#for some reason it appeared as all one block of text on desktop?? why??

[incarnation-of-rasputin]

a “should we know us a little better” tag 📜
RULES: you must answer these 92 statements and tag 20 people


Tagged by @steviebvck (thanks fam 💛)


THE LAST:


1. Drink: water. Not water: milk


2. Phone call: my dad (but also my mom and brother and dog on the same call)


3. Text message: a text to a group chat congratulating one of my besties on her final :)


4. Song you listened to: growl - EXO


5. Time you cried: oh man while watching Assassination Classroom last week


6. Dated someone twice: I don't even know what this means so probably never lol


7. Kissed someone and regretted it: yep.


8. Been cheated on: not that I know of~


9. Lost someone special: yep.


10. Been depressed: yep.


11. Gotten drunk and thrown up: twice (and 3 years apart bc I went hard in freshman and senior years)


LIST 3 FAVORITE COLORS:


12-14: forest green, blue, bright yellow


IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU:


15. Made new friends: yee!! :D


16. Fallen out of love: maybe. I think with the idea of someone, yeah.


17. Laughed until you cried: yee


18. Found out someone was talking about you: yeah. It was drama and not my fault.


19. Met someone who changed you: yeah :)


20. Found out who your friends are: lol YUP.


21. Kissed someone on your Facebook list: yes! She graciously fulfilled my bucket list wish of kissing someone on the Street. What a friend, yo.


GENERAL:


22. How many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life: all of them.


23. Do you have any pets: a dog named Jimmy!


24. Do you want to change your name: thinkin about it. Definitely in some social groups, I've already done so.


25. What did you do for your last Birthday: I don't remember haha. I went to Chapel Choir and maybe Philadelphia for archival research... I don't remember doing anything with friends tho. My roommate got me cupcakes :)


26. What time did you wake up: 8:45am


27. What were you doing at midnight last night: taking a nap!


28. Name something you can’t wait for: visiting my friend next month ^_^


29. When was the last time you saw your mom: the day after graduation in person, 3 days ago on call


30. What is one thing you wish you could change in your life: I am trying to become more confident in myself! So that would be nice. 


31. What are you listening right now: dial tones (yay work)


32. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom: my uncle is called Tom, so yes


33. Something that is getting on your nerves: my inability to overcome my anxiety about applying for jobs


34. Most visited Website: YouTube and Tumblr probably. On my phone it used to be not just YouTube but specifically the 'look at this graph' video


35. Mole/s: a lot? I have a big one behind my ear


36. Mark/s: not really? I think I have a birth mark on my ankle.


37. Childhood dream: become a hobbit and live in the Shire


38. Hair color: dirty blond


39. Long or short hair: used to have long hair but I just cut it the shortest it's ever been since I was like 1 month old probably.


40. Do you have a crush on someone?: yeah probably idk dude. Def love me some fictional boys.


41. What do you like about yourself: i try to be a nice person, and I like that people can come to me for advice and they'll feel better after talking to me <3 I like that I care about my friends a lot, too :)


42. Piercings: none


43. Bloodtype: I don't know, mang


44. Nickname: Racheypoo, Liefy


45. Relationship status: single & v ready to mingle my dudes


46. Zodiac: aquarius


47. Pronouns: he/him/his


48. Favorite TV Show: Spongebob


49. Tattoos: none, but I want the elvish number nine someday


50. Right or left hand: I'm right handed


51. Surgery: wisdom teeth


52. Piercing: none


53. Sport: I used to play soccer and lacrosse.


55. Vacation: ideal would be going to New Zealand but I often go visit my family in Canada, which is still nice.


56. Pair of trainers: normally converse.


MORE GENERAL:


57. Eating: currently nothing


58. Drinking: currently nothing


59. I’m about to: call another prospect and listen to their voicemail :'D


61. Waiting for: lunch break (oi where’s 60?)


62. Want: hugs and hair ruffles. But also the weekend. And to get buff. Especially my shoulders.


63. Get married: v want.


64. Career: *hyperventilates* history professor or working as a political / historical analyst for an international government agency


WHICH IS BETTER?:


65. Hugs or kisses: HUGS


66. Lips or eyes: eyes definitely


67. Shorter or taller: you'd have to work really hard to be shorter than me


68. Older or younger: doesn’t really matter. All the people I've dated (aka 2 people) have been younger than me (but only by max 11 months).


70. Nice arms or nice stomach: I don't really care? I love me some forearms but like that doesn't really matter to me


71. Sensitive or loud: sensitive definitely


72. Hook up or relationship: relationship


73. Troublemaker or hesitant: hesitant most of the time. Love some reckless spirit once in a while tho.


HAVE YOU EVER:


74. Kissed a stranger: no, but I've tried to psych myself up to do it and couldn't


75. Drank hard liquor: pfft of course who do you think I am #RussianScottishIrish


76. Lost glasses/contact lenses: don't wear them


77. Turned someone down: yeah I think so


78. Sex in the first date: nope


79. Broken someones heart: probably not? Hopefully not??


80. Had your heart broken: yeah probably but not in the conventional way. gotta love terrible realizations.


81. Been arrested: nope


82. Cried when someone died: yes


83. Fallen for a friend: yeah? That's how my relationships started yo


DO YOU BELIEVE IN:


84. Yourself: I try to! It's hard though.


85. Miracles: not really


86. Love at first sight: yeah, but I haven't experienced it. I know people who say they have and I trust them.


87. Santa Claus: nope.


88. Kiss on the first date: depends on whether I know the person well beforehand


89. Angels: not really


OTHER:


90. Current best friends name: the fuck dude you only have one best friend?


91. Eyecolor: green / blue


92. Favorite movie: Lord of the Rings (don't make me choose among my babies) 

 I'm tagging @gengarsho @pizzajpg @not-the-kind-you-save (hehe tagged again) @eknott0 @scootastic @ultramaster ​@broodystargayzer @thegenderqueerbatman and anyone else who wants to do this! (Sorry it's not 20 people)

[tittyblade]

tumblr etiquette 101

a list that is nowhere near exhaustive, from yours truly.

First off, welcome! Whether you’re a twitter veteran looking for anything but whatever twitter is, or a new user just done signing up, glad to see you in our ranks beloveds! Welcome home. Refer to this quick tour to make sure your fandom experience (or tumblr experience in general) is a positive one!

Disclaimer: I know it’s long, but please try to read or skim through til the end if you’re new here! This is by no means meant to be a rule book (for the most part lol), only a guide to help you get settled easier!

1) Your blog

This is where people will see and interact with you, so put some effort into it!

Try to choose a name (url) that’s simple. You can see it as your brand, it’s how people will perceive you and remember you. If you’d like to interact with other users here (and not use the site just for the content) it’s better to have something short and sweet, preferably without spaces. (Of course, these are only suggestions.) Rest assured, you can change it literally any time you want.

Have a theme. Utilize the tool that lets you edit your blog’s color or the font of your bio! You can make it match your profile picture, or your blog if it has a theme of its own. Make it feel homey :]

Fill in your bio. People will be checking out your profile probably more often than you think. Don’t leave it empty! Put in any information you’re comfortable with sharing and isn’t too personal (like your age if you’re a minor, or other TMI that can be found on other people’s carrds). It’s always better to add a name/nickname people can use to refer to you by, but feel free to use your blog description to shitpost still.

You can have an intro post. More often than not, you’ll see a blog have a pinned post, a post permanently appearing at the top of a blog until you pin another post or unpin it. You can make one of those, if you’d like to introduce yourself in more length, link any other socials or a carrd, and show others visiting your blog how you tag things so it’ll be easy for them to navigate. Not an obligation.

Keep your anonymity and your safety. It should go without saying, but there’s no harm in repeating it just in case. Your comfort, privacy and safety has the utmost importance. Don’t share any information you don’t want to. Don’t share your age if you’re a minor, or any other incredibly personal info. I’d encourage you to go by a nickname that’s not your real name, (blog name, your brand, remember?) since there’s safety in anonymity, and that’s lowkey one of the big deals of tumblr, but that’s up to you still.

Choose what you want to be visible. Your liked posts and who you follow are all things you can set to keep to yourself and hide from the publics eye, how handy! You should go through all the setting while you’re at it, set it to your comfort.

Side blogs are a thing. You can have multiple blogs that you can use for different things (see: different fandoms, art blog, etc) to keep them organized or away from your followers. Just remember that the replies and off-anon asks you send will be from your main blog, as well as where you follow other blogs from.

2) Interacting with others

You’ve set up your account, now comes the fun part!

Follow to your heart’s desire. If you care about others seeing who you follow, fear not! In tumblr, usually only two types of blogs keep their following visible to others: newbies, and big blogs using it to point people on other good blogs’ direction. Just turn it off, and go ham following people.

Customize your dashboard. Gonna mention just two things here: this is another reason why it’s really important that you follow blogs without sparing, your dash will collect dust otherwise; and you should turn off “best stuff first” in your dashboard settings, to have a better community here and all.

Follow tags. You can set it in your settings that posts with your followed tags appear on your dashboard.

You can check the og post for edits and context. When you see a reblogged post you don’t understand the context of (or don’t recognize the character in case of fanarts), click on the profile so it will take you to the original post. From there you can check the original poster’s tags to get the context, or see if there have been any edits made to the post, since when you edit a post it doesn’t update any past reblogs.

Send people asks... This is how you make mutuals, people! Do it off-anon if you’d like them to know your blog, or anon if you’d rather not! (You can still end your messages with a signature to show you’re the same person, -[name] is one example.) Send them nice messages, ask their opinion on something, discuss things, or just straight up shitpost lol. Go wild. The sky’s your limit and it’s definitely more than 280 characters.

...and let them ask you! You can set your preference in the settings, do it on desktop tumblr to access more settings tho! What you can customize on mobile is limited (like letting people ask you things anonymously, that’s only on desktop settings). In my personal opinion, it’s always better to tag their username (or a nickname you give them, if they’re a friend) on that post, since you wouldn’t want your interactions with your friends to get buried in your blog forever.

Comment on posts. If you have something to say but don’t want the post to appear on your blog you can add a comment. The owner of the post will get a notif for it, but for anyone else you need to tag them.

For the love of god, reblog. People will only see your liked posts if you have it visible to public and they specifically go on your blog to look at them. You like something? You reblog. It’s already hard for posts to circulate properly, if you don’t reblog them literally no one will see them. If not for anything do it for the artists. Just hold and drag on mobile to fast rb.

3) Your Posts

Finally here! Don’t be a lurker, post and engage!

Make use of “read more”. If your post is long, add it. That’s what you clicked on earlier to expand this post. On desktop leave an empty line and you’ll see three dots appear, and on mobile type :readmore: on that empty line.

Draft a post to come back to it later. Pretty self explanatory.

Queue your post. Whether it’s your own post or you’re reblogging, make use of the queue feature to a) not spam reblog and fill up the dashboard of people following you and b) keep your blog active while you’re gone. Mess around in the settings, it’s fairly easy to set up.

Schedule your post. Same as queueing, the only difference is you get to choose the exact time your post will go up. Handy if you want to schedule a post for certain dates like april fools, or 5 years in the future for some reason. 

Format your texts. You can do all kinds of fancy stuff here (that’s a link, try pressing on it). Twitter doesn’t have this, make use of it. Changes depending on whether you’re on mobile or desktop. (Desktop has less features.)

Check your stats. If you’re trying to understand the algorithm better or want to look at some pretty graphs you can get your data on that on desktop tumblr.

@ people in comments. You’ll get all the notifs when people comment on your posts but they won’t see your reply unless you tag them in your message.

4) Tags, and tagging a post

This is where my earlier statement “this isn’t a rule book” stops being applicable. It’s not a war crime to go against these, I won’t come chasing you (don’t take my word for this) but you’ll work up a bad rep. Just saying lol.

Do NOT crosstag posts. It’s really tempting to add unrelated tags to increase your posts’ interaction, I know, but that’s not what tumblr is about. Don’t be a dick and make other communities’ experience worse for them.

Always tag your posts with “crit/critical/discourse/etc” if it calls for it. There’s no exceptions to it. This is the reason you see people migrating to tumblr. Let people enjoy things.

Don’t main tag a critical/negative post. If your crit post is about “Thing”, you add the “Thing critical” tag, but not the “Thing” tag. People block crit tags if they don’t want to see it, don’t shove it in their faces by main tagging it. 

If you don’t want to see something, just block it. Another reason why people are able to survive on tumblr. You don’t start discourse, you don’t make call-outs, you block. You can find something for every community you can think of if you go looking for it. The worst of the worst probably won’t ever appear on your dash, but if you’re worried or feel the need for it, you know where the block button is.

Feel free to shitpost or ramble. More often than not you’ll see people rb a post with a comment, and their elaboration will be in the tags. The tags are only visible on your profile and the notifications of the owner of the og blog. Just a thing people do.

Reblog artists’ posts with nice comments in the tags! Commenting on a drawing is usually done through the tags (Not an obligation, again, just a thing people do. Feel free to add your comment on the rb itself if you’d want other people to see it tho!) and leave nice messages for the artists! It’s a win-win for everyone involved. 

If you have more than a single follower, always use the common tw warning tags. You don’t need to tw everything, but tw’ing some common things is the bare minimum human decency. Keep it safe for others. 

Tag a post “long post” if it’s really long. Pretty self explanatory. Don’t make people scroll through all that please lol. 

You can use them to organize your blog. This is more of a pro tip, if you’d like to not miss a post in your blog, cause they will start pilin’ up soon enough.

#Liveblogging is pretty fun. If you’d like to talk to people during streams, don’t forget to add the relevant tags still! Again, you won’t show up on people’s dash otherwise.

Whew! That got out of hand. Hopefully I didn’t bore you too much. Check out blogs like @heritageposts and @hellsite-hall-of-fame to honor our past o7. @mcytblr-hall-of-fame too maybe :eyes:. Anyways, don’t forget the most important rule of them all:

Enjoy your stay! You’re meant to have fun on here while also making friends (if that’s your thing). Just be kind and respectful of others, you’ll get the hang of the rest! <3

[mommoshh]

Review and feedback on CMS WordPress

WordPress is a free open source CMS that suits both novice users and professional developers. Here are just the first in order to understand the capabilities of the engine, at least at a basic level, you need to be ready to study instructions, guides and forums with tips.

WordPress can be used to create blogs, company websites, landing pages, online stores, portals with the ability to register users. The functionality of the engine largely depends on what plugins are installed on it - and also on the skills of the webmaster: open source allows experienced developers to customize the system for themselves.

Many users start out with WordPress on their way to web development. This is not the easiest solution because there really is a lot to learn to create and customize a website. However, the engine updates clearly demonstrate that it is moving towards simplification, although deep customization still requires programming skills.

Although we are focusing on wordpress here, there are better alternatives to wordpress too.

 What's new in WordPress 5.5.1?

Major updates in recent versions concern the Gutenberg block editor. For example, in version 5.3, a new Group block was added, which allows you to divide the page into several parts, and in the Columns block, support for fixed column widths appeared. In addition, text and background controls are now available in title blocks. The possibilities for deep customization have also expanded - now, the preferred style can be set to any block that supports this function.

Version 5.4 has two new blocks - social icons and buttons. With their help, you can quickly add interactive elements to the interface for going to pages in social networks, reposting, opening other sections of the site. In addition, there are new ways to work with colour: you can use gradients in the button block and skin.

There are also less noticeable improvements. For instance:

Images are automatically rotated when loaded according to built-in landmarks.

The extended health check screen recommendations indicate potential site issues.

When you log in, you are periodically prompted to confirm your email address to reduce the likelihood of the site being blocked due to a change in the administrator's email address.

The last major WordPress update is version 5.5. It has updated three key areas - engine speed, search capabilities, and security.

Lazy loading of images. Images placed on the page are not loaded until the user scrolls to them. On mobile devices, this technology also prevents browsers from loading images intended for other devices - for example, widescreen photos for the desktop. This saves traffic and reduces the load on the battery.

New XML sitemap that helps search engines find important pages right away.

Ability to enable automatic updates for plugins and themes, as well as support for manual updates via downloading ZIP files.

Much attention has been paid to the visual editor as well. It has new templates with combinations of text and media files, from which you can assemble beautiful layouts. All available blocks are now collected in a catalogue available in the editor. In addition, there was a built-in image editing - you can crop, rotate and scale photos directly from the image block.

 Functionality

WordPress is the most popular system in the world. This fact is usually enough to immediately draw close attention to it. But it's much more interesting to understand why developers love WordPress so much. We have identified several reasons:

Flexibility due to the open-source engine.

Unique extensibility provided by a huge plugin base.

Multifunctionality and ease of use.

If you have never created a website before, then you will be surprised how easy it is to do it in WordPress. Even to get additional features, no special knowledge is required - in most cases, it is enough to install the required plugin. Experienced developers, on the other hand, value WordPress for its common PHP language and detailed documentation.

Before you start creating a WordPress site, you need to choose a suitable hosting and purchase a domain. Some hosters offer special rates optimized for working with the engine, but you do not need to buy them - for the first site, ordinary shared hosting is fine.

Even a novice webmaster shouldn't have any problems with installing WordPress - on most hosting sites; the system is deployed in a few minutes in one click. This also applies to the latest version. However, you need to be careful with updates. The main danger is the incompatibility of the engine and plugins after the update.

If you already had a site with an old version of WordPress, but now you decide to upgrade to 5.5.1, then it is recommended to disable all extensions before updating and then enable them one by one and check the functionality.

Once installed, WordPress is a fairly crude system that requires additional configuration. At a minimum, you will have to:

Go through all the settings sections to specify the name and address of the site, the type of permalinks, the format of the main page and other parameters.

Select and install a template.

Add and configure plugins for spam protection, SEO optimization, sitemap creation, name transliteration, etc.

All these actions you will perform through the administrative panel. It has been completely translated into Russian and made very logically. The control panel is an excellent example of a balance between functionality and simplicity. It is convenient to use it in all browsers and even on mobile devices without installing any add-ons or applications - although they are also available for iOS, Android and Windows.

The main menu of the control panel consists of the following functional sections:

"Console" - the main page, which collects general information about updates, news, comments.

"Records" - all materials posted on the site with the ability to edit them, add new ones and delete unnecessary ones.

"Media files" is a manager of images, videos, tables and other types of files uploaded to the hosting.

"Pages" is a section for managing static information - for example, the "About" page, terms of use or advertising. It offers the same functionality as Posts, except that published content does not appear in the blog feed.

"Comments" - all discussions on the site and moderation tools.

"Appearance" - tools for adding and customizing themes, including a built-in editor for template files.

"Plugins" - section for adding, removing and configuring extensions.

"Users" - managing all registered visitors, adjusting access rights.

"Tools" - WordPress service features such as import and export.

"Settings" - the main parameters of the site: name, language, mail, file format, rules for generating addresses, etc.

Within each section, there are thematic subsections containing their own sets of settings. All this makes the system highly customizable.

For advanced users who know how to work with CSS and PHP, WordPress offers a built-in code editor. With its help, the site can be deeply customized by adding widgets and blocks or, for example, replacing standard comments with an application from a third-party service. True, when making serious changes, it is recommended to unload the template files from the hosting and edit them on the computer, first creating a backup copy - this allows you to quickly return the theme to its original state if necessary.

The main tool for adding pages and posts is the Gutenberg visual editor. The classic editor offered limited content management functionality. To add additional features, users had to install plugins, which is not always convenient, including due to the increased load on the server. The Gutenberg editor addresses this issue by offering content function blocks:

heading, paragraph, quote, list;

image, gallery, audio, video and file;

code and markup elements;

widgets and inserts from popular services.

Each block can be configured individually. To add a widget to a page or a post from Twitter to a post, you do not need to work with the code: just select the appropriate block and provide a link to the content of interest, after which it will appear in the editor field. Permanent block combinations can be saved as templates, increasing the speed of publication creation.

Basically, Gutenberg allows WordPress users to do what website builders have long been suggesting - focus on how the content will look without being distracted by complex configuration settings. In visual editing mode, you can immediately evaluate how the page or post will be displayed, and you can make changes to the interface without resorting to editing the code.

Many WordPress users didn't like replacing the classic editor with Gutenberg. For those who prefer a traditional text / HTML editor, the Classic Editor extension has appeared in the plugin list. After adding it, you can choose with which editor you will add content - classic or visual.

 Designs and work with templates (themes)

Websites are built on the basis of templates, of which a huge number have been developed for WordPress. The standard theme catalogue is available from the engine control panel in the "Appearance" section. Here you can select and install a template from the library, as well as download files downloaded from other sources.

Finding free templates for WordPress is not a problem - even if the theme is not Russified, you can fix it manually or using special programs. Version compatibility is much more difficult. However, the official plugins are updated fast enough so that there are no problems. If you have a paid template with support from developers, then there should be no errors either. Only old free themes that are no longer supported by the creators cause problems.

To avoid unnecessary problems, before installing the template, make sure that it is optimized for the latest version of WordPress. If there are no suitable options, then it does not matter. The same Gutenberg editor can be used to customize the template that would have required code changes in the past.

In the functionality of WordPress, we have already explored what the new editor is capable of. In fact, you can use it to customize the site's interface by creating new pages and adding widgets and blocks to them. If you have had experience with website builders, then you will instantly understand how it works. But even if the WordPress site is the first one, there will be no difficulties. With the help of widgets, plugins and shortcodes, you can quickly build the look of the page you want.

In addition, each WordPress theme has its own settings that allow you to upload a site logo, change the colour scheme, create the main menu, and enable/disable the display of individual widgets. The number of configurable parameters varies depending on the template, but the basic set is present in any theme. If you know how to work with CSS and PHP, then there will be even more possibilities for customization thanks to the open-source code of the engine and the built-in code editor, in which all template files are available.

 Optimization (SEO) and promotion

When analyzing the pages at the top of the search results, it becomes clear that most of them are made in WordPress. This is due not only to the popularity of the engine itself but also to its promotion capabilities. When used correctly, the content is well-indexed by robots and ranks high.

Basic WordPress is not the best example of SEO optimization. But if you work a little with the engine, then you can achieve good results in search results without any problems - of course, taking into account the publication of useful and interesting content.

The first step to optimizing your website is choosing an SEO friendly theme. For a template to be considered as such, it must meet a number of requirements, including layout according to CSS3 and HTML5 standards, as well as fast page loading. If you buy or download a free theme from a third-party site, pay attention to its description - it should contain an indication of SEO friendly or SEO Optimized.

After choosing a suitable theme, you need to change the default configuration for WordPress.

In the general settings, specify the site address in the same style - with WWW or without WWW. In order for search engines to accurately identify the site at the specified address, add it to Yandex. Webmaster and Google Search Console.

Set the format of links like "site/category/post name". Go to the "Permalinks" section in the settings, select the "Custom" option and insert the value /%category%/%postname%.html into the field.

Further optimization of the engine is possible only with plugins. The first extension to install is Cyr to Lat. This plugin will automatically transliterate the names of pages and posts in Cyrillic to Latin. This will avoid the difficulties with an encoding that search engines face due to addresses with Cyrillic characters.

To optimize, you will also need to install one of their powerful plugins - All in One Seo Pack or Yoast SEO. After adding them, a new section will appear in the editor, where you can specify the title, description and keywords of the post. But the impact of SEO plugins on WordPress is not limited to this: there are a lot of options in their settings, for which there are separate guides for working. All in One Seo Pack covers all optimization needs, from meta tags for search engine spiders to creating an XML sitemap. Yoast SEO offers no less functionality, so it will be difficult to make a choice, but in any case, you will get very powerful website promotion tools on WordPress.

To improve behavioural factors, it does not hurt to connect an online consultant widget and install an online calculator to calculate something right on the site. You can use a CRM system to work with clients and process orders/requests. Of course, we recommend adding buttons for social networks. Such tools have a positive effect on website promotion in the search engines Yandex and Google, add weight to the perception of the site and are able to bring customers.

 Price policy

The engine itself is distributed free of charge. You can download it from the official website or install it directly from the hosting admin panel - most hosters provide this option. You can also not pay for plugins and templates: even if some extension is distributed for money, you can almost always find a free alternative that will do the job just as well.

If you still want to install a premium theme, then prepare between $ 50 and $ 100. In this price range, there are a huge number of options on different theme sites, such as TemplateMonster. The cost depends on the functionality of the theme, its prevalence and the degree of the seller's popularity. Popular template stores average $ 75, but you can find options for both $ 45 and $ 600.

VIEW PREMIUM TEMPLATES

The situation is similar to plugins. The price is usually tied to what opportunities they offer. Often a free light version of the plugin is available in the WordPress directory. If you use it but at some point understand that there are not enough tools, then you can easily upgrade to the Pro version. Expanded functionality isn't the only benefit of the paid plugins. You also give money for support from the developers, which ensures compatibility with new versions of WordPress.

 Advantages and disadvantages

The main plus of the latest versions of WordPress is the development of the Gutenberg editor, which adds a visual content management mode. Its appearance demonstrates the movement of the system towards simplification, lowering the entry threshold for novice webmasters. Gutenberg makes installing a number of extensions pointless by offering similar functionality in the base CMS.

Version 5.5.1 finally has support for lazy loading images. This will noticeably affect the speed of page loading, especially on mobile devices, where high-resolution images added for the desktop will no longer be loaded.

Other advantages of the system after major updates remained unchanged:

simple admin panel;

built-in file manager, which has become even more convenient to use thanks to the introduction of the Gutenberg editor.

an extensive library of plugins that extend the basic functionality of the engine;

a competent community and a large number of training materials.

With a change in the updated policy, a problem may appear - the frequent occurrence of problems with the compatibility of templates and plugins. If earlier large updates arrived twice a year, now the developers will send them more often. But there is a way out - you can not update immediately but accumulate versions with changes. In addition, in WordPress 5.5.1, update management has become even more convenient - now you can install plugin and theme updates automatically or download them manually via ZIP files.

 Best WordPress Hosting

Even if you don't pay for themes and plugins, you will still need money for a WordPress site - at least in order to purchase hosting space and register a domain name.

The best site for WP projects is Bluehost hosting. It has an official recommendation from WordPress.org - the developers of the engine. They recommend Bluehost as one of the best CMS optimizations. Independent experts agree with the WordPress developers, who, on an ongoing basis, include Bluehost in the rating of the best ratings in the world.

TRY BLUEHOST HOSTING

To understand why Bluehost.com has so many positive reviews, just look at the list of its advantages:

Automatic installation of CMS WordPress on hosting in one click!

Server uptime rates are steadily approaching 100%.

High download speed.

Using a CDN to quickly deliver content to users.

Hosting web projects on servers in different countries of the world.

Free domain and SSL when paying for the plan.

Support for one-click installation of a large number of web applications.

Prompt technical support that answers questions through tickets, online chat or by phone.

Bluehost has special rates for WordPress sites. They are based on shared hosting and come in two lines: WordPress Hosting and WP Pro. The first one is suitable for small projects and consists of three tariffs. In the minimum configuration for $ 3.95 per month, you get 50 GB of SSD, on which you can create one site. At higher tariffs, the restriction on the number of sites and the available disk space is removed. All service packages include a free domain and SSL as a gift.

The WP Proline provides more powerful solutions that allow you to create professional WordPress sites.

Build ($ 19.95 / month) - The foundation for launching a professional website with a built-in analytics centre, 100+ free themes, daily backups, and malware protection.

Grow ($ 29.95 / month) - All Build features plus additional SEO tools, video compression up to 10GB / month, premium support.

Scale ($ 49.95 per month) - All Grow features plus unlimited backups, PayPal integration, unlimited video compression, advanced search, live chat support.

The latest service pack is suitable for e-commerce. But if you want to create a store on WordPress, then it is better to immediately go into another category of tariffs called eCommerce. Here are service packages optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce, the most popular e-commerce plugin. The cost of the tariffs is from 6.95 to 12.95 dollars per month. All packages have a built-in theme tailored for sales, free SSL and a free callback widget.

For large projects, Bluehost also offers VPS and Dedicated rentals. Virtual servers start at $ 18.99, and physical servers start at $ 79.99. All the features of shared hosting are available for them, but some tools need to be installed manually - for example, a backup system.

The domain name of the site is also registered with Bluehost. The rental price for a year depends on the domain zone. For example, an address like mysite.com can be purchased for $ 11.99 and mysite.blog for $ 16.99. The cheapest solution for Bluehost is a.SPACE domain. National zones are not represented in the catalogue, so if you want a site in.RU / RF, then buy a domain on another site and then link it to a project on Bluehost in a few clicks.

 WordPress counterparts and competitors

With its open-source code and many extensions, WordPress offers functionality that only a few web development tools can provide. But when creating a website, it is not the power of the tool that is more important, but its effectiveness for the implementation of the project. If you look at WordPress from this position, you can find many services that are much easier to learn and do the job just as well.

Best WordPress Alternatives

uKit is a website builder for business, where you can assemble a one-page page, a business card, a company website or a small online store in a few hours. Intuitively simple and straightforward. Its tools are selected so that the service is convenient for novice webmasters. uKit offers several hundred thematic templates, made at a very good level, and the sites created on it are no different from the projects of professional developers.

uCoz is the only website builder competitor that can easily compare to WordPress in terms of functionality. The service uses a modular system that makes it versatile. What is added to WordPress as plugins are presented on uCoz in the basic package or available for installation as a module. The builder can be used to create any type of site, from a one-page site to an information portal with a forum, blog, and user registration.

Wix - Can be an alternative to WP when it comes to customizing the look and feel of your site. The constructor offers a huge number of colourful design themes made by professional designers. Basic functionality is higher compared to WordPress. In the built-in Wix App Market, the user can find dozens of useful applications and integrations with third-party services that extend the functionality of the service. So when creating, for example, an online store, choosing between WordPress and Wix is ​​a very real situation.

Drupal is a free content management framework. More flexible, versatile, but also much more difficult to work with when compared to the WordPress CMS. Contraindicated for beginners, strong programming skills are required. Suitable for creating stores, news portals, social networks, corporate and other large-scale types of sites. It is impractical to use it for business cards, landing pages and other things in this spirit. There are many templates and modules, but their number is several times less than those on WP. Suitable for professionals only.

Joomla is a slightly more complex free CMS compared to WP. Usually, newbies choose between these two engines. The number of templates and plugins is very large but still noticeably inferior to that on WP. Best used for creating business cards, corporate websites, shops and social networks. Not so good for creating blogs, landing pages and forums. Basic coding skills are required - knowledge of HTML / CSS, the page code is easier to edit here than on WP with its PHP base. Good SEO opportunities, but the level of security in the stock suffers—balanced and popular engine for beginners.

Despite the fact that WordPress, in the latest versions, is moving towards simplifying content management tools, it is still far from top builders in this regard. In fact, Gutenberg is the same extension that adds visual editor capabilities to the CMS, only provided in the basic package.

The logic of working with Drupal is complex and inaccessible to beginners. This engine is usually used by webmasters who have been developing sites on the same WP for a long time, wanting to get more scalability for large projects. Joomla is comparable to WP in complexity and many features, but still not so easy to use, has a slightly different specialization.

On constructors, the ease of learning is not limited only to the design of pages and content. When creating a site on uKit, uCoz or Wix, the user does not need to worry about anything at all, except for the design and content, which are fully customizable in visual editing mode. To fully manage WordPress, however, coding skills are still required. On the other hand, it provides more customization options, which not all designers can boast of.

 Conclusions and recommendations

WordPress is one of the best website building tools out there, which has gotten a bit easier with the release of version 5 thanks to the introduction of a visual editor. However, in terms of creation and reconfiguration, there are no major changes. Users still have to choose to host, take care of security on their own and follow the updates.

Create a website with WordPress + Bluehost1-click CMS installation on hosting ↵

Fast, easy and secure hosting with automatic installation of CMS WordPress in 2 minutes. It included FREE domain registration for one year + a free SSL certificate!

Price: from $ 2.95

WordPress 5.5 offers almost unlimited functionality, which is based on open source code and a wide range of extensions. However, not every project requires such versatility and power.

uKit and Wix are much more efficient to use if you need to create a company business card website, landing page or a small online store - these builders offer all the necessary tools.

uCoz - it is wiser to choose when it comes to a complex project - at least it will eliminate the need to select hosting and monitor updates.

However, WordPress is one of the top website building tools used by both beginners and seasoned developers alike. It can be used to solve various problems, but only you yourself know whether it is suitable for the implementation of your idea.

[supraveng]

Agent of Shield - Chapter 2

Summary: You are a relatively new agent at Shield, but not a field agent, apparently that is about to change when you meet the Avengers and they realize you are a valuable asset

Word count:2259

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

I wake up Sunday morning around 5am, I can’t remember the last time I slept for a full 8 hours like that, but I feel so refreshed that I hop right up and head to the kitchen.   Checking my phone while my coffee brews, I see a text from my dad just before midnight last night.  

Pops: Pumpkin, how was your day?  I hadn’t heard from you, I’m sure you are staying busy.  Hopefully made it to the shelter today and found yourself a new companion.  

Y/N: Good morning Colonel!  I was in bed much earlier than you apparently.  I’ll call you after my run this morning, love you

I sit down sipping my coffee and grab a protein bar before heading back in my room to change to my favorite leggings and tank.  I used to hate running, but after moving to NYC, watching the sunrise as I jog through Central Park makes my day so much better, I can’t imagine missing it even once. This morning I’m a bit earlier than usual and get a chance to take the longer route through the park.  The sunrise is as beautiful as ever and adds a calming effect that I crave in this crazy world.  I decide to treat myself this morning and swing by my favorite coffee shop while heading down Central Park West.  As I step into the shop my phone rings and I answer without looking at the caller id. “Colonel, I told you I would call you when I got home, what’s making you so impatient this morning?” 

I state with fake annoyance.  “uh, Agent Miller?” I hear in response, ok, that’s definitely not my dad.  “Yea, who is this?  And how did you get this number?” I respond as I finally look at the caller id and see it’s a blocked number.  With a soft chuckle they respond “this is Steve Rogers; Director Fury gave me your number.  I didn’t intend on calling you this early, but we received some new communications late last night and hoping you are available to translate for us again.”  Wow, he even sounds handsome, how is that possible.  “Oh, hi, yes of course I can help.  I’m on the upper west side right now, I can be at the tower in 15 minutes, but I just finished a run and I’m kind of disgusting.”  Why did you just say that, you idiot? “That would be great, the quicker we can get this resolved, the better.  Should we send a car for you?” he asks.  “No, I’m good.  I’m picking up coffee, do you need any?” Seriously? What is wrong with me? It’s like I hear his voice and turn into an imbecile.  “No, but thank you for the offer, see you soon.” he replies before disconnecting the call. I grab my coffee and start heading toward mid-town when I look down and realize what I’m wearing, not only is the word Juicy across my ass, but my tank reads ‘I’m not a rapper, I just cuss a lot’. I laugh at how ridiculous I feel for being worried about what I’m wearing, I should be worried about the sweat that’s beginning to dry on my skin, bleh.

I arrive at the tower just as a security guard is unlocking the door for me. “Good morning” I chirp trying to sound as professional as possible while looking like a huge mess. “They are expecting you in the conference room on the 25th floor, use the first elevator on the left” he responds barely looking up, apparently, he’s not a morning person.  “Thanks” I smile as I head toward the elevators.  “Nice outfit” he smirks as I walk into the elevator.  Well, this should be interesting. Walking down the hall I get an eerie flashback from yesterday’s recordings and try to calm myself to focus on the task and not get too overwhelmed.   That worked for almost a full 5 minutes before you walk into the conference room to find Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson dressed in sweats and t-shirts.  A girl could die happy here! Deep breath and don’t make an ass of yourself! “Good morning gentlemen, I’m glad you got the dress code memo” I say as I enter the room.  “Glad you could make it on such short notice, Agent Miller, this is Sam Wilson. Sam, this is Agent Miller, she is helping us with our translating” Steve smiles as he introduces me.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you Mr. Wilson, please call me Y/N.” “Well, you can call me Sam, and I’m glad none of us overdressed this morning.” he responds as you move closer to the conference room table.  “Normally, I would have put a bit more effort into my appearance, but I was finishing my run through the park when you called.” I smile and try to calm my nerves.  “It’s 645 in the morning and you were finishing your run?” he asks with a bit of shock.  I nod my head and grab a pen and paper off the table. “Geez, your worst than Cap! Wait, what park are you running through in the middle of the night?” he asks with a raised eyebrow and has now caught the attention of Steve, who seems more interested in the conversation now.  “Um, Central Park and it’s not the middle of the night, I didn’t get there until almost 530” you say nonchalantly.  The are both now looking at you like you have 3 heads.  “What? Growing up, I was the lazy one still in bed at 6am.  And I like watching the sunrise, it’s a good way to start your day.  So, you have another conversation to translate?”  you add quickly trying to change the subject.  

“Yes, we received a few early this morning, or I guess last night is a better time frame. Anyway, there are a few bits and pieces here and there.   Hopefully they have more info for us, but anything we can get will help us at this point.” Steve responds.  “Actually, how are your typing skills?  There are about 15 different recordings so I was hoping you might be able to type them up as you translate.” he adds looking at you hopeful.  “I think I’m around 90 wpm, so that shouldn’t be an issue” “Great, I’ll grab the laptop and you can get started” he claps Sam on the back as he heads out the door.  Sam looks you over as if he’s trying to solve a riddle.  “You ok?” I ask.  “I’m assuming you came from a military family if 6am made you the lazy one, am I right?” he asks with a knowing smile.  “Yes, my dad is a marine, and both of my brothers joined after college, one in the Navy and one in the Air Force” you smile realizing that Sam probably knows your dad and your brothers even if he hasn’t figured it out yet.  Steve comes back in the room, walking up behind you with the laptop and you realize that he’s now probably read your ass and you are trying your best to not crawl under the table in embarrassment.  “Ok, here is everything you should need.   The files are in the desktop folder with today’s date.  Thanks again for putting your life on hold to help us out.”  Steve says as he sets the laptop down in front of you.  You relax just from his kind words and smile at him, “it’s my pleasure, Steve”.

You begin working and do your best to not stare and drool over the gorgeous men in the room.  Just as you are about to begin your next recording, the buildings AI FRIDAY alerts Steve of a call coming in for you.  You look up confused and shrug your shoulders, no one knows you are here.  Then you hear Director Fury’s voice loud and clear. “Sorry to interrupt the party going on over there, but Agent Miller?  Would you like to explain why Colonel Miller is calling me at this hour on a Sunday morning?” he states sounding as irritated as ever.  “That’s probably because he loves you and misses you.” You respond flatly. “Ok, that’s probably only part of the reason, I was supposed to call him when I was done with my run and I got sidetracked.  Be a dear and cover for me?” you respond hoping that Nick is in a good mood and willing to help you out.  Sam is looking at Steve utterly confused, to which Steve just shrugs and shakes his head, laughing at how you seem completely comfortable around Fury and not at all intimidated like everyone else in SHIELD.  “How about you tell him yourself?” he responds before you hear a beep and your dad starting to talk. “Pumpkin, are you there?”  You hang your head embarrassed even more than you thought was possible for one day and you’ve only been awake for a little over 2 hours at this point. “Hi dad, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you, but I’m at work right now and I will call you as soon as I’m done, I promise.” You begin bargaining knowing full well it will get you no where but hoping he will take mercy on you.  “What are you having for breakfast?” he responds.  Your shoulders slump knowing this is only going to get worst.  Steve looks at you a little confused as to the question. Ok, I might as well get this over, if I don’t play along with his silly games then this is only going to become more humiliating. “I’m having pineapples covered in guacamole” you respond hoping Sam and Steve aren’t paying attention.  You then look up and know they heard but the confused and disgusted expressions on their faces.  “Alright, that’s good.  Now explain yourself.” he responds, and you take a deep breath.  “Dad, I was finishing my run and got called into work. I’m here now but have a bit more work to do, I promise I will call you the minute I’m done and headed home.”  “Fine, I wasn’t expecting to see you at the Stark tower at this time of the morning and assumed your body was discarded in the dumpster, that would be the only reason .you hadn’t called and didn’t answer my calls.” “Old man, you are so dramatic” you say with a smirk “and I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.”  “Good, bye Pumpkin.”  

The call disconnects and you look at Sam and Steve hoping that you can get back to translating but knowing by the looks on their faces they have a lot of questions. “What the hell was that?” Sam asks trying to understand the conversation you just had with your dad.  “That was my dad, he’s a bit overprotective and paranoid” you respond hoping that would explain enough.  “Wait, your dad is Colonel Miller, as in Colonel Joseph Miller?” he asks. You nod and smile, you love your dad, but he had a reputation of being a big mean Marine, which he could be if he wanted to, but he never was with you, he was a giant teddy bear that worried about you more than necessary.  “And your breakfast choice?” Steve asked, still quite confused by what just happened. “Oh, that” I respond “when we were younger, my dad started this thing so that we could relay to him if we were in danger or kidnapped.   He asks about what we are eating and the most ridiculous or gross thing you answer means you are fine.  If I had answered pancakes, then he would know that I’m in danger, if I add eggs, then I’ve been injured.  If I add bacon it’s by someone I know, it’s crazy, and has only been used in innocent situations like today, but like I said he’s paranoid and overprotective” I shrug and smile at the guys.  It’s one of the things that made you love your dad, a thousand miles away and still making sure you are protected no matter what.  Steve looks at you with his brow furrowed “that’s kind of genius.”  I nod “yea, he’s good like that” I respond. “Wait, if he’s your dad, then Joshua and Jacob are your brothers?” Sam asks like he just figured everything out. I nod and smile “Yes, they are, and I apologize for anything they did that got you in trouble, that’s kind of their specialty.”  “Are you kidding?  Jacob was my saving grace in the Air Force, he is a bad ass and one of the best airmen I’ve ever known!” Sam explains with a huge smile on his face.  “Well, I’m glad, he would like to here that, he was medically discharged a few years ago after breaking his shoulder and it not healing as quickly as it should have.  He actually just started working with the Secret Service and finally feeling like himself again.” I tell him.  “Wow, that’s incredible.  I would love to catch up with him.  What about Josh?  Is he still sailing?” he asks.  “Yes, he’s on the west coast, San Diego or maybe Seattle.  I’m not sure, he moves around a lot.” I respond.  “Well, now that we are all caught up, Sam, can you check the data that just came in?  Hopefully, we can get through this info and still enjoy the rest of our day” Steve says thoughtfully as he looks between you and Sam.  “Of course” I respond and go back to the recordings. 

TAGS @farfromjustordinary​

NEXT CHAPTER

[ferryboatpeak]

into the harryverse: SNL edition

3K sequel to this fic, because the hs2 era keeps serving up harrycest content and i can’t stop writing crackfic about it. also available at ao3.

The angel stands in front of the flatscreen, flicking it off and back on again, doublechecking to make sure it stays tuned to NBC. He ticks the volume up several notches, then back down. Finally, he tosses the remote onto the sofa just to get it out of his hands. Slipping his phone from the pocket of his white jumpsuit, he checks the time -- 20:22 -- and places it in front of him on the coffee table before collapsing with an impatient huff on the end of the sofa opposite the remote.

He’s up again almost immediately, pacing restlessly over to the room service trolley to pour a glass of champagne. He shouldn’t (he really shouldn’t, tonight of all nights), but there’s no reason to think anything will go wrong, is there? Jeffrey’s there, and Ben Winston, and there’s not much the angel could handle that they can’t. Still, he’s been on edge ever since the Cancun incident. So many Harrys converging, each one unmoored from his respective universe. He’s got to make sure nothing like that happens again.

A decisive knock at the door of the hotel suite startles him into sloshing champagne down his fingers. Swearing under his breath, he slides the glass onto the table next to his phone and tiptoes toward the door. The thick carpet muffles his footsteps as he approaches the peephole suspiciously. Nobody knows he’s here, and room service has come and gone already.

On the other side of the fisheye lens, his own face looms large above a plunging neckline framed by purple sequins. The angel backs up. He combs his fingers through his hair and tugs his jabot straight before he flips back the security latch and pulls open the door. “What are you doing here?”

The demon sidesteps past him into the suite, sequins scraping against the angel’s knuckles in the narrow entryway. He’s got a black bottle by the neck in one hand. “Heard it was SNL tonight.” The demon saunters through the suite’s sitting room, looking up at the high ceilings and trailing his fingers along the back of the sofa. At the window, he twitches back the edge of the thick damask curtain. “Thought we could have a little party,” he says to the glass, peering out over Manhattan.

The angel’s shoulderblades tingle, right where his wings would erupt if he wasn’t trying to be unobtrusive in the city. The demon suddenly pivots back toward him. “Catch!” The bottle in his hand sails over the sofa and across the suite.

“Fucker.” The angel lunges for the bottle and snags it with one hand just before it hits the floor. He straightens up, looking at the label. Casamigos.

The demon leans a hand against the frame of the double doors into the suite’s bedroom and pokes his head inside. The angel hadn’t expected to sleep here tonight -- there's too much to do, a whole afterparty to keep an eye on, the possibility that Harry could make all kinds of terrible Xander-related decisions. But suddenly’s he’s conscious of the pristine expanse of the king-sized bed, all the corners crisply tucked under like a wrapped present. He flushes and turns away to browse through the glassware on the bar, wondering what the demon expects to pour tequila into.

He looks back over his shoulder when the silverware rattles on the trolley behind him. “What the fuck is this?” The demon’s got the room service cloche tilted upward. He jabs a finger at the contents of the plate underneath.

“It’s a Beyond Burger,” the angel says defensively. “It’s vegan.”

“No shit.” The cloche clangs back down. In two strides, the demon’s at the desk, dialing the phone. “Room service, please.” He clacks his fingertips against the desktop, pink and blue and pink and blue tapping down in a staccato sequence while he waits on the line. “A cheeseburger, medium rare… no, not the Beyond Burger… no, yes, you had the last order right.” The demon rolls his eyes. “It’s only that I’ve changed my mind about being a vegan… yes, just in the last ten minutes. I’ve seen the light.” He flips a cheery middle finger at the angel. “And send up some limes too, please.”

The angel glances back at the television. “Shit, time.” Text is scrolling across the Capitol Building. He hurries to the sofa and retrieves the remote.

“Just the cold open,” the demon says lazily, hanging up the phone. “He won’t be in it.”

“How do you know?” The angel jabs the volume button with indignant emphasis. “Justin Timberlake did the cold open. Remember, the Hugo Chavez song?”

“Believe me, I’ve got some friends at SNL.” The demon vaults over the back of the sofa and into the seat next to the angel. Water drips from his hair.

“Why are you wet?” the angel asks suspiciously.

The demon inspects the damp sequins on the sleeve of his jumpsuit. “I dunno,” he says with surprise. “It just happens sometimes. Do you mind it?”

“You’re soaking through the cushion,” the angel points out.

“Sorry.” The demon inelegantly sweeps his arm down his chest and out to the side. The water evaporates from his jumpsuit. His freshly dried hair looks perfect. The angel tries not to be jealous.

The cold open stretches on interminably. Harry doesn’t follow American politics in any universe, so the angel doesn’t get any of the jokes. He jiggles his leg impatiently as the sketch finishes and the opening credits start to roll. They’re unforgivably long.

“I think you could use some more champagne.” The demon swipes the glass off the table and knocks it against the back of the angel’s clenched fingers.

“I shouldn’t.” The angel tries to wave it away. God, how many more cast members are in the alphabet?

The demon fixes him with one of those stares that the angel ought to be immune to, since he’s a master at them himself. “Drink up.”

The angel takes a gulp of champagne. “Host and musical guest!” announces the television.

“Oh, there he is!” The angel gingerly claps around the stem of his champagne glass as HARRY STYLES appears on the screen in capital letters, followed shortly by Harry himself.

The demon raises an eyebrow at Harry’s white jacket. “The suiting’s a bit boring. Should have gone with a jumpsuit.”

The angel nods in agreement as Harry preens in front of the cheering audience onscreen. “Jumpsuit’s always the best move.”

“Or at least one of those Harris Reed outf…”

“Shhhh.” The angel cuts him off with a hiss, flapping his hand at the demon as the cheers die down. “He’s starting.”

He’s so intent on the monologue that he doesn’t realize the demon’s on his feet again until he thunks the champagne bottle against the angel’s glass. “Hold still,” the demon instructs, tipping up the bottle as Harry utters the words “One Direction” for the first time since 2015.

“Shhhh!” the angel hisses again. The demon’s about to interrupt a Zayn joke. But he obediently holds up his glass to be topped off. The demon steps languorously over him to reclaim his seat on the sofa, taking his time as he blocks the angel’s view. The angel bobs back and forth to see the screen on either side of the demon’s hips.

The purple sequined nightmare thankfully keeps his mouth shut for Harry’s first sketch. Everything’s going well so far. Harry’s doing great as Rob the intern. The angel finishes his glass of champagne.

“Nice work.” The demon thumps him on the knee and stands up as the sketch ends. “Time for tequila now.”

Harry doesn’t seem to be in the next sketch, so the angel watches as the demon collects two heavy-bottomed glasses from the bar and tucks the Casamigos bottle under one arm. He snags the salt shaker from the trolley in his other hand, and lines everything up on the coffee table in front of the angel. The demon looks around the room with a disappointed expression. “No limes yet.”

Right on cue, there’s a knock at the door. The demon’s face brightens. On screen, a dog morphs into Harry. The angel suddenly realizes that the bellhop is about to be very confused. “Shit!” He looks frantically back and forth between the screen and the demon. “There’s... three of us. You have to hide.”

“Please,” the demon scoffs. “I’ve got this.” He flashes a finger gun at the angel.

The angel looks down at the gesture, and when he looks back up, the demon’s transformed into Rob the intern. “That doesn’t solve anything! You’re still another Harry!”

“Believe me,” the demon says. “No one will notice a thing.” His smug drawl is out of place coming from Rob’s eager, freshly scrubbed face.

The angel stands up and moves toward the television, keeping his back to the door and trying to block the bellhop’s view of Harry on screen. “God… and his friends!” exclaims Harry. The angel narrows his eyes suspiciously. How does Harry know about God’s friends?

Behind him, Rob the intern's voice effusively thanks the bellhop. At the sound of the door closing, the angel relaxes and sinks onto the sofa. The demon joins him, back in his jumpsuited form. He slides his cheeseburger and a dish of limes onto the coffee table.

“Listen to that accent!” the angel exclaims as Magnus introduces himself. Harry’s really far more versatile than the angel gave him credit for. This is very impressive.

“Shame he’s not the pregnant one,” the demon comments. He uncorks the tequila and adds a generous pour to each glass. “You’re not, are you?”

“Not what?” The angel looks at him quizzically.

“Pregnant.” The demon’s eyes smoulder as as he licks his wrist with a slow, wide swipe of his tongue.

“No…” The question is baffling but also somehow embarrassing. “Is that… possible?”

“You never know.” The demon sprinkles salt on his damp wrist. “But if you’re not pregnant, there won’t be any problem with this, will there?” He punctuates the question by sliding a tumbler of tequila down the tabletop toward the angel. As the angel catches it before it topples over the edge, the demon holds his own tumbler up expectantly.

The angel touches his glass to the demon’s. “To Harry.”

“And Harry, and Harry, and Harry,” the demon adds with relish, taking a gulp of tequila.

The angel sips more modestly, closing his eyes at the burn. When he opens them, the demon’s arm is extended toward him, hand bent back to expose his wrist. Salt crystals glimmer on his skin.

With heat trickling up his spine, the angel bends in and touches his tongue briefly to the demon’s pulse. His mouth waters.

“Good.” The demon plucks a lime wedge from the dish and tosses it to the angel before licking the remainder of the salt off his wrist with a broad-tongued flourish.

The angel suddenly remembers Harry. Face burning, he snaps his attention back toward the television.

“There’s that jumpsuit,” the demon says with satisfaction as the first musical number starts. He swings his legs into the angel’s lap and settles back against the throw pillows at the end of the sofa. “Color’s a little bland, though. I did like that silver one.”

The angel touches the demon’s sequined knee and glances sideways at him. “I like the purple better.”

“Thank you,” the demon says with great satisfaction. He wriggles further down the sofa, so that the angel’s hand slides from his knee up to his thigh. The demon’s body always seems to be a couple of degrees warmer than any other being the angel knows of. Hopefully the performance of Lights Up will be on YouTube later. It’s a little hard to focus right now.

But when Harry appears in a pilot’s uniform, he forgets all about the weight of the demon’s legs in his lap. Harry’s hair... “Is he gray?” the angel asks with surprise.

“Distinguished, isn’t he?” The demon’s fingers toy with the angel’s ruffled cuff, brushing over his wrist.

The angel leans toward the screen. Pinned under the demon’s legs, he can’t spring up to inspect as closely as he wants to. “Is it a different one?”

“Naaaah, it’s all makeup.” The demon flattens a hand on his chest and presses the angel back toward the sofa. “Relax.”

“Are you sure?” Harry’s been awfully busy tonight. Suspiciously busy. The angel squints at the screen. Is it all the same Harry?

“Of course I’m sure.” The demon’s sedative voice is convincing. He traces the line of the angel’s collar. “He’s going to age well, isn’t he?”

The angel sighs and relaxes back against the cushion. “Oh, they all are.”

He lets the demon tug the bow of his jabot loose and marvels at Harry’s bizarre accent and terrible jokes. Until the next sketch. The angel tenses forward as soon as Thug 1 appears on screen.

“That’s not the same one,” the angel says decisively, shaking off the demon’s hand. “That one’s got crazy eyes.”

“It’s fiiiiiine,” the demon whines, crawling closer on the sofa. “He’s an actor. He’s impressive. They almost made him the Little Mermaid, of course he can pull off those braids.”

"He was supposed to be Prince Eric," the angel corrects.

The demon snorts. "Shows what you know."

"Never mind, listen to that accent,” the angel says worriedly. “That can’t be the same one who played Magnus.” He bends to grab his laptop from the far end of the coffee table, shouldering the demon aside. “Maybe there are credits…”

“Of course there aren’t credits,” the demon huffs as his feet thump back onto the floor. “It’s just going to say Harry Styles. What are you expecting, a nice scrolling list that says, ‘Harry Styles from KL154X7, and Harry Styles from WK373Y2, and Harry Styles from Eroda’?”

“Oh shit, is it the one from Eroda? This is a disaster.” The angel types “SNL” into the search bar. Instagram, goddammit. Does no one have a web site anymore? He backs up, clicking frantically against the slow hotel WiFi. All roads lead to the SNL Instagram.

“I’m joking.” The demon gently but insistently tugs the laptop out of his hands and sets it back on the table. “See?” He pokes a thumb under the angel’s chin and prods his face back toward the television.

The angel exhales. It’s Rob the intern again. No, wait, now he’s named Dylan? At least his accent is somewhat subdued.

The demon curls up next to him with an arm around his shoulders. “Same old Harry.”

“Oh…” The angel breathes a sigh of relief. “Yes, that’s definitely him. All he had to do was say ‘getting railed to death’.”

“Right! How many times have you heard him say that?” Somehow the demon’s in his lap now, straddling the angel’s thighs. He’s found the zipper to the white jumpsuit.

“So many,” the angel sighs. The demon’s hands are as warm as the rest of him. “Sounds better in your accent.” Unlike Harry’s speech lately, the demon’s hasn’t been polluted by California.

“What does?” the demon murmurs. He leans in. “Getting… railed… to… death?” He enunciates each word slowly, letting his lips brush the angel’s ear.

“Yeah…,” the angel breathes, “that....” He pushes apart the deep neckline of the sequin jumpsuit, trying to work both halves off the demon’s shoulders. The demon grinds down into his lap slowly and purposefully.

This is probably forbidden, somehow. Or maybe God and his friends haven’t even considered the possibility.

Over the demon’s shoulder, the screen on the laptop loads into focus. Harry appears. Three of him. Ten of him. Twenty of him? A row of Harrys in black leotards vogues in sequence. A Harry in a silk shirt smiles winningly. Harry after Harry after Harry fans himself. There’s so many of them. “Oh....” The angel bats at the demon’s shoulder. “Oh, there’s definitely more than one.”

“Is there?” The demon’s voice rises with incredulity. “Is there?” He looks over his shoulder, fingertips still resting on the exposed skin just beneath the angel’s butterfly tattoo. “Oh shit, there is.”

“Look, that one’s backwards!” The angel laughs in disbelief. He reaches around the demon for his glass of tequila and takes a bracing, burning swig. Somehow, a gathering of dancing Harrys in sweater vests seems funny. Not like a dangerous breach of the space-time continuum.

The demon lets his forehead drop to the angel’s shoulder, cackling helplessly. It only sounds a little bit demonic.

The angel tosses aside the empty glass and pokes him. “No, no, you have to see this one. Look at him go!” One of the Harrys tosses his hair and stares seductively at them over a bared shoulder.

The demon turns his head just enough to see the laptop, forehead still against the angel’s cheek. “That one’s gunning for my job.”

“One of you is plenty.” The angel traces his fingers over the familiar numbers inked onto the outside of the demon’s arm. The tattoos look different on him, as if his hellfire body heat has baked them into his skin.

“That’s right.” The demon tugs at a lace cuff until the angel lets his arm slide out of his sleeve. He pulls the angel’s blouse over his head and drags both hands down the angel’s chest.

The angel glances futilely at the laptop. “Should I do something about this?”

“Nah.” The demon continues to deconstruct the angel’s jumpsuit with efficiency and enthusiasm. “They can’t cause any more trouble together than they can on their own, can they?”

“I suppose they can’t.” The angel tips his head away from the screen, letting the demon mouth at his throat. The Harrys loop again and again on the laptop behind the demon, vogueing and kicking and preening, ready to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.

[basileusgerudo]

William’s Backstory

I had the weirdest god damn dream and I’m pretty sure it was just my William taking over my brain and laying out his life story.  I’m just copy pasting it directly in here, so it will be written as a dream, but, this is officially William’s backstory.

Big oof.

So like, it happened in the house but the layout was a bit different because my computer was in the corner of my room, and there’s usually a window and my a/c unit there, but all that was gone.  So it was truly just in the corner.  And mom was with me for some reason and wanting me to google something, or whatever, but the desktop was acting really weird so I held the power button down to restart it but it was taking a really long time??  And when it finally restarted it instantly came back on and a Fuck Ton of red nonsensical text appeared and just scrolled on and on and *on* until it stopped, went black, and then formed a face made of text.

He called himself ‘William Afton’ and the face looked like him, not like any one specific version, but like, I was looking at him dead in the cyber-eye and I knew it was him?  Anyway, he said via text that if we wanted to make out of this encounter alive, I’d have to play his game(s) and of course I didn’t believe him, it felt so vividly real that I figured something was fucking up so I said, out loud, “You’re lying, you can’t be real, this isn’t real, I remember laying down for a nap so this must be just a dream.” And he replied,

>Not real? >Just a dream?

>Well, how about I give your leg a poke then.

>Does this feel real to you, Catherine?

And I felt a pressure on my leg and, of course, freaked the fuck out and just told him to go away, there’s no way this was actually happened, etc., and the entire time I was freaking out the screen was being filled with nothing but laughter like:

>hahahaha(etc. etc.)

But then he threatened mom and said if I wouldn’t play along he’ll just have to “toy with her instead” and I flipped my damn shit cause me and mom are really close and I wouldn’t forgive myself if she got hurt because of me and I just remember sobbing and begging him not to hurt her to let her leave the room and I’ll do as you say, whole nine yards.  He agreed and she left and went and sat in the living room, I guess, but I still didn’t want to play his games because they were like, 8-bit pixel fnaf style mini games of killing kids, so I just started talking to him to stall for time.

And somehow we got into a conversation into his home life and told me about his father, whose name was also William Afton, and how his father was an abusive alcoholic and would beat him and his siblings, he had a younger sister and a younger brother, he was the oldest of the three.  I never got ages but anyway, his dad ended up killing his younger sister b/c he beat the shit out of her so bad and then when the cops showed up (i think the neighbors called?), his dad had William lie or

>He’d do the same thing to me that he did to her.

>And I was terrified, so, of course, I lied.

I started feeling really bad for him so we just kept talking, only it wasn’t because I wanted to stall, it was mainly b/c he seemed really lonely and I figured he hadn’t had a real conversation with someone in a long time.  The next thing he tells me about is the first time he ever killed someone.

>School was the only safe place we all had.

>I always like learning, I made sure to get good grades.

>I suppose because I thought that would make him proud of me, but he never cared.

>I could’ve stayed home a whole week and he wouldn’t have cared.

>Would have just given him more time to beat me.

>So, when I found out my brother was being bullied, I snapped.

>I made him tell me who, what grade, what class he shared with them.

>They were a class above me but I was taller than him, I was taller than nearly everyone in the school, so I had a clear advantage.

>They put up a fight.

>I didn’t know how to punch, but I copied what my father did, how he held his fist, and landed in a few decent hits.

>I suppose he could see he was losing so he ran but I chased after him and I tackled him.

>There was a cinder block nearby so I used it to bash his head in.

>I’ve never felt more powerful in my life.

And I told him I understood why he did it and he accused me of lying but then I went on a whole rant about how I was bullied back in school and my brother would always look out for me (not to the extent of Literal Fucking Murder™) but that I really did understand where he was coming from.  I think he said thank you, or seemed appreciative to some degree, and then I kinda shifted the subject b/c I said,

“Wait, where’s your mom in all this?”

Because he hadn’t mentioned her once.  So then he tells about how he started Afton Robotics and how his mother came into his life and then promptly out of it.

>My mother was just as much a monster and just as guilty as my father.

>She left us soon after my sister was born because she couldn’t take the abuse anymore.

>I begged her to take at least the baby and my brother with her, I would stay behind, as long as they were safe.

>I’ll remember what she said to my dying day.

>”I never wanted any of you, your father just wanted more punching bags.”

>So she left and I’ve hated her ever since.

“William, I’m so sorry.”

>It’s alright, you have no need to apologize.

>You did nothing wrong.

“I know, but I’m still sorry.  You didn’t deserve any of this.  Your siblings didn’t either.”

>...Thank you.

“I only feel a bit terrible for asking but did you ever kill your Dad?  Take over the household, all that jazz?”

>Oh, yes, of course.

>He was drunk one night, too drunk to put up a fight, so I hauled him to his feet but it didn’t quite finish him off.

>So I snapped his neck.

>I told the cops the same exact thing I told them years ago.

>”He fell down the stairs Officer, he’s always been a bit of a drunk and I guess he just lost his balance.”

>They believed me, of course.

>I was free to take over the house, the money, and I went to college and worked on a Robotics degree, started my own business and my own company, Afton Robotics.

>I ran it out of my garage, mind you, but it was successful.

“That’s great!  I mean- minus the murder, but he really fucking deserved it.”

>He did.

>Thank you, for understanding.

>I suppose I should apologize for threatening you.

“It’s okay, you didn’t actually hurt me or Mom, so don’t worry about it.  Tell me more about Afton Robotics.”

>Very well.

>Did I ever mention I had a penchant for the joy of creation?

“No?”

>Well, I did.

>I do, still.

>Ever since I killed that bully, felt such a high, I wanted to keep it.

>I read up on creation and God and decided that if he could make life, so could I.

>So I shifted my focus to technology, robotics, how to build them from scratch, which leads back into the founding of Afton Robotics.

>I was *finally* good at something so I wanted to make some money from it.

>I made kittens, puppies, and small birds for people, sold them as ‘Never-Dying Pets.’

>”Get your child a friend that’ll last them a life-time!”

>It was a hit.

>It was a stable income and it helped when my father’s money, which wasn’t much, eventually ran out.

>I kept the house stable, funded my way through college, and kept it up for a few years.

>But then business dwindled.  My creations weren’t life-like enough anymore.

>Too cold, too clinical.  That’s when I remembered something from my short stint in studying religion.

>Souls.

>My creations didn’t have souls, didn’t have *true* life.

>I decided to give it to them.

>I didn’t want to harm any animals, though so people did just fine.

>I adjusted my robots accordingly - making small dolls was far easier than animals, actually.

>And children are such fragile creatures; so easy to win their favor with promises of candy, of fun, of a friend.

>That’s when I discovered Remnant.

“What is that?”

>Without going into the finer details, it is a substance that is in everyone.  It is in you.  It is in me.

>Children have more of it, everyone does when they’re young, but when they age, it spreads and disperses.

>Much like a soul, it never truly goes away.

>But, given its abundance, it was always far easier to collect it from children.

“But you watched your sister die, didn’t you feel bad?”

>Not at all.

>You see, when my sister died in my arms, she looked so peaceful.  Happy.

>Death, in itself, must be happy.

>I always singled out children who looked sad, were lost, crying.  Unhappy.

>That was the best lure I used: what better thing to offer a sad, lonely child but a chance to be happy forever?

“I… don’t agree with that but, okay. How does your mom factor into all this?”

>It’s alright, I don’t expect you to.

>She factors in because she figured out I had money and she wanted it.

>She called me, of all things, didn’t even bother to track me down, come back to the house.

>Told me she’d heard of my success and so sorry about your father’s accident.

>It didn’t even phase her when I told her about my sister’s death. >That’s when I decided I would kill her too.

>So I told her to come to the house, we could talk about money, and she fell for it.

>She came a few days later.

>She didn’t even apologize for abandoning us.

>She only begged for mercy as I stabbed her until the screaming stopped.

He also never mentions his brother again so I really really don’t know what happened there, other than I guess he left home.  I don’t think he wanted to hurt his only sibling and I guess I didn’t ask or don’t remember, but the next thing I remember is him telling me about Fredbear’s Family Diner.

>I came up with the idea for the Diner when I was nearly caught killing another child.

>I had to come up with something inconspicuous, something that would let me hide the bodies until I could be rid of them properly.

>So I went back to college, got an undergrad in Business, and started to draft blueprints for a bigger animatronic.

>A golden bear.

>Gold is such a soft color, pleasing on the eyes, and I often saw children with stuffed bears, I thought, “what better animal to make full scale than a bear?”

>It took me a year to develop the springlock suit - I’ll get into that in a bit - and then another year to develop the second animal, a golden rabbit.

>I’ve always loved rabbits, such soft, innocent creatures.  Until they aren’t.

“What do you mean?”

>Rabbits are adorable.

>But they are unnerving to some.

>Empty, soulless eyes.  Sharp teeth.  *Quick.*

>A predator hiding behind soft fur.

“Kinda like you.”

>Yes!

>Yes.

>That’s why I made the rabbit suit for me.

>I would become a symbol of innocence, something children would love.

>I would take them away, take the lonely and the sad, and I would make them happy forever.

>I would let them live their happiest day forever.

>I would give them a family.  *My* family.

“William-”

>So I started Fredbear’s Family Diner.

>There were games, pizza, prizes, and of course, two brand new forever friends.

>Fredbear and Spring Bonnie.

>It was an immediate success.

>And the suits, oh, the wonderful springlock suits.

>They were even better, my magnum opus.

>A creation of duality, like rabbits.

>Something that could be worn by an animatronic skeleton or worn by myself.

>I was always in the rabbit suit, I was careful to never let anyone see my face.

>I hired someone as a faux manager, someone easy I could manipulate, and if they ever showed signs of betrayal, I ‘fired’ them and hired another.

>And it was much easier to lure a lost child away, into the back, with promises of meeting Fredbear.

>With a chance to play with me.

>A friend.

>I would stuff their bodies into Fredbear after I’d collected their remnant and their soul.

“Could you collect remnant from the managers you ‘fired?’”

>Caught on to that, did you?

>Clever.

>Yes, I could.

>Like I said before, remnant never truly goes away, it simply thins out.

>A few factors make it collect within the body, but I found fear to be the most enjoyable.

“Why not give adults a happy ending?”

>Because adults are cruel.

>They’ve lost their childhood innocence.

“More like they can see past your act.”

>Haha.

>Yes, I suppose that too.

>I cannot offer an adult candy and pizza and get the same excitement from a child given the same offer.

I kinda lost the plot after that because someone broke into the house and tried to steal the living room T.V. so I chased them off and then me and mom had to run for some reason and the backyard was hella foggy and there was construction equipment everywhere.   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sandershospitalau]

Help (Un)Wanted

(Warnings- Mentions of crime, Blackmail, Innuendos. Tell me if I missed any!)

Characters: Roman Prince, Virgil Lawson, Remus Prince, Dot Higgins, Nate Christopoulous

Read on AO3

—————————————

The first-floor doctor's lounge was often one of the busiest lounges in Sanders Hospital. There was always someone inside- brewing coffee, microwaving lunch, taking a nap on one of the beds stuffed against the wall- someone was doing something when you came in. Roman had tried to catch the room empty in the past, but he never succeeded. There was always someone in there, though the people in the room often made him laugh. He once caught Patton sleeping on one of the beds, half of his body dangling off the mattress. Another time he saw Remy grabbing a box of store-bought powdered donuts, which later appeared in his coffee shop. He wasn't sure if Remy was allowed in the lounges since he wasn't a doctor, but neither was Roman and he had used the lounge's resources many times before. That day, Roman thought he would finally find the room empty, but Virgil had beaten him inside.

The Head of Nursing sat at the off-white table in the center of the room. His dark purple scrubs dangled on his thin body like a mattress draped on a pole. He sat cross-legged on the chair, black Crocs cradling his fabric wrapped feet. Roman noticed he'd redyed his grape colored hair- the color had been faded for the past week. Virgil had his laptop on one side of the table and a worn notebook on the other. He scribbled something into his notebook as Roman closed the door. Virgil looked up, bangs reaching his eyes. He leaned over and pushed out a chair next to him.

"You're really getting into this nurse's rally idea, huh?" Roman chuckled, sliding into the chair.

"Did you get the go-ahead from Thomas?" Virgil asked, stuffing the pen he was using behind his ear.

"He's all for it," Roman chirped. "As long as we jump through the needed hoops to keep everyone safe, he's more than happy to let it go on." Virgil grinned and pulled his laptop closer. Roman couldn't help himself- the emo nurse's smiles were rare enough that when they emerged, they ignited Roman's heart. Smiles like those were part of the reason Roman loved his job.

"So you told me a bit about what this is supposed to be," Roman yawned, stretching his arms. "What's the full story here? Leave nothing out!"

"Do you watch the news?" Virgil asked as he typed something.

"A bit," Roman admitted. "I find it to be a bit too depressing most of the time."

"Yeah, well good thing you didn't watch it when this came onscreen," Virgil huffed. He turned his laptop screen around so Roman could see. It was pulled up to VIN3, the major news channel for Florida news. It was an article by VIN3's leading medical journalist- Terrence Williams. For a moment, Roman was a bit excited- whenever Sanders Hospital released press statements, Roman always preferred talking to Terrence- but his excitement dimmed when he saw the article's title.

'State government plans to cut funding for Florida nursing education.'

"Well that's no good," Roman muttered.

"No, duh, Princey," Virgil snapped. Roman rolled his eyes a bit at the nickname. "We already need more nurses, we don't need the government giving the ones we have a half-baked education. This hospital would collapse without nurses. They need just as good an education as the doctors do! Who do they think actually gives patients their medication? Who does most of the hands-on work? What genius came up with this idea?"

"I agree with you, no need to get your Crocs in a twist," Roman interrupted, holding out his hands to stop Virgil's ranting. "Also, Crocs? Really?"

"What?" Virgil grumbled. "They're comfy. My shoes don't matter, this is what matters. We need to get those moronic politicians to realize how stupid this is."

"That's where this rally comes in, right?" Roman asked. He reached for Virgil's notebook. Virgil slammed his hand down on the notebook. Roman pulled his hand back. "Woah, alright there, J.Delightful. Just wanted to see your ideas."

"Alright, just..." Virgil muttered. "Don't touch the notebook. So far I'm thinking we get as many nurses as possible to march on City Hall. Maybe get some speakers up there, chanting..."

"T-shirts!" Roman chirped. Virgil raised an eyebrow. "I'm serious! A good protest has t-shirts! We've got the funds. Oh, and a big banner we can carry at the front of the march. Do you have a march path planned?" Virgil typed something on his laptop and pulled up a map. A purple line snaked across Miami, starting in front of Sanders and ending at City Hall. "Hmm... Virgil, unless your plan is to lead our nurses through the heart of gang territory, I suggest going around this neighborhood." Roman circled a neighborhood on the map. Virgil sighed and pulled his purple line around the area Roman circled. "I'm a bit surprised Mr. Honorary Security Guard didn't know that."

"I'm from Atlanta, what do you want from me," Virgil huffed. "And how do you know-"

"Nate," Roman chuckled. "We have coffee every other Saturday." Virgil rolled his eyes, a tiny smile playing on his lips. "When you get to this street, you're only a couple of blocks away from St. Gemma's. If you want a good impact, you could make a stop there and pick up their nurses."

"I dunno," Virgil groaned, rubbing his neck. "St. Gemma's doesn't have a good track record with how they treat their nurses..."

"They can't stop people from joining the march if they want to," Roman huffed. "Oh! We could even schedule it around lunchtime so most of them don't have to leave during a shift!"

"So it's 'we' now, is it?" Virgil scoffed, glancing at Roman.

"Why of course!" Roman declared. "I'm just as upset by this news as you! The world needs good nurses!" Roman's phone buzzed in the pocket of his personalized red letter jacket (while it wasn't 'the proper attire of a communications director', Roman always wore it around the chilly hospital). Roman pulled out his phone. It was a text from Dot, the receptionist at the lobby desk.

DARLING DOT (sent 1:53 PM)

Hey there. I just sent a man up to your office. He said he wanted to speak to you about a job. I know, I know, basic hirings are a bit below your job description, but he had all the proper paperwork and was insistent upon talking to you. I paged your office, but you weren't in.

Roman sighed, frowning softly. He had more important things to do than doing the job of human services!

ME: (sent 1:54 PM)

It's alright. I'm not one to deny a fan. Thank you for telling me.

"It seems duty calls," Roman sighed, stuffing his phone back in his pocket. "Shoot Thomas an email when you can. I'm sure Patton can help you brainstorm in the meantime!"

"Have fun sucking up to the board," Virgil scoffed, shooting Roman a two-fingered salute. He pulled his laptop onto his lap and started working again. Roman stood, cracking his back, and jogged out of the lounge.

Now, he could have used the elevator like a normal person to get to his office. It was on the top floor, after all. What moron would use the stairs to get from the first floor to the top? Roman, apparently. While others used treadmills and rowing machines to get their daily workouts in, Roman used the jog from the lobby to Entertainment Row. His shiny shoes clopped up the stone staircase as Roman started his climb. He could already feel his face begin to flush by the second floor, blood pumping through his body, heart thudding in his ears. When he reached the fourth floor, a pair of kids with thick wool beanies stumbled out of the door and raced up the staircase alongside Roman. Roman held out his hand, and the kid in the lead gave him an enthusiastic high five. The two kids scurried ahead of him and disappeared into the fifth-floor doorway. Roman didn't question why two children were running around the hospital unsupervised as he jogged on. That was a Patton problem!

By the time he reached the top floor, he'd tied his letter jacket around his waist and could feel some sweat clinging to his forehead. He hoped he hadn't sweated through his white polo. That would be a horrible first impression! Entertainment Row was to the left of the stairwell. Roman could hear people playing something in the patient's lounge from the sounds of the cheering and gunshots. However, Roman turned right, padding down the halls of meeting rooms and offices. If you had told a young Roman he would have an office next to award-winning doctors, he would have laughed. But he traced the Braille on the nameplate for Thomas's office as he walked past, smiling. His office was right next door to the hospital president. He pushed open his door and stopped in the doorway.

His office was about half the size of Thomas's grand room, but it was enough room for Roman to settle in and call the space his own. He didn't have any diplomas hanging on the walls like everyone else (the only one he had was the one from the online school he attended just to keep his crappy old job at a paper company), but he did have posters of his favorite musicals. Wicked, Hamilton, Les Mis, Newsies, they were all on his wall. He'd moved out the bookshelf that came with each office for a worn brown couch. His desk usually lacked much reason to it- He'd move his computer monitor to the left or right of the old wooden desk whenever he pleased and his bowl of Skittles roamed around the desk. His two photos- one of him and his parents, the other of him, Virgil, Logan, and Patton he took one day out of boredom- lacked a home. His office supplies were either scattered around in his desk drawers or scattered around the table as he made tiny origami from the post-it notes that would defend his landline phone. The nameplate, bearing the name Roman Prince in shiny letters was stuck to the desk, making it the only thing that made sense. But now, there was an unfamiliar order on the desktop. The monitor was nestled neatly in the middle of the desk. There was a photo on either side of the monitor. His origami birds sat in neat rows on the edge of the desk. The two chairs facing the desk were pushed in. Not to mention someone was sitting in Roman's chair.

The man wore a green leather jacket over a stained black t-shirt. He had a silky, bright lime scarf wrapped around his neck like a French fashionista. Despite his young age, the man's dark ginger hair was already graying at the front like Rogue from X-Men. He rested his pirate-style black boots on Roman's desktop and his jeans were covered in holes. There was a sickly pink tinge to the skin around the man's eyes that only stood out against his pale skin. His mustache would have been proper in the 1900's, but now it looked cartoonishly evil. The way he was now, it would have been very difficult for anyone to figure out how the man knew Roman. But with a bit of a makeover, it wouldn't take long for people to recognize Roman's twin brother.

"Boo," Remus said, smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Roman slammed his door shut.

"Remus!" Roman hissed. "Get- get off that!" Roman darted across his office and grabbed Remus's arm. Remus ducked underneath Roman and crawled to the couch- literally, he crab-walked like a possessed child in a horror movie onto Roman's couch. He sat on the couch's arm, one leg dangling off the side.

"Well that's a rude welcome," Remus huffed. Roman stomped to the couch.

"What are you doing here?" Roman snapped.

"I work here!" Remus chirped. "Unofficially, for now."

"Uh, no," Roman said. "You don't work here, officially or unofficially, you knock-off Heather Duke. Why are you in my office?!"

"I thought it was high time I dropped in on you!" Remus sighed, leaning his head on his hand, elbow to knee. "Isn't this what brothers do? Come see each other at work? That's not rhetorical, I'm actually asking."

"You texted me last week," Roman huffed.

"I know, but when it comes to giving you a good old fashioned hug..." Remus sighed. "Our last meeting was at Christmas last year! Thank you for the sweater, by the way. I've done many things in it."

"Ew," Roman groaned, regretting many of his life choices, one of which was not devouring his brother in the womb (an event that Logan once described to Roman which temporarily scarred him). "I am not hugging you." Last time the two hugged, Remus put Roman in a choke-hold and didn't let go for a minute and a half.

"So this is your office," Remus purred, hopping off the couch. He strolled around the room, hands behind his back. "Good job, brother! I should have visited sooner!"

"Please don't tell me you're the person Dot referred to," Roman groaned.

"That's me!" Remus chirped, spinning on one heel to face Roman. "I would like to get paid, please. I won't make you pay for the couple of months I've already worked, but it would be nice to start earning a paycheck."

"Couple of-" Roman stammered. "What?!"

"For my services as a janitor," Remus declared, giving Roman a little bow.

"I thought you had a job already," Roman huffed, crossing his arms. "Unless you got fired again."

"No, no, no, I still have my other job," Remus said, shaking his head and hands like he was denying another serving of cake. "But since I clean two hospitals, I'd like to be paid for both!"

"You are not getting a job here," Roman snapped. "Remus, you may be my brother, but my family duty has its limits. I'm sorry, but I need you to leave." He pointed towards the door.

"Why can't I work here?" Remus asked, turning and admiring the room. "I need the money. Are you afraid I'd do something bad?" Remus looked over his shoulder to Roman. "Or are you afraid to let your friends know about me?" Roman's fingers dug into the sleeves of his leather jacket.

"I'm calling security," Roman huffed. He reached for his landline. Remus's pale, boney hand grabbed Roman's hand and pulled his back. Roman spun around, now standing face to face with Remus, his hand gripped between them.

"Imagine with me," Remus purred as Roman tried to pull his hand out of Remus's tight grip. He tried to pry Remus's fingers off, but Remus's other hand grabbed his free hand. "Your boss is in his office, doing paperwork or whatever pretty folk he pleases-"

"Ew!" Roman groaned.

"-and suddenly, he gets an email from deodoranteater73," Remus explained. "with the caption 'Roman Prince has lied to you!' He opens the email and sees everything he needs to know about you and me! Including-"

"Remus, you can't!" Roman begged.

"I easily can," Remus said. "Your boss deserves the truth." Remus let go of Roman's hands. His grip left red impressions on Roman's hands.

"I've already been punished for what happened!" Roman begged, nursing his sore hands. "You-you're better off now too, right? I mean, last month you left me a voicemail in the middle of the night talking about how happy you were!"

"To be fair, there's a solid week of that month I only remember in vague gestures," Remus admitted, flourishing his hands in the air.

"Why bring up the past?" Roman stammered. "Why wreck my life?"

"Wreck your life?" Remus said, hand to his chest, pinkish eyes softening for a moment. "No no no, is that why you think I'm here? I'm happy for you!"

"You just threatened to expose me!" Roman snapped.

"If I wanted to expose you, it would be a lot more hands-on," Remus giggled.

"You know what I mean!" Roman shouted. He froze, looking to the door. Did anyone hear that?

"Roman, Roman, Roman," Remus sighed, shaking his head. He walked back to the couch and sat down like a normal human being. "I hate the thought of you losing your job. It keeps me up at night thinking of it. You know me, you know I'm telling you the truth here. I may be a demented man, but even I despise some of my ideas. But the issue here is, I need money. I'm afraid my job isn't paying me enough to keep up with my rent. Do you want me to live on the street like an animal?"

"Let's be frank, you're Oscar the Grouch's long lost cousin," Roman grumbled, crossing his arms again.

"True, true," Remus admitted, nodding. "I'm going to keep cleaning this place whether you want me to or not. Frankly, it's a wonderful job for stinky fellows like me." Remus wiggled his eyebrows. "I just need some cash."

"Then get a job at McDonald's," Roman huffed. "Take up professional dumpster diving. You can't work here."

"I prefer to keep my dumpster diving as a hobby, thank you," Remus chuckled."You know what? As my brother, I'll make you a deal. You don't need to pay me for my cleaning services. It's an honor I'm more than happy to give to this hospital. Simply send me some cash every couple of weeks to help make my rent, and we can go about our lives as normal." Remus's face darkened, his Cheshire smile returning. An instinctive fear stirred in Roman's guts. "Neither of us want to ruin a good thing." Roman tightened his crossed arms.

"Are you blackmailing me?" Roman asked.

"You could call it that," Remus sighed, standing. "I'll give you some time to think it over. I'll treat you to some funny photos I found online when I get home. There's this great website I found full of old serial killer case files-"

"Out," Roman groaned. "Please."

"I'm done, I'm done," Remus laughed, walking to the door. "Make sure not to think about dismembered dog tails while I'm gone! Byeeeeeee!" Remus grabbed the doorknob and swung the door open. Virgil stood outside the room, hand raised, ready to knock. He froze in the doorway, staring at Remus with giant eyes.

"Remus?" Virgil gasped, eyes frozen.

"My dear old friend!" Remus exclaimed. He wrapped his arms around Virgil. The nurse yelped and squirmed away from Remus. He backed into the room and shot Roman an unsettling glare. "It's so nice to see you! I can’t believe I forgot you worked here!”

”This is who you ditched me for?” Virgil muttered, pointing a hand at Remus.

”I’m afraid I must be off,” Remus sighed. “I have many important things to do, important people to do. It was wonderful seeing you again, Virge. It was just like old times.” With that, Remus slipped out of the office, closing the door, leaving Roman and Virgil with his Cheshire smile. Roman collapsed onto his chair with a deep sigh.

”Why was he here?” Virgil snapped, pointing to the door. Roman thought carefully about his answer in the few seconds he had to answer. Did Virgil not know Roman was Remus's twin? Maybe his secret was still safe.

”He was asking for a job,” Roman sighed, frowning. “Don’t worry, I turned his resume down quickly.”

”Yeah, you might want to call security to make sure he leaves the hospital,” Virgil muttered. He took a seat on Roman’s couch.

”How do you know the man?” Roman asked as he pulled out his phone to text Nate.

”He...” Virgil sighed, tugging on the edges of his scrubs. “He was a janitor where I used to work. At... St. Gemma's. He always freaked me out."

"I can understand that," Roman scoffed. "I mean, I only met him once and I was half-way to calling Nate on him!" Roman prayed his acting skills wouldn't fail him. "Nevermind the crazy man, I assume you came up here for something. Unless you just missed me." Roman ruffled his hair and flashed Virgil a grin.

"Yeah, right," Virgil scoffed, rolling his eyes. "I wanted to show you something." Virgil reached into the pocket of his scrubs. He pulled out a folded piece of lined paper and tossed it at Roman's head. The paper fell onto his desk. Roman unfolded the paper. It was a sketch of a t-shirt. Inside the t-shirt was a stethoscope surrounded by the words 'Educated nurses save lives'. "Concept art for the t-shirt."

"I knew you'd come around!" Roman laughed, pushing down the pool of strange emotions his brother unearthed.

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

The window of Roman's office looked out over the Miami skyline. It wasn't a great window, barely big enough to crawl through to get to the fire escape outside, but it was enough to see the gorgeous view. The pulse of the city's night-time heroes raced through the blinking lights that covered the world. The city lit the clouds floating overhead that blocked the half-moon. The faint sounds of ambulances roaring into the ED broke through the window. Roman leaned on the windowsill, his red letter jacket pulled tight around his shoulders. He should have gone home an hour ago. He wasn't like Patton or Logan or Virgil- he didn't have to work through the night. He didn't work a 9 to 5 job, but his hours didn't extend far into the inky abyss of the night.

He leaned his phone against the warm glass. The harsh light glaring from his screen kept him alert. He scrolled through Instagram, but he wasn't really looking at anything. His thoughts were completely focused on his brother. Remus was often a man of empty threats, but he didn't lie. That was something Roman never understood about his brother- while he did so many horrid things, he never lied about doing any of it. What Roman wasn't sure of was whether his little story about sending Thomas an email was one of his empty threats. He just wanted cash. Was it worth losing Roman's job over? He couldn't give Remus a job in the hospital, could he? No. It wasn't safe for Remus to be around patients. Roman was smart enough to know that.

Roman wasn't poor anymore. Personally, he wouldn't describe himself as rich, but he didn't have student loans to pay off like his friends, and his job paid more than enough for Roman to live a comfortable life. Didn't family help each other through hard times? What was a bit of cash every couple of weeks compared to what Roman made? Remus's rent couldn't cost that much. It was a favor for his brother. But Roman knew better. He'd seen plenty of shows where someone was being blackmailed. The blackmailer would get greedy and demand more and more from their victim, and the victim would comply. Roman used to think they were stupid for getting blackmailed in the first place. He didn't think that anymore.

He took his phone off the windowsill and walked to his couch. The lights were off in his office, with only a sliver of light escaping from the hallway. The light of Roman's phone illuminated his uncharacteristically grave face. He pulled up his contact list and sent a text he knew he would regret.

ME: (sent 9:22 PM)

How much money do you need?

It only took a few minutes for Roman to get a response.

REMUS: (sent 9:26 PM)

I knew you'd come around! :D

Oh boy.

————————————————

Tag List-

@cocobearthe4th

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Oh for fuck's sake, not this fucking bullshit again (cryptography edition)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data.

In a recently released Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption, the Five Eyes powers have demanded, again, that strong cryptography be abolished and replaced with defective cryptography so that they can spy on bad guys.

They defend this by saying "Privacy is not absolute."

But of course, working crypto isn't just how we stay private from governments (though god knows all five of the Five Eyes have, in very recent times, proven themselves to be catastrophically unsuited to collect, analyze and act on all of our private and most intimate conversations). It's how we make sure that no one can break into the data from our voting machines, or push lethal fake firmware updates to our pacemakers, or steal all the money from all of the banks, or steal all of the kompromat on all 22,000,000 US military and government employees and contractors who've sought security clearance.

Also, this is bullshit.

Because it won't work.

Here's the text of my go-to post about why this is so fucking stupid. I just can't be bothered anymore. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously? Are we still fucking talking about this? Seriously? Come on, SERIOUSLY?

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What these leaders thinks they're saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. These officials don't understand technology very well, so they doesn't actually know what they're asking for.

For this proposal to work, they will need to stop Britons, Canadians, Americans, Kiwis and Australians from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of their jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Australia is not alone here. The regime they proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Australian governments have already shown that they believes they can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the 5 Eyes nations are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other states are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or Mexico could come to the 5 Eyes countries with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what the Five Eyes are proposing:

* All 5 Eyes citizens' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of a 5 Eyes government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked in the 5 Eyes

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the 5 Eyes must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of 5 Eyes countries, and within those countries, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting a 5 Eyes country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

The Five Eyes officials will say that they doesn't want to do any of this. They'll say that they can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the every 5 Eyes nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html

[queenssunshine]

Making a Living off of Death (1/4)

I literally cannot believe I’ve posted my first fic to AO3! This is my first fic in almost seven years, so I’m really excited to become a contributing member of fandom again. 

Anyway, here’s my first Spider-boy fic, and in the spirit of Whumptober, it is of course whump.

Read On AO3 Here

When people ask him what he does, he generally tells them he’s a freelancer. On occasion they will enquire further, “A freelance what?”, to which he will respond, “Whatever I can.” That’s basically true—while he deals mostly in assassinations, he also does assaults and robberies on occasion. Sometimes he needs to put the fear of God into people. Sometimes he just needs to play God.

The hit on Tony Stark comes to him in a heavily encrypted email that takes his computer two days to work through. Sometimes clients are paranoid like that, making the orders so difficult to access that most people in the business walk away before they even know what they’re for. He supposes this isn’t a bad idea. Plausible deniability and all that. But it’s annoying for him to have to wait around for his program to work out the endless lines of tangled code. This also probably means payment will come in a similar form, which is even more annoying.

Anyway, the hit on Tony Stark gets sent to him and three other colleagues and he’s the first one to decode it (and probably the only one to try) so first come, first kill. The built-in kill code activates and his instructions unwrite themselves from the screen, his laptop defaulting to his desktop photo of the silhouette of a dog on a sunset. Alright, time to strategize.

First, he has to get to New York. Then he has to figure out how to get Stark’s schedule. Then he has to get close to him. Then he has to kill him.

Hacking into Stark’s security team is above his skill set but gaining access to his employee files ends up being pretty easy. Cross-check some names, Google some addresses, hack a local AT&T store, and boom, he has access to the personal phones of who he has decided is two key players in his plan: the head of security and an intern.

He decides these two are key because he sees them too much. Photos from expos, parties, conferences, press events—the two are a constant presence at the side of Tony Stark. The security head quite frankly looks like an oaf, and the intern doesn’t appear to be older than college age, so he decides that they can’t do too much thwarting to his plan. The more he gets to know them through the screen, the more he feels that way.

The emails that the two have sent back and forth are heavily encrypted, and there are heaps of text messages that are as well. He can’t believe it, but his main source of information is coming from the animojis that the two send each other on occasion. The intern favors the alien. The security head favors the brown bear. (The intern also thinks the security head should use the poop one more, but that’s beside the point.)

Through the animojis, GPS tracking, and some old-fashioned stalking-- er, in-person reconnaissance, he discovers that the intern is a student at a magnet school in Forest Hills and that the security head is, for whatever reason, his personal after-school driver. The relationship between the two of them seems pretty relaxed. They clearly have a long history of uneventful school pick-ups, because he just sits in the visitor parking lot and stares at them without detection as the security head pulls up in the black Audi, the intern hops in, and they wait in the long queue to get off the campus. He trails the car, but the location of drop-off changes on the daily—sometimes a restaurant, sometimes a bodega, twice it was just an alleyway. Once they went to Stark Tower, or at least he assumes that’s where they were heading, but by the time they were two blocks away he decided to drop off to avoid getting clocked on any of Stark’s cameras. Even though Stark probably had access to every CCTV in town. Sometimes you just have to play it safe.

After about two weeks of monitoring, he gets his golden ticket. His phone pings a few times in a row, and he opens it to witness an exchange between Alien and Brown Bear:

[Alien] Are we still on for after school? [Brown Bear] Yeah, he had to move some stuff around so we might be late, but we’ll still be there. [Alien] Cool! It’s probably better, I don’t want—[the alien hesitates, rotates his head, lowers voice] Mr. Stark to have to deal with people freaking out about him being here. [Brown Bear] Don’t worry about it, kid. [Brown Bear] I think he’s kind of excited to see your school and your friends. [Alien] Okay, well I’ll see you guys later then. [Alien] OH! Can we please go to Julio’s again? Please? I’m craving breadsticks. [Brown Bear] Boss says okay.

So the decision had to be made: to carry out the assassination on a high school campus, or at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. He sighs as he Googles “Midtown academic calendar forest hills,” and sighs again when he discovers that tonight is the Annual Science Fair. What will Tony Stark do in the presence of one thousand geeks and their parents: double down on security or keep it modest? He rapidly Googles some more, trying to find instances of Tony Stark, billionaire and savior of the universe, attending a high school science fair. Bingo. Seven years ago he had attended the science fair of the Bronx High School of Science, and according to r/TonyStark and r/IronMan, he had only had Brown Bear and his gauntlets at his disposal. No supplementary guards? Not wise, Stark. Still, one instance was not enough to base his operation on.

Further inquiries reveal that Stark, in his years since becoming the savior of the universe, has only grown laxer. His prosthetic arm doubles as a housing unit for the Iron Man suit, sure, but it seems to be de-weaponized most of the time. He’s spotted without security regularly—outings with clients, with the Avengers team, with the kid, all solo. Rarely a body guard appears, but it’s only when he’s with his daughter or wife. Maybe it’s because Stark thinks he’s too big to fuck with. Maybe Stark is, and maybe this is a big mess in the making. Oh well. He decides the assassination is going to go down at the school, but he needs one more thing to make it go off well. So he calls a colleague, has them transfer the encrypted message, decodes it again (but faster, thank you machine learning), backward engineers it, and makes a phone call. And a request.

Two hours later, a cloaking suit arrives at a P.O. box, to which he has the key.

Sometimes his clients gift him cool things to execute a mission, but a cloaking suit is hands-down the coolest thing he’s gotten. He didn’t know what he expected when he takes it out of the courier box, but it looks almost civilian—a thick grey windbreaker with lines of reflective material running down the sleeves, and a pair of pants to match. It’s basically a tracksuit. He’s relieved. New Yorkers have likely seen weirder things than a man dressed in full tactical attire on the subway, but it’s still nice to have a low profile.

He messes around with the settings and soon enough he’s standing before the hotel bathroom mirror almost completely invisible, only a slight warp betraying where he is. Nothing anyone would see unless they were looking for it. Without the hood on, he looks like Harry Potter on his first Christmas at Hogwarts. He is—he dare say—giddy.

He deactivates the cloaking, grabs his guitar case (read: sniper rifle) and wallet and leaves the hotel.

Before getting to the school, he has a slice of pizza, a coke, and a bag of gummy bears. This is not good fuel for the potential get-away sprint, but he can’t help himself. He’s so happy, he can just feel the brewing of a good mission on its way.

He arrives at the school after classes have let out and before the end of the science fair, meaning that the parking lot is a ghost town. His cloaking suit already activated, he climbs up on his predetermined hiding spot (a portable building next to the bus parking lot which would allow him ample cover and a quick escape were things to get hairy), sets up his Barrett M82 (already sheathed in its matching grey cloaking suit), and hunkers down. He lets his mind wander as half an hour passes, thoughts looping around his ex-wife (that bitch), his breakfast tomorrow (maybe that 2.8-star diner down the street), and his dog (who was currently boarding at a doggy daycare next to his house in Kentucky and got a time-out today). Finally, families start spilling out of the front doors of the school, and from his view atop the portable, he can clearly see the faces of all exiting.

Fifteen minutes pass of parental pride and filial embarrassment before Stark, the security head, and the intern come walking out. By the time they exit, most of the fair has cleared out and only a few cars remain in the lot—probably teachers and staff. The intern is clutching a blue ribbon and a small trophy while the security head struggles to maintain hold of some kind of robotic device. Stark has his hands jammed in his pockets, strolling casually, lips quirked in a contented smile as the intern rambles about something. He can barely hear it—something about how the intern knew his project was good but didn’t think it would win an award or anything. For a moment, he pauses, feeling a little remorse. He had always wanted kids. The intern seemed pretty endearing. Oh well. Moment over.

He lines up the sight on Stark. It’s a clean shot, a beautiful shot, a stars-have-aligned-and-I’m-about-to-get-away-with-this shot, and he feels the rush of a perfectly executed assassination flow through his veins. This moment is why he mainly deals in assassinations. This high of having so much power yet not even being seen, it hits different. He drops the safety and just as his finger twitches back to the trigger the most bizarre thing happens.

The intern looks at him.

Of course, the kid can’t look at him, he has the cloaking suit on, but the kid’s suspicious eyes pass over the top of the portable and he feels violated.

Also, he squeezes the trigger thrice.

And then a more bizarre thing happens: the kid drops.

Well, shit.

[gushingskirtflipper-blog]

A simple way to create drop shadow in details

An effect that often found in catalog photographs, advertising images, and web pages, is called the drop shadow, which is sometimes called a “box shadow”. By separating the object from the background and then adding a custom shadow, it’s created. In this case, the background is deleted sometimes, but other times it’s substituted out or modified. And the result is that it creates the illusion so that the object is floating in space. It means that a drop shadow is an effect where an image is repeated behind itself to create the illusion and the image is floating over its background, which is done in the graphics design.

Although a cast shadow is similar to a drop shadow, it has the added dimension of perspective. And if we talk about the cast shadows then it can be rotated, slid, or stretched to create the illusion. This is to do as the light source is coming from different directions.

What is Drop Shadow in photoshop?

Drop Shadow is a visual effect, which is consisting of a drawing element which looks like the shadow of an object. In the field of graphics design the shadow of an object provide the impression of it. Sometimes it rises higher than the object of background. The reason is graphical user interface. It includes windows, menus, texts and the drop shadow. So, it may be in front as this effect effectively distinguishes the text from any colored background. This is because the text label for icons on desktops and many desktop environments has a drop shadow. If you like to get a simple way of drawing a drop shadow then it’s a rectangular object that’s to draw a gray or black area underneath and offset from the object.

Generally, this is a copy in black or gray of the object that’s drawn in a slightly different position. The ways to increase realism by:

Using Alpha Blending the shadow with the area cast on while darkening the colors of the pixels where the shadow casts instead of making them gray.

Adding a Gaussian blur to the shadow’s alpha channel before blending so you can make soften the edges of the shadow.

What is the Importance of Drop Shadow?

Raw images may not fulfill your desire in the digital world. So, if you want to grab the attention of the visitors then the original images need some additional qualities. Although you can remove the background of the image, it’s not enough as it requires something more. That’s why, when you add a drop shadow, it can beautify your images intensely. Moreover, it can upgrade your catalog to the next level while adding a drop shadow to your product images. However, this is not always easy to determine which type to use. In order to simulate 3D depth in a 2D image is the traditional use for a drop shadow. And you can dramatically change the look of an image by changing only the settings of the shadow.

It can make your product pop ease of your anxieties while making the opposite choice when you understand that each shadow style is individual and equally makes. As shadow types are only chosen based on preference, there is no “right” or “wrong” shadow type. Your program appears professional work of drop shadow to consumers if you want the look that you like satisfying. And then use that look in all of your product images. Although you can remove the background and place the image on any different background through clipping path service, that doesn’t increase the natural effect of your images. As a result, you need to apply some additional Photoshop technique in order to bring natural mood in your images. And in this place, drop shadow effect plays a vital role to increase the natural effect for your images.

What is Inside the Drop Shadow of Photoshop?

You may need to add type to identify parts of your work or even complete them depending on the kind of project you’re working. The typographical elements in your project can be stylized with a drop shadow behind them to make them look extra stylish whether they are technical illustrations, logos, charts or simple infographics. For these reasons, Photoshop layer styles are a popular way to add effects. These include drop shadows and strokes and they are to layers in a non-destructive way. You can achieve any effect with the right knowledge and experience. So, you need to understand what each setting does and how they can be combined to achieve these effects. Now, let’s start learning what inside the drop shadow of the Photoshop.

Drop Shadow Dialog Box

Because the settings are pretty basic and will give you an overall feel of how to use the rest of the effects, the Drop Shadow Dialog Box is a good place to start for beginners. It gives your design a little more pick-me-up as a subtle drop shadow is also one of the best effects.

Blend Mode

If you want to set the blending mode for your shadow then you have to use the “Blend Mode”. As it allows darkening the layer that is behind it, you’ll want this to be “Multiply” or “Linear Burn”. By clicking the color block next to the Blend Mode drop-down menu, you can set the color of your shadow. Although the shadow color will be black by default, you can add a tint of color or even try something outrageous to get special effects.

Opacity

When you need to specify how transparent your shadow will be, the Opacity slider allows it. Here, while 100% is completely opaque, 0% is completely see-through setting.

Angle

It allows you to change the apparent angle that the light source comes from by the Angle spinner and corresponding box. If you turn the “Use Global Light” checkbox on then any changes you make to the angle of the drop shadow will also change the angle of the light sources used in other effects. These effects include Bevel and Emboss, Inner Shadow etc. Also, you can change the light angle for the drop shadow independently of other effects by leaving it unchecked. Because we want to have a uniform light source for the most cohesive looking effect, the recommended setting is “checked” in most cases.

This is the Distance slider, which changes the apparent distance between the subject and the background. And by altering the distance between the subject and the drop shadow itself, you can get the effect. Although you’ll normally want to leave this at 0% for a typical drop shadow, you’ll normally want to leave this at 0%. However, you should increase it for harder shadows, and you can set it all the way to 100% for shadows with hard edges or even extra strokes.

Size

To change the apparent size of the shadow, the Size slider is used. The shadow is exactly the same size as the shape of the object when it is set to 0. The shadow grows in 1-pixel increments as you increase the size.

Contour

In a nonlinear fashion, the Contour shapes allow you to change the falloff of the shadow. You can get the shadow to fade out in different ways if you choose the different curve profiles. And when you’re trying to achieve special glow or abstract effects, this is really useful. Moreover, if you use the “Anti-aliased” checkbox then it allows you to improve the quality of the shadow falloff with a very slight drop in performance. In addition to these, we recommend always keeping the box checked as the performance decrease is negligible. This is an important factor to focus to create drop shadow photoshop.

Apart from the above features, there is something more, such as:

Noise

Knock It Out

Premium Options

Realistic Drop Shadow (Photoshop Action) (in the premium options)

Special Drop Shadows Generator (in the premium options)

Photoshop Text Effect: Cinematic 3D Light & Shadow (in the premium options)

What are the Uses of the Drop Shadow Photoshop?

When looking for adding effects to your images, layers are one of the great ways. As the Drop Shadow comes in the layers option, we’ll learn about it. And it’s to add a 3D look to your text, which is the typical example of the drop shadow effect in Photoshop. By clicking on the “fx” icon at the bottom of the layers palette, you get into the layer styles in Photoshop. And then, when you’ll click on “Drop Shadow” and it’ll bring up the “Drop Shadow Dialog Box”.

As it put the drop shadow on its own separate layer, you can now make modifications non-destructively to the drop shadow using adjustments layers. You can create the distance and the angle of the drop shadow in one movement by moving this layer around. And you can add Gaussian Blur or any other filter if you change this later to a Smart Object.

Drop Shadow in After Effects

Because the Adobe After Effects is post-production software, it enables video editors and graphic artists to add special effects to their videos. The addition of drop shadow can give your video a more professional and high-quality appearance as it’s one of the program’s special effects. Also, behind the original version, it gives on-screen text and graphics the appearance of floating by creating a “shadow” version. And if we talk about the fields of uses of the drop shadow then it’s widely used in the movie studios, news broadcast stations, and aspiring filmmakers.

Shadow creating service is a system of graphic design which creates an object over the rest of an image by laying a direct shade behind the object. This is used to add a shadow effect into a picture. Shadow creating service can make fantastic images, highlight emotions, modify the impressions and be applied in numerous ways. It is as well used to text along with makes visible images of the document. Sometimes drop shadow requires dropping on only the component of the layer. Perhaps the shade may drop on the content or just below of the level. Some clients may need to form an illusion of deepness to their images to make the focus of object showing at the viewers. This is a complex service, on behalf of this kind of services or for any sort of shadow creating services you may appoint a professional.

Why use Shadow Creating Service?

Mainly there are three kinds of shadow creating services. They are drop shadow and reflection shadow and natural shadow.These all are important and widely used in photo editing service. The usage of Photoshop shadow creating services are:

Creates shadow behind different forms of a photo

Extend or cut a shadow

Modify shadow of an image.

Create shadow behind Text

Include white border to a photo

Darken the masked portion of a photo

Make irregular shadow

Who Uses Shadow Creating Service?

E-commerce companies.

Publishing Companies

Modeling Companies

Jewelry business companies

Advertising Companies

Health care companies

Conclusion

In conclusion, we must admire that the drop shadow photoshop is not only a very useful effect but it also can greatly enhance your imagery. It takes note of the direction and the type of light for realistic shadows. Moreover, your designs can get a lot of depth in interest while using a drop shadow. And you can transform your work from flat, two-dimensional canvas into depth-filled designs that appear to come off of the page with a little effort. However, one of the fundamentals of creating realistic depth in your work is the understanding light sources and how light and shadow create the illusion of depth.

Now, it’s time to show your creativity readers, let us see your own drop shadow images. Also, share with our audiences if you have any tips for them. And if you have any tricks for adding dimension to your work using drop shadows then share them in the comments section below.

If you are looking for a shadow creating service provider for your photos then we think that you are in right place. Clipping USA team is ready to serve for you with reasonable price. We accept up to two free trial form our new clients to show our skill and ability. Therefore, you may send us free trial or order any time. For more information contact Clipping USA.

[babemazzello]

Somebody to Love - A Joe Mazzello FanFiction - Chapter 4: The Party

Notes: Something FINALLY happens with Joe, guys. Sorry it took a while to get here, but now we’re here! Thanks for sticking with it!

Warnings: None.

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

---------- Two Days Later ----------

I woke up to an alarm on my phone that read "Tonight's the party". I wasn't ready. Whenever I go to a party, I have to amp myself up a full day beforehand in order to have enough energy to be around that many people I didn't know for that long. I sat up and brushed my hair out of my face. I just sat there staring at the wall trying to wake myself up. I didn't have anywhere to be until tonight, so I wasn't too rushed.

"I should probably make an update video," I said to myself in a groggy state. So, I stood up and got myself ready. Brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, and picking out an outfit to wear for the video. I ended up choosing something that was really comfortable. My audience knew that I loved comfy clothes, especially when I was taking a break from making videos. I rummage through my camera equipment that I had put in the corner of my music room to find my camera and an empty SD Card. I put it on a tripod on the desk I had set up in the room and press record.

"Hi, guys," I said this in a breathy, almost sighing tone. "I'm gonna start off by saying that I'm not officially back yet, I'm going to take another couple of days to get fully settled, but I just thought you all should know that I made it to LA. I've been here for almost 2 weeks now and I can't wait to get back to making covers for you guys. Um..." I had already run out of things to say. Quick, think of something fast so you won't have to edit the video.

"I'm spending some time with an old friend out here that I haven't seen in a very long time. He's helping me get used to the streets and the traffic and everything else that is strange and new around here." Gio had an 'open door' policy when it came to texting him with questions. Questions that I had been bombarding him with since we met at the bar a couple nights ago. "I am OFFICIALLY unpacked and moved in for good, plus...!" I gesture around my music room. "I actually have a music room now! Not just my living room with all of my instruments lying everywhere. An actual place where I can record and jam and make lots of great new stuff for you guys." I sigh and sit up in my chair a little bit.

"I want to thank you guys for letting me take this break. I know I only make weekly videos, but the quality of them means a lot to me. So, I always spend a lot of time perfecting them and making them all perfect. So...what I'm saying is...If I didn't take this break, you guys would have been facing 2 weeks of really sucky material." I laugh at my own joke. "I'll see you guys soon. Thanks again. Bye."

I blow a kiss to my camera and hit a button to stop recording. I sit in my chair for a minute and reflect. Everything in my life in the past two weeks has moved so fast that I hadn't had time to just stop and revel in the moment. I looked around at my music room; swiveling around in my chair. I had dreamed about having a room like this since I was 6 years old, and I finally had one. Now, I wasn't too happy to have moved away from a city I loved, but I know that everything happens for a reason. Maybe not because some man in the sky wanted it to happen and it was already written out in some divine plan, but a reason that would open more doors and give me more fantastic adventures than I had even planned. I logged onto my desktop and uploaded the video without editing it. I called it "LA Update". When the video was done uploading, I turned off the computer and left my music room.

I decided that if I was going to be spending the night with a bunch of people I didn't know, then I might as well spend the morning doing something that I loved; something that would calm me. I decided to watch some Netflix. Just, catch up on a couple shows, maybe watch a movie I hadn't seen before. Who knows. I just knew that I was building up the energy to be around 13 people I didn't know.

---------- A Couple Hours Later ----------

Another alarm goes off on my phone. "Time to get ready". I think about whether I want to go to this party or not one more time. I sigh and say to myself, "Yeah, I'll go." I slump off of my couch and slowly make my way to my bedroom. I needed to find something to wear. Even though I had no faith that this Joe guy was going to be a good match for me, I still wanted to look presentable at the least. I really just wanted to go out in what I had on; a hoodie slightly too big for my frame, yoga pants and some knee-high pink and black mustache socks. Ok...So maybe wearing what I had on to a party wouldn't be the best idea. But, I would have been more comfortable, that's for sure.

I open my closet, something I hadn't done since I unpacked, and looked at my options. I see a medium length, long sleeve black dress that I had never worn. It was always something that was either too fancy or not fancy enough to wear out. I figured it might be perfect for this party. I grab it and put it on along with a long silver necklace with a dreamcatcher on it. Since it was in the middle of November, I wasn't used to the warm weather yet. So, I made sure that the dress was breezy in case I got a bit too hot. I went to the bathroom to do my hair and makeup. I wanted to look presentable, so doing my makeup and hair was something I was willing to do. I separated my hair horizontally and put the top half in a ponytail. I also put on some eyeliner, concealer, and mascara. Nothing too much, but just enough to look like I put an effort in.

I grab my purse and make sure I have my phone, wallet, and keys. I leave my apartment and as I'm walking, I type in Gio address into my phone. As I get into my car, I set up my phone on my phone mount and start the directions to his place. I turn on some Queen and Styx music in my car to get pumped. I made myself a cd specifically for when I need to go to parties because their music gets me really pumped up. As I navigate the windy roads up and down some hills, I get excited about seeing Gio and I start singing along with some of the songs. Songs like "Angry Young Man" by Styx and "Somebody to Love" by Queen. A couple of my favorites from each band. As I get close, I notice many cars lining the streets and I find a spot about a block away. I lock my car and start making my way to the door. I fix small things about my appearance as I get closer to the door. I fix my dress by pulling on the bottom hem, and I tuck some hair pieces behind my ear and straighten my necklace.

I ring the doorbell and wait to be buzzed in. A loud buzz sounds and I push the door open. He said his apartment was on the third floor. Apartment 314. He lived in a much bigger building than I did. It made a little worried that I would get lost, but now I see that it is just one big hallway, so there's no way I'll miss his door. I adjust myself one more time and check my watch. I was only 5 minutes late. I knew that didn't matter because people would be coming and going all night, but it mattered to me that I was there relatively close to when it started. I knocked on the door and waited patiently. Gio opened the door and smiled excitedly as he opened the door. I could hear some music from inside, not too loud or too soft. But I didn't recognize it.

"Hi!" He went in to hug me and I hugged him back. "Come in, come in." He waved his hand welcoming me inside. I see a couple people scattered around but I don't recognize anyone. I knew I wouldn't. I don't know why I thought I would. "Well, enjoy the party." He waved around. Then he went in to hug me again and whispered in my ear. "And, if you need to take a breather or need anything, you can interrupt me at any time. I'll be around and I'll check on you. I know you don't like these things, but it means a lot to me that you came." He let go of the hug and smiled while reassuringly put his hand on my shoulder. He left to talk to a group of people standing close to the speakers.

I look around and decide to get myself something to drink. I don't like to drink. Even when I was in the bar with Gio, I only drank water. Drinking makes me feel vulnerable and I'm never sure what's going to come out of my mouth. I go to the kitchen and I grab a bottle of water. I also grab a red solo cup and pour my water into the cup. I have never been made fun of for just drinking water at a party, but I put it in the red solo cup just in case it could cause a problem. I try to eliminate every possible problem before it happens. I turn towards the party and take a few sips out of my water taking in everything that's happening. There is a small group of about 5 people over by the speakers and a couple of people on the other side of the room talking. There are even two people kind of dancing in the middle of the room. Gio runs over to the door. He must have heard a knock, but I didn't hear it over the music. He opens the door excitedly and opens it fast. I see two guys standing at the door and he high fives and hugs the first guy enthusiastically.

I decide to stop spying on each person and move over to the food table on the other side of the kitchen. Food. The real MVP. I spot a couple of carrots and ranch. As a Midwestern girl, I love ranch and I will eat it with pretty much anything. I stand there eating some carrots and ranch while trying to amp myself up to go talk to someone at this party. Just when I was about to reach for another carrot, I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn around and see Gio standing there.

"Oh, hi," I say, trying to act as though I am having the time of my life.

"Oh, you're already by the food. That can only mean one thing, you have no one to talk to." I look down ashamed. "Well, then, thank God Joe just got here." My eyes shoot up to look at him and he raises an eyebrow at me as if to say, Do you want to go meet him? I take a deep breath and nod. Gio puts his hand on the small of my back and softly pushes me into the living room. We come up behind a guy wearing a dark jean jacket, some black jeans, and brown shoes. He only seems to be a couple inches taller than me. I fold my hands together and wait as Gio's hand leaves my back and he taps Joe on the shoulder. He turns around and faces us.

He has auburn hair and dark eyes that are bigger than normal. His nose is pretty big, but that has never bothered me on guys before. He has scruff on his jawline and chin. Overall, he's just really pretty. He has a skinny, yet slightly muscular frame. But, I couldn't really tell what was under the jean jacket and green sweater he had on. The kind of guy I really like and that I would probably double take looking at on the street. He smiles as Gio tells him my name.

"Oh, hi. It's nice to meet you. Gio's told me a lot about you." He holds his hand out for me to shake. I realized I had been staring. I blinked a couple of times and I grabbed his hand to shake it. I smile at the touch of his hand. It felt really...calming. This has never happened to me before with a complete stranger.

"How lovely," I say. "But, sadly, Gio hasn't told me anything about you."

"Gio?" He looks at Gio as he lets go of my hand. Gio shoots me a look that says Really?

"Oh, sorry. I meant Brian." I grit my teeth at Gio and smile. Joe looks at me confused and I elbowed Gio.

"Ugh. I've known Julie since high school, which you know," He gestures toward Joe. "And, I had a different last name then."

"I knew it!" Joe clapped his hands together. He pointed at Gio. "I knew that Brian Barton was too good to be true. No parent would be that cruel." He chuckled.

"Hey, I picked that name so don't be too harsh," Gio says in defense.

"I refuse to back off your name now that I know for sure it's fake." They both chuckle.

"Ok, I gotta go check on some other people. Have fun." Gio leaves. I look at Joe who doesn't look nervous at all. I'm shocked that anyone left alone to talk to a person that they don't know at all doesn't feel nervous. But, I have to seem confident.

"So, I heard that you worked with Gio on The Pacific, right?" Hopefully, that would get us talking a little bit.

"Yeah, we worked together for about 2 weeks, but we kept in touch. He's a really good guy. You're lucky you've known him so well for so long."

"Well, we fell out of touch for about 3 years, but we're back to where we were now." I feel a bit more comfortable now.

"Oh, when did you guys start talking again?"

"A couple days ago." He chuckles at that response. I continue. "It wasn't like we hated each other or anything, we just lost touch cause we were both busy." He raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing. It's just that he's definitely mentioned you to me in the past 3 years. Whenever he could mention you actually." I smiled at the thought that Gio still mentioned me to people.

"That's nice," I say. I don't really know where to take the conversation after that, but thankfully Joe speaks up.

"What has Brian told you about me? You said he didn't tell you much."

"Well, he told me that you two worked on the Pacific together and that you just got back from New York. He told me that you were there for about a year." Joe's face dropped. It broke my heart to see. "I'm...sorry. Did I say something wrong?"

"No, no. It's ok. You didn't know. It's alright." I hit a nerve, and I felt awful. What happened to him? I wanted to know, but I didn't want to pry. There was some silence between us as he seemingly tried to restore his mood. "What do you do for a living?" I was shocked he even wanted to still talk to me after that.

"Well, I guess you can call me a musician." He grinned.

"Well, what would be the technical term then? What are you really?" He seemed to be back to a good mood.

"I guess the technical term would be YouTuber, but I hate that word. I make covers of songs and I put them up on YouTube." He seemed shocked.

"And you can make money from that?"

"Yeah, not that much. Like not 'Fuck you' money that some people make, but enough to live here." He laughed at my joke. I smiled because he smiled. His smile was infectious. Although, while I was looking at him, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had seen him somewhere before.

"So, like. Do you make 'Screw off' or 'Shut up' money?" He was smiling through the delivery of that joke. I laughed.

"Maybe, 'could you please get out of my way, I need to get past you' money." He laughed some more. There was another small pause, but it felt different from the others. It felt like we just wanted to live in that moment for a little bit. We kept talking. I could have talked to him for hours. He was so lovely and funny and kind and very attractive. He was also very grounded for an actor. I pretty much assume that every actor will have a big ego, but he didn't. That made me very happy. After about an hour of talking and making jokes with each other, I asked a hard-hitting question.

"So, do you have any acting jobs coming up?" he smiled and seemed excited to tell me.

"Yeah, actually. Man, Brian really didn't tell you anything about me, huh?" I shook my head. "Well, about two months ago I got cast in a biopic about Queen." I gasped. I loved Queen. What were the chances that I would meet someone who was going to be in a movie about Queen after their music was pumping me up in the car on the way here. "I take it you like that band." I was speechless so I just nodded. I shook my head as if to shake the speechlessness away.

"Who will you be playing? A roadie, some executive?" He smiled again.

"No, I'm playing the bass player, John Deacon." My mouth hung open. I chuckled through my opened mouth and ended up putting my hand over my mouth. Internally, I was freaking out. "You ok?" He said, genuinely worried about my health.

"Yeah, I'm fine." I smiled and laughed. I used my thumb to point toward the window behind me. "I was just listening to Queen on the way here and thinking about how talented each of them were." I shook my head. "It really is a small world, huh?" He laughed.

"Maybe I'll come to you if I need help figuring out the character. You wouldn't mind would you." He was flirting hard, and I loved it. He actually seemed a bit nervous now.

"Yeah, I would love that." I smiled at him.

"Great." A guy I hadn't seen before came up behind Joe and put his hand on his shoulder.

"Hey, man. Jake's wasted and I think it's best if we take him home." Joe seemed concerned but then looked at me with sorrowful eyes.

"Sorry...I'm the designated driver. So, I guess I have to go." I could tell he didn't want to go. His eyes seemed sad and sorrowful.

"Go. It's important. That's ok." I kept nodding. He smiled and turned to leave with his friend.

"Oh." He turned back to me. "Could I get your number? You know, in case I need help with the biopic." I could have melted right then and there, but I didn't. Thankfully, I kept it together pretty well.

"Oh, well, as long as it is solely for work purposes." I laughed and so did he. I took his phone and typed my number in as well as my first and last name. He took the phone back and read my name.

"Watson? Like the Sherlock character?" He asked raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah." I chuckled. "Kids in school were ruthless." He chuckled softly. "Wait," I exclaimed as he was turning away. He turned back toward me. "What's your last name?"

"Mazzello. I'll see you around." He said waving his phone in the air. "Bye."

"Bye."

***

Masterlist

[netnahas]

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We're going cover technical SEO in very much more depth in future content, but in short, it offers things like site speed, examine errors, redirects, duplicate content, canonicalization, mobile optimization, sitemaps, markups, organized data, and various HTML labels, like rel=nofollow, that might end up being needed sometimes. Traditional SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques are still effective, yet a number of trends are usually in the works that can significantly alter the practice of enhancing for search. Whatever you do, be sure you don't fall in the trap and begin doing some black-hat SEO techniques like cloaking or spammy backlink building, it may get you seriously penalized by Google. Unless you upgrade your own SEO strategy and just stay to traditional methods, you may find hard to push your own website pages in top ten results, and even worst, obtain penalized by Google for carrying on with aggressive and forceful SEO strategies to gain ranking. The blog post of interest in order to SEOs from is this a single: 4 Search Trends That Produced Waves in 2017” This write-up begins using a paragraph that might resonate with those who have got searched on Google (or additional search engines like google, regarding that matter) for many yrs: For the past 2 decades, the particular pinnacle of search sophistication had been talking to a search motor like you're Tarzan. As mentioned over, speed will be paramount intended for SEO in 2018, that leads all of us on to Accelerated Mobile Web pages (AMP). Therefore, on top of content marketing and advertising, SEO now should be profoundly aligned with your company's PAGE RANK efforts. For these reasons they have each a huge SEO value (it's one of the most essential ranking factors), and also a clickability” worth (it serves as a inspiration for people to click). The particular SEO trends and technique in order to rank websites higher changes quick because of the emergence associated with new technologies and changing client behavior. It is often used simply by mobile users on a huge scale which made it the powerful SEO trend for this particular year. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends in 2018 considers the particular important issues SEO practitioners require to think about in 2018 as well as the path taken by travel search motors and SEO in general. When you know you have QUITE low-quality doorway pages on your own site, you need to eliminate them or rethink your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy if you want in order to rank high in Google with regard to the long term. Away page SEO refers to methods that can be used in order to increase the positioning of the website in the search motor results page (SERPs). Long gone are the times when keyword placement and inbound links guaranteed success in SEO. I think the particular #1 trend for 2018 within SEO is going to become Google Voice. Links and technical SEO are usually the largest bits of the curry, but multimedia efforts such since video, photos, and podcasts can be the game changer plus differentiator in many competitive marketplaces. Back in the wild-west times of SEO, Google wasn't therefore great at identifying the connection SEO 2019 Slide between semantic keywords. Changes searching algorithms and within people's search habits and the particular preferences of mobile over desktop computer are changing the world associated with SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (Search Engine Optimization) has turn out to be the driving force behind effective web-based companies. Lookup engine optimization strategies and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION best practices that were as soon as effective this past year may not end up being useful today. one. As search engines nowadays might be the most popular on the web tools among web surfers in order to look for specific information, the particular scope of SEO is very enormous. SEO will promptly include every thing from content, link acquisition, UX and endpoint delivery like quick loading pages through AMP Search engines Accelerated Mobile Pages. If you decide to function with them, they can display you how to take your own SEO strategy well beyond key phrases and provide you a marketing campaign that is well-suited for your twenty first century. Instead, research through good online articles plus learn the ability of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is all about quality content material and quality links. Apart from this particular, keywords, too, play an essential part in SEO. First, realize that schema markup is a single of the most powerful, minimum used parts of SEO nowadays Schema are basically brief clips of data that can provide extra information to find users plus search engines. She provides some awesome tips on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for voice search, including thinking of how people ask questions plus understanding local queries and objective. In addition, when it comes to Nearby SEO, long-tail keywords become also more important. Regional SEO will play a excellent role in mobile searches is definitely all about content. That's why optimizing your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique for voice search nowadays is of vital importance. To rest guaranteed that the right SEO Business has been selected, the earlier projects must be looked with. See the search positions of the projects on the particular top search engines. Adapting to tone of voice search in your SEO technique calls for careful attention in order to the keywords you try in order to rank for. In other words, content and hyperlinks will still be the creating blocks of SEO in 2018. From the above-mentioned information, crafting link-worthy content seemed in order to be the winning choice, because chosen by 35. 2% associated with the 100+ participants as properly as the close runner-up choice came out to become : guest blogging on sites along with high Domain Authority for constructing reliable backlinks gaining 30. 8%. Outreaching top influencers of the particular niche to write articles and insert links in this; bagged the support of twenty one. 3% of the SEO experts, whereas the option of damaged backlink although being highly efficient in white-hat SEO practices obtained the selection rate of twelve. 7% of the total sharers in the survey. Unfortunately, SEO - plus search in general - is definitely typically soloed into focusing upon The Google” and not actually considered for other tactics. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is all about providing proprietors with a positive content encounter on the right moment in their particular user journey across different systems and devices. Whichever SEO trends plus techniques you choose to make use of, it's important to keep within mind that whatever your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION approach is the underlying objective is definitely an informative plus enjoyable user experience. For this to take place a variety of local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies, have to be applied to get the site rated on search engines like Search engines, business directories such as Yelp, Superpages, Google My Business record etc. But before we speak more about how they function, here's what SEOs mean whenever talking about links. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and SEM will continue in order to shift as major search motors like google are continually transforming their parameters for rankings. For this reason, whenever building links, SEOs focus not really on building any links. It also helps in quicker indexing, which supports boost your own search ranking and drive even more traffic to your website plus as such, if you desire to ace the SEO sport in 2018 then implementation associated with AMP is really important. Which was the description but if we follow the particular SEO Trends then it is usually considered to be among the particular ranking factors. In the digital advertising world, naturally, this fast-growing sensation means that marketers must create new ways to tailor their particular SEO strategies to optimize intended for voice search. It's furthermore important to realize that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is not the only method to show on top associated with search engines. Semantic Lookup: Further fortifying the importance of this sort of content material creation strategy, as well since the SEO advantages it may translate into, it's essential in order to comprehend Google's recent focus upon something many known as semantic search. Many electronic natives and marketers alike are usually using SEO to its benefit by incorporating every keyword possible into the content they create. Now that a person understand how you can please your customers, how to satisfy search purpose, and how to create articles, it's time to move on to Pillar #3 in this SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. As mentioned previously, businesses could not make the bigger mistake than thinking that will best SEO techniques only rely on content, because the most recent SEO techniques you need in order to adapt depend on greater than simply content. Right now that you're on top associated with these 6 SEO trends plus have an arsenal of guidelines to manage your strategy, a person are well positioned for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and digital marketing in 2018. In order to obtain a featured snippet, content online marketers must structure their articles in order to a number of factors, using SEO well beyond the present competition to reach the number 1 spot on Google. People love to gain access to the internet while they are usually on the go, meaning nearby SEO is going to turn out to be a lot more popular. SEO means search engine optimization. Google, the world's most utilized internet search engine, is every single eager to keep webmasters, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION experts and businesses on their feet. By giving you an SEO tool that will give you a unique regarding just how much your organic traffic will be worth, along with keeping track of external links and monitoring competitors. The results also emphasize the value of creating fresh at ease with your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing strategy. Fortunately, for SEO-focused keyword analysis, these two tools are more than enough to generate thousands of possible keywords. Local SEO will keep on as a popular SEO plus digital marketing trend in 2018 for local businesses. With the passing associated with time, search engines such since Google, Yahoo keep on altering their algorithms for SEO. Interpersonal SEO is not a individual branch of SEO also it is not going to soon be replacing traditional SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, but social signals have turn out to be increasingly integrated into search motor algorithms. Which action reflects in SEO ranking. -2 - We ought to have realized Search engines will use engagement data with regard to rankings, but they're not going to talk about it. They possess nothing to gain from getting open, and a reasonable level of risk if they request spammers and manipulators to imitate searchers and click for ratings (a practice that, sadly, provides popped up within the grey hat SEO world, will not really sometimes, unfortunately, work). Marketing and SEO experts like as Bill Slawski, Eric Enge, and Marcus Miller believe the particular chase for a featured little will end up the focal point within 2018. SEO merely stands forSearch Engine Optimisation. He is passionate regarding online marketing technology and like to spend the valuable period to research and operate SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION operations Team. Carrying out there technical SEO for local lookup engines is a similar procedure. Technical SEO involves producing sure everything behind the moments is set up for ideal rankings. This totally changes black head wear SEO tactics to gain relevance for various searches by building pages that are individually designed for different keywords. S. S Please note that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques works on the vast majority of websites. SEO agencies offer solutions that change from writing next text messages to giving advice on the particular subject of the website, plus choosing the best directories which usually the website can be signed up at. A few unethical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agencies have given the sector a bad name through intense marketing strategies and attempts upon gaining ranks in unfair methods. These 8 On-Page SEO methods are simply some of the particular ways to increase organic lookup traffic. Off page SEO signifies search engine that how the particular particular website is being recognized by other website and customers. Most associated with respondents gave thumbs up in order to Mobile SEO and AMP adopted by featured snippets and lengthy tail keywords. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION today is what it's usually been: making sure your internet site both ranks well and turns traffic. As an SEO, this particular means that you have in order to significantly raise your standards about quality content and links within order to achieve top research engine rankings. Presently there are no shortcuts when this comes to SEO, regardless associated with what some unethical search motor optimization providers will tell a person. Content denseness could be the major requirement of natural SEO services High-quality content plus proper keyword stuffing in the website helps to grab the particular attention of the viewers plus enables the website to obtain the traffic easily. Therefore, it's about time you transformed the way you conceptualize that will SEO strategies for mobile queries. 1- We know that backlinks with robots or programs, that not great for SEO and Your government Search engines do not love it we mention to Fiverr Gig”. Running both PPC plus SEO campaigns side by part can improve the CTR associated with keywords and therefore we obtain organic traffic. Fairly recently, I've seen the resurgence of on-page SEO elements making a difference in research engine rankings. A person can also see the off-page SEO power of free equipment through backlinks. If you would like to keep thriving in research rankings, you need to become aware of all of the particular latest Google algorithm updates plus SEO best practices. Although the fundamentals associated with SEO will stay important (links, onsite SEO, page speed, content material etc. ), how one increases for certain queries will modify. Several thanks for your awesome In-depth Guide, I have learnt a few new SEO Strategies, I can begin with improving my website's Dwell Time Beside Creating Visible Content, I am going in order to really appreciate If you can Write an In-depth Guide regarding Creating Embeddable Images”, I require to understand it better. On-page SEO may be the process of enhancing websites or blogs in purchase to increase a site's position in search results. In 2018, your SEO achievement won't depend on how nicely you optimize your website regarding Google. With the same time, SEOs will certainly need to pay more interest to Long Tail Keywords. SEO Smart links enables you to specify a term, like 'SEO' and after that link this to a post on your own web site. SEO web design for your client's site is also the big influence in the position of the site as nicely as the popularity of the particular site to human browsers. Together with this new accepted company reality, there are many declaring they have the "secrets" in order to achieving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), when in reality it just about all comes down to making certain your web site is properly built, managed and promoted. In that will post, I broke down just about all the steps to do the full SEO website audit plus included a template for customers to download. Whenever these two are fully utilized, one will generate a much better user experience and improve the particular effectiveness of their SEO technique. Rating today has more regarding significant and useful content than SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION voodoo link crazy linking methods and spending your time upon keyword density and other specialized items. Their particular product categories often rank very first in search under keywords such as ‘weightlifting shoes. ' They concentrate primarily on on-site SEO. Some search engines have furthermore provided to the SEO business, and are frequent sponsors plus guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Seems ranking video clips last few weeks for key phrase like SEO Outsourcing” and Wp training London” and some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency terms here. Since an SEO person, you have to be actually fast at learning and presenting innovative tactics to stay forward in the competition, and making sure that your company appears upon the first page from the particular search engines is not because easy a job as it can appear. With all the particular talk in the SEO planet today about content and sociable signals it's easy to overlook just a little thing that will happens to be the basis of SEO: keyword research. I am together with you 100%, I think #0, AMP, video and all RankBrain stuff it's gonna make the particular main subjects in SEO (and marketing) for 2. 017. In today's rapidly moving world, SEO techniques can alter on the dime—and the most severe part is that you just might not even know this. Hacks which could have received you a front-page result mainly because recently as 2016 are outdated now, but they may also hurt your website's rankings. It's a really wonderful and knowledgeable blog to enhance your SEO ranking. Take some time plus find out about your Meta titles, description, URL readability plus how to earn featured thoughts and site links SEO's about the globe are taking click through rate seriously claiming it in order to be one of the best ranking signals. Bing has confirmed that will they track unlinked brand plugs and use them as the ranking signal — and the patent by Google (along along with observations from many SEO experts) indicates that Google may end up being doing this as well. I've seen success with producing videos lately and am searching forward to making use of your SEO guidelines to help my videos position on page 1. Plus SEO professionals are absolutely thrilled about this new opportunity since featured snippets provide a opportunity for low-ranking pages to get at the particular top of search results along with almost zero effort. SEO stands for lookup engine optimization. ” It is definitely the procedure for getting visitors from the free, ” natural, ” editorial” or natural” research engine results on search motors. This typically involves using advanced SEO tags (e. g., tags) that search motors like google reference when the more visual search engine outcomes page is displayed. Focal points for SEO in 2018 functions suggestions on what to prioritise in 2018, including on-site research, topical, local and mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and where SEO capabilities ought to sit within organisations. We would certainly construct a blog post that will has the SEO related key phrases in it and we would certainly put the link of the particular website that people are trying in order to build the back link in order to within text of that blog page post. My SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION guide will break search motor optimization down for you. Meta description is not a immediate SEO ranking factor but this helps in ranking indirectly. Once such an interview gets published, it nearly always gets a lot of backlinks and SEO value.

[wickedbananas]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 2: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

Posted by BritneyMuller

It's been a few months since our last share of our work-in-progress rewrite of the Beginner's Guide to SEO, but after a brief hiatus, we're back to share our draft of Chapter Two with you! This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Kameron Jenkins, who has thoughtfully contributed her great talent for wordsmithing throughout this piece.

This is your resource, the guide that likely kicked off your interest in and knowledge of SEO, and we want to do right by you. You left amazingly helpful commentary on our outline and draft of Chapter One, and we'd be honored if you would take the time to let us know what you think of Chapter Two in the comments below.

Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work – Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

First, show up.

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, search engines are answer machines. They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet's content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking.

In order to show up in search results, your content needs to first be visible to search engines. It's arguably the most important piece of the SEO puzzle: If your site can't be found, there's no way you'll ever show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

How do search engines work?

Search engines have three primary functions:

Crawl: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.

Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.

Rank: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher's query. Order the search results by the most helpful to a particular query.

What is search engine crawling?

Crawling, is the discovery process in which search engines send out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content. Content can vary — it could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc. — but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links.

The bot starts out by fetching a few web pages, and then follows the links on those webpages to find new URLs. By hopping along this path of links, crawlers are able to find new content and add it to their index — a massive database of discovered URLs — to later be retrieved when a searcher is seeking information that the content on that URL is a good match for.

What is a search engine index?

Search engines process and store information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.

Search engine ranking

When someone performs a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then orders that content in the hopes of solving the searcher's query. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site is to the query.

It’s possible to block search engine crawlers from part or all of your site, or instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in their index. While there can be reasons for doing this, if you want your content found by searchers, you have to first make sure it’s accessible to crawlers and is indexable. Otherwise, it’s as good as invisible.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have the context you need to work with the search engine, rather than against it!

Note: In SEO, not all search engines are equal

Many beginners wonder about the relative importance of particular search engines. Most people know that Google has the largest market share, but how important it is to optimize for Bing, Yahoo, and others? The truth is that despite the existence of more than 30 major web search engines, the SEO community really only pays attention to Google. Why? The short answer is that Google is where the vast majority of people search the web. If we include Google Images, Google Maps, and YouTube (a Google property), more than 90% of web searches happen on Google — that's nearly 20 times Bing and Yahoo combined.

Crawling: Can search engines find your site?

As you've just learned, making sure your site gets crawled and indexed is a prerequisite for showing up in the SERPs. First things first: You can check to see how many and which pages of your website have been indexed by Google using "site:yourdomain.com", an advanced search operator.

Head to Google and type "site:yourdomain.com" into the search bar. This will return results Google has in its index for the site specified:

The number of results Google displays (see “About __ results” above) isn't exact, but it does give you a solid idea of which pages are indexed on your site and how they are currently showing up in search results.

For more accurate results, monitor and use the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don't currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google's index, among other things.

If you're not showing up anywhere in the search results, there are a few possible reasons why:

Your site is brand new and hasn't been crawled yet.

Your site isn't linked to from any external websites.

Your site's navigation makes it hard for a robot to crawl it effectively.

Your site contains some basic code called crawler directives that is blocking search engines.

Your site has been penalized by Google for spammy tactics.

If your site doesn't have any other sites linking to it, you still might be able to get it indexed by submitting your XML sitemap in Google Search Console or manually submitting individual URLs to Google. There's no guarantee they'll include a submitted URL in their index, but it's worth a try!

Can search engines see your whole site?

Sometimes a search engine will be able to find parts of your site by crawling, but other pages or sections might be obscured for one reason or another. It's important to make sure that search engines are able to discover all the content you want indexed, and not just your homepage.

Ask yourself this: Can the bot crawl through your website, and not just to it?

Is your content hidden behind login forms?

If you require users to log in, fill out forms, or answer surveys before accessing certain content, search engines won't see those protected pages. A crawler is definitely not going to log in.

Are you relying on search forms?

Robots cannot use search forms. Some individuals believe that if they place a search box on their site, search engines will be able to find everything that their visitors search for.

Is text hidden within non-text content?

Non-text media forms (images, video, GIFs, etc.) should not be used to display text that you wish to be indexed. While search engines are getting better at recognizing images, there's no guarantee they will be able to read and understand it just yet. It's always best to add text within the <HTML> markup of your webpage.

Can search engines follow your site navigation?

Just as a crawler needs to discover your site via links from other sites, it needs a path of links on your own site to guide it from page to page. If you’ve got a page you want search engines to find but it isn’t linked to from any other pages, it’s as good as invisible. Many sites make the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in ways that are inaccessible to search engines, hindering their ability to get listed in search results.

Common navigation mistakes that can keep crawlers from seeing all of your site:

Having a mobile navigation that shows different results than your desktop navigation

Any type of navigation where the menu items are not in the HTML, such as JavaScript-enabled navigations. Google has gotten much better at crawling and understanding Javascript, but it’s still not a perfect process. The more surefire way to ensure something gets found, understood, and indexed by Google is by putting it in the HTML.

Personalization, or showing unique navigation to a specific type of visitor versus others, could appear to be cloaking to a search engine crawler

Forgetting to link to a primary page on your website through your navigation — remember, links are the paths crawlers follow to new pages!

This is why it's essential that your website has a clear navigation and helpful URL folder structures.

Information architecture

Information architecture is the practice of organizing and labeling content on a website to improve efficiency and fundability for users. The best information architecture is intuitive, meaning that users shouldn't have to think very hard to flow through your website or to find something.

Your site should also have a useful 404 (page not found) page for when a visitor clicks on a dead link or mistypes a URL. The best 404 pages allow users to click back into your site so they don’t bounce off just because they tried to access a nonexistent link.

Tell search engines how to crawl your site

In addition to making sure crawlers can reach your most important pages, it’s also pertinent to note that you’ll have pages on your site you don’t want them to find. These might include things like old URLs that have thin content, duplicate URLs (such as sort-and-filter parameters for e-commerce), special promo code pages, staging or test pages, and so on.

Blocking pages from search engines can also help crawlers prioritize your most important pages and maximize your crawl budget (the average number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site).

Crawler directives allow you to control what you want Googlebot to crawl and index using a robots.txt file, meta tag, sitemap.xml file, or Google Search Console.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt files are located in the root directory of websites (ex. yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn't crawl via specific robots.txt directives. This is a great solution when trying to block search engines from non-private pages on your site.

You wouldn't want to block private/sensitive pages from being crawled here because the file is easily accessible by users and bots.

Pro tip:

If Googlebot can't find a robots.txt file for a site (40X HTTP status code), it proceeds to crawl the site.

If Googlebot finds a robots.txt file for a site (20X HTTP status code), it will usually abide by the suggestions and proceed to crawl the site.

If Googlebot finds neither a 20X or a 40X HTTP status code (ex. a 501 server error) it can't determine if you have a robots.txt file or not and won't crawl your site.

Meta directives

The two types of meta directives are the meta robots tag (more commonly used) and the x-robots-tag. Each provides crawlers with stronger instructions on how to crawl and index a URL's content.

The x-robots tag provides more flexibility and functionality if you want to block search engines at scale because you can use regular expressions, block non-HTML files, and apply sitewide noindex tags.

These are the best options for blocking more sensitive*/private URLs from search engines.

*For very sensitive URLs, it is best practice to remove them from or require a secure login to view the pages.

WordPress Tip: In Dashboard > Settings > Reading, make sure the "Search Engine Visibility" box is not checked. This blocks search engines from coming to your site via your robots.txt file!

Avoid these common pitfalls, and you'll have clean, crawlable content that will allow bots easy access to your pages.

Once you’ve ensured your site has been crawled, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed. That’s right — just because your site can be discovered and crawled by a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be stored in their index. Read on to learn about how indexing works and how you can make sure your site makes it into this all-important database.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is just what it sounds like: a list of URLs on your site that crawlers can use to discover and index your content. One of the easiest ways to ensure Google is finding your highest priority pages is to create a file that meets Google's standards and submit it through Google Search Console. While submitting a sitemap doesn’t replace the need for good site navigation, it can certainly help crawlers follow a path to all of your important pages.

Google Search Console

Some sites (most common with e-commerce) make the same content available on multiple different URLs by appending certain parameters to URLs. If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ve likely narrowed down your search via filters. For example, you may search for “shoes” on Amazon, and then refine your search by size, color, and style. Each time you refine, the URL changes slightly. How does Google know which version of the URL to serve to searchers? Google does a pretty good job at figuring out the representative URL on its own, but you can use the URL Parameters feature in Google Search Console to tell Google exactly how you want them to treat your pages.

Indexing: How do search engines understand and remember your site?

Once you’ve ensured your site has been crawled, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed. That’s right — just because your site can be discovered and crawled by a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be stored in their index. In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines discover your web pages. The index is where your discovered pages are stored. After a crawler finds a page, the search engine renders it just like a browser would. In the process of doing so, the search engine analyzes that page's contents. All of that information is stored in its index.

Read on to learn about how indexing works and how you can make sure your site makes it into this all-important database.

Can I see how a Googlebot crawler sees my pages?

Yes, the cached version of your page will reflect a snapshot of the last time googlebot crawled it.

Google crawls and caches web pages at different frequencies. More established, well-known sites that post frequently like https://www.nytimes.com will be crawled more frequently than the much-less-famous website for Roger the Mozbot’s side hustle, http://www.rogerlovescupcakes.com (if only it were real…)

You can view what your cached version of a page looks like by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the URL in the SERP and choosing "Cached":

You can also view the text-only version of your site to determine if your important content is being crawled and cached effectively.

Are pages ever removed from the index?

Yes, pages can be removed from the index! Some of the main reasons why a URL might be removed include:

The URL is returning a "not found" error (4XX) or server error (5XX) – This could be accidental (the page was moved and a 301 redirect was not set up) or intentional (the page was deleted and 404ed in order to get it removed from the index)

The URL had a noindex meta tag added – This tag can be added by site owners to instruct the search engine to omit the page from its index.

The URL has been manually penalized for violating the search engine’s Webmaster Guidelines and, as a result, was removed from the index.

The URL has been blocked from crawling with the addition of a password required before visitors can access the page.

If you believe that a page on your website that was previously in Google’s index is no longer showing up, you can manually submit the URL to Google by navigating to the “Submit URL” tool in Search Console.

Ranking: How do search engines rank URLs?

How do search engines ensure that when someone types a query into the search bar, they get relevant results in return? That process is known as ranking, or the ordering of search results by most relevant to least relevant to a particular query.

To determine relevance, search engines use algorithms, a process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways. These algorithms have gone through many changes over the years in order to improve the quality of search results. Google, for example, makes algorithm adjustments every day — some of these updates are minor quality tweaks, whereas others are core/broad algorithm updates deployed to tackle a specific issue, like Penguin to tackle link spam. Check out our Google Algorithm Change History for a list of both confirmed and unconfirmed Google updates going back to the year 2000.

Why does the algorithm change so often? Is Google just trying to keep us on our toes? While Google doesn’t always reveal specifics as to why they do what they do, we do know that Google’s aim when making algorithm adjustments is to improve overall search quality. That’s why, in response to algorithm update questions, Google will answer with something along the lines of: “We’re making quality updates all the time.” This indicates that, if your site suffered after an algorithm adjustment, compare it against Google’s Quality Guidelines or Search Quality Rater Guidelines, both are very telling in terms of what search engines want.

What do search engines want?

Search engines have always wanted the same thing: to provide useful answers to searcher’s questions in the most helpful formats. If that’s true, then why does it appear that SEO is different now than in years past?

Think about it in terms of someone learning a new language.

At first, their understanding of the language is very rudimentary — “See Spot Run.” Over time, their understanding starts to deepen, and they learn semantics—- the meaning behind language and the relationship between words and phrases. Eventually, with enough practice, the student knows the language well enough to even understand nuance, and is able to provide answers to even vague or incomplete questions.

When search engines were just beginning to learn our language, it was much easier to game the system by using tricks and tactics that actually go against quality guidelines. Take keyword stuffing, for example. If you wanted to rank for a particular keyword like “funny jokes,” you might add the words “funny jokes” a bunch of times onto your page, and make it bold, in hopes of boosting your ranking for that term:

Welcome to funny jokes! We tell the funniest jokes in the world. Funny jokes are fun and crazy. Your funny joke awaits. Sit back and read funny jokes because funny jokes can make you happy and funnier. Some funny favorite funny jokes.

This tactic made for terrible user experiences, and instead of laughing at funny jokes, people were bombarded by annoying, hard-to-read text. It may have worked in the past, but this is never what search engines wanted.

The role links play in SEO

When we talk about links, we could mean two things. Backlinks or "inbound links" are links from other websites that point to your website, while internal links are links on your own site that point to your other pages (on the same site).

Links have historically played a big role in SEO. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results. Calculating the number of links pointing to any given site helped them do this.

Backlinks work very similarly to real life WOM (Word-Of-Mouth) referrals. Let’s take a hypothetical coffee shop, Jenny’s Coffee, as an example:

Referrals from others = good sign of authority Example: Many different people have all told you that Jenny’s Coffee is the best in town

Referrals from yourself = biased, so not a good sign of authority Example: Jenny claims that Jenny’s Coffee is the best in town

Referrals from irrelevant or low-quality sources = not a good sign of authority and could even get you flagged for spam Example: Jenny paid to have people who have never visited her coffee shop tell others how good it is.

No referrals = unclear authority Example: Jenny’s Coffee might be good, but you’ve been unable to find anyone who has an opinion so you can’t be sure.

This is why PageRank was created. PageRank (part of Google's core algorithm) is a link analysis algorithm named after one of Google's founders, Larry Page. PageRank estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. The assumption is that the more relevant, important, and trustworthy a web page is, the more links it will have earned.

The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results.

The role content plays in SEO

There would be no point to links if they didn’t direct searchers to something. That something is content! Content is more than just words; it’s anything meant to be consumed by searchers — there’s video content, image content, and of course, text. If search engines are answer machines, content is the means by which the engines deliver those answers.

Any time someone performs a search, there are thousands of possible results, so how do search engines decide which pages the searcher is going to find valuable? A big part of determining where your page will rank for a given query is how well the content on your page matches the query’s intent. In other words, does this page match the words that were searched and help fulfill the task the searcher was trying to accomplish?

Because of this focus on user satisfaction and task accomplishment, there’s no strict benchmarks on how long your content should be, how many times it should contain a keyword, or what you put in your header tags. All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content.

Today, with hundreds or even thousands of ranking signals, the top three have stayed fairly consistent: links to your website (which serve as a third-party credibility signals), on-page content (quality content that fulfills a searcher’s intent), and RankBrain.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is the machine learning component of Google’s core algorithm. Machine learning is a computer program that continues to improve its predictions over time through new observations and training data. In other words, it’s always learning, and because it’s always learning, search results should be constantly improving.

For example, if RankBrain notices a lower ranking URL providing a better result to users than the higher ranking URLs, you can bet that RankBrain will adjust those results, moving the more relevant result higher and demoting the lesser relevant pages as a byproduct.

Like most things with the search engine, we don’t know exactly what comprises RankBrain, but apparently, neither do the folks at Google.

What does this mean for SEOs?

Because Google will continue leveraging RankBrain to promote the most relevant, helpful content, we need to focus on fulfilling searcher intent more than ever before. Provide the best possible information and experience for searchers who might land on your page, and you’ve taken a big first step to performing well in a RankBrain world.

Engagement metrics: correlation, causation, or both?

With Google rankings, engagement metrics are most likely part correlation and part causation.

When we say engagement metrics, we mean data that represents how searchers interact with your site from search results. This includes things like:

Clicks (visits from search)

Time on page (amount of time the visitor spent on a page before leaving it)

Bounce rate (the percentage of all website sessions where users viewed only one page)

Pogo-sticking (clicking on an organic result and then quickly returning to the SERP to choose another result)

Many tests, including Moz’s own ranking factor survey, have indicated that engagement metrics correlate with higher ranking, but causation has been hotly debated. Are good engagement metrics just indicative of highly ranked sites? Or are sites ranked highly because they possess good engagement metrics?

What Google has said

While they’ve never used the term “direct ranking signal,” Google has been clear that they absolutely use click data to modify the SERP for particular queries.

According to Google’s former Chief of Search Quality, Udi Manber:

“The ranking itself is affected by the click data. If we discover that, for a particular query, 80% of people click on #2 and only 10% click on #1, after a while we figure out probably #2 is the one people want, so we’ll switch it.”

Another comment from former Google engineer Edmond Lau corroborates this:

“It’s pretty clear that any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results. The actual mechanics of how click data is used is often proprietary, but Google makes it obvious that it uses click data with its patents on systems like rank-adjusted content items.”

Because Google needs to maintain and improve search quality, it seems inevitable that engagement metrics are more than correlation, but it would appear that Google falls short of calling engagement metrics a “ranking signal” because those metrics are used to improve search quality, and the rank of individual URLs is just a byproduct of that.

What tests have confirmed

Various tests have confirmed that Google will adjust SERP order in response to searcher engagement:

Rand Fishkin’s 2014 test resulted in a #7 result moving up to the #1 spot after getting around 200 people to click on the URL from the SERP. Interestingly, ranking improvement seemed to be isolated to the location of the people who visited the link. The rank position spiked in the US, where many participants were located, whereas it remained lower on the page in Google Canada, Google Australia, etc.

Larry Kim’s comparison of top pages and their average dwell time pre- and post-RankBrain seemed to indicate that the machine-learning component of Google’s algorithm demotes the rank position of pages that people don’t spend as much time on.

Darren Shaw’s testing has shown user behavior’s impact on local search and map pack results as well.

Since user engagement metrics are clearly used to adjust the SERPs for quality, and rank position changes as a byproduct, it’s safe to say that SEOs should optimize for engagement. Engagement doesn’t change the objective quality of your web page, but rather your value to searchers relative to other results for that query. That’s why, after no changes to your page or its backlinks, it could decline in rankings if searchers’ behaviors indicates they like other pages better.

In terms of ranking web pages, engagement metrics act like a fact-checker. Objective factors such as links and content first rank the page, then engagement metrics help Google adjust if they didn’t get it right.

The evolution of search results

Back when search engines lacked a lot of the sophistication they have today, the term “10 blue links” was coined to describe the flat structure of the SERP. Any time a search was performed, Google would return a page with 10 organic results, each in the same format.

In this search landscape, holding the #1 spot was the holy grail of SEO. But then something happened. Google began adding results in new formats on their search result pages, called SERP features. Some of these SERP features include:

Paid advertisements

Featured snippets

People Also Ask boxes

Local (map) pack

Knowledge panel

Sitelinks

And Google is adding new ones all the time. It even experimented with “zero-result SERPs,” a phenomenon where only one result from the Knowledge Graph was displayed on the SERP with no results below it except for an option to “view more results.”

The addition of these features caused some initial panic for two main reasons. For one, many of these features caused organic results to be pushed down further on the SERP. Another byproduct is that fewer searchers are clicking on the organic results since more queries are being answered on the SERP itself.

So why would Google do this? It all goes back to the search experience. User behavior indicates that some queries are better satisfied by different content formats. Notice how the different types of SERP features match the different types of query intents.

Query Intent

Possible SERP Feature Triggered

Informational

Featured Snippet

Informational with one answer

Knowledge Graph / Instant Answer

Local

Map Pack

Transactional

Shopping

We’ll talk more about intent in Chapter 3, but for now, it’s important to know that answers can be delivered to searchers in a wide array of formats, and how you structure your content can impact the format in which it appears in search.

Localized search

A search engine like Google has its own proprietary index of local business listings, from which it creates local search results.

If you are performing local SEO work for a business that has a physical location customers can visit (ex: dentist) or for a business that travels to visit their customers (ex: plumber), make sure that you claim, verify, and optimize a free Google My Business Listing.

When it comes to localized search results, Google uses three main factors to determine ranking:

Relevance

Distance

Prominence

Relevance

Relevance is how well a local business matches what the searcher is looking for. To ensure that the business is doing everything it can to be relevant to searchers, make sure the business’ information is thoroughly and accurately filled out.

Distance

Google use your geo-location to better serve you local results. Local search results are extremely sensitive to proximity, which refers to the location of the searcher and/or the location specified in the query (if the searcher included one).

Organic search results are sensitive to a searcher's location, though seldom as pronounced as in local pack results.

Prominence

With prominence as a factor, Google is looking to reward businesses that are well-known in the real world. In addition to a business’ offline prominence, Google also looks to some online factors to determine local ranking, such as:

Reviews

The number of Google reviews a local business receives, and the sentiment of those reviews, have a notable impact on their ability to rank in local results.

Citations

A "business citation" or "business listing" is a web-based reference to a local business' "NAP" (name, address, phone number) on a localized platform (Yelp, Acxiom, YP, Infogroup, Localeze, etc.).

Local rankings are influenced by the number and consistency of local business citations. Google pulls data from a wide variety of sources in continuously making up its local business index. When Google finds multiple consistent references to a business's name, location, and phone number it strengthens Google's "trust" in the validity of that data. This then leads to Google being able to show the business with a higher degree of confidence. Google also uses information from other sources on the web, such as links and articles.

Check a local business' citation accuracy here.

Organic ranking

SEO best practices also apply to local SEO, since Google also considers a website’s position in organic search results when determining local ranking.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn on-page best practices that will help Google and users better understand your content.

[Bonus!] Local engagement

Although not listed by Google as a local ranking determiner, the role of engagement is only going to increase as time goes on. Google continues to enrich local results by incorporating real-world data like popular times to visit and average length of visits...

...and even provides searchers with the ability to ask the business questions!

Undoubtedly now more than ever before, local results are being influenced by real-world data. This interactivity is how searchers interact with and respond to local businesses, rather than purely static (and game-able) information like links and citations.

Since Google wants to deliver the best, most relevant local businesses to searchers, it makes perfect sense for them to use real time engagement metrics to determine quality and relevance.

You don’t have to know the ins and outs of Google’s algorithm (that remains a mystery!), but by now you should have a great baseline knowledge of how the search engine finds, interprets, stores, and ranks content. Armed with that knowledge, let’s learn about choosing the keywords your content will target!

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

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[dot-one-innovations]

What is the future of Web Development?

What is the future of  Web Development?

Every Web Developer must think about that what will be the future of Web Development? Is Web Development will alive in the future? Is Website Development a reliable career?

So in this blog, I will answer all these questions and try to share some knowledge about web technologies which helps you in the future.

 Today the internet has millions of active websites. The number is increasing every second. But is the demand remains the same in the future? The short and simple answer is YES.

 Let's discuss some reasons with facts. As we all know, we're living in the age of the internet and technology. And in this era of the internet, web applications play a vital role. Nowadays, every business requires an appearance on the internet. With the spread of the internet, people understand the importance of having a website for their business.

 Web applications help businesses in many ways, such as better customer reach, products selling in a wide range, help in record keeping and managing data, recruitment, etc. In short, web applications are using in many ways. E-commerce websites, ERP, CMS, CRM, and LMS, are some examples of it.

 But being a web developer, you need to update yourself with the new technologies for staying in this field. So the question is how to upgrade yourself? & which new technologies do you need to learn?

 There are the following ways for Web Developers to stay up-to-date.

1.    Learning New Technologies.

2.    Building Network.

3.    Going to meetups.

4.    Attending industry seminars and conferences.

5.    Always connected with popular Web Development forums and related news.

 Web Technologies To Learn For Future:

Today we will discuss advanced web technologies which help you in the future.

1.    Progressive Web Apps (PWA).

2.    Artificial Intelligence (AI).

3.    Internet of Things (IoT).

4.    Motion UI.

5.    Blockchain.

6.    Voice Search.

 Progressive Web Apps (PWA):

Progressive Web Apps provide users app-like experience. Performance plays a vital role in the digital success of any business. Due to performance, many big brands use this technology. BMW, Starbucks, Uber, and Spotify are some of those brands. Progressive Web Apps are developed using web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular, and React.

They provide the best user experience both on mobile and desktop. Users can add these Web Apps to their mobile home screen. So they can access these websites as mobile applications without installing them.

 Artificial Intelligence (AI):

Many websites use AI bots which help in auto-responding customer's queries. AI assistants can collect data and solve issues. AI is also using for recommending products to customers on e-commerce websites based on customer interests by using different algorithms. That's why Artificial Intelligence is the most influential technology that shapes the future of web development.

 Internet of Things (IoT):

IoT means the connection of devices with the internet. There are billions of internet users, and the number is increasing day by day. IoT Web Applications refer to an IoT device that collects data, performs analysis, and displays the findings using a web application front-end and back-end. No doubt, Web Application Development for IoT has a ton of potential in the future.

 Motion UI:

Websites that merely include blocks of text and HTML code are not appealing enough to catch customers' attention. That's why the website user interface needs to be more engaging, responsive, and easy to use. As a result, websites or applications are capable of attracting client attention and user interest.

Motion UI library used to create animations and transitions on web pages. If you used it accurately in your front-end, then it can boost page conversion rate very well. Motion UI is easy to use, which makes it the future of Web Development.

 Blockchain:

Blockchain is one of the growing technologies in Web Development. It is using for the digital assets transactions such as cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is called a decentralized network. It provides multiple advantages when implementing on web development:

1.    Safe and secure transactions.

2.    Transparency.

3.    Cost-effectiveness.

4.    Data security.

 Voice Search:

Nowadays, information was not all about the text. A lot of Internet users prefer communicating with audio over using text information. That is the reason a lot of websites use audio and speech interpretation. Voice recognition technologies like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant make voice search more popular. Therefore, voice search optimization is one of the most rapidly rising technologies in web development. Every web development company is now implementing voice search functionality on its digital products.

 Building Network:

If you want to grow and learn in this field, you need to build a network with like-minded people. It helps you a lot in learning new things. If you have a quality network, your chances of getting worthy clients are high.

 Going to meetups:

Like any other field, developers also have meetups. Meetups help you to stay up-to-date with new trends and technologies. In meetups, you have a high chance of meeting with like-minded people and share valuable discussions & also make partnerships. In these kinds of get-togethers, you can share your experience with others and also get benefitted from other's experiences.

 Attending industry seminars and conferences:

Seminars and conferences are also very important for professionals to attend. There's a lot to learn in the industry seminars. In these seminars, you have a chance to meet industry leaders and mentors.

 Always connected with popular Web Development forums and related news:

Forums help you in many ways. You can discover the latest tech updates, get help from others when you are stuck in something, learn new topics. And you can also take part in public discussions.

Written By: Muhammad Shahhum (Owner Dot One Innovations)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Oh for fuck's sake, not this fucking bullshit again (cryptography edition)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data.

In a recently released Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption, the Five Eyes powers have demanded, again, that strong cryptography be abolished and replaced with defective cryptography so that they can spy on bad guys.

They defend this by saying "Privacy is not absolute."

But of course, working crypto isn't just how we stay private from governments (though god knows all five of the Five Eyes have, in very recent times, proven themselves to be catastrophically unsuited to collect, analyze and act on all of our private and most intimate conversations). It's how we make sure that no one can break into the data from our voting machines, or push lethal fake firmware updates to our pacemakers, or steal all the money from all of the banks, or steal all of the kompromat on all 22,000,000 US military and government employees and contractors who've sought security clearance.

Also, this is bullshit.

Because it won't work.

Here's the text of my go-to post about why this is so fucking stupid. I just can't be bothered anymore. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously? Are we still fucking talking about this? Seriously? Come on, SERIOUSLY?

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What these leaders thinks they're saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. These officials don't understand technology very well, so they doesn't actually know what they're asking for.

For this proposal to work, they will need to stop Britons, Canadians, Americans, Kiwis and Australians from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of their jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Australia is not alone here. The regime they proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Australian governments have already shown that they believes they can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the 5 Eyes nations are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other states are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or Mexico could come to the 5 Eyes countries with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what the Five Eyes are proposing:

* All 5 Eyes citizens' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of a 5 Eyes government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked in the 5 Eyes

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the 5 Eyes must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of 5 Eyes countries, and within those countries, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting a 5 Eyes country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

The Five Eyes officials will say that they doesn't want to do any of this. They'll say that they can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the every 5 Eyes nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html