature like the Dark One, but who spend so much time talking about how to handle him that he becomes un-handle-able right under our noses?

We’re authors, that’s who.

Various cultures in various realms have had different names for us throughout the ages; I’ve personally—to my face, I mean—been called a god, a spirit, a demon, an angel, a watcher and a world-bender, but there are thousands of others that people have tossed around. We call ourselves the Wordsmiths, if you care. 

Back in the day—do I sound old or what? I’m in my youthful single-digit millions, I promise—each of us had a single job, working together as a team to shape culture and history throughout all the realms. Mine, for example, was to discover and define the concept of “home” for each successive place and people and individual. That might sound easy, but it was actually extremely complicated and time-consuming. For some, home was a location, for others, a people group or race; it could be a whole country, a house, a single room, a tiny bottle of soil… it varied. The sense of belonging that one can call “home” is impossible to truly standardize, but the whole point of humanity, in all its beautiful variety, is that very little can ever be truly standardized. 

That’s why humans need Wordsmiths to help keep the balance. But I digress.

Back to the point, I was sifting through one world—the locals referred to it as The Enchanted Forest—and I came across a particular character. He had this completely unspellable name, and I freely admit to calling him “spinner guy” for the longest time. I encountered many, many characters, but this one stood out, because of his wholehearted, selfless, beautiful love for his son. It didn’t get him anywhere, sadly, but I remember thinking it was incredible—especially because it wasn’t something he was ever taught; no one had ever modeled it for him. Spinner Guy’s love for his son was this innate thing that he was just born with, and every attempt the world made to crush it out of him just made it stronger, more unshakable.

It was around that time that our lead story-boarders came up with this elaborate ritual to nullify the power of the Dark One. Unfortunately the Dark One at that time—guy by the name of Zoso—was way too far gone. His human willpower was almost completely nonexistent. If he had the autonomy to make one more good choice, then the only one he had left in him was probably to try and pass on the dagger’s power by dying himself. That meant we needed a new host, someone as far on the side of light as possible, someone who would take on the Dark One’s curse out of love, rather than a lust for power. Every Wordsmith, regardless of their department, dropped everything to search for the best possible candidate.

That was why I ultimately learned to spell Rumpelstiltskin’s name.

I presented him—his whole file, everything I could glean from every department—to the Story-Board. I pointed out his desperate situation; his failing marriage, financial difficulties, negative reputation, everything working against him. I pointed out his miraculous love for his son, and the way it allowed him to overcome every obstacle, no matter what the cost to him. This, I said, this is a man who would take up the Dark One’s curse to protect his son, and whose love would keep the blackness from reaching his heart before we could get it out of him.

They considered other candidates, but ultimately picked mine.

I descended into his world to make that happen. There was no fanfare, no lightning, no me-waving-my-hands-and-making-magical-stuff-fly-around, nothing like that. No, in real life, a Wordsmith interfering directly goes like this: I took on the image of a fairy, waited for Zoso to hit a low point (happened a few times a month, hardly a long wait) and when he did, I appeared, talked to him, and advised him to give his power to another. I gave him Rumpelstiltskin’s name, and the location of his village. Then I left, flying off into the sunset on my fake fairy wings. 

Not a very interesting story, is it? But that was all it took. That’s how we work.

So, anyway, a new Dark One was born, and the Story-Boarders frantically started to work on the next step of the plan. I’m not on the Board—I’m sure that by now you’ve gathered that I’m not really important among my people—so I’m not totally sure how the spell worked. It involved some more getting-Rumpelstiltskin-to-make-decisions, something about getting him to the Base Rock, something about the blood of the purest love, a couple dozen other ingredients that everyone was scrambling to collect, and something about the one he loves most. It would take a little while to get everything ready, but in the meantime, our newest Dark One had Baelfire with him, and the boy could stall his father’s descent into darkness until we were ready to cure him of it.

Well, that was the idea.

That was before the kid got ahold of a previously extinct species of magic bean.

My real name doesn’t translate nicely into English, but you know me as Belle, and this is the story about how one simple thing I did—that one conversation with Zoso that was so boring I haven’t bothered to record it in full—broke the universe.

A Prisoner’s Memoir

A World Without Magic, between 1983 and 2011…

I didn’t use my powers while I was in prison—except twice, near the end. 

It was desperately boring, spending 28 years in a padded cell in the hospital basement with not a single person to talk to, and no way to pass the time, other than to replay history in my mind like a macabre video. At first, it wasn’t so bad. The wards the Story-Boarders placed on my mind when I took my little human vacation evaporated when the Dark Curse hit, so instead of having my memories wiped, I had them restored. I had a few million years’ worth of stories memorized, so I lay back on my cot, closed my eyes, relaxed my body, and started to recall them.

That pastime got me through about half of my internment.

There were two reasons for this deficit of amusement. The first is that the speed of thought is incomprehensibly faster than the speed of reality. My eyes rolled back in my head as I witnessed day after day, remembering adventure after adventure, hero after hero, outcome after outcome, and months would pass in my mind while only a few minutes ticked painstakingly by in the world around me. Over time, I ran out, started over, began to sift through and only re-watch the best parts. 

By the tenth year of my confinement, I’d reduced all of mortal history down to my hundred favorite stories. By the twelfth, I was down to my thirty favorite gifs. By the thirteenth, the thirty gifs had condensed to a series of images, and by the fourteenth year, I was left with a single, immobile collage. It burned itself into my head, tormented me by how sorrowfully limited it was. I’d arranged the images such that I could see the way one influenced another. History was the endless turning of a spinning wheel, creaking and squeaking and whirling and churning out thread after thread after thread after thread after thread after thread after thread after…

I think I was about twenty years in by the time I realized I really was going thoroughly crazy.

Spinning wheels reminded me of him, though, and that was sickeningly confusing. I still remembered being Belle, I still remembered loving him… no, that wasn’t true. I still loved him. I sort of loved him before I even met him, I think. That was why I’d volunteered to go down into the human world, powerless and defenseless, to slow his fall into darkness in the hopes that we could still find a way to save him… 

Anyway, it was complicated, because I also resented him. I might’ve gotten him into the whole mess, but his choices had gotten me into quite the cauldron of hot water myself. Of course, spinning wheels also reminded me of him in a positive light, because that endless cycle, in the right hands, could spin pure gold from the humblest of straw. I didn’t know what to think, and I still had to wait a total of 255,312,967 endless, paint-drying-slow seconds before I had a prayer of seeing him again, to even try and figure out how I felt about him.

And what to do about it, if I ever figured it out. 

After all, I wasn’t human. Wordsmiths can’t safely remain in human worlds for too long with our memories and powers in tact. I might sneeze and drop a continent into the ocean. I might have a nightmare and wish a whole retail chain and all its employees out of existence. 

Focusing on the past was infinitely better than focusing on the future, but my collage was starting to bore me to tears. I had to break it down, go back to the individual stories, and linger on the details, and for focus like that, I needed a physical outlet. That was the first time I used my powers; I made a book-binder down the street lose count and create one blank book more than his inventory required. Then as he re-counted in confusion, I “reminded” him that he’d intended the book and a package of fine-point pens in thirty different colors as a gift for someone in the hospital. He wrapped them in brown paper, gave them to the desk-attendant, who gave them to an orderly, who gave them to Doctor Whale, who brought them to me, and then all four of them forgot the whole un-memorable affair.

Just because I couldn’t interfere in the world at present didn’t mean I couldn’t prepare to help those who would interfere with it. In eight years, the savior was going to show up, but I knew a thing or two about humans from Base Rock. While she might have been designed to be compassionate and to feel a pull surrounding this place, her natural magic telling her that this was home, she was going to need some serious help believing. It wouldn’t be in her nature to be tied down, and certainly not to strangers and nebulous magic. She’d need to learn their history somehow—that was where I came in.

I spent eight years carefully planning, writing and illustrating The Storybook. I only had one shot at it—if the hurricane-level storms surrounding my very subtle acquisition of the materials was anything to go by—so I had to do everything perfectly the first time. The pictures had to be lifelike, had to be evidence, not just embellishments. The stories had to be exact, I had to resist the urge—which was strong—to censor them a little, to show characters in this or that light. I had to rid it of bias as much as possible. The Book wasn’t neither a commendation nor a condemnation. It was simply the truth of the matter. The only thing I cut out—obviously—was my own involvement in the very beginning, although I did include myself as Belle, the innocent human who loved the Beast. 

I wrote out every story in letters so uniform that anyone but another Wordsmith would swear that it was typed and printed. I had eight years to get it right, after all. I could go at a rate of one page per day, one drawing per week. 

Then, when it was finished, I used my powers one last time, and after the earthquake that they unleashed, Mary Margaret Blanchard cleaned out the mess that the shifting ground had made in her closet, and what should she discover but my book. She gifted it to Henry, and within six months, Henry had hopped on a greyhound bus and run off to Boston to find his birth mother. To find the savoir. I lay back in my cell, studying my latest mental collage of human history. It was starting to look more and more like a spinning wheel, but perhaps that was because I had made this one out of memories of Rumpelstiltskin. 

I hadn’t expected to enjoy being Belle, but I missed it—missed being her, and missed being with him. The only one of my powers that I retained back then was the uncanny ability to see the truth about people. Other than that, I was, for all intents and purposes, human, and that had been a remarkably calming state of being, now that I could look back on it objectively.

“I miss you, Rumpelstiltskin,” I whispered into the darkness after lights out. 

Across town, as Emma Swan paid for a room at Granny’s, she introduced herself to one, Mr. Gold, bringing back his memories with her magic-infused name…

New Mission

Storybrook, as the curse’s power began to wane…

I’d had no contact from the Story-Board in over thirty years, between the curse and my time as Belle in the Enchanted forest. That wasn’t long, in the grand scheme of things—you remember the part where I said I was a few million years old, right?—but in the middle of a crisis situation where every minute counted, a three-decade communication blackout was a little concerning. The people monitoring me had to have noticed that I had my head back on straight, and dream communication was fairly safe, but no matter how many nights I spent there in my padded cell, I didn’t hear one word from my people.

As I felt the curse wearing off (breaking it was a weirdly long process, I thought, but I didn’t dare use even my Far-Sight to figure out what was going on) I had to make a decision about what I would do when it broke. I could use the magical backlash wave to cover one quick use of my power, so I could return to my Publishing House if I wanted, but I was beginning to wonder if the Board would let me come back down after the whole Belle idea had backfired so badly. What if they pulled me off the project all together because so far my ideas had ended in catastrophe? Would I ever see Rumpelstiltskin again?

But I couldn’t stay here on Base Rock, at least not in my current state. I gave myself a week of being out in the world, rubbing shoulders with people and their problems, before I’d succumb and try and use my powers to change things. That couldn’t happen, not with the universe in the shape it was in at the moment. I loved Rumple, but I couldn’t sacrifice the world just to be with him.

But… I could sacrifice my powers, I realized. I’d have one moment where I could safely use the full extent of my Author powers—and in that moment, I could seal them away again, make it so I couldn’t use them by accident. Leave myself with only the soul-reading that I’d had as Belle. Then if anyone from the Story-Board ever asked me what I was doing, I could truthfully say that in the absence of further instructions, I’d continued the mission as planned. Then I could stick with Rumple, keep his heart from going black, and when they eventually managed to collect all the ingredients for the spell to fix him, I’d have him ready.

I wouldn’t let myself entertain the thought that they might decide he wasn’t a fit candidate anymore, and kill him to transfer the power to someone with a better chance. I wouldn’t let them. After everything I’d done to make sure that this would work with him as the vessel, I would not allow them to sacrifice him, not when I knew he still had some light left in him. At the end of the day, this was my plan, he was my candidate, and I should be the one to make the call, since I was the one closest to the action.

Yeah, yeah, rationalization, denial… I know. Shut up. 

I wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact moment the curse would break, but I could feel the magic building, getting ready to explode. I was ready.

Well, ready for the magic. I wasn’t ready for Jefferson to burst into my cell, telling me to go find Mr. Gold and tell him that Regina had locked me up. I wasn’t supposed to be around people until after the whole sealing thing, remember? But I was also supposed to play along with the story, not make waves and all that. And he was leaving the door open, telling me to go find my Rumpelstiltskin… 

I stumbled out, pretending to be in a curse-and-drug-induced haze. It wasn’t difficult; solitary confinement had not been kind to me, and I was ridiculously out of shape. The cheap hospital shoes didn’t help either, and I was sorely tempted to kick them off, but I supposed a human wouldn’t run around a 21st Century town barefoot, so I shuffled awkwardly in the general direction of Gold’s shop. I didn’t bother pretending I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t have the patience to muddle around in the stupid shoes and stop to ask for directions.

The doorbell jingled faintly as I entered. The day was overcast, so my eyes didn’t have to go far to adjust to the dusty, golden light that Rumple seemed to favor in every world. In his castle, it had looked mysterious and timeless. In this one, it gave the shop an antique-y aura, like I was stepping into time itself...

[ozarkwebdesign]

How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively

I mean, really, who doesn’t love a good meme? After all, most people use social media for entertainment. B2C marketers (business-to-customer) and business owners will do well to remember this and use their social media channels accordingly. And to that end, a good meme definitely offers fun and laughs. In fact, memes are one of the most likely forms of social media elements (along with funny videos) to go viral. And why not? They integrate and lend themselves extremely well to just about every social media platform. And the concise nature of expressive pictures associated with brief text makes them ideal for the incredibly fast-feeding frenzy that is social media today.

They are a big part of the fun on social media, and we all like to participate. Therefore, any digital marketing company worth its salt will always be asking how to generate viral memes to help engage people and drive more traffic.

So if you’re wanting a fun and creative way to engage and connect with people then maybe you should explore how to create and leverage memes for your social media marketing. And this guide will provide you with several practical tips on how to use memes more effectively.

Table of Contents:

How to Use Memes Effectively

Curate Memes for Your Keywords

Inspiration for Memes

Re-Purpose an Existing Meme

What about Copyright Infringement?

Inspirational and Motivational Memes

How to Make a Meme

Branding Your Memes

Memes Can Dramatically Improve Social Signals for Your Brand

The Key Takeaway

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How to Use Memes Effectively

Memes should reflect the voice and tone of your business.

Let’s start with this. As a business, it’s best not to overuse memes. For some of my customers, I’ll use one per week. Others will use less, depending on the tone and voice of the business itself. Of course, you do realize that your business creates its own voice and tone, right? For example, my tendency is to try to offer insight and some humor. And that’s based upon who I am as a person and what my career has looked like. I’ve been a presenter and instructor through most of my adult life and I value humor, so I intentionally shape my social media and blogging around those traits.  Some will like it, some will not. The same goes for you. Your voice and personality should resonate throughout your social channels and your blog. Anyway, on to our subject!

Your humor and your values should resonate in your memes. Some memes offer content that is inappropriate for a business–any business! Others may not be inappropriate from a social or ethical perspective, but they may not fit your business. It’s best to find those that are best suited for your voice and values.

Curate Memes for Your Keywords

I curate the vast majority of my memes. I simply run a Google search on the keyword for which I want to find a meme, then I add a qualifier like “meme”, “jokes”, or “humor”. So the search may look like this, “social media marketing memes” or “blogging jokes”. Occasionally this turns up other sources that may inspire me to create my own meme. More on that in a moment. 

On some social media business accounts that I manage, I will occasionally just tell a joke that my search turns up and see if people respond. In fact, a joke told with no picture attached, often gets some of the best interactions on a page. And on Facebook, this is pure gold. So don’t be afraid to tell a joke or share a funny story, and sometimes without a picture. This may seem counterintuitive since everything in social media is so picture and video-based. And you will undoubtedly read some writers who say you should always use graphics. However, I have found that the occasional simple post with no graphics, written in a personal way, garners some of the best results on a page. Just remember to use this practice in moderation, simply because social media is image and video-centric.

Inspiration for Memes

If you have ever wondered how to make niche memes, here’s an example. As mentioned above, sometimes I find inspiration for a meme while curating or reading jokes. Just this morning, inspiration came another way. (DISCLAIMER: In the following example I am not advocating any political position on gun legislation. It is simply an instance of inspiration, so please do not take offense.) I was reading through my Facebook feed and one of my friends, a military veteran, wrote a post about guns and how he doesn’t believe guns are good or bad. When I read that, I heard in my mind for some creative and bizarre reason (since that’s what my mind is like) the words of the old song by Dave Mason, “We Just Disagree.” This is what ran through my mind: “There ain’t no good guns. There ain’t no bad guns. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.” Boom, baby! That’s meme fodder, right there. And that’s how inspiration works. So when you get, just go with it. At the end of your creative process, try to evaluate honestly whether it’s good or not-so-much.

This is an example of creating a niche meme that will get a lot of shares.

So what did I do next? What’s the process? Well, first I thought of who might best represent this sentiment in a meme? I thought of the military (like my friend). Nope. Not quite right. Perhaps someone older who would fit the age of the song reference. Yes, good idea. Maybe a gunslinger hero? Bingo. Tough guy? Definitely. Maybe a likable cowboy? Hmm…Sam Elliott? Touchdown! There have been lots of memes created with actor Sam Elliott in them. So I looked for a meme template by searching,“Sam Elliott blank memes”. I found the following pic and added the words, and I now have an original meme with a hot topic that will be very shareable. 

And even though it doesn’t really fit my brand well, I will still use it just because it does have the potential to get shared.  In fact, I’ve already decided how I’ll use it in a way that fits my business type.  I will use it in a series of posts about creating memes that link back to this article.  So you see, even though a meme may not exactly fit your brand, you can sometimes use them in a creative way and get some good social signals from it. (More about social signals later in the post…)

Re-purpose an Existing Meme

This funny pic was one that I came across in my Facebook feed. I had recently watched a video about clarity in marketing and it occurred to me that the picture in this was perfect for that theme. And as an added bonus, there was no copyright displayed, plus, there was plenty of negative space at the bottom so I was able to simply add the phrase, “Be clear in your marketing”.

This example is from a very common meme that I have seen quite a bit. However, I now have a roofer whose social media I manage, so I saw this from a different perspective. I recently wrote a blog article about soffit and fascia for him, so when I saw this meme, guess what caught my attention? Right. Browsing through all those roofing images and pictures of fascia suddenly paid off in a different way. 

So you can sometimes see a meme or funny picture from a different perspective and re-purpose and reframe it to that new point of view. And it this case, the different perspective is what actually creates the humor.  BTW, it’s also good to include the new keywords in the title. The title and description of this image use the words “fascia board” and “meme”.

Share it on the right social media channel, but put your own spin on it.

Another good practice is to simply share existing memes and put your own spin on it in your comments. The massively popular grumpy cat meme has offered me several such opportunities.  The one that says, “Had fun once. Hated it.” has given me a lot to work with. For example, add a comment like, “Warning: This is my mode every Monday” or “every morning before coffee.” These things personalize the existing meme and add your voice to it. This is why it is a very good practice to comment on nearly anything you share, even if it’s only a simple “LOL” or “So true” comment. And if you can’t come up with a salient comment to add, just use something simple and then add an emoji or gif.

Another note of importance here is that every meme you use may not fit every social media channel. For example, what works well on Facebook sometimes won’t work nearly as well on LinkedIn due to the vast difference in those two channels. So consider the SM channel and whether the meme fits in with the ambiance.

But what about copyright infringement?

Great question! Strictly speaking, you can assume that any meme that is popular has been copyrighted. So if you don’t find it in a Creative Commons search or website, or if it isn’t public domain, then you had better realize that you don’t own the right to freely share it. But, that being said, with literally millions of memes being created and shared on a daily basis, sharing on social media is a bit of a different critter. If you stick with the most popular memes, licensed meme generating software sites, or simply sharing and commenting, the preponderance of anecdotal evidence (millions of memes created and shared daily) tells us that we really need not worry. Here is a helpful article from Northeastern University that explores the legalities and disposition in which courts view memes.

Inspirational and Motivational Memes

Brainy Quote offers a good source of intelligent inspirational and motivational quotes. This pic was from their Top Ten list. (Click the image to visit the website.)

Both of these genres can be helpful in your social media content curation and planning. Some of the businesses I work with will specifically request more motivational or inspirational posts, while others lean more toward current events or humor. I personally advocate a blend of all of these. Here are a good experiment and analysis. Simply observe your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feed for two or three days and take note of the memes that gain the most traction and popularity among your friends. Rule out any that come from pages that you follow, and simply observe what your friends (or followers) share. This will give you an anecdotal sampling of what is resonating with what kinds of people. 

Now consider, what demographics are you targeting in your social media? If you don’t have many that fit this avatar in your personal Facebook feed, then join a group where these folks hang out. You will be able to observe them there. This can help you determine what mix or style of meme content you want to post on your social media. And remember, just because you may like your memes funny, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is what appeals best to everyone else. Be open to using motivational or inspirational memes since they are very popular. And conversely, if you tend to gravitate toward the more serious memes, don’t be afraid to lighten it up and use some joke memes. I guarantee that some of your readers will appreciate it.

How to Make a Meme

An example of a meme to provoke conversation on social media.

Perhaps the easiest way to make your own memes is to use an online meme generator such as imgflip.com or makeameme.org. There are free versions of various sites where you can browse the images and create your text very simply. These will typically be watermarked or branded by the software. To create versions of these without watermarks, which I recommend, you can usually get a paid “pro” version of the more popular meme generators which is very inexpensive. I just paid $2.95 for one month in imageflip and made this meme. Plus, if you’re concerned about copyrights, this may be the best avenue for you.

For those who are more DIYers, rather than using an online meme maker you may prefer to use your own editing software (I highly recommend Affinity Photo) or online graphics sites like Canva.com are the usual choices.

Branding Your Memes

It’s a good practice to brand a meme that you have created so long as you intend to use it as a promotional feature. It’s akin to wearing a tee-shirt with your company name or sporting a window cling with your business name in your car.  I do it on business-relevant memes or on memes that I create that I think may have a chance of going viral. Even so, I don’t brand most of the existing popular memes I use, mainly because everyone knows that’s a “rip-off” and in my humble opinion it cheapens the feel of your brand and has a bit of a greasy uber-salesman vibe to it.

When you do brand, the standard practice is to place your logo and/or name (I personally prefer the printed name version of my logo) somewhere on the meme with some transparency so it is not glaring and detracting from the overall effect. It has become more common of late to place your brand somewhere inside the image rather than at the extreme bottom.  This way, it’s not as easy for others to rip-off…um, excuse me…borrow your meme and replace your logo with theirs.

Are you missing out on your social media's potential for outreach? Get professional social media management now.

Let's Get Started!

Memes can dramatically improve Social Signals for your brand.

Many people who aren’t involved with SEO tactics are unfamiliar with social signals. In short, they are all the interactions and link follows you get from social channels. These all eventually drip out to all the various search engines as signals that your brand and your website have popularity and relevance. This means that every share, like, pin, view, and vote matters. In fact, they matter a great deal. 

You see, search engines interpret your social signals as legitimate evidence that your brand is being seen and shared by consumers. This, then, translates into an improvement in your website or social channel’s SERP (Search Engine Page Rank). And that’s because social signals you’re receiving are interpreted as trusted recommendations for your brand from consumers. You should not underestimate the significant importance of social signals for your brand marketing. And just think, memes, when used effectively, can help with that!

The Key Takeaway

Due to the transient and fickle nature of social mood, popular and relevant themes will ebb and flow. Still, we believe that memes are now a permanent part of social sharing. These little jewels are simple to make and even easier for people to share, so from a marketing perspective, the ROI is great considering their explosive potential of going viral.

That being said, you must still give due diligence to your keywords, meme content, your target demographic and how it integrates with your brand. But wow, when the stars align for you, your meme could expand your brand like never before!

Like this? Please share it!

Share on facebook

Share on twitter

Share on linkedin

Share on pinterest

Share on reddit

Share on email

The post How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively appeared first on Ozark Web Design.

from Ozark Web Design https://ozarkwebdesign.com/how-to-make-memes-for-your-business-and-use-them-effectively/

[rosajspinksca]

How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively

I mean, really, who doesn’t love a good meme? After all, most people use social media for entertainment. B2C marketers (business-to-customer) and business owners will do well to remember this and use their social media channels accordingly. And to that end, a good meme definitely offers fun and laughs. In fact, memes are one of the most likely forms of social media elements (along with funny videos) to go viral. And why not? They integrate and lend themselves extremely well to just about every social media platform. And the concise nature of expressive pictures associated with brief text makes them ideal for the incredibly fast-feeding frenzy that is social media today.

They are a big part of the fun on social media, and we all like to participate. Therefore, any digital marketing company worth its salt will always be asking how to generate viral memes to help engage people and drive more traffic.

So if you’re wanting a fun and creative way to engage and connect with people then maybe you should explore how to create and leverage memes for your social media marketing. And this guide will provide you with several practical tips on how to use memes more effectively.

Table of Contents:

How to Use Memes Effectively

Curate Memes for Your Keywords

Inspiration for Memes

Re-Purpose an Existing Meme

What about Copyright Infringement?

Inspirational and Motivational Memes

How to Make a Meme

Branding Your Memes

Memes Can Dramatically Improve Social Signals for Your Brand

The Key Takeaway

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How to Use Memes Effectively

Memes should reflect the voice and tone of your business.

Let’s start with this. As a business, it’s best not to overuse memes. For some of my customers, I’ll use one per week. Others will use less, depending on the tone and voice of the business itself. Of course, you do realize that your business creates its own voice and tone, right? For example, my tendency is to try to offer insight and some humor. And that’s based upon who I am as a person and what my career has looked like. I’ve been a presenter and instructor through most of my adult life and I value humor, so I intentionally shape my social media and blogging around those traits.  Some will like it, some will not. The same goes for you. Your voice and personality should resonate throughout your social channels and your blog. Anyway, on to our subject!

Your humor and your values should resonate in your memes. Some memes offer content that is inappropriate for a business–any business! Others may not be inappropriate from a social or ethical perspective, but they may not fit your business. It’s best to find those that are best suited for your voice and values.

Curate Memes for Your Keywords

I curate the vast majority of my memes. I simply run a Google search on the keyword for which I want to find a meme, then I add a qualifier like “meme”, “jokes”, or “humor”. So the search may look like this, “social media marketing memes” or “blogging jokes”. Occasionally this turns up other sources that may inspire me to create my own meme. More on that in a moment. 

On some social media business accounts that I manage, I will occasionally just tell a joke that my search turns up and see if people respond. In fact, a joke told with no picture attached, often gets some of the best interactions on a page. And on Facebook, this is pure gold. So don’t be afraid to tell a joke or share a funny story, and sometimes without a picture. This may seem counterintuitive since everything in social media is so picture and video-based. And you will undoubtedly read some writers who say you should always use graphics. However, I have found that the occasional simple post with no graphics, written in a personal way, garners some of the best results on a page. Just remember to use this practice in moderation, simply because social media is image and video-centric.

Inspiration for Memes

If you have ever wondered how to make niche memes, here’s an example. As mentioned above, sometimes I find inspiration for a meme while curating or reading jokes. Just this morning, inspiration came another way. (DISCLAIMER: In the following example I am not advocating any political position on gun legislation. It is simply an instance of inspiration, so please do not take offense.) I was reading through my Facebook feed and one of my friends, a military veteran, wrote a post about guns and how he doesn’t believe guns are good or bad. When I read that, I heard in my mind for some creative and bizarre reason (since that’s what my mind is like) the words of the old song by Dave Mason, “We Just Disagree.” This is what ran through my mind: “There ain’t no good guns. There ain’t no bad guns. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.” Boom, baby! That’s meme fodder, right there. And that’s how inspiration works. So when you get, just go with it. At the end of your creative process, try to evaluate honestly whether it’s good or not-so-much.

This is an example of creating a niche meme that will get a lot of shares.

So what did I do next? What’s the process? Well, first I thought of who might best represent this sentiment in a meme? I thought of the military (like my friend). Nope. Not quite right. Perhaps someone older who would fit the age of the song reference. Yes, good idea. Maybe a gunslinger hero? Bingo. Tough guy? Definitely. Maybe a likable cowboy? Hmm…Sam Elliott? Touchdown! There have been lots of memes created with actor Sam Elliott in them. So I looked for a meme template by searching,“Sam Elliott blank memes”. I found the following pic and added the words, and I now have an original meme with a hot topic that will be very shareable. 

And even though it doesn’t really fit my brand well, I will still use it just because it does have the potential to get shared.  In fact, I’ve already decided how I’ll use it in a way that fits my business type.  I will use it in a series of posts about creating memes that link back to this article.  So you see, even though a meme may not exactly fit your brand, you can sometimes use them in a creative way and get some good social signals from it. (More about social signals later in the post…)

Re-purpose an Existing Meme

This funny pic was one that I came across in my Facebook feed. I had recently watched a video about clarity in marketing and it occurred to me that the picture in this was perfect for that theme. And as an added bonus, there was no copyright displayed, plus, there was plenty of negative space at the bottom so I was able to simply add the phrase, “Be clear in your marketing”.

This example is from a very common meme that I have seen quite a bit. However, I now have a roofer whose social media I manage, so I saw this from a different perspective. I recently wrote a blog article about soffit and fascia for him, so when I saw this meme, guess what caught my attention? Right. Browsing through all those roofing images and pictures of fascia suddenly paid off in a different way. 

So you can sometimes see a meme or funny picture from a different perspective and re-purpose and reframe it to that new point of view. And it this case, the different perspective is what actually creates the humor.  BTW, it’s also good to include the new keywords in the title. The title and description of this image use the words “fascia board” and “meme”.

Share it on the right social media channel, but put your own spin on it.

Another good practice is to simply share existing memes and put your own spin on it in your comments. The massively popular grumpy cat meme has offered me several such opportunities.  The one that says, “Had fun once. Hated it.” has given me a lot to work with. For example, add a comment like, “Warning: This is my mode every Monday” or “every morning before coffee.” These things personalize the existing meme and add your voice to it. This is why it is a very good practice to comment on nearly anything you share, even if it’s only a simple “LOL” or “So true” comment. And if you can’t come up with a salient comment to add, just use something simple and then add an emoji or gif.

Another note of importance here is that every meme you use may not fit every social media channel. For example, what works well on Facebook sometimes won’t work nearly as well on LinkedIn due to the vast difference in those two channels. So consider the SM channel and whether the meme fits in with the ambiance.

But what about copyright infringement?

Great question! Strictly speaking, you can assume that any meme that is popular has been copyrighted. So if you don’t find it in a Creative Commons search or website, or if it isn’t public domain, then you had better realize that you don’t own the right to freely share it. But, that being said, with literally millions of memes being created and shared on a daily basis, sharing on social media is a bit of a different critter. If you stick with the most popular memes, licensed meme generating software sites, or simply sharing and commenting, the preponderance of anecdotal evidence (millions of memes created and shared daily) tells us that we really need not worry. Here is a helpful article from Northeastern University that explores the legalities and disposition in which courts view memes.

Inspirational and Motivational Memes

Brainy Quote offers a good source of intelligent inspirational and motivational quotes. This pic was from their Top Ten list. (Click the image to visit the website.)

Both of these genres can be helpful in your social media content curation and planning. Some of the businesses I work with will specifically request more motivational or inspirational posts, while others lean more toward current events or humor. I personally advocate a blend of all of these. Here are a good experiment and analysis. Simply observe your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feed for two or three days and take note of the memes that gain the most traction and popularity among your friends. Rule out any that come from pages that you follow, and simply observe what your friends (or followers) share. This will give you an anecdotal sampling of what is resonating with what kinds of people. 

Now consider, what demographics are you targeting in your social media? If you don’t have many that fit this avatar in your personal Facebook feed, then join a group where these folks hang out. You will be able to observe them there. This can help you determine what mix or style of meme content you want to post on your social media. And remember, just because you may like your memes funny, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is what appeals best to everyone else. Be open to using motivational or inspirational memes since they are very popular. And conversely, if you tend to gravitate toward the more serious memes, don’t be afraid to lighten it up and use some joke memes. I guarantee that some of your readers will appreciate it.

How to Make a Meme

An example of a meme to provoke conversation on social media.

Perhaps the easiest way to make your own memes is to use an online meme generator such as imgflip.com or makeameme.org. There are free versions of various sites where you can browse the images and create your text very simply. These will typically be watermarked or branded by the software. To create versions of these without watermarks, which I recommend, you can usually get a paid “pro” version of the more popular meme generators which is very inexpensive. I just paid $2.95 for one month in imageflip and made this meme. Plus, if you’re concerned about copyrights, this may be the best avenue for you.

For those who are more DIYers, rather than using an online meme maker you may prefer to use your own editing software (I highly recommend Affinity Photo) or online graphics sites like Canva.com are the usual choices.

Branding Your Memes

It’s a good practice to brand a meme that you have created so long as you intend to use it as a promotional feature. It’s akin to wearing a tee-shirt with your company name or sporting a window cling with your business name in your car.  I do it on business-relevant memes or on memes that I create that I think may have a chance of going viral. Even so, I don’t brand most of the existing popular memes I use, mainly because everyone knows that’s a “rip-off” and in my humble opinion it cheapens the feel of your brand and has a bit of a greasy uber-salesman vibe to it.

When you do brand, the standard practice is to place your logo and/or name (I personally prefer the printed name version of my logo) somewhere on the meme with some transparency so it is not glaring and detracting from the overall effect. It has become more common of late to place your brand somewhere inside the image rather than at the extreme bottom.  This way, it’s not as easy for others to rip-off…um, excuse me…borrow your meme and replace your logo with theirs.

Are you missing out on your social media's potential for outreach? Get professional social media management now.

Let's Get Started!

Memes can dramatically improve Social Signals for your brand.

Many people who aren’t involved with SEO tactics are unfamiliar with social signals. In short, they are all the interactions and link follows you get from social channels. These all eventually drip out to all the various search engines as signals that your brand and your website have popularity and relevance. This means that every share, like, pin, view, and vote matters. In fact, they matter a great deal. 

You see, search engines interpret your social signals as legitimate evidence that your brand is being seen and shared by consumers. This, then, translates into an improvement in your website or social channel’s SERP (Search Engine Page Rank). And that’s because social signals you’re receiving are interpreted as trusted recommendations for your brand from consumers. You should not underestimate the significant importance of social signals for your brand marketing. And just think, memes, when used effectively, can help with that!

The Key Takeaway

Due to the transient and fickle nature of social mood, popular and relevant themes will ebb and flow. Still, we believe that memes are now a permanent part of social sharing. These little jewels are simple to make and even easier for people to share, so from a marketing perspective, the ROI is great considering their explosive potential of going viral.

That being said, you must still give due diligence to your keywords, meme content, your target demographic and how it integrates with your brand. But wow, when the stars align for you, your meme could expand your brand like never before!

Like this? Please share it!

Share on facebook

Share on twitter

Share on linkedin

Share on pinterest

Share on reddit

Share on email

The post How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively appeared first on Ozark Web Design.

source https://ozarkwebdesign.com/how-to-make-memes-for-your-business-and-use-them-effectively/ from Ozark Web Design https://ozarkwebdesign1.blogspot.com/2019/10/how-to-make-memes-for-your-business-and.html

[ozarkwebdesignseo]

How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively

I mean, really, who doesn’t love a good meme? After all, most people use social media for entertainment. B2C marketers (business-to-customer) and business owners will do well to remember this and use their social media channels accordingly. And to that end, a good meme definitely offers fun and laughs. In fact, memes are one of the most likely forms of social media elements (along with funny videos) to go viral. And why not? They integrate and lend themselves extremely well to just about every social media platform. And the concise nature of expressive pictures associated with brief text makes them ideal for the incredibly fast-feeding frenzy that is social media today.

They are a big part of the fun on social media, and we all like to participate. Therefore, any digital marketing company worth its salt will always be asking how to generate viral memes to help engage people and drive more traffic.

So if you’re wanting a fun and creative way to engage and connect with people then maybe you should explore how to create and leverage memes for your social media marketing. And this guide will provide you with several practical tips on how to use memes more effectively.

Table of Contents:

How to Use Memes Effectively

Curate Memes for Your Keywords

Inspiration for Memes

Re-Purpose an Existing Meme

What about Copyright Infringement?

Inspirational and Motivational Memes

How to Make a Meme

Branding Your Memes

Memes Can Dramatically Improve Social Signals for Your Brand

The Key Takeaway

Why SEO Marketing is So Effective for Local Small Businesses

September 17, 2019 No Comments

If you are a small business owner or doing a startup business, or even a micro business or side-hustle, the

Read More »

Increase Post Engagement with Personal Happenings

September 25, 2017 No Comments

A sure-fire way to boost post engagement on Facebook is to occasionally post a “personal happening” – maybe once or

Read More »

Optimize SEO with Google Plus

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Optimize Your Social Media It is sometimes difficult, I know, just to keep up with posting to one’s own Facebook

Read More »

How to Use Memes Effectively

Memes should reflect the voice and tone of your business.

Let’s start with this. As a business, it’s best not to overuse memes. For some of my customers, I’ll use one per week. Others will use less, depending on the tone and voice of the business itself. Of course, you do realize that your business creates its own voice and tone, right? For example, my tendency is to try to offer insight and some humor. And that’s based upon who I am as a person and what my career has looked like. I’ve been a presenter and instructor through most of my adult life and I value humor, so I intentionally shape my social media and blogging around those traits.  Some will like it, some will not. The same goes for you. Your voice and personality should resonate throughout your social channels and your blog. Anyway, on to our subject!

Your humor and your values should resonate in your memes. Some memes offer content that is inappropriate for a business–any business! Others may not be inappropriate from a social or ethical perspective, but they may not fit your business. It’s best to find those that are best suited for your voice and values.

Curate Memes for Your Keywords

I curate the vast majority of my memes. I simply run a Google search on the keyword for which I want to find a meme, then I add a qualifier like “meme”, “jokes”, or “humor”. So the search may look like this, “social media marketing memes” or “blogging jokes”. Occasionally this turns up other sources that may inspire me to create my own meme. More on that in a moment. 

On some social media business accounts that I manage, I will occasionally just tell a joke that my search turns up and see if people respond. In fact, a joke told with no picture attached, often gets some of the best interactions on a page. And on Facebook, this is pure gold. So don’t be afraid to tell a joke or share a funny story, and sometimes without a picture. This may seem counterintuitive since everything in social media is so picture and video-based. And you will undoubtedly read some writers who say you should always use graphics. However, I have found that the occasional simple post with no graphics, written in a personal way, garners some of the best results on a page. Just remember to use this practice in moderation, simply because social media is image and video-centric.

Inspiration for Memes

If you have ever wondered how to make niche memes, here’s an example. As mentioned above, sometimes I find inspiration for a meme while curating or reading jokes. Just this morning, inspiration came another way. (DISCLAIMER: In the following example I am not advocating any political position on gun legislation. It is simply an instance of inspiration, so please do not take offense.) I was reading through my Facebook feed and one of my friends, a military veteran, wrote a post about guns and how he doesn’t believe guns are good or bad. When I read that, I heard in my mind for some creative and bizarre reason (since that’s what my mind is like) the words of the old song by Dave Mason, “We Just Disagree.” This is what ran through my mind: “There ain’t no good guns. There ain’t no bad guns. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.” Boom, baby! That’s meme fodder, right there. And that’s how inspiration works. So when you get, just go with it. At the end of your creative process, try to evaluate honestly whether it’s good or not-so-much.

This is an example of creating a niche meme that will get a lot of shares.

So what did I do next? What’s the process? Well, first I thought of who might best represent this sentiment in a meme? I thought of the military (like my friend). Nope. Not quite right. Perhaps someone older who would fit the age of the song reference. Yes, good idea. Maybe a gunslinger hero? Bingo. Tough guy? Definitely. Maybe a likable cowboy? Hmm…Sam Elliott? Touchdown! There have been lots of memes created with actor Sam Elliott in them. So I looked for a meme template by searching,“Sam Elliott blank memes”. I found the following pic and added the words, and I now have an original meme with a hot topic that will be very shareable. 

And even though it doesn’t really fit my brand well, I will still use it just because it does have the potential to get shared.  In fact, I’ve already decided how I’ll use it in a way that fits my business type.  I will use it in a series of posts about creating memes that link back to this article.  So you see, even though a meme may not exactly fit your brand, you can sometimes use them in a creative way and get some good social signals from it. (More about social signals later in the post…)

Re-purpose an Existing Meme

This funny pic was one that I came across in my Facebook feed. I had recently watched a video about clarity in marketing and it occurred to me that the picture in this was perfect for that theme. And as an added bonus, there was no copyright displayed, plus, there was plenty of negative space at the bottom so I was able to simply add the phrase, “Be clear in your marketing”.

This example is from a very common meme that I have seen quite a bit. However, I now have a roofer whose social media I manage, so I saw this from a different perspective. I recently wrote a blog article about soffit and fascia for him, so when I saw this meme, guess what caught my attention? Right. Browsing through all those roofing images and pictures of fascia suddenly paid off in a different way. 

So you can sometimes see a meme or funny picture from a different perspective and re-purpose and reframe it to that new point of view. And it this case, the different perspective is what actually creates the humor.  BTW, it’s also good to include the new keywords in the title. The title and description of this image use the words “fascia board” and “meme”.

Share it on the right social media channel, but put your own spin on it.

Another good practice is to simply share existing memes and put your own spin on it in your comments. The massively popular grumpy cat meme has offered me several such opportunities.  The one that says, “Had fun once. Hated it.” has given me a lot to work with. For example, add a comment like, “Warning: This is my mode every Monday” or “every morning before coffee.” These things personalize the existing meme and add your voice to it. This is why it is a very good practice to comment on nearly anything you share, even if it’s only a simple “LOL” or “So true” comment. And if you can’t come up with a salient comment to add, just use something simple and then add an emoji or gif.

Another note of importance here is that every meme you use may not fit every social media channel. For example, what works well on Facebook sometimes won’t work nearly as well on LinkedIn due to the vast difference in those two channels. So consider the SM channel and whether the meme fits in with the ambiance.

But what about copyright infringement?

Great question! Strictly speaking, you can assume that any meme that is popular has been copyrighted. So if you don’t find it in a Creative Commons search or website, or if it isn’t public domain, then you had better realize that you don’t own the right to freely share it. But, that being said, with literally millions of memes being created and shared on a daily basis, sharing on social media is a bit of a different critter. If you stick with the most popular memes, licensed meme generating software sites, or simply sharing and commenting, the preponderance of anecdotal evidence (millions of memes created and shared daily) tells us that we really need not worry. Here is a helpful article from Northeastern University that explores the legalities and disposition in which courts view memes.

Inspirational and Motivational Memes

Brainy Quote offers a good source of intelligent inspirational and motivational quotes. This pic was from their Top Ten list. (Click the image to visit the website.)

Both of these genres can be helpful in your social media content curation and planning. Some of the businesses I work with will specifically request more motivational or inspirational posts, while others lean more toward current events or humor. I personally advocate a blend of all of these. Here are a good experiment and analysis. Simply observe your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feed for two or three days and take note of the memes that gain the most traction and popularity among your friends. Rule out any that come from pages that you follow, and simply observe what your friends (or followers) share. This will give you an anecdotal sampling of what is resonating with what kinds of people. 

Now consider, what demographics are you targeting in your social media? If you don’t have many that fit this avatar in your personal Facebook feed, then join a group where these folks hang out. You will be able to observe them there. This can help you determine what mix or style of meme content you want to post on your social media. And remember, just because you may like your memes funny, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is what appeals best to everyone else. Be open to using motivational or inspirational memes since they are very popular. And conversely, if you tend to gravitate toward the more serious memes, don’t be afraid to lighten it up and use some joke memes. I guarantee that some of your readers will appreciate it.

How to Make a Meme

An example of a meme to provoke conversation on social media.

Perhaps the easiest way to make your own memes is to use an online meme generator such as imgflip.com or makeameme.org. There are free versions of various sites where you can browse the images and create your text very simply. These will typically be watermarked or branded by the software. To create versions of these without watermarks, which I recommend, you can usually get a paid “pro” version of the more popular meme generators which is very inexpensive. I just paid $2.95 for one month in imageflip and made this meme. Plus, if you’re concerned about copyrights, this may be the best avenue for you.

For those who are more DIYers, rather than using an online meme maker you may prefer to use your own editing software (I highly recommend Affinity Photo) or online graphics sites like Canva.com are the usual choices.

Branding Your Memes

It’s a good practice to brand a meme that you have created so long as you intend to use it as a promotional feature. It’s akin to wearing a tee-shirt with your company name or sporting a window cling with your business name in your car.  I do it on business-relevant memes or on memes that I create that I think may have a chance of going viral. Even so, I don’t brand most of the existing popular memes I use, mainly because everyone knows that’s a “rip-off” and in my humble opinion it cheapens the feel of your brand and has a bit of a greasy uber-salesman vibe to it.

When you do brand, the standard practice is to place your logo and/or name (I personally prefer the printed name version of my logo) somewhere on the meme with some transparency so it is not glaring and detracting from the overall effect. It has become more common of late to place your brand somewhere inside the image rather than at the extreme bottom.  This way, it’s not as easy for others to rip-off…um, excuse me…borrow your meme and replace your logo with theirs.

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Memes can dramatically improve Social Signals for your brand.

Many people who aren’t involved with SEO tactics are unfamiliar with social signals. In short, they are all the interactions and link follows you get from social channels. These all eventually drip out to all the various search engines as signals that your brand and your website have popularity and relevance. This means that every share, like, pin, view, and vote matters. In fact, they matter a great deal. 

You see, search engines interpret your social signals as legitimate evidence that your brand is being seen and shared by consumers. This, then, translates into an improvement in your website or social channel’s SERP (Search Engine Page Rank). And that’s because social signals you’re receiving are interpreted as trusted recommendations for your brand from consumers. You should not underestimate the significant importance of social signals for your brand marketing. And just think, memes, when used effectively, can help with that!

The Key Takeaway

Due to the transient and fickle nature of social mood, popular and relevant themes will ebb and flow. Still, we believe that memes are now a permanent part of social sharing. These little jewels are simple to make and even easier for people to share, so from a marketing perspective, the ROI is great considering their explosive potential of going viral.

That being said, you must still give due diligence to your keywords, meme content, your target demographic and how it integrates with your brand. But wow, when the stars align for you, your meme could expand your brand like never before!

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The post How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively appeared first on Ozark Web Design.

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