#classified software

[businessadvis321]

Key Revenue Factors for Your Classified Marketplace in 2024

In today's tech-driven era, the classified business has emerged as a super business with the power of technology. Businesses have changed their work algorithm in a convenient, quick, and hassle-free way. 

While the core concept remains the same, the transition to digital platforms has made the experience seamless. Enter into a world of seamless and profitable Classified Software business experiences. In a constantly evolving world, your approach to buying and selling should evolve too.

Adapting to the new change - the classifieds script is the key to unlocking your business success. How did the classified ad script elevate your business success? 

This article explores strategies to maximize the revenue of your classified ads business. 

Let's begin with some enlightening statistics!

What is a Classified Marketplace?

A few years ago, people often confused classified advertising with traditional classified ad script businesses, where goods were listed for resale in newspapers. Interested buyers would contact sellers directly to negotiate prices.

In today's fast-paced world, newspapers have also gone digital, and so has classified advertising. Classified software emerged, enabling users to buy and sell items directly, without intermediaries. This shift has facilitated a transition to a customer-to-customer (C2C) model in classifieds.

C2C online marketplace apps are similar to e-commerce apps. The only difference is, that in classified applications, people can sell their used goods. Letgo and OfferUp are a notable classified marketplace to buy and sell used products.

Growing Demand for Classified Marketplace

The online classified market is dynamic and evolving, facing exciting challenges. Studies indicate a positive outlook among industry leaders about its future. A significant 84% of CEOs and owners in online classified enterprises expressed optimism about the market's prospects in the coming years.

The business model in classifieds is increasingly emphasizing transactional incomes. Currently, revenues from transactional services constitute an average of 15% of companies' total revenues, with expectations to grow up to 50% in the future.

Looking ahead, the online classifieds market is projected to reach $741.47 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.80% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2032.

Industry reports also highlight the future plans among companies, with 57% planning to launch new products and 59% intending to hire new employees in the coming years. 

Furthermore, 39% of surveyed businesses plan to modify their operations within the next 3-5 years to stay competitive and innovative in the dynamic classified industry.

How does a Classified Marketplace Make Money?

Each online platform adopts different monetization strategies. Here are the most commonly used models across the classified marketplace like Letgo:

In-App Advertisement 

Harnessing in-app advertisements effectively boosts individual user product visibility on the platform. Here's how integrating targeted in-app advertising can drive revenue:

Implement Targeted Advertising: Set up a system that lets sellers display their products to a specific audience based on user preferences, location, and search history. This targeted approach improves user engagement and increases the possibility of conversions.

Encourage User Engagement: To maximize earnings, focus on keeping users engaged on your classified software for longer periods. Enable sellers to create special offers, discounts, or bundled deals that attract more buyers. 

This not only promotes individual listings but also encourages multiple purchases, thereby increasing overall sales and revenue.

Membership Fee 

Another effective way to monetize a classifieds script is by implementing membership fees. This can be divided into two categories: special features for a price and subscription plans.

Special Features for a Price 

Offer special features to premium users. For example, users can pay to have their listings appear at the top of search results. This not only generates revenue but also provides added value to users willing to pay for extra visibility.

Subscription Plans 

While not all marketplaces use this feature, subscription plans can be a valuable addition to increase revenue. By offering different plans, users can choose a level of service that suits their needs. 

For instance, a platform like Contentplace might offer three subscription plans, each providing various benefits based on the price. Casual users can opt for a basic plan, while more frequent users might choose a premium plan for additional features. 

This tiered approach caters to different user needs and maximizes the revenue potential of your classified ads marketplace.

Seller Fee

The seller fee is similar to the membership fee. Sellers pay a small amount to list their products on the platform, typically between 1% and 5% of the sale price.

Interestingly, some platforms allow sellers to decide how much they want to charge. For small traders or those selling just a few items, the fee might be minimal. This flexibility makes it easier for sellers to list their products without significant upfront costs.

Charging a listing fee benefits the platform by generating revenue while providing value to sellers. If the platform effectively connects sellers with buyers, most sellers will be willing to pay a small fee for the increased exposure and sales opportunities.

Transaction Fees

Every online buy-sell marketplace uses transaction fees to generate revenue. This approach involves charging a fee from buyers to facilitate smooth exchanges of goods and services on the classified ad script platform. The fee charged is known as the transaction fee.

You can either set a fixed amount as a transaction fee or decide on a specific percentage to keep from every transaction amount.

In-App Purchases

A classified website script can generate income through in-app purchases rather than from app downloads or sales. This allows sellers to draw attention to their listings and sell their products quickly.  

For instance, users can pay to “feature” a listing. This places the listing at the top of the user’s feed and highlights it with a unique “Features” ribbon. Additionally, it adds a button that allows buyers to contact the sellers with a single tap. Sellers can choose to feature their product listing for 24 hours, 3 days, or 7 days. 

While the core functionality of the marketplace - buying and selling is free, users can pay for special features to enhance their experience. 

This revenue model encourages wide app utilization and increases brand awareness, as customers are more likely to try something out when it’s free. 

Wrapping Up

Now that you have understood the key revenue strategies for classified software. By implementing a combination of these revenue factors and continually adapting to user behavior, your classified marketplace can thrive in the competitive classified ads script market and generate substantial revenue. 

All you need to do is reach out to the right development team and pick a robust classified ad script to start your classified business instantly!

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[techanicinfotech]

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[truelist]

Check out the TrueList App – where you can buy and sell used items!

[phplistings]

Premium business directory software that converts any website into a profitable directory of business listings, classifieds, events, job offers, property listings & articles. Revenue is generated by selling premium packages and ads.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech’s benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

Silicon Valley's "authoritarian turn" is hard to miss: tech bosses have come out for autocrats like Trump, Orban, Milei, Bolsonaro, et al, and want to turn San Francisco into a militia-patrolled apartheid state operated for the benefit of tech bros:

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

Smart people have written well about what this means, and have gotten me thinking, too:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right

Regular readers will know that I make a kind of hobby of collecting definitions of right-wing thought:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

One of these – a hoary old cliche – is that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." I don't give this one much credence, but it takes on an interesting sheen when combined with this anonymous gem: "Conservatives say they long for the simpler times of their childhood, but what they miss is that the reason they lived simpler lives back then wasn't that the times were simpler; rather, it's because they were children."

If you're a tech founder who once lived in a world where your workers were also your pals and didn't shout at you about labor relations, perhaps that's not because workers got "woke," but rather, because when you were all scrapping at a startup, you were all on an equal footing and there weren't any labor relations to speak of. And if you're a once-right-on tech founder who used to abstractly favor "social justice" but now find yourself beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have.

In other words, "a reactionary tech boss is a liberal tech boss who hired a bunch of pals only to have them turn around and start a union." And also: "Tech founders say things were simpler when they were running startups, but what they miss is that the reason no one asked their startup to seriously engage with the social harms it caused is the because the startup was largely irrelevant to society, while the large company it turned into is destroying millions of peoples' lives today."

The oft-repeated reactionary excuse that "I didn't leave the progressive movement, they left me," can be both technically true and also profoundly wrong: if progressives in your circle never bothered you about your commercial affairs, perhaps that's because those affairs didn't matter when you were grinding out code in your hacker house, but they matter a lot now that you have millions of users and thousands of employees.

I've been in tech circles since before the dawn of the dotcoms; I was part of a movement of people who would come over to your house with a stack of floppies and install TCP/IP and PPP networking software on your computer and show you how to connect to a BBS or ISP, because we wanted everyone to have as much fun as we were having.

Some of us channeled that excitement into starting companies that let people get online, create digital presences of their own, and connect with other people. Some of us were more .ORG than .COM and gave our lives over to activism and nonprofits, missing out on the stock options and big paydays. But even though we ended up in different places, we mostly started in the same place, as spittle-flecked, excited kids talking a mile a minute about how cool this internet thing would be and helping you, a normie, jump into it.

Many of my peers from the .ORG and .COM worlds went on to set up institutions – both companies and nonprofits – that have since grown to be critical pieces of internet infrastructure: classified ad platforms, online encyclopedias, CMSes and personal publishing services, critical free/open source projects, standards bodies, server-to-server utilities, and more.

These all started out as benevolent autocracies: personal projects started by people who pitched in to help their virtual neighbors with the new, digital problems we were all facing. These good people, with good impulses, did good: their projects filled an important need, and grew, and grew, and became structurally important to the digital world. What started off as "Our pal's project that we all pitch in on," became, "Our pal's important mission that we help with, but that also has paid staff and important stakeholders, which they oversee as 'benevolent dictator for life.'"

Which was fine. The people who kicked off these projects had nurtured them all the way from a napkin doodle to infrastructure. They understood them better than anyone else, had sacrificed much for them, and it made sense for them to be installed as stewards.

But what they did next, how they used their powers as "BFDLs," made a huge difference. Because we are all imperfect, we are all capable of rationalizing our way into bad choices, we are all riven with insecurities that can push us to do things we later regret. When our actions are checked – by our peers' social approval or approbation; by the need to keep our volunteers happy; by the possibility of a mass exodus of our users or a fork of our code – these imperfections are balanced by consequences.

Dictators aren't necessarily any more prone to these lapses in judgment than anyone else. Benevolent dictators actually exist, people who only retain power because they genuinely want to use that power for good. Those people aren't more likely to fly off the handle or talk themselves into bad places than you or me – but to be a dictator (benevolent or otherwise) is to exist without the consequences that prevent you from giving in to those impulses. Worse: if you are the dictator – again, benevolent or otherwise – of a big, structurally important company or nonprofit that millions of people rely on, the consequences of these lapses are extremely consequential.

This is how BDFL arrangements turn sour: by removing themselves from formal constraint, the people whose screwups matter the most end up with the fewest guardrails to prevent themselves from screwing up.

No wonder people who set out to do good, to help others find safe and satisfying digital homes online, find themselves feeling furious and beset. Given those feelings, can we really be surprised when "benevolent" dictators discover that they have sympathy for real-world autocrats whose core ethos is, "I know what needs to be done and I could do it, if only the rest of you would stop nagging me about petty bullshit that you just made up 10 minutes ago but now insist is the most important thing in the world?"

That all said, it's interesting to look at the process by which some BDFLs transitioned to community-run projects with checks and balances. I often think about how Wikipedia's BDFL, the self-avowed libertarian Jimmy Wales, decided (correctly, and to his everlasting credit), that the project he raised from a weird idea into a world-historic phenomenon should not be ruled over by one guy, not even him.

(Jimmy is one of those libertarians who believes that we don't need governments to make us be kind and take care of one another because he is kind and takes care of other people – see also John Gilmore and Penn Jillette:)

https://www.cracked.com/article_40871_penn-jillette-wants-to-talk-it-all-out.html

Jimmy's handover to the Wikimedia Foundation gives me hope for our other BDFLs. He's proof that you can find yourself in the hotseat without being so overwhelmed with personal grievance that you find yourself in sympathy with actual fascists, but rather, have the maturity and self-awareness to know that the reason people are demanding so much of you is that you have – deliberately and with great effort – created a situation in which you owe the world a superhuman degree of care and attention, and the only way to resolve that situation equitably and secure your own posterity is to share that power around, not demand that you be allowed to wield it without reproach.

[antoniosvivaldi]

Rotoscoping Tutorial by @antoniosvivaldi​​

Hi everyone! I’m excited to announce my long-delayed Rotoscoping Tutorial - requested by a number of people over the past calendar year. 

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create the cutout gifs like this (and seen in most of my gifsets under this tag) with Rotoscoping on After Effects. I’ll also provide additional examples and a number of things that I do to optimise my giffing / Rotoscoping workflow (e.g. useful shortcuts & other things to be aware of).

This is the structure of the tutorial:

Why Rotoscoping? Photoshop video timeline’s limitations

Photoshop workflow pt 1: Preparing your gif

After Effects workflow: Interface, shortcuts, and Rotoscoping tools

Photoshop workflow pt 2: Assembling your gif; with multiple examples

Bonus content: Rotoscoping tips* & workarounds to common issues

For quick reference, here are example gifsets (and where Rotoscoping is used in the posts) that I will mention in the tutorial:

Example 1: Cutout gif effect | panels 2 + 4

Example 2: Changing a gif’s background colour | all panels

Example 3: Cutout gif effect in a shape | all panels

Example 4: Putting it all together | panels 1, 3, & 5

What you need & need to know:

Software: Photoshop & After Effects (After Effects 2021 or later for Rotobrush 2.0)*

Hardware: 16GB RAM required to run later versions of AE*

Difficulty: Advanced; Knowledge in making gifs, applying layer masks, and using video timeline interface assumed

Key concepts: Rotoscoping (AE) / Video Timeline (AE+ PS) / Layer Masks & Groups (PS)

Supplementary files: tutorial resources

*I’m currently running the latest version of PS & AE on an M2 Mac, but I’ve also used older versions (CC 2015 & 2020) on Intel-based Macs. I’ll outline some known compatibility & performance issues, and workarounds later in this tutorial that could help streamline your giffing workflow.

Tutorial under the cut. Like / Reblog this post if you find this tutorial helpful. Linking this post / the example gifsets in your post caption, will be greatly appreciated if you read this to create effects seen in Examples 3 + 4.

1) Why Rotoscoping?

My Rotoscoping journey is motivated by the shortcomings on Photoshop - namely the limited options to manipulate the Layer Mask keyframes in the video timeline interface, as well my need to gif more efficiently.

Suppose I want to cutout this subject or recolour the background of a gif on Photoshop: I personally classify the gifs that I prepare on PS into 3 types based on the motion of the subject

These are the common Photoshop-only approaches when attempting to mask the subject in the gif.

Case 1: minimal motion in the subject → a simple layer mask will do the trick

Case 2: some linear panning of the subject in the gif → using the Layer Mask Position keyframes in the video timeline interface will do the trick

Case 3: subject moves around a lot (e.g. zoom motion) → Unfortunately this is where a Photoshop-only workflow will require frame by frame masking. Layer Mask Position keyframes only apply positional translation (but not transformation / rotation) on the layer mask

Enter Rotoscoping on After Effects: Instead of resigning to frame by frame procedure on Photoshop, I opted to make my life easier by learning to Rotoscope on After Effects. This essentially provides me an opportunity to cutout / recolour a wider range of gifs with relative ease.

2) Photoshop pt. 1: Preparing your gif

Prepare your gif the usual way - whether you screencap or import frames from video.

Then your Photoshop should look like this:

Now, I shall walkthrough & explain my personal giffing workflow (as of 2023) after loading the gif frames. To speed up the process, import my gif prep action file to Photoshop.

Going to Window > Action, you’ll see a set of actions under the “gif prep” folder. 

"set frame delay for timeline” (highlighted in yellow) will set all of your entire gif’s frame delay to 0.03s

“convert to timeline“ (highlighted in red) will take you to the Video Timeline interface

To play an action, press on the Play button (highlighted in green)

i. Set the frame delay of the entire gif to 0.03s. (play “set frame delay for timeline” from my gif prep action pack)

I work with everything in 0.03s frame delay (or equivalently 30fps) at first. It’s always possible to change the frame delay of the final gif to 0.05s before uploading onto Tumblr.   

ii) Convert this gif to a Smart Video Layer (play “convert to timeline” from my action pack)

Note: I personally don’t resize the gif just yet. That’s because Rotoscoping in full video resolution will render higher quality details around the edges as well as more flexibilities later on in the editing process.

Performance optimisation: If your computer has 8GB of RAM or less, you might find it helpful to crop / resize your gif to Tumblr dimensions now for a less sluggish performance in After Effects later on. 

(I have giffed on a desktop with 8GB of RAM and it’s quite slow at rendering individual frames of a 1080p short clip on AE)

iii) Add colouring adjustments on the gif. This will save you A LOT of time when you Rotoscope gifs that are originally very dark / poorly lit (e.g. the uncoloured Taylor Swift gif shown just above). 

If you usually colour your gifs at the very end of your giffing process (i.e. after sharpening), this will be a bit of a change.Nevertheless I still highly recommend adding some base colourings now to at least increase the contrast between the subject and the background.

iv) To minimise lagging on After Effects, simplify this gif file as follows: 

Flatten / Unsmart this gif file back to frame animation mode: play “flatten” (highlighted in red) from my gif prep action pack

Set the frame delay to 0.03s: play “set frame delay for timeline” (highlighted in green)

Convert the simplified gif file back to the video timeline interface: play “convert to timeline” (highlighted in yellow)

After “unsmarting” and converting back to the video timeline, your interface should look like this

And voila! This gif PSD is now ready to be imported to After Effects for Rotoscoping work!

3) After Effects: Interface and useful shortcuts

Open After Effects and Import (Cmmd / Ctrl + I) your gif PSD that you’ve just prepared.

After importing your gif PSD to After Effects, the interface should look like this. 

In the screenshot below, there are two compositions: the imported gif (highlighted in green) & another composition file made from selecting the imported gif (highlighted in red)

For the rest of the workflow, we will edit from the clone composition (the one highlighted in red), so select this one.

Before we take our plunge into the Rotoscoping, here are a few useful shortcuts to remember. I’ll explain the Roto Brush tool in the next section.

Preview the previous: fn + up arrow

Preview the next frame: fn + down arrow

Add to Roto Brush selection: holding Shift while you’re using the Roto Brush Tool

Subtract from Roto Brush selection: holding Alt while you’re using the Roto Brush Tool

Change Roto Brush size: while holding Cmmd / Ctrl, click + drag your mouse left / right

4) After Effects: The Rotoscoping Process

To access the Rotoscoping tools, click on the Roto Brush icon (highlighted in red in the screenshot below)

Then you’ll get the following dropdown options with two Rotoscoping Tools

Roto Brush Tool: This is where you add / subtract your Rotoscoping selection in your composition

Refine Edge Tool: Paint around the edge of your selection for more refined edges. Very helpful for Rotoscoping fuzzy edges / hairs

To make some Rotoscoping selection, first grab the Roto Brush Tool and click on the subject you want to cut out from your composition. 

When you’re Rotoscoping you’ll see this in the Effect Controls panel. 

There are two versions of Roto Brush:

Version 2.0: The Rotoscoping selection is powered by AI for higher accuracy when you propagate the frames. 

Version 1.0 (Classic): This is the legacy Roto Brush Tool that uses a lesser algorithm. Recommended only if Roto Brush 2.0 is unstable on your machine due to RAM issues.

And two quality settings for Roto Brush 2.0:

Standard

Best

Note: I am currently unable to use Roto Brush 2.0 with Best quality model on my machine to compare the differences myself, so I’ll link this page that explains the two quality settings.

Note: if you’re using an older version of After Effects you’ll see this instead. This corresponds to Roto Brush 1.0 / Classic in the newer versions of AE.

When you’ve made a selection using the Roto Brush Tool, you’ll see the pink lines around the subject. This is the region that you’ve selected to Rotoscope!

To bring out some details around the edges, grab the Refine Edge Tool and paint around the edges

Then the interface will look like this

To view the Rotoscoping selection that you’ve made more intuitively, you could click on the following buttons.

Personally I like the viewing my selection using Toggle Alpha (the second box from the left) & Toggle Alpha Boundary (the 3rd box from the left)

Toggle Alpha

Toggle Alpha Boundary

Note: If you aren’t happy with the initial Roto Brush selection, you can always add (press Shift while using the Roto Brush Tool) / subtract (press Alt / Option using the Roto Brush Tool) your selection.

After you’re happy with your Rotoscoping selection in the first frame of your composition, press fn + down to view the next frame.

Repeat pressing fn + down and fix the selection along the way (e.g. I subtracted a small area from my Rotoscoping selection with the Roto Brush tool to make the edge look cleaner).

After fixing the selection along the way, go back to the composition file (select the clone composition again) and you will see that a cutout gif is made!

To export this, go to File > Export > Add to Render Queue. You’ll be redirected to the Render Queue panel at the bottom of After Effects. 

Highlighted in red: click to change export setings

Highlighted in green: click to change save destination

Highlighted in yellow: click to render video

To preserve the transparency of your cutout gif, you need to change your export settings in the Output Module. 

Under the Video Output section, change your Channels to RGB + Alpha. Press OK. Then Render the video.

5) Photoshop pt. 2: Assembling your final gif

The essence is to drag the cutout gif (aka the video file that you’ve just rendered on AE) into a new PSD composition file. This will be where you’ll do the rest of your giffing. Your workflow will contain the follow steps:

Make a new blank PSD composition file in Tumblr dimensions

Enable the Video Timeline

Follow the instructions detailed in the individual examples i.e. drag the cutout gif into the PSD & adjust the timeline start / end points

Exporting the final gif. If you’ve worked in 0.03s frame delay all the way up to here, just play the action that I’ve provided in the tutorial in the following order to set the frame delay to 0.05s.

EXAMPLE 1: finalising your cutout gif | sample gifset

After enabling the Video Timeline in your PSD composition file you’ll see something like this

Go to your folder, drag the cutout gif you’ve made on After Effects, resize / reposition, then press Enter. 

And also make sure to adjust the Video Timeline’s start / end values.

Add some finishing touches. Because I did the Rotoscoping at full HD resolution, I’ll also need to sharpen my gif in this step.

After you’re happy, you can export this into a gif file and do what you usually do to change the frame delay to 0.05s. 

Notes on my “Unsmarting” approach:

To prevent accidentally writing over a PSD composition file that I’ve spent time editing, I personally render this into a short video (File > Export > Render Video) and use the following export settings (to prevent quality loss)

Then I open the rendered clip and play the actions in my gif prep action pack as follows:

flatten: this “Unsmarts” the clip / video

set frame rate: this sets all frames to have 0.05s frame delay

This is the final interface that I get before I pull up the Save For Web window.

EXAMPLE 2: changing your gif’s background colour (for Case 3 gifs) | sample gifset

From your folder, drag BOTH the cutout gif (rendered on AE) and the original gif to your blank composition. 

Important: you need to make sure that both layers are properly lined up in the composition file (i.e. selecting both layers when repositioning / resizing)

 On Photoshop, press Enter twice and place the cutout gif on top of the original gif from the Layers panel. Then you should get something like this

Select both layers and resize / reposition them in your PSD composition until you’re satisfied with the placements.

The basic idea here is to add some adjustment layers / other things in between the cutout gif and the original gif. To do this, select the original gif layer in the Layers panel.

Then you can start adding.a bunch layers e.g. textures, onto the composition.

And then here’s the exported gif!

6) Fancier Rotoscoping examples

Note: knowledge in using layer masks / groups and making shape / text layers assumed

In the next two examples, I’ll show you how to combine the two previous examples with shape / text layers.

EXAMPLE 3: Placing your cutout gif into a shape / text layer | sample gifset

Add a text / shape layer to your blank PSD composition

We want to prepare a masked group so in the Layers panel:

Make selection from layer: Cmmd / Ctrl + Click (highlighted in red)

Make a new group: click on the folder icon (in yellow)

Create layer mask: click on the icon (in green)

After duplicating the masked group you’ll get something like this in the Layers panel

Drag your cutout gif into the PSD composition

Place the cutout gif into the masked group on top

Select the mask of the top group and paint (in white) over the region you want to reveal for the cutout gif

Add some finishing touches & export the gif!

EXAMPLE 4: Putting it all together | sample gifset

You follow the same approach as in Example 3 to prepare the masked groups, but you need to drag two gif layers in (and resize them using the approach outlined in Example 2)

Place the gif layers as follows

While selecting the mask of the group on top, paint (in white) over the region that you want to reveal in the cutout gif

Now select the original gif (placed within the other group) and add some adjustment layers

After adding some finishing touches & exporting the gif, I get this!

Note: you can do even more overlay effects in the background portion of example 4. There will just be more masked groups + adjustment layers

7) Bonus: Some useful Rotoscoping / giffing lifehacks

GIFFING LIFEHACKS:

— Use best quality footage that you could find & Rotoscope in full video resolution, for better details around the edges

— Poorly lit scenes & low contrast edges are harder to Rotoscope (e.g. Toy Story set / TS evermore set).

If you’re new to AE, I would recommend choosing videos with well-lit gifs with simpler backgrounds and high contrast edges (e.g. Maisie Peters Cate’s Brother set)

— Use Rotobrush 2.0 if you’re using After Effects 2021 or later. It’s more difficult to Rotoscope / change background colour for gifs with a lot of movements with the classic Rotobrush tool. If the scene is tricky, you might want to switch to the “Best” quality model.

HARDWARE-RELATED PERFORMANCE OPTIMISATION:

— The recent versions of Photoshop require at least 8GB of RAM. If you have less RAM, it will still work provided you have enough scratch disk space. For better performance, it’s best to close other applications when you’re using Photoshop.

— The recent versions of After Effects require at least 16GB of RAM. If your machine has less RAM than this, there are some workarounds to prevent your machine from hanging: 

Essential: close other applications that you’re running on your computer

Resize your gif down to Tumblr dimensions & sharpen it before importing to After Effects.

Install an older version of AE 

8) Bonus: Some known software + hardware issues, and workarounds

KNOWN ISSUES ON PHOTOSHOP:

I currently have minimal issues in my giffing workflow, but I’ll nevertheless outline a few common known Photoshop issues for anyone who needs some workarounds.

— Video Timeline interface missing: this affects Apple Silicon Macs (i.e. M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max / M1 Ultra / M2 / M2 Pro / M2 Max)

Update to newer version of Photoshop (updated 2022 or 2023)

Open Photoshop with Rosetta

— Scratch disk full error: This is a common issue with machines that lack RAM & have nearly used up internal storage. Editing video layers in the timeline interface uses a lot of memory hence will require a lot of scratch disk space. 

Make sure that you have enough free storage space while using Photoshop. Alternatively you can use an external hard drive as a scratch disk.

KNOWN ISSUES ON AFTER EFFECTS:

These are a few issues that I have personally ran into over the course of giffing on multiple devices & multiple versions of After Effects.

Note: Inputs from M1 / M2 Mac users with regards to experiences on using the After Effects Rotoscoping tools are welcome!

— Rotobrush 2.0 set to “Best” quality model causes AE to crash: this affects anyone who’s using MacOS Ventura

I’m currently experiencing this issue on my M2 Mac. The workaround right now is to change the Roto Brush 2.0 quality setting to Standard. 

This is due to some software compatibility issues on Adobe’s side specifically with MacOS Ventura. Fingers crossed that they will properly fix this bug in the future updates!

— Cannot re-open project files with Rotoscoping: this affects anyone using the initial release of After Effects 2020 (I had installed this on an Intel-based machine and it sucked)

The only option here is to update to a later version of After Effects.

8) More useful Rotoscoping resources

Rotoscoping + Keyframes Tutorial by @jenna--ortega​

Rotoscoping + Masking Tutorial by @usergif​

Rotoscoping For Beginners in After Effects | Motion Graphics Tutorial

I hope you enjoy reading this! If you have any questions / need any help related to this tutorial, feel free to send me an ask!

[businessadvisorrobert]

Why You Need an Online Classified Script for Your Startup

A part of the world looks at the second-hand market as economically sensible and environmentally friendly. However, this view differs in other parts of the world. 

After the technology evolution, places, where second-hand products are less in practice, have become regular practitioners. 

Currently, the second-hand market is in the booming phase with the technology assistance.  As the market opens endless opportunities and thriving potential resources, going with the online classified ads script is the best option. 

This article highlights why your business needs a classified market in all aspects. Let’s jump into the article and find insightful information. 

Market Value Of Online Classified Script

Classified markets have begun to compete with industries previously unimagined. Let's take a look at their growth figures!

This year, the digital ad market has reached $21.66 billion and is projected to grow to $23.85 billion by 2029, with an annual CAGR of 1.95%.

The number is interesting, right? Let’s see how you can take your business to this height.

Beneficial Factors To Look At In Online Classified Script Development  

Over time, it's crucial to find strategies that will drive you to the height of success. Let’s find out how you can find these elements in auto-classified scripts. Take a look at it! 

Expanding Your Audience Faster

In today's business landscape, having a strong online presence is essential, and a classified website script is a powerful tool for achieving this. With a solid online presence, you can attract a broad audience, including those in the global market. Success depends on understanding audience preferences and positioning your business as their top choice for shopping.

Online classified script business allows you to tap into a vast market, breaking through geographical boundaries. Global outreach is crucial in the current environment, enabling you to reach a large audience and boost productivity.

To reach this goal, you'll need robust features. The app offers support for multiple languages, currencies, geo-location, and more to effectively engage global users.

Cost-Effective Promotion Strategy

Many companies invest heavily in advertising to reach their audience. Traditionally, this involved relying on third parties, often requiring substantial financial outlays. However, the digital space offers a more affordable alternative through free promotional activities. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook allow you to advertise your business without any cost, making it a low-investment, high-return strategy.

These modern promotion methods are more advanced and effective than traditional approaches. Ever heard of built-in marketing? Features like reviews, ratings, comments, and shares naturally promote your business, creating an organic marketing effect.

For instance, if you are promoting your business with small businesses that offer items related to you, there is a high possibility that you can reach out to your audiences easily.   

To succeed, create a business image that resonates with your audience. This image is reflected in your logo, visuals, descriptions, and overall brand identity. Choose these elements carefully and implement them wisely!

Key Features of the User Panel

For an audience that's not tech-savvy, designing a user panel that makes navigating your platform a breeze is crucial. Here’s how you can achieve a seamless experience from start to finish:

   - Offer multiple login options so users can quickly sign up without hassle.

   - Implement advanced search features that help users easily find what they're looking for, like a car that meets their needs.

   -Once users have found their choice, make the booking process straightforward, with various payout options to choose from.

   - Ensure that the payment options are diverse and easy to use, so transactions are completed without any confusion.

   - The final step is receiving a confirmation, reassuring users that their order is successfully placed.

By incorporating these features, auto-classified scripts create an environment where users can shop effortlessly. Let’s dive into the tools that make this seamless experience possible!

Real-Time Notification And Inventory Management

The platform consistently keeps its inventory up-to-date, a critical task in the automotive industry. With the auto classified software, businesses can efficiently list their vehicles, ensuring that users always see the most current information.

The reason for maintaining real-time updates is to avoid advertising vehicles that have already been sold, which helps build trust between customers and sellers. This trust encourages repeat visits to the platform.

Notification enhances the platform’s user-friendliness by providing essential information without requiring users to open the app. Users can easily find the required updates of the platform via the notification option. Inventory management can complete tasks without hassle at a few tabs. The technology used in it creates a simple workflow. 

How can you uplift your business with these benefits? Let’s find out about its revenue factors! 

Monetization Tactics That Drive Business Results

Revenue is crucial for the long-term success of your business. Key income sources include commission fees, which are a major part of the platform’s earnings. Users and sellers can access the platform for free, while the platform makes money from transparent commission rates, boosting credibility. Another revenue stream is advertising, where allowing third-party ads on your platform generates passive income that helps with operational costs. Subscription fees are also important; users can opt for a quarterly plan, providing a steady revenue flow and simplifying payments. Additionally, in-app purchases offer users extra features for a fee, which can significantly boost revenue, though it’s important to use this strategy judiciously to avoid overwhelming users.

Bottom Line, 

In the digital landscape, to stand ahead in the market, uniqueness is key. How do you get the optimal traits for your business? 

First, you find the right team that has previous experience and is strong in the field. If you feel like moving to the next step, head to gathering all the necessary things like features, functionalities, technologies, and other factors. 

You can complete these processes simply without using your savvy insight. Read my blog on the development process of the online classified ad script.

[tutorialdrawix]

Working on a Website!

Hey, everyone! I've been given the thought of making a website for the blog. So all the resources that I've been listing and classifying can be found easily by pressing the button.

New Things:

1. Visibility

I can find more resources for you so you can find other blogs that love to share this knowledge and help you improve as an artist.

2. Organization

Easier to find the resources in your markers on Google. Even when I needed to use this post for a project, I had to search by the tag and find the right now I need in that moment.

3. New Sections

New sections can be created for example: Websites or Blogs about how to use Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Blender 3d... Others!

Because there are lots of people who know these tricks to learn and use that kind of software.

4. Donations

Also, I've been considering that I've been doing a lot of work to make this blog for the last few years. And especially when I've been doing this last post with the resources while I was with the job I keep doing, my personal life matters, and my art career.

So I'm really saying that you would send donations

like 1/2$ in my Ko-fi. Would be really kind of you.

Because I know that all of you no matter that you like Art as a lifestyle, job career even as a hobby. These kinds of tools have to be easy to find and you can improve as artists.

[roosterforme]

Always Ever Only You Part 6 | Rooster x Reader

Summary: At the Hard Deck, Bradley learns something about the origins of your friendship with Cam that leaves him feeling out of sorts. You call him out on his behavior and reassure him that he's always more than enough for you. Then he takes you away for a Valentine's trip, and he can finally surprise you with something unique.

Warnings: Fluff, smut, angst, swearing

Length: 4700 words

Pairing: Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x Female Reader

This was written to accompany my series Is It Working For You? along with a bunch of my one-shots and other series, but it can be read on its own! Check my masterlist for the reading order. Gorgeous banner by @mak-32

Bradley thought he was hilarious with the way he refused to tell you where you and he were going for the night on Friday. He wouldn't even tell you how you were getting there. All he said every time you asked was, "Just pack a bag and find out."

"Infuriating," you whispered to yourself at work on Thursday. When you heard footsteps coming up behind you in the hallway, you turned to see Jake rushing your way. "Seriously? Don't you ever work?"

"Come on, Angel," he whined. "I'm gonna ask her out. I just need one more shot at talking to her."

You sighed and said, "Fine. Come on. We could actually use your help."

A few minutes later, Jake looked absolutely delighted as Cat had him sit down on the stool next to hers. "Ready?" she asked him. "There are a lot of questions."

"I'm ready," he replied, eyes glued to her face as she opened the aviation survey document on her computer. It wasn't like this needed to be completed today. The software was still in the testing stage. But you knew this would be a good excuse to keep Jake in the lab for a little while and let him engage with Cat.

"Name, age, rank and aircraft. Please," she asked him. You tried to sit quietly and work further down the counter, but you were half focused on them. 

"Jacob C. Seresin. Thirty three. Lieutenant. F/A-18." His voice was calm and even as he answered her, but you could see his leg bouncing a little bit. He was so smitten it was absolutely ridiculous. 

"What does the C stand for?" she asked, entering his information.

"That's classified," he told her with a smirk.

She turned to look at him with a smirk of her own. "Your full name is Jacob Classified Seresin?"

You had to press your lips together as Jake started laughing. "Shoulda thought that one through a little better," he drawled with a blush. "It actually stands for Christopher." 

"Where are you from, Lieutenant Classified?" she asked, and he leaned in to look at her screen. 

"Is that actually a question?"

"No," she said softly. "I was just curious about your accent."

Jake's voice sounded smug as hell as he said, "It's not an accent, Lieutenant Coleman. It's a drawl." And then you were forced to listen to their flirtation mixed in with the real survey questions for the better part of an hour. 

When Cat was finally done gathering information about Jake's flight history, you were surprised she didn't also have his phone number. "Thanks for your help," she told him as they both stood. 

"Anytime, Lieutenant," Jake replied. And when he walked past you, he whispered, "I owe you one, Angel."

Once he was gone, you stared at Cat until she looked at you. "If you're interested in big, strong aviators, all you have to do is ask," you told her. "I think he'd happily go out with you."

She scoffed and waved you off. "He's just fun to flirt with a tiny bit. Absolutely none of that was serious." 

"Speak for yourself," you muttered.

"Besides, he would never go for a woman like me. At least not for more than a date or two. Maybe a long weekend, if you catch my drift. And after my ex husband, I'm done playing games. Like I said, Lieutenant Seresin is nice to look at, but under no circumstances will I touch."

"Never?" you asked softly.

Cat planted her hand on the counter and leaned toward you. "He gets around, Lieutenant Commander. Women on base brag about it. And I've seen how he is at the bar. Just surrounded at all times."

Once again, you didn't know how to respond.

"But your friend, Cam?" she asked, giving you a pointed look. "He seems sweet."

You remained silent. Cat was beautiful. If she wanted to go out with Jake, she could go out with Jake. If she wanted to go out with Cam, she could go out with Cam. She could probably get pretty much any guy to ask her out if she wanted to. But if she was just going to flirt with Jake, because she thought it was no big deal, then Jake might end up getting hurt in the process if she moved on with someone else. 

And then your suspicions started to come true. When you went down to eat lunch with Bradley at noon, you saw Cat and Jake at a small table together. So his reputation was terrible, but not so bad that she didn't want to keep flirting? You sat with your head in your hands until Bradley and Nat joined you.

"What's wrong?" Nat asked, taking the seat across from you. "And where's Jake? He told me he was eating with us."

"He's over there," you said, nodding your head in his direction where he was sitting with Cat. "And she's flirting with him."

"Isn't that good?" Bradley asked, dropping down into the seat next to you. 

"No," you groaned. "She likes Cam. She thinks Jake is a womanizer who would never be interested in her. She thinks this is just some harmless flirting."

"Oof, he's about to get shot down isn't he?" Nat asked, and now all there of you were watching across the cafeteria as Cat and Jake smiled at each other. Then Jake leaned in a little closer, and Cat bit her lip. 

"Oh no," you whispered, reaching for Bradley's hand as your heart pounded. "Maybe he is a bit of a womanizer?" you asked. "I've seen that look on his face before. He's asking her out."

Bradley laced his fingers with yours. "He's not doing that kind of thing anymore," he told you and Nat. "He seems to be ready to settle down in a relationship. Been talking about it for months. Oh no, there he goes."

Nat gasped as Jake stroked the back of Cat's hand with his thumb. Her smile faltered and she kind of shrugged and shook her head. Even though you couldn't hear them, you had a pretty good idea of how the conversation was going. Cat's hand slid away from his, and soon she was standing to leave.

"Yikes," Nat whispered as the three of you scrambled to make it appear as though you hadn't been watching Jake get turned down. "That was so surreal. Looked exactly like the day you asked your wife out and she told you no," she added to Bradley, trying not to laugh now. "Remember that, Soul Sister?"

Bradley placed a loud, sloppy kiss on your cheek and said, "She came around eventually. One kiss and she was begging me to take her on a date."

You rolled your eyes. "I would love to dispute that, but it's actually the truth."

"Hey, guys," Jake said, gingerly sitting down next to Nat. His face was completely neutral, and his voice was even. But you could tell he was upset. 

"Hangman," Bradley grunted. And then he and Nat filled up the silence before it became too much while you picked at your food. And Jake just sat quietly. 

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

"Hard Deck night, Baby Girl," Bradley reminded you when you walked inside after work. 

You were tired, and you didn't really feel like going out. The bar would be packed, just like it was every Thursday night, and you were starting to get crampy, which meant your period was coming. "You don't want to stay in?" you asked, pouting up at him. "We could take a bath together."

Bradley ran his thumb along your pouty lips. "We can stay in if you want to, Sweetheart. Let me text Nat and tell her."

Then you kissed his thumb and said, "No, we can go. But maybe we can leave early. I'm exhausted."

Famous last words. At ten o'clock, you were kind of drunk, Bradley's hands were all over you, and Cat was waving you up to the bar. "I'll be right back, Roo," you told him, slipping away before he could keep you with him. Bradley watched you chatting with you coworker, happy you seemed to be getting along with her now. 

"I gotta know, man. How do you grow such a good mustache?"

Bradley turned just in time for Cam to try to lean against the edge of the pool table, miss completely and nealy land on his face. Shit, he was as at least as drunk as you were. 

"Genetics," Bradley said, thinking of nearly every damn photo he had of Goose sporting the same facial hair. Cam had a bit of a baby face, and the idea of him with a mustache was almost laughable. 

Then you walked back over in a state of annoyance. "Oh good, you're here," you said to Cam. "Mr. Popularity."

"What do you mean?" he asked, stroking his bare upper lip. 

"You know my coworker Cat? She just told me Jake asked her out, but that she'd rather go out with you."

Cam blinked a few times and then burst into laughter, leaning on Bradley while he hooted. "That's such a funny joke!"

"I'm serious! Roo, tell him I'm serious."

"She's serious," Bradley said, sipping his beer and trying not to get involved in this conversation. 

"Nobody would pick me over that guy," Cam replied, pointing to Jake. "He's fucking ripped! And his hair is always perfect. And he can do that thing with his mouth and the toothpicks!"

You started laughing and said, "I tried to tell Cat you're nothing special."

"Wow," Cam said, feigning offense, "you're the worst friend ever. Where's Maria?"

"Wait," you said, still laughing while you grabbed his hand. "Just because your repertoire of talents did nothing for me doesn't mean you're not as good as Jake!"

Bradley choked on his beer, remembering what he had overheard you say to Jake. "I'm sorry. What?"

You both turned to look at him, and Cam's cheeks were turning pink. 

"The two of you hooked up?" Bradley asked, wondering why this was something he'd only been hearing about recently. Cam slowly backed away from him, suddenly looking like he was afraid Bradley might hit him. And that's when Bradley realized that his tone definitely sounded a little threatening, but he couldn't take it back now.

"It was ten years ago!" Cam quickly supplied, taking a step to his left once he realized he was standing right next to you. 

"Didn't I tell you this, Roo?" you asked, still smiling at Bradley as you cocked your head to the side. 

"No. Never," he replied, annoyed at himself for being annoyed about this. It clearly didn't matter at all. It had nothing to do with your marriage. But Cam was the same age as you, and in many ways he was probably well suited for you. 

"There's literally nothing to tell," Cam insisted.

"Yeah," you agreed. "It didn't mean anything. We were twenty one. It didn't work for either of us, so we stopped what we were doing and decided to just be friends. Because Cam's moves were decidedly terrible at that age."

"God, you're so annoying," Cam told you with a grin. "You think you had moves? You did not. All you had back then was nice tits."

"Jesus," Bradley growled, pinching the bridge of his nose. Because even though this happened ten years ago, suddenly he was wondering about all the details. 

"There was no penetration," you said casually.

"No penetration of any kind," Cam confirmed. 

"Then what was there?" Bradley asked as you laced your fingers with his.

"Wait, do fingers count?" Cam asked you, scratching his head. "No, fingers don't count, right? Whatever, all I did was feel her up."

"I wasn't good," you added. "Just friends after that."

"Yep," Cam confirmed, giving Bradley some side eye. "She likes big guys. Muscular ones. Mustaches. Which is exactly why nobody who turned down Jake Seresin would say yes to me."

You rolled your eyes and said, "That's so not true."

Bradley wanted all of the details and none of them at the same time as he pulled you a little closer. But then Cam handed you his drink and said, "Really? Watch this."

"Oh no," you muttered, gasping and clinging to Bradley as Cam walked away.

"Sweetheart, why didn't you ever tell me you and Cam messed around? I hate being blindsided by this shit. You hang out with him all the time."

But you weren't listening to him. You weren't even looking at him. Cam was walking confidently over to Cat, and suddenly he was leaning against the bar next to her, occasionally glancing this way. After a moment, Cat looked delighted, and Cam looked completely shocked. 

"He asked her out!" you moaned, burying your face against Bradley's chest. "Poor Jake!"

When Bradley's eyes found Jake, he was glaring daggers from the dartboard over toward Cam and Cat. "Oh, shit," he muttered, wrapping his arm a little tighter around you. "This is a fucking disaster."

"It really is," you whispered.

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

Jake was upset. You could see it on his face. And now Cam looked concerned. When you tried to talk to him, all he said was, "Apparently I have a date on Saturday night."

And before Cat left the bar for the night, she had a smile on her face as she came over to you and Bradley. "Any idea where I might be able to find a good babysitter for Saturday evening?"

"Babysitter?" Bradley asked her, and you couldn't help but see how his expression changed as he asked Cat, "Do you have a kid?"

"Yes," she replied, looking a little surprised. "I thought you would have told your husband. I have a son. He's a year old."

You desperately wanted her date with Cam to suck, and that made you feel like a shitty person all around. So you were suddenly blurting out, "We can watch him." The look on Bradley's face as he registered that he'd get to spend a few hours playing with a one year old, made your heart clench. 

"Yeah, you can drop him off with us," he told Cat, and tears stung your eyes. You had cramps. You'd probably get your period right in the middle of the overnight trip tomorrow night. But you just nodded, because even though Cat was going out with Cam instead of Jake, and even though you still weren't pregnant, you knew Bradley would have fun babysitting.

On the ride home, you were starting to get upset as you sobered up a bit more. You didn't want your mood to make you miserable for your night away. 

Bradley was pretty quiet until he asked, "Why didn't you tell me about you and Cam?"

"Nothing to tell," you replied softly. It was the truth. You'd harbored a bit of a crush on your friend at first; he was sweet and funny and you had all of your classes with him. You had spent a lot of time together, and you trusted him. And one night, despite both of your best efforts, it just didn't work when you tried to hookup. 

"But you spend a lot of time with him now. So what? Your attraction to him just stopped after one night?" Bradley grunted. "You go out to brunch with Cam and Maria all the time for that disgusting avocado toast. Hell, you make me spend so much time with him, I know what kind of pizza he likes and what he orders at the burger shack."

"Oh my god, Bradley. Exactly. He's just my friend! You know what kind of pizza he likes, because I want you to spend time with my friends!"

"But you clearly care about him."

"Bradley! You lived a whole life with other women before we met!"

"I never cared about them! I never loved them! Cam is your friend, and you care about him."

As soon as he parked the Bronco in the driveway, you were unbuckling your seatbelt and crawling into his lap. "What has gotten into you, Roo?" you asked, straddling his thighs and forcing him to look at you. "Cam? You're jealous of Cam in this moment? Knock it the fuck off."

"I'm sorry," he muttered, wrapping his arms around you. "I just didn't like the way I found out about it. Which isn't fair to you at all. Because you're right...about my past. And I know it has to embarrass you sometimes-"

You silenced him with a kiss as you brushed your fingers through his hair. When your forehead came to rest against his, you said, "Don't talk about yourself like that. You want all the details? We did not date. Cam and I ended up in his bed exactly one time. He was hard until I put my hand down his pants. I was excited until he took my bra off. Then we laughed awkwardly, called it quits, and watched a movie with three feet of space between us. So if you can't get onboard with the avocado toast brunches now, I don't even know what to say."

Bradley laughed a little bit. "I love you, and I'm sorry. I've just been... feeling my age recently, Baby Girl."

"What does that mean?" you asked, pressing your lips to his scarred cheek. 

He sighed. "Just trying to make sure I can keep up with you and everything you want."

"I want you."

"I know you do," he whispered.

"Then start acting like it, Bradley. Or I'll call you Grandpa instead of Daddy."

He was silent for a beat as you ran your hand down the front of his body. "You wanna go have some Daddy time right now?"

"It's like you can read my mind."

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

Bradley wore you out on Thursday night, and you were still tired on Friday after work when he drove up the coastal roads to the mysterious hotel he booked for the night. "Will you please tell me where you're taking me?" you asked for the millionth time. 

But he just laughed and said, "The funny thing is, I'm not really sure, Sweetheart. It's some crazy hotel called Le Chateau California, and I'm really only taking you there because they have something I think you'll love."

"What is it?" you asked, suddenly even more curious. 

"I'm not telling. We'll have to experience it for ourselves," he said, reaching for your bare thigh and stroking your skin.

"Are we there yet?" you whined. "How much further? I want my surprise." 

"You're worse than a child," he said with a smile, inching his hand further up under your dress. "We'll be there in twenty minutes. We're having dinner at eight, and you'll see the surprise then."

Bradley was great at teasing you, but this was perhaps his best effort to date. His fingers were just tucked inside your panties, stroking you while you tried to sit patiently, as he pulled up to a colorful boutique hotel on the outskirts of Newport Beach. "What is this place?" you asked him, whining again as he pulled his hand free before the valet could see where it had been. 

"Let's go find out," he said with a smirk. When you strolled into the lobby that looked like you'd fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Bradley wrapped his arm around your waist. 

"This is so cool," you gasped, still a little wound up from Bradley's fingers on your pussy. 

You were looking up at him with barely concealed lust. He had both overnight bags slung over his left shoulder like it was nothing. And when the woman at the concierge desk asked for the last name on the reservation, your core clenched as he rasped, "The Bradshaws."

As he handed over his credit card, you whimpered softly. His wide brown eyes were on yours as you pressed your lips together. Then he was smiling, but he didn't pick up the pace like you wanted him to. He asked the woman where the restaurant was located. He listened to her tell him more about the history of the hotel. He asked her another question as she handed over the room keys. He forced your hand. 

"Please?" you whispered, pressing yourself to his side. 

When he finally led you across the technicolor lobby toward the purple elevators, he pushed the up arrow and said, "We have dinner in twenty minutes."

You nearly wanted to stomp your foot. "You can fuck me in less time than that."

"You told me I'm never fast," he replied as the doors slid open. "So, probably not, Baby Girl."

"Bradley!" you screeched as soon as you and he were alone in the elevator. "I won't make it through dinner and you know it!" 

He kissed your lips so softly before the elevator stopped on your floor. "I love it when you get like this," he said as you tripped down the hallway next to him. "Go in and get ready for me." He handed you one of the keys, and you ran down the hallway that looked like a multicolored fever dream, barely taking the time to enjoy any of it. 

The hotel room was colorful and spacious with a king bed and a Juliet balcony. There was a view of the beach and some champagne in an ice bucket. But all you were concerned about was getting your underwear off and getting on the bed. 

Bradley strolled in and set the bags down before adjusting the thermostat. He tossed his sunglasses on the nightstand and combed his fingers through his hair before turning to watch you where you were laying on the bed with your dress pulled up to your waist. "Get on your knees," he rasped, and you did as you were told. Then his hands and lips were all over your butt and thighs before tasting you from behind.

"Bradley!" you gasped. You'd never get used to how good it felt to have him surprise you there with his mustache. And then you heard him unzip his jeans before wrapping one muscular arm around you and fucking you hard. You rocked forward onto your hands as he slammed into you. 

"You're so impatient," he grunted. "Can't even make it to dinner and to your surprise unless you're full of my cum."

It was going to be embarrassing how quickly you came for him when he was dishing out the smug dirty talk. But when his fingers stroked you in time with his thrusts, you smiled and bit your lip. The colorful bedding and walls around the room made you feel a little dizzy, but nothing compared to the sensation when Bradley hit just the right spot inside you and gently spanked your clit.

"Fuck!" you squealed, clenching so hard he groaned your name. 

"Shit, Baby Girl," he growled, filling you up with his cum. But you were already there, face planted in the pillows to keep yourself quiet as you came. When you picked your head up a few inches and turned to look back at him while he was still inside you, he rubbed one big palm along your butt. "Sorry I finished so fast. You look pretty with your ass in the air," he whispered. 

You pushed yourself up on shaky arms. "And you look pretty with your cock inside me."

He chuckled and withdrew himself, and then he ran his fingers along your pussy like he was massaging his cum back inside you. "I'm not ovulating anymore, Roo," you reminded him. He could cum inside you all weekend and it wouldn't make a difference. 

"Doesn't matter," he whispered, leaning down to kiss your butt, thighs and pussy once more. "It's not going to make me want to stop giving you creampies all the time." You sighed softly as he finally stood, and you watched him walk around the bed with his cock hanging out of his jeans. "It's almost time for our dinner reservation," he reminded you as he walked into the bathroom. 

You rolled onto your back, legs clenched together as his mess coated your thighs. While you listened to him wash his hands, you closed your eyes and wished desperately that you were pregnant. You thought about everything that would change for you if you were, and you knew you'd be ready for it. 

"Coming?" he asked, reaching out for your hand. Bradley pulled you to your feet and helped you back into your underwear, looking up at you and shaking his head at the sight of his cum everywhere. He wasn't old. It blew your mind that he sometimes thought he was. He was better and sexier and stronger than anyone younger. He was everything you wanted.

"Let's go."

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

Bradley spent almost seven hundred dollars for the hotel room for the night. It was another fifty bucks to valet the Bronco, and the prices on the dinner menu in the swanky restaurant were so high, he thought they must be joking. But he wanted you to have whatever you wanted, so he ordered a twenty dollar beer so you would, too. And he ordered exactly what he wanted to eat so you would, too. 

He'd tapped out his savings when he bought the craftsman for the two of you, including the money his mom left for him. But he'd been working on building up his savings again. The dream of making one of the bedrooms a nursery sometime in the near future was clawing away at his mind. He thought about it a lot: colorful airplanes and clouds on the walls and a crib with a sweet baby that had his hair and your eyes. 

His attention was drawn back to the present as soon as the waiter returned with your beers and a platter of bread and fruit. The colorful overhead light was reflecting blue, green and orange onto your pretty face as you glanced up with a look of wonder at the waiter. Because he was now saying the words Bradley had been waiting weeks for you to hear. It was the reason he wanted to book a room as soon as he heard about this hotel. 

"While you wait for your entrees, feel free to walk around and explore our wall of condiments from around the world, our champagne waterfall, and our hot sauce vending machine."

You lurched in your seat. "Did you say hot sauce vending machine?!"

"Yes," the waiter replied with a smile, nodding to the far end of the restaurant. "Have fun."

"Bradley!" you shrieked. "They have a hot sauce vending machine!"

He grinned as you pulled him to his feet. "I know, Baby Girl. That's why I brought you here."

You wrapped your hands around his neck and pulled him in for a kiss that was better suited for the bedroom, but Bradley didn't care that there was a couple trying to eat at the next table. You were happy right now when there were times recently that you clearly hadn't been, so they'd just have to deal. 

Bradley eventually led you to the vending machine which was enormous and filled with tiny bottles of hundreds of different kinds of sauces. You stood before it in the colorful wonderland of a restaurant, analyzing each one like this was the most important work assignment of your career. 

"That's one's from Japan," you mused out loud, pointing to a green bottle. "I've always wanted to try it. Oh, and that one is made in Maryland! We need to get that one."

"Pick as many as you want, Sweetheart. They come with the meal." You actually jumped up and down and clapped your hands as you pushed the buttons to select twenty two different hot sauces, loading Bradley's arms up with the little bottles one at a time.

Then you stopped at the champagne fountain and got two glasses to take back as well. The waiter brought your dinners and some extra plates for all of the hot sauces, and you lined them up across the table. "I think I'm in heaven," you said, dipping your fork into a sauce and tasting it. 

Bradley watched you enjoy the flavor before dipping the fork again and holding it out to him. Your smile and the expectant look on your face as he tasted it made him happy, too. "I know I'm in heaven."

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

How do we feel about Cam and Cat? How do we feel about Cam and BG? I also have a Cam face grab. The hot sauce vending machine is for @dakotakazansky !Thanks to @mak-32 and @beyondthesefourwalls

PART 7

@hotch-meeeeeuppppp

@swthxrry

@chassy21

@yaboid19

@solacestyles

@avoirlecoupdefoudre

@daisyhollyxox

@throwinsauce

@awesomebooklover17

@wintercap89

@whosyourgnomie4

@rosesinmars

@blog-name6996

@bcon24

@wishfulwithwine

@backinwonderl4nd

@tetragonia

@gingerbreadandpaper

@emptyloverofmine

@chaoticassidy

@missmirandafe

@changlingkhat

@sugarcoated-lame

@avada-kedavra-bitch-187

@katiebby04

@marantha

@averyhotchner

@abaker74

@heli991113

@k-k0129

@noz4a2

@tallyovie

@shanimallina87

@starlightstories

@teddyluvs2sing

@little-wiseone

@ccbb2222

@lilyevanswhore

@o-the-o-grim-o-reaper-o

@hecate-steps-on-me

@xoxabs88xox

[aston-axo]

Niki Lauda and James Hunt — Friday 18th July 1975 Silverstone - Practice Runs for the Grand Prix

ATV Sports Reporter Gary Newbon interviews championship leader, Niki Lauda from Austria and Britain's James Hunt, about the race and the new car they will soon be driving. In 1975 James Hunt was driving for Hesketh Racing and Lauda was driving for Scuderia Ferrari.

In the race, Niki Lauda would hold fourth place off the start, but soon a heavy shower brought a flurry of tyre changes. A wheel had not been fastened when Niki was released and fell off within 20 meters, resulting in a scramble to reattach it. He stopped again a lap later for it to be tightened properly, and rejoined a lap down.

As the track dried, he showed blistering speed: four seconds a lap faster than the rest, but then came another deluge and the field was decimated by a series of aquaplaning shunts and the race red-flagged. The official results announced shortly afterwards were based on a count-back lap, which meant that Niki was classified eighth despite being third across the line. Ferrari protested, but without result.

James hunt would make it to the final lap without major incident, before retiring along with many other drivers. His final position: fourth, was unaffected.

A miserable race for the both of them, all in all.

[Comparisons between versions and editors notes are below the cut.]

Clipped and Cropped • Colour Corrected • Removed Colour Cast • Upscaled with Artemis • Denoised • Sharpened and Enhanced • Recovered Original Detail • Added Noise and Film Grain • 60fps Frame Interpolation • Edited Gamma and Exposure • Stabilised • Audio Cleaned • Manual Cleaning of Degraded Film

• While the lower logo is a lost cause, I had a real good go at cleaning up the upper logo. Despite it being easy to remove in James' zoom sections, where it hovered and moved over the banner made the erasure too disruptive and time intensive to clean up in whole.

• I did all the film cleaning manually, therefore it's very likely I missed out on some damage. I got all the major stuff though.

• At the beginning, for god knows what reason, the upscaler has a hissy fit and throws up coloured blocks. Incredibly annoying, but I couldn't find a way to fix it.

• The video is dark at the start due to cloud cover, and it's more noticeable without the colour cast, there's better lighting by the end.

• There's much more to the original video: cars practising at the track, a later interview by Niki in 1977, and a separate one of James the same year. I cut those, so I could focus on this interview, and because the film degradation of the practice runs is noticeably severe. But, if people are interested, I'm very happy to also tidy those.

• I'm here nor there on the cleaned up audio. I wish there was an easy software where I could more manually tune it.

• I snipped off like a second of the end because the degradation got so bad it was easier just to cut it since James had finished talking by that point anyway.

Despite all this, please enjoy.

[andmaybegayer]

What are some of the coolest computer chips ever, in your opinion?

Hmm. There are a lot of chips, and a lot of different things you could call a Computer Chip. Here's a few that come to mind as "interesting" or "important", or, if I can figure out what that means, "cool".

If your favourite chip is not on here honestly it probably deserves to be and I either forgot or I classified it more under "general IC's" instead of "computer chips" (e.g. 555, LM, 4000, 7000 series chips, those last three each capable of filling a book on their own). The 6502 is not here because I do not know much about the 6502, I was neither an Apple nor a BBC Micro type of kid. I am also not 70 years old so as much as I love the DEC Alphas, I have never so much as breathed on one.

Disclaimer for writing this mostly out of my head and/or ass at one in the morning, do not use any of this as a source in an argument without checking.

Intel 3101

So I mean, obvious shout, the Intel 3101, a 64-bit chip from 1969, and Intel's first ever product. You may look at that, and go, "wow, 64-bit computing in 1969? That's really early" and I will laugh heartily and say no, that's not 64-bit computing, that is 64 bits of SRAM memory.

This one is cool because it's cute. Look at that. This thing was completely hand-designed by engineers drawing the shapes of transistor gates on sheets of overhead transparency and exposing pieces of crudely spun silicon to light in a """"cleanroom"""" that would cause most modern fab equipment to swoon like a delicate Victorian lady. Semiconductor manufacturing was maturing at this point but a fab still had more in common with a darkroom for film development than with the mega expensive building sized machines we use today.

As that link above notes, these things were really rough and tumble, and designs were being updated on the scale of weeks as Intel learned, well, how to make chips at an industrial scale. They weren't the first company to do this, in the 60's you could run a chip fab out of a sufficiently well sealed garage, but they were busy building the background that would lead to the next sixty years.

Lisp Chips

This is a family of utterly bullshit prototype processors that failed to be born in the whirlwind days of AI research in the 70's and 80's.

Lisps, a very old but exceedingly clever family of functional programming languages, were the language of choice for AI research at the time. Lisp compilers and interpreters had all sorts of tricks for compiling Lisp down to instructions, and also the hardware was frequently being built by the AI researchers themselves with explicit aims to run Lisp better.

The illogical conclusion of this was attempts to implement Lisp right in silicon, no translation layer.

Yeah, that is Sussman himself on this paper.

These never left labs, there have since been dozens of abortive attempts to make Lisp Chips happen because the idea is so extremely attractive to a certain kind of programmer, the most recent big one being a pile of weird designd aimed to run OpenGenera. I bet you there are no less than four members of r/lisp who have bought an Icestick FPGA in the past year with the explicit goal of writing their own Lisp Chip. It will fail, because this is a terrible idea, but damn if it isn't cool.

There were many more chips that bridged this gap, stuff designed by or for Symbolics (like the Ivory series of chips or the 3600) to go into their Lisp machines that exploited the up and coming fields of microcode optimization to improve Lisp performance, but sadly there are no known working true Lisp Chips in the wild.

Zilog Z80

Perhaps the most important chip that ever just kinda hung out. The Z80 was almost, almost the basis of The Future. The Z80 is bizzare. It is a software compatible clone of the Intel 8080, which is to say that it has the same instructions implemented in a completely different way.

This is, a strange choice, but it was the right one somehow because through the 80's and 90's practically every single piece of technology made in Japan contained at least one, maybe two Z80's even if there was no readily apparent reason why it should have one (or two). I will defer to Cathode Ray Dude here: What follows is a joke, but only barely

The Z80 is the basis of the MSX, the IBM PC of Japan, which was produced through a system of hardware and software licensing to third party manufacturers by Microsoft of Japan which was exactly as confusing as it sounds. The result is that the Z80, originally intended for embedded applications, ended up forming the basis of an entire alternate branch of the PC family tree.

It is important to note that the Z80 is boring. It is a normal-ass chip but it just so happens that it ended up being the focal point of like a dozen different industries all looking for a cheap, easy to program chip they could shove into Appliances.

Effectively everything that happened to the Intel 8080 happened to the Z80 and then some. Black market clones, reverse engineered Soviet compatibles, licensed second party manufacturers, hundreds of semi-compatible bastard half-sisters made by anyone with a fab, used in everything from toys to industrial machinery, still persisting to this day as an embedded processor that is probably powering something near you quietly and without much fuss. If you have one of those old TI-86 calculators, that's a Z80. Oh also a horrible hybrid Z80/8080 from Sharp powered the original Game Boy.

I was going to try and find a picture of a Z80 by just searching for it and look at this mess! There's so many of these things.

I mean the C/PM computers. The ZX Spectrum, I almost forgot that one! I can keep making this list go! So many bits of the Tech Explosion of the 80's and 90's are powered by the Z80. I was not joking when I said that you sometimes found more than one Z80 in a single computer because you might use one Z80 to run the computer and another Z80 to run a specialty peripheral like a video toaster or music synthesizer. Everyone imaginable has had their hand on the Z80 ball at some point in time or another. Z80 based devices probably launched several dozen hardware companies that persist to this day and I have no idea which ones because there were so goddamn many.

The Z80 eventually got super efficient due to process shrinks so it turns up in weird laptops and handhelds! Zilog and the Z80 persist to this day like some kind of crocodile beast, you can go to RS components and buy a brand new piece of Z80 silicon clocked at 20MHz. There's probably a couple in a car somewhere near you.

Pentium (P6 microarchitecture)

Yeah I am going to bring up the Hackers chip. The Pentium P6 series is currently remembered for being the chip that Acidburn geeks out over in Hackers (1995) instead of making out with her boyfriend, but it is actually noteworthy IMO for being one of the first mainstream chips to start pulling serious tricks on the system running it.

The P6 microarchitecture comes out swinging with like four or five tricks to get around the numerous problems with x86 and deploys them all at once. It has superscalar pipelining, it has a RISC microcode, it has branch prediction, it has a bunch of zany mathematical optimizations, none of these are new per se but this is the first time you're really seeing them all at once on a chip that was going into PC's.

Without these improvements it's possible Intel would have been beaten out by one of its competitors, maybe Power or SPARC or whatever you call the thing that runs on the Motorola 68k. Hell even MIPS could have beaten the ageing cancerous mistake that was x86. But by discovering the power of lying to the computer, Intel managed to speed up x86 by implementing it in a sensible instruction set in the background, allowing them to do all the same clever pipelining and optimization that was happening with RISC without having to give up their stranglehold on the desktop market. Without the P5 we live in a very, very different world from a computer hardware perspective.

From this falls many of the bizzare microcode execution bugs that plague modern computers, because when you're doing your optimization on the fly in chip with a second, smaller unix hidden inside your processor eventually you're not going to be cryptographically secure.

RISC is very clearly better for, most things. You can find papers stating this as far back as the 70's, when they start doing pipelining for the first time and are like "you know pipelining is a lot easier if you have a few small instructions instead of ten thousand massive ones.

x86 only persists to this day because Intel cemented their lead and they happened to use x86. True RISC cuts out the middleman of hyperoptimizing microcode on the chip, but if you can't do that because you've girlbossed too close to the sun as Intel had in the late 80's you have to do something.

The Future

This gets us to like the year 2000. I have more chips I find interesting or cool, although from here it's mostly microcontrollers in part because from here it gets pretty monotonous because Intel basically wins for a while. I might pick that up later. Also if this post gets any longer it'll be annoying to scroll past. Here is a sample from a post I have in my drafts since May:

I have some notes on the weirdo PowerPC stuff that shows up here it's mostly interesting because of where it goes, not what it is. A lot of it ends up in games consoles. Some of it goes into mainframes. There is some of it in space. Really got around, PowerPC did.

[cyberpunkonline]

What is a Cypherpunk?

The term "cypherpunk" refers to a movement and a community of activists advocating for the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the cypherpunk movement is a confluence of libertarian political philosophy, hacker ethos, and cryptographic science.

The Core Traits of Cypherpunks

1. Advocacy for Privacy and Anonymity: Cypherpunks champion the right to privacy, emphasizing that individuals should have control over their personal information and digital footprints. This advocacy is often in direct opposition to government surveillance and corporate data collection practices.

2. Use of Cryptography: The cornerstone of the cypherpunk movement is the use of strong cryptography to secure communications and transactions. Cypherpunks believe that through cryptographic techniques, individuals can protect their privacy in the digital world.

3. Open Source and Decentralization: A significant trait among cypherpunks is the belief in open-source software and decentralized systems. This ethos promotes transparency, security, and resistance to censorship and control by central authorities.

Who are the Cypherpunks?

The cypherpunk community consists of programmers, activists, academics, and technologists. Notable figures include Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks; Jacob Appelbaum, a former spokesperson for the Tor Project; and Hal Finney, a pioneer in digital cash systems. The manifesto "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" by Eric Hughes (1993) [https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html] eloquently encapsulates the philosophy and ideals of this movement.

The Cypherpunk Movement

Cypherpunks are not a formal organization but rather a loosely associated group sharing common interests in cryptography and privacy. The movement's origins can be traced to the “Cypherpunks” mailing list, started in 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May, and John Gilmore. This list served as a platform for discussing privacy, cryptography, and related political issues.

Relation to Cyberpunk Principles

While cypherpunks share some overlap with the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, they are distinct in their real-world activism. Cyberpunk literature, like William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (1984) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6088006-neuromancer], often presents a dystopian future where technology is pervasive and oppressive. In contrast, cypherpunks aim to use technology, specifically cryptography, as a tool for empowerment and resistance against such dystopian futures.

Notable Contributions and Technologies

The cypherpunk movement has been instrumental in the development of technologies that emphasize privacy and security:

Tor (The Onion Router): A free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication [https://www.torproject.org/].

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP): A data encryption and decryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication [https://www.openpgp.org/].

Bitcoin: The creation of Bitcoin by an individual or group under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto was heavily influenced by the ideas of the cypherpunk movement. It embodies principles of decentralization and financial privacy [https://bitcoin.org/en/].

Wikileaks: Founded by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks is a multinational media organization that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources [https://wikileaks.org/].

Conclusion

The cypherpunk movement is a critical lens through which to view the ongoing dialogue about privacy, security, and freedom in the digital age. While not an organized group, the collective impact of cypherpunks on modern cryptography, internet privacy, and digital rights is profound. As digital technology continues to permeate every facet of our lives, the principles and contributions of the cypherpunk community remain more relevant than ever. - REV1.

[subliminalbo]

Classified Information #2: The Sound

From the Carpenter Foghorn Vol. 21, Issue 3

Uploaded by Christopher C. Buchanan 08/25/2018

Life Beyond the Stars? Carpenter State Researchers Capture Mysterious Sound from Space

By Troy M. Bauserman

Since Galileo first charted the moon’s phases, scientists have obsessed over a haunting question: are we truly alone in the universe? For many, all it takes is a glance through a telescope to answer that question. How could we possibly be alone in all that real estate? But the student researchers at CSU’s Department of Astrophysics and Astronomy may be closing in on a definitive answer. It comes in the form of a mysterious sound recorded from the very depths of space.

“There are all kinds of radio signals in space,” explains Sharon Ackworth, a PhD student working out of Carpenter State’s esteemed Weir Laboratory. “Anything that produces a magnetic field will also cast radio waves which we can pick up. And yes, you can translate those radio waves into sounds. But [our sound] is unique from say, a radio wave generated by an atmosphere, because it is a sound.”

“The Sound” as it’s come to be known in the department, is not wholly unique. NASA first captured sound from space in 2003, but sadly these noises remain inaudible to the human ear. “We know we have a sound,” Ackworth says, the frustration heavy in her voice. “We’re just not there yet—technologically—to hear it. Suddenly we’re in an arms race to be the first laboratory to amplify a cosmic sound into an audible range.” A feat that Ackworth notes sounds much simpler than it is, requiring state of the art audio technology to “turn it up” by millions of decibels.

As for what the sound may be, Ackworth hypothesizes that they’ve captured the sound of gas expelled from a black hole. Until we hear it with our own ears, however, I’m happy to believe that our little gray friends are finally reaching out to us from beyond the stars.

“I don’t get it,” Kayla cocked her head to the side as she watched Iris work at her laptop. “You can’t even hear it?”

“That’s the whole point,” Iris said, her eyes glued to the computer screen. “It was recorded before this software existed. Fuck, I can’t believe it’s even real.”

“I still don’t get it,” Kayla repeated. “So, we recorded a sound that isn’t a sound…sure. But if the technology exists now, why hasn’t anyone done this before?”

“Because,” Iris said, glancing conspiratorially through the glass walls of their private study room in the Carpenter State University Library. “The Department of Astrophysics and Astronomy shut down years ago. There was like a whole scandal. A bunch of fellows transferred out and their work was abandoned. After that, The Sound just kind of became an urban legend.”

Kayla leaned in behind Iris’ shoulder. Iris had pulled the audio file from the school’s archives and was now playing around with the sound wave in some fancy audio program that Kayla didn’t recognize (Her question, “What is that, Audacity?” had elicited a sharp snort from Iris). At its native frequency, the sound wave charted a straight line. But slowly, as Iris played with the program, small, periodic ridges interrupted the line’s straight path. It was satisfying to watch the sound take shape, even if Kayla didn’t totally understand the process.

“How did you even find it?” Kayla asked.

“It was buried in CSU’s private server. Bailey hooked me up with access.”

A knock at the glass cut into their conversation.

“Speak of the devil.”

Bailey DuBois entered the study room with her backpack slung casually over her shoulder. The small blonde adjusted her glasses on her nose as she said quietly, “Library’s closing in fifteen.”

“Cool,” Iris nodded.

“No, Iris,” She said. “Like, you need to leave.” Bailey did her best to look stern in the face of old friends, but she’d always been more comfortable with books than people. She glanced around to see if anyone was passing by, then said more quietly, “The confidential server is no joke, Iris. If someone finds out that I let you use my access…”

“Confidential?” Kayla squeaked.

“Relax,” Iris said. “We’re wrapping up now anyway. I copied the file to my computer so I can do the rest from the apartment.”

The tension released from Bailey’s shoulders. “So you found the file?”

“Sure did.”

Bailey stepped further into the room to join Kayla behind Iris. “That’s it?” She asked.

“It’s taking shape right now,” Iris said. “We’re going to leave, I just…I need to hear it first.”

“What are you even going to do with it?” Kayla asked.

Iris smiled then said, “I’m gonna put it in a song.”

Bailey’s laugh pulled Iris momentarily from the screen. “Why not?”

“I thought there wasn’t any sound in space,” Kayla said.

“Technically that’s not true,” Iris replied, turning back to her work on the laptop. “In a vacuum, sound waves can’t go anywhere. But the student who discovered The Sound hypothesized that it was sound moving through space gas or something.”

“Or,” Bailey said. “It could be aliens.”

Kayla backed away toward the glass wall, her arms crossed over her chest. “Is there any chance this thing is dangerous?” she asked. “I mean someone took the time to bury it on the very fucking private and spooky secret server, yeah? You remember what happened to those people in Cuba?”

“I’m pretty sure the government made that up,” Iris laughed, digging into her backpack to pull out a pair of wired headphones. “You can spot for me if you’re so worried. Take these off if I start bleeding from the eyes.”

“Honestly, it’s a moral imperative that we listen to it,” Bailey said. “For science.”

“And rock and roll,” Iris nodded.

Unspooling the cord, she slipped the headphones over her ears and plugged the audio jack into her laptop. She took a deep breath, said something campy like, “To infinity and beyond,” then hit play on the program.

From the Carpenter Foghorn Vol. 22, Issue 5

Uploaded by Christopher C. Buchanan 09/01/2018

“Weird” Weir Laboratory to Close Down: Dean Pulls Funding on Controversial Program Amid Rumors

By Teri Daniels

The Department of Astrophysics and Astronomy is closing down after nearly forty years in operation. The decision was announced in a press statement by Dean of Arts and Sciences Strickland Pierce. Though many departments have been forced to tighten their budgets in the wake of the economic downturn, the Department of Astrophysics and Astronomy is an outlier in Dean Pierce’s plan to maintain funding in STEM.

“It’s purely an economic decision,” Office Liaison Amanda Cline said on behalf of Dean Pierce. “A time of austerity forces us to make tough decisions. We’ve seen that in the elimination of other programs such as the Screenwriting major last year.”

But the decision comes in the aftermath of Dean Pierce’s souring relationship with program director Dr. Philip Weir, Jr. Dr. Weir, whose father bears the namesake for the Weir Laboratory, had endeared his students to his eccentric personality throughout the years, though his behavior had reportedly grown erratic in the weeks leading up to the department’s closure. Dr. Weir had attempted to publish an article in the Carpenter State University Scientific Journal purporting definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. He later barricaded himself inside of the Weir Laboratory with a dozen PhD students, insisting that he wouldn’t leave until he had proven the unpublished paper to be true. An anonymous source claims that the culture inside the Weir Laboratory was in recent years less of an academic community than it was a cult. Following the incident, Carpenter State University declined to press charges against Dr. Weir but dismissed him from his position.

Dr. Sharon Ackworth, head researcher at the Weir Laboratory, has vowed to continue Dr. Weir’s work. “It’s like losing your home in a storm,” she stated. “What can you do but pick up the pieces and move on?”

Kayla backed into the corner of the study room as she watched her friends take turns on the headphones. First Iris, trancing out, head bobbing to the cosmic tones, slowly back and forth on a swivel.

“Take them off!” Kayla cried after a few minutes.

A weak moan trembled from Iris’ lips as Bailey pulled the headphones from her ears. She’d never felt anything like that before. Though she turned to look at her friends, she only saw the outlines of their bodies. Her mind was somewhere else in the universe.

“You’ve got to hear to this,” she managed.

Bailey closed her eyes as The Sound washed over her. It was faint, an echo of something deeper that she knew was there but couldn’t quite hear yet. It was taking shape, just as Iris had described. Something was reaching out, something wanted to be heard. A message filled with pure, uncorrupted power.

“Music,” Iris said when she removed the headphones from Bailey’s ears.

“Music,” Bailey repeated. Her thoughts floated beneath a cosmic mist. Everything felt so still in that moment, as if the entire world had come to a stop. Everything except for Bailey’s heart, which was racing.

It wasn’t fear. It was arousal.

Iris must have felt the same way, because she leaned in close to Bailey, her hands pressing down into the arms of the chair as if it was the only thing keeping her upright. Her heavy breaths still moved to the tempo of The Sound. Bailey licked her lips unconsciously, fighting a sudden urge to make the space between them as small as possible.

And she would have if Kayla hadn’t interrupted her.

“Are…are y’all okay?” she squeaked from her corner.

“It’s like…we’re so insignificant,” Iris spoke through glassy eyes.

“So small,” Bailey echoed.

Kayla managed to get Iris to pack up her stuff and by the time they were outside of the library her friend had mostly come to her senses. Iris’ initial reaction had shifted to the practical applications of The Sound. “I mean, I’ll still have to play with the decibels but even at this level…wow. It’s not rock and roll, it’s like trance music. Imagine what it’ll do for the club scene…”

That night Kayla turned in her bed, images of her friends under the influence of The Sound ensuring a restless sleep. In the next room, Iris was wide awake as well, slaving away at her computer. She’d tried to sleep, but couldn’t tear herself away from her work. She continued amplifying The Sound until she found sound beneath the sound.

She was certain now that it was a voice. Distant and inaudible, like a conversation heard from the bottom of the ocean. But it was unmistakably something alive and something intelligent.

Iris’ desire to piece together the full range of sounds buried in this single audio file had driven her forward, but when she heard The Voice she was once again sucked into the black hole that was its Power.

Its? Who was it? A being that existed long before the earth and would continue to exist long after.

Fuck, why was that so hot? Why was she suddenly burning up? Why was she soaking through her panties? Iris thought of the look in Bailey’s eyes after she’d listened to The Sound and found herself growing hungry, not just for her friend but for everything. She wasn’t working anymore, abandoning the program to lean back into her chair and explore her wet pussy. But as her fingers rolled over her swollen clit, The Sound pushed through on its own, growing clearer in Iris’ ears as she neared orgasm.

It was unmistakable. An intelligent voice speaking in an unknown language. A message that was meant to be heard, its strange words mixing into Iris’ moans until she was repeating them herself. As she came to The Voice’s Message, Iris felt that some fundamental part of her existence was melting away, lost down some deep, cosmic rabbit hole.

What was left over would be remade by The Voice.

From the Carpenter Watchblog

Uploaded by Jamie Watt 05/22/2018

In Search of a Reclusive Scientist

By Corbin Arroyo

In the short, often strange history of Carpenter State University, few stories are stranger than the sudden meltdown of The Department of Astrophysics and Astronomy. Yet it’s an event that few talk about, buried in the shallow pages of a student newspaper and left there with no critical consideration. At its peak, The Weir Laboratory was an acclaimed research facility that made massive contributions to our modern understanding of space. Many of its student researchers transferred to more notable schools, but in my attempts to reach these former students, none were interested in discussing their history. None, save one, who remained in the area after the department’s closure.

Despite her proximity to Romero, Dr. Sharon Ackworth was not easy to track down. After a brief attempt to salvage the Astrophysics and Astronomy program, she left academia entirely. She now lives a few miles outside of town. Shrouded in a dense overgrowth of trees, you can only spot her trailer from the road if you’re looking for it. That’s how Dr. Ackworth likes it. Her small abode is a shocking contrast to the sanitary, fluorescent glow you may imagine in a science lab. Color has faded in every corner of this place, the wallpaper an off-white trending toward yellow. That’s what I can see of the walls, anyway. Most of it is papered with pages from spiral notebooks, margins filled with obscure and complex equations far above my English major.

Dr. Ackworth clears some space from a small table just off of the kitchenette. It’s cluttered with old cardboard boxes stuffed with files that I assume are everything she salvaged from her department. She later confirms that she took everything from Dr. Weir’s office. An entire history of a college department stuffed into a leaky, old trailer just off a dirty county road. Dr. Ackworth sips from a coffee mug that says “C8H10N4O2” on its face. My mug has Garfield on it. It sits untouched in front of me.

Dr. Ackworth is barely forty, but a long, thick tangle of rusty-gray hair makes her age difficult to track. Her face looks young. Despite her surroundings, her appearance, I’m certain she could pass for thirty. She doesn’t care about any of that. She hasn’t for a long time.

Her forthcoming account to me of the last days of the Weir Laboratory makes me question why she chooses to live in seclusion. She tells me that it isn’t necessarily fear that’s driven her away from Romero. After all, if she were running from something she’d at least leave the state. No, instead she’s just given up on being heard. In all the years that she’s lived out here, no one has cared enough to ask why.

“Everyone thought that [Dr. Weir] was obsessed with extra-terrestrials,” she remembers. “But that wasn’t the point of his paper. He wasn’t looking for fame or glory, he didn’t want to be the person to prove that aliens exist. It was a warning. At first, we thought The Sound was some sort of natural phenomenon, but we were wrong.”

The Sound that Dr. Ackworth refers to here was recorded by her laboratory in 2005 and became the major point of research in the last years of the Weir Laboratory. An actual sound recorded from the depths of space, one which Dr. Weir and Dr. Ackworth became obsessed with. Inaudible with regular audio technology, but not impossible to hear.

“It wasn’t just one sound though,” she continues. “As we worked with it, we found that it was cascading. Sounds upon a sounds, a voice buried beneath a deep, deep echo. And the more we listened to The Sound, the more it changed us. It burrows into your mind until it’s the only thing that you hear. It’s the only thing that you care about. And you find that it’s not just words, but commands. And you’re powerless to disobey them.

“It moved through the laboratory like a virus, infecting anyone who listened to it. The message was sent to prepare us. An arrival, in which its speaker would inherit the earth and all life that existed within.”

She takes a breath, grips her cup a bit tighter.

“[Dr. Weir] was the first to see what we were becoming. Our obsessive dedication to unlocking every detail of its hidden message terrified him. When he locked the laboratory down, it wasn’t to prove his theory or anything. It was containment. Until the The Sound could be properly destroyed, nobody could leave. He knew that such drastic measures would surely mean the end of his career, and he was right. Everything that you’ve read, the story about program cuts—that was all Dean Pierce’s spin.”

Watching Dr. Ackworth share her story, it’s clear to me that something really happened in that department, something that necessitated a cover up from the highest levels of Carpenter State authority. It drove Dr. Weir to destroy his own reputation, forced Dr. Ackworth to the edge of society. Things like this don’t happen without reason. Was it an evil message meant to prime us for extra-terrestrial conquerors? It’s hard to believe. But reality won’t diminish Dr. Ackworth’s feelings, the years she’s struggled to find anyone to listen to her.

I’m listening, Sharon. And I won’t stop until I find the truth of it all.

The preceding article was retrieved from online archives. It was initially removed from the Carpenter Watchblog by writer Corbin Arroyo at the request of the College of Arts and Sciences. It has been retained on the private server for documentation purposes.

Bailey hadn’t been herself since she’d listened to The Sound.

Even days after, she couldn’t shake it from her head. It echoed in her mind like a bad song.

At night she would drift off into a sleep weighted down by the same vivid dream. There was a figure deep in space. Deep, but not unreachable. It spoke to her, its words locked behind an unknowable language, muffled further by the millions upon millions of light years that separated her from it.

And yet she understood the meaning of its message.

Bailey would awaken, heart pounding, drenched in sweat. The first thing she saw was Iris. The image of her friend in the study room was burned into her memory. Those distant eyes focused on a power so far away, but still stronger than any human on earth. It was the hottest thing Bailey had ever seen.

Iris swung both ways, but as far as sexual orientation was concerned Bailey had never deviated from men. Iris would joke about hooking up, a kind of punk rock desire to make everybody in the room uncomfortable, and Bailey would always laugh it off. But now she drifted off into rough fantasies of Iris holding her down, dominating her.

She could teach me, Bailey thought. She could teach me to be a good flesh puppet.

What was that? Where had that come from?

Bailey tried to resist the urges that her late night fantasies conjured. She avoided contact with Iris, even went so far as to delete her from her contacts. Yet when Bailey wandered the library she caught herself peering through the glass walls of its study rooms. What did Bailey even plan to do when she saw Iris again? She feared to speak the answer into existence.

Work normally kept Bailey grounded, but now she found the library to be the hardest place to think. For her, it was ground zero. She was becoming something now and it couldn’t be stopped.

She was becoming a flesh puppet.

The thought made her drop in a quiet corner among the stacks, aching for release. The top floor of the library had a private bathroom where she would go on breaks to scroll Instagram. Locking herself in, Bailey was barely sitting down before she had her fingers buried in her pussy. Even awake she could hear The Voice, encouraging her.

“Fuck!”

Her cries were pure, unrestrained obedience.

The orgasm broke her. She remained seated, arms hanging limp like a doll’s, as The Voice’s Message filled the space where she had once had thoughts.

She came back slowly. A finger twitch, a jaw click, an eye roll. It was like something had crawled inside of her and was adjusting to its new home.

She took a deep breath.

It was time to see her friends.

The apartment door vibrated with the thumping sound on the other side. Bailey tried the knob and it creaked open. She was met with a mix of voices that she immediately recognized.

The first was Iris, confident and domineering, issuing commands between shallow breaths. The second, distant and hungry, was Kayla submitting to those commands, begging Iris to go deeper. The third voice—Bailey knew it but had never heard it. Not like this. It was The Voice, its alien words pumping through Iris’ sound system as clearly as Iris and Kayla’s cries.

Bailey found her friends in the living room. Iris had Kayla bent over the couch, taking her from behind with a large, black strap on. Beads of sweat trickled down their naked bodies. Kayla’s mouth was wide open, tongue dripping, glassy eyes rolled back into her head as she took the full force of her best friend’s silicone cock.

Bailey was driven to the floor by the massive weight of The Voice’s Message. She tore at her shirt, pulling her bra down to expose her breasts. With one hand she groped; pinching, twisting, rolling her fingers over her nipple. The other hand found its way down into her wet shorts.

Bailey’s moans mixed among her friends as she cried out the words that burned their way into her mind. They weren’t alien when they left her lips. A translated Message for the world to hear: “I am…the Birth of a new species! I will Prepare…my body and my mind for the…Great Arrival! I will Fill whatever need is…expected! I will Preach, I will Build, I will Breed! I will Shape the…soil to The Messenger’s Desires! I am a flesh puppet! My Submission is eternal.”

When Bailey looked up, she saw that Iris was speaking the same words, her eyes looking through her. Kayla too was trying her best to repeat the loop, but she struggled through the pounding. After the two finished, Iris stepped toward Bailey, leaving Kayla motionless on the couch, simply absorbing The Message that repeated over the speakers.

Though Iris spoke freely, her lips continued to move silently to The Message’s words in small breaks between her own. The effect was something uncanny, like a robot imitating a human’s speech patterns but struggling not to process all of the other data around it.

“I was wondering when you’d return,” Iris said coldly, approaching Bailey. “I couldn’t fight it for that long. I let it take me the night we found it. Kayla too. She was so scared at first, but she saw the way. How long did it bounce around your head?”

“So long…” Bailey moaned.

“And now that you’ve heard the complete Message, you know how much work we have to do.”

“So much…”

Iris slipped her finger beneath Bailey’s chin and lifted her head so that she could look down into those empty eyes. Empty, but so full of desire.

Bailey, staring down the face of Iris’ cock still dripping in Kayla’s sex, licked her lips.

“I am ready,” she said, her lips too beginning to move to The Message. “We must prepare my body for The Great Arrival.”