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Gigaleak, preservation, emulation and content dissemination

(la version française de cet article est disponible ici)

On November 21, 1992, the sequel to the most widespread Mega Drive title was released in both Japan and South Korea, then in the rest of the world. In spite of itself, this game made many people want to find out what had happened to all those elements that had been cut during development. A few months earlier, when Sega started to show its future hit to the press, the public got a glimpse of levels such as Hidden Palace, an area absent from the final version. This wasn't the first time such an event had occurred; other sometimes equally popular titles such as Super Mario Bros. 3 have encountered the same fate, either through press coverage or via screenshots featured on the game's box. But Sonic 2 has one point that sets it apart from most other titles, in addition to its popularity: a development version was stolen a few months before the game hit the shelves. According to Yuji Naka, programmer and figurehead of the license at the time, a cartridge was stolen at a trade show in New York. His former colleague Akinori Nishiyama, meanwhile, says Sega had been hacked. In any case, this version was marketed in markets where cartridges produced without an official license were common, before being found in 1999 on a Chinese website as a ROM. Named after the person who found the ROM, the Simon Wai prototype features an unfinished version of a level that was thought to be never playable: Hidden Palace. The popularity of the license helping, amateurs started to collect documents of all types in order to identify all the differences between the versions marketed by Sega and the numerous screenshots and other development versions found over the years.

A preview published in the October 1992 issue of the British magazine Mega. 2 of the 3 levels shown here do not appear in the final version of the game.

Since Sonic 2, a lot of development versions and design documents have found their way on the net with more or less echo and communities of amateur researchers have gathered around sites such as The Cutting Room Floor, Unseen64 or Hidden Palace. On February 23, 2008, the latter put online a thousand development versions of games produced by Sega or released on Sega consoles after buying archives disks containing the games in question, sometimes with several dozen versions per title. However, the data leakage that Nintendo is experiencing in recent months seems unparalleled in terms of volume and variety of content.

In April 2020, development versions of various episodes of Pokémon, as well as source code, development tools and graphics from intermediate versions were released. Before that, in 2018 and 2019, a development version of Pokémon Gold and Silver (the "Spaceworld 1997 demo", named after the show where it was presented), assets of Pokémon Red and Green then Pokémon Diamond and Pearl had leaked on the net. In the days that followed, other types of content appeared on 4chan: official documentation relating to a number of Nintendo consoles including the Wii, the Nintendo 64, the 64DD, the iQue Player, a technical demo produced for the Nintendo 64, source code written for Super Mario 64, Powerpoints and internal correspondence from several companies for a total of about 29,000 documents. A second batch of data began to appear on July 24th and found an echo that goes far beyond technical enthusiasts and console clone producers. A large amount of content relating to some of the most popular titles and licenses in the history of video games (Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, StarFox) has been put online, linked on 4chan then distributed on the rest of the Internet. Development versions of Super NES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance games, as well as source codes, graphic assets, 3D animation tests, sound effects and uncompressed music, 2D and 3D illustrations, logos, level editors, conversations between developers, visuals for a website, documents relating to the Wii, etc.

The origins of the leak Nintendo has been the subject of several attacks in recent years. Of those that have come to light, one resulted in the leakage of information about the Switch prior to its release, another involved source codes obtained from dozens of companies, but the one that most closely corresponds to the present case - generally called the Gigaleak - was carried out in 2018 by a man named Zammis Clark, a British security researcher and former Malwarebytes employee, a company specialised in detecting and removing malicious software. In 2015, he hacked VTech's servers, revealing that the company had illegally collected the data of nearly 200,000 children. He also revealed vulnerabilities in apps from manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba as well as in a tool used in UK schools and developed by Impero. In 2017, he hacked some of the Microsoft servers and stole tens of thousands of files before sharing access to these servers with others. After being arrested and released on bail, he hacked Nintendo's internal network in March 2018. In its official communication, the Japanese company only mentioned the theft of a few thousand IDs and passwords as well as access to data relating to games in development at the time. However, Ganix, the man who released the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl sprites in December 2019, explained in an interview he gave to LavaCutContent a few days later that the various leaked content relating to Pokémon (including the Spaceworld 1997 demo released in May 2018, the month Nintendo realised it had been hacked by Clark) all came from a hack done in March 2018 by a man who goes by the pseudonym "Wack0". We know since the Impero affair that Wack0 is none other than Clark's pseudonym - a letter written by Impero and addressed to Clark in 2015 links the two names. Clark had shared these files with Ganix, who decided on his own initiative to leak them in December 2019, thus betraying Clark's confidence in him. The 4chan thread with which the Gigaleak started in July 2020 seems to refer to this event by its title: "ppg leak time: fuck ganix".

Because of his profile - Clark has a form of autism and suffers from prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize and identify faces - the judge felt that he would be at too great a risk if sent to prison. He was sentenced in 2019 to a 15-month suspended prison sentence and subject to a 5-year judicial review.

The presence of files relating to the iQue Player and the BroadOn company among the leaked documents suggests that the hacker accessed BroadOn’s servers, a company founded by Wei Yen who also co-founded iQue with Nintendo. Due to the legal restrictions in effect in China from 2000 to 2015, Nintendo had to make a joint venture to enter this market and develop a variant of the Nintendo 64 - the iQue Player. BroadOn is one of Nintendo's collaborators and has developed software for the Wii as well as for the iQue Brand (which includes game consoles such as the Game Boy Advance, the DS and the 3DS).

The iQue Player (picture by Evan Amos)

While Nintendo is the main target of this leak, other companies have also been affected by the ripple effect. Among them are Capcom, Konami and M2 (which is the current holder of the rights to the Aleste series). Assets and development versions of some of their games released on Super Famicom are now in the wild. Among them are Megaman X, Super Ghouls'n Ghosts, Super Castlevania IV, Axelay, Parodius Da!, Ganbare Goemon and Super Aleste. Since the release of Collection of Mana, it is public knowledge that Nintendo keep content produced by other companies in its archives. Masaru Oyamada, producer of the Mana series, said that this compilation was made possible by Nintendo, which allowed Square-Enix to recover the various source codes of these games.

In the wake of the Gigaleak, the source code for the Xbox Unreal Championship 2 game has been put online, along with numerous design documents. Epic Games' servers had been hacked in 2011 without the identity of the visitor being revealed; it cannot be excluded that the files in question originated from this attack and that the author of the hack kept them until that day on July 30, 2020. The link between this leak and the Gigaleak is not yet certain. In such a case, it is unlikely that anyone would publicly claim responsibility for the leak.

On the authenticity of the leaked content When a console prototype, a development version of a popular game or from a major license surfaces, it is customary to take it with a pinch of salt, in case someone came up with the idea of pulling a hoax or to replenish his bank account by trying to sell a fake. In the case of the contents leaked in 2020, since Nintendo hasn't officially commented on the case despite the requests made by Vice.com and LeMonde.fr, the doubt persists and the volume of data is such that it will be difficult to authenticate everything file by file. Nevertheless, Dylan Cuthbert, former developer of Argonaut who later joined Nintendo, recognised one of the tools developed for Starfox 2. In addition, in a number of cases, developers at the company have in the past provided clues suggesting that at least some of the content is authentic. This includes some rejected designs for Yoshi from Super Mario World, already unveiled in 2017.

A sprite sheet created by Shigefumi Hino during the development of Super Mario World, one year before the game’s release.

There are also quotes from developers about the presence of Luigi in Super Mario 64 and adult Mario in Yoshi's Island (both of which were set aside during development), characters in overalls in Super Mario Kart before it was decided to set the game in the Mario universe and a circuit from Mario Kart 64 located in a city but deemed too big. The same goes for the Zelda license: Yoshiaki Koizumi said he made a polygonal version of Link as part of a prototype adaptation of Zelda II for the Super Famicom, Eiji Aonuma explained that the cycle of Majora's Mask originally lasted not three days but a week and Link's Awakening was originally thought to be an adaptation of A Link to the Past - the world map of the latter made with the engine of the former has been found. Regarding Dragonfly, one of the very first Super Famicom titles shown to the public in 1988 before being renamed Pilotwings, the different screenshots published in magazines correspond to the version that leaked. While this is not an absolute proof of its authenticity - in 2012, a fan recreated an early version of Sonic 1 using screenshots as references -, the sum of clues previously cited and the large amount of documents posted online make the hoax thesis unlikely.

This leak also contains a lot of files that are difficult to identify, mainly because the names used for the files and directories are not always very explicit and some titles had never been publicly shown before or in another form. Examples include Sleep, an unfinished mouse-playable Super Famicom game (which may have been announced under the title "Black Out" in 1992), Super Donkey, another unfinished title with a number of visual similarities to Yoshi's Island, or Link's profile sprites for which we can only make guesses. Plunging into this maze of repertories requires patience as well as certain skills. Let's take the case of a game: each game has its own CVS file (named after the software used by Nintendo). A CVS file may contain several versions of a game, like a log of its evolution: an early version, a more advanced version with some elements that differ from the final version, the final version, etc. These files are not ROMs that could be launched in an emulator in 3 clicks. You have to compile the source code of the game you want to launch first, if there is source code.

Private conversations There is one point on which the leak doesn't seem to have been publicly praised: the posting of private conversations. Since April 2020, conversations between employees from various companies (Nintendo, BroadOn, then Argonaut in July) have been circulating on the net, in particular exchanges between Argonaut employees that took place in the early 90s, when some of them came to work at Nintendo in Japan. In addition to the fact that these are private correspondence - which already poses legal and moral issues - some of the excerpts shared online highlight issues that echo recent cases involving other companies, particularly on the subject of sexism and sexual harassment. In this case, the problem is twofold: there is, of course, the harassment itself (unsolicited pornographic images), but also the fact that the subject has come up without the victims having chosen to deal with it themselves.

This case illustrates the fact that video game preservation requires a minimum of methodology and should not necessarily result in the unregulated dissemination of any content relating to the development of a game or the history of a society. On the rest of the leak, opinions are very divided. Some people welcome it unreservedly; others have a mixed or even negative opinion, with the question of preservation and its modalities itself being debated.

Preservation Video game preservation is a race against time that began years ago, but the rules to be applied are still being discussed. A part of the public considers that everything that is not yet available as a ROM or ISO on the net should be dumped and shared. In 2019, a notorious collector, owner of one of the 3 knonw copies of the arcade game Akka Arrh, claimed that someone came to his home to unknowingly dump the ROM of the game in question and put it online. This is one of the most extreme cases known (if true), but it raises another issue: does preservation necessarily have to be illegal? The ROMs of commercial games you can find on the net (excluding the official websites such as the Nintendo eShop) are copies that contravene intellectual property law, whether they are final or intermediate versions, marketed or not. As early as 1993-94, consoles such as the NES, Super NES and Mega Drive had their dedicated emulator and with them ROMs that could be found via BBS. Already at that time, there were ROMs of development versions, some of which seem to have disappeared from the net because of their low distribution. These generally come either from developers who kept cartridges, CDs or files on hard disk, or from journalists who did the same with preview versions. In both cases, it is likely that they were not supposed to keep possession of them, let alone resell them years later to individuals. The amount of money exchanged for these copies has skyrocketed over the last 20 years. What might have been worth a hundred dollars in the early 2000s is now steadily rising to over a thousand. The illegal nature of the Gigaleak is nothing new in this field, but it may have been shocking in terms of its scale and the fact that the content was not obtained through a transaction (even if what made it possible is of questionable legality).

In 1979, while Namco was conducting a location test of Galaxian in a coffee shop, the game's PCB was swapped and duplicated, making it one of the first commercial titles with a beta version that ended up in the wild even before the final (and official) version was released.

Legislation in countries such as Japan, France or the United States is not so much a hindrance to the preservation as it is to the dissemination of ROMs and ISOs. We can certainly deplore the inadequacy of state initiatives as well as the meagre budgets allocated to the preservation of video games - in 2017, during a symposium on the preservation of video game preservation held at the BNF (National Library of France), its audiovisual department confessed that the budget allocated for video games was much lower than that obtained by the film sector with an average of 5,000 to 6,000 euros per year, going up to 8,000 euros in good years. It covers the acquisition of missing games (those who fell through the cracks of legal deposit), storage costs (the room where the games and machines are kept must remain at a constant temperature), etc. But the current legislation is an obstacle to preservation mainly in special cases such as video games with child pornographic content, games that companies such as Enix sometimes published in the early 1980s in Japan.

The Game Preservation Society, an entity based in Japan, does not have the task of putting online copies of the (sometimes very rare) games that it keeps in its archives, but of preserving them. Private individuals can also call on it to make backups of titles from their collection, the purpose of a private backup being to prevent damage to the programme's storage medium (cassettes, floppy disks, CDs, etc.). This policy is sometimes met with incomprehension or even disapproval from a certain fringe of the public who tirelessly demand the games' ROMs. OK, but which games? Websites that share ROMs without the agreement of their rights holders have a definite advantage over game publishers: almost all the games released on some of the most popular consoles can be found on the net. Few publishers are able to exploit their entire catalogue on a continuous basis for reasons as diverse as lack of resources, rights problems in the event of third-party licenses, or lack of commercial interest. If you want to try out the entire Mega Drive library, either you buy the 900 or so cartridges published in the past, or you download an emulator and the corresponding ROMset, thus breaking the law. It gets even more complicated with games that were playable online or available for sale in digital form only if the relevant service has closed. Abandonware-France, a website created in 2000 where you can find thousands of PC games and video game-related magazines, has adopted a clear line excluding games that are still commercially exploited as well as those released after 2000. It's less an ideal solution than a default solution - it doesn't solve the legality issue, since the games haven't yet fallen into the public domain - but it has no impact on publishers' sales, which is still one of the surest ways to get through the bullets. Other websites have been less cautious on this point by making available content that is still commercially exploited. Due to its special status, Internet Archives makes it possible to play (but not download) thousands of old games online, including titles that are still commercially exploited (Sonic 1 for example) but with the notable exception of Nintendo games or games released on Nintendo systems. In 2016, the Japanese company took down the Nintendo Power issues that were available for download at the digital library, stating that "The unapproved use of Nintendo's intellectual property can weaken our ability to protect and preserve it, or to possibly use it for new projects”. On June 1, 2020, four book publishers sued the Internet Archive after its National Emergency Library project went online, a project with which the library lent out digitized versions of books that are still commercially available. The outcome of this lawsuit could have an impact on the fate of the site and the different types of content that can be found there.

If you're interested in development versions, having a well-stocked wallet won't be of much help as legally accessible versions are rare. Sega provided us with a few exceptions by including both the final and an intermediate version of Gunstar Heroes in "Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 25: Gunstar Heroes Treasure Box". Probably unintentionally, the version of Revenge of Shinobi featured in "Sega Smash Pack Volume 1" on PC is a development version. As for “Silent Hill HD Collection”, the choice to base these adaptations of Silent Hill 2 and 3 on intermediate versions (retouched for the occasion) was made by default.

Finally, there is the question of making the design documents available, which again relies largely on the good will of the publishers. In addition to the interviews and documents published on specialized sites and magazines, many artbooks including illustrations, concept art and/or excerpts from design documents have been released in Japan since the end of the 1980s, followed by the US market in the early 2000s and more recently by France. Although it is not the first representative of its category, Sonic Jam has long been a reference in terms of compilation by offering galleries of documents, information and sometimes previously unseen videos in addition to the first Mega Drive episodes. In 2002, Final Fantasy X came bundled with a making of, following in the footsteps of the movie industry Square was looking towards at the time. For the past few years, some of the games produced by Sony have been the subject of making of accompanying their release and many independent developers regularly communicate on the progress of their games, both on social networks and through their blogs. However, not all games have their own journal or post-mortem. This is where initiatives such as the one launched by the Conservatoire National du Jeu Vidéo in France take over. The latter meets with developers and development companies and requests that part of their archives be made available to the public, with varying degrees of success. Other organizations such as the Musée Bolo in Switzerland (which was given archives by former Infogrames CEO Bruno Bonnell) and Internet Archive have hosted documents of this type.

The issue of preservation is not only a public issue, as companies are (or should be) concerned as well. Apart from exceptional cases such as the Great Hanshin earthquake that destroyed part of the Konami Archives in 1995, development companies rarely communicate about the loss of documents. One of the reasons for this is that in many cases they have disposed of all or part of their archives themselves. In 2016, 2 Namco employees started the Archive Project to save 350 boxes of documents from the dumpster. The two men had to convince their company to release a budget for this project even though the latter was planning to dispose of the boxes to avoid incurring new storage costs. At Square Enix, on the other hand, some files could not be saved in time and some games' source codes were lost. In addition to the Mana series previously mentioned, we know that the source code of the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy VIII has disappeared, forcing the developers of the HD version to fall back on the code of the PC version whose music is slightly different. Same with the first episode of Kingdom Hearts; the developers of the 1.5 HD Remix version had to analyze in depth a commercial copy and recreate many assets. An example that echoes the story a developer posted in 2010 in which he explained that, as part of a port of various Midway arcade games, the editor in charge of the project was unable to get his hands on the source code of Spy Hunter, so he had to download the game's ROM in order to extract the graphics via MAME and retrieve the sound files from a fan site, among other things.

---- Interlude: source code----- Having the ROM of a game does not mean you have the source code of that game. While there are thousands of ROMs of commercial games on the net, source codes are much rarer. In 2012, Jordan Mechner released the source code for the Apple II version of Prince of Persia, which he wrote alone and for which he is the owner, even though the licensing rights now belong to Ubisoft. More unexpectedly, it was discovered in 2014 that a large part of the source code for the NeoGeo version of Art of Fighting was in a file from its adaptation on PC Engine CD. In all likelihood, the developers of this version had access to the source code of the original version, which was mistakenly included in all copies of the game. In theory, having the source code of a game facilitates its adaptation on another support since, from one version to another, one can reuse a more or less important part of it, thus reducing the workload and the development costs. The loss of a game's source code therefore greatly reduces the chances of seeing a remastered version of the game. The fallback solution when it is an old game originally released on console or arcade is to use a ROM and an emulator, as it has been done on many compilations or re-releases of arcade games since the early 2000s.

The Nintendo case The source code for several Nintendo games and systems is now available on the net. Some might see this as a public backup, but the various leaks that happened since 2018 tend to prove that Nintendo knows how to preserve its data (at least for some time) and doesn't necessarily need outside help. There are several rumours about Nintendo that have not yet been confirmed. One of them is that the source code for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has been lost, a hypothesis that arose after studying the source code for the DX version of the game, released five years later for Game Boy Color. Another rumour claims that Nintendo is downloading the ROMs for its own NES games, a rumour that found an echo in 2016 after a lecture on emulation was given at the Game Developer Conference. However, if the NES game ROMs used by Nintendo for its Virtual Console look like the ones circulating on the rest of the net, maybe it's because at least one of the persons hired by the Japanese manufacturer to dump the ROMs of its games - Tomohiro Kawase - contributed to the group (iNES) that was dumping ROMs of those same games before joining the company.

The argument that Nintendo is a temple from which nothing comes out seems somewhat exaggerated. The company's games may not have been the subject of as many artbooks as Square Enix's, which, when it doesn't lose its source codes, knows how to showcase its heritage, but it has published many documents in the past relating to series such as Mario and Zelda (which was recently the subject of a series of artbooks), has released new games or versions of new games (Starfox 2 on the Super NES Mini, the European version of Drill Dozer on the Wii U Virtual Console), not to mention the "Iwata Asks" series, which we'd like to see an equivalent in all other development companies. The sense of secrecy that some people might see in Nintendo is probably due in part to the fact that the public is more interested in it than in most of its competitors. The popularity of some of its licenses has few equivalents in the world of video games and pop culture in general. The fact that we still discover old, unreleased Nintendo games nowadays is nothing unusual; tons of games are cancelled without having had a chance to be officially announced.

On the age of the content put online Two arguments are regularly put forward to minimize the significance of the Gigaleak. According to the first one, the content in question is old and therefore less sensitive or of lesser value than if it were recent documents. This is forgetting that Nintendo has more than once taken ideas or concepts that are sometimes decades old out of its boxes. During the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Shigeru Miyamoto went back over the concept of Miis and explained that it had undergone several changes over the years, starting as a demo on the Famicom Disk System, then reappearing on Super Famicom and 64DD before finally finding its way to the Wii in 2006. The Mario series has also had its share of ideas that have been put aside then used in later episodes. The idea of straddling a mount, for example, was first suggested during the development of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) before being adopted in Super Mario World (1990) with Yoshi. Miyamoto had originally envisioned a horse, but he kept the idea for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998). A simultaneous multiplayer mode was experimented with at the time of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) and will only be included in the series starting with New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009). Finally, one of the sprites from Super Donkey bears some resemblance with one of those appearing in Super Mario Maker, by its concept.

Top: Super Donkey. Bottom: Super Mario Maker.

The second argument concerns the damage suffered by Nintendo and reveals a difference in treatment with what happened in April 2020 when a development version of The Last of Us 2 leaked a few weeks before the game's release. Messages of disapproval and support for the developers seem to have been more popular than those welcoming the leak. In the case of the Gigaleak, Nintendo has often been perceived as a big company, an abstract entity, thus obscuring the fact that its games are also the sum of the work of a group of individuals. In legal terms, unless otherwise stated, the fruit of the work produced within a company is the property of the company. On a personal level, it often happens that a developer has a particular attachment to what he produces.

Dylan Cuthbert, in response to a person asking him how he felt, a few hours after the July 24th leak.

While some developers may have been in favour of releasing development versions - Yuji Naka tried to find the prototype of the first Sonic publicly shown in June 1990 to include it in Sonic Mega Collection - or even production documents - Jordan Mechner published the journals he kept during the development of Karateka and Prince of Persia - others are less enthusiastic about making such files available. By definition, a development version is not a finished product, and while it is natural for a finished product to be made public, this is not necessarily the case with everything relating to the development process. This is not exclusive to video games: many illustrators are reluctant to show their sketches, works in progress or unfinished drawings, no matter how old theirs works are, and the same is true of writers and musicians. As with private conversations, there is the question of respect for developers and their consent. This is obviously not a small obstacle for anyone who wants to preserve and share all the documents relating to the history of video games, but it seems difficult to me to do the work of an archivist or historian (who relies on the work of developers) if it means harming some of these developers even slightly. Of course, you have to hope that as much information as possible will come out and you can work on it in different ways, but you also have to set limits on the methods you can use and not just reason in legal and/or material terms.

Consequences It is difficult to measure how much will come out of this case, as other elements may be added in the coming days or weeks. Now that the leaked content is circulating, Nintendo will have a hard time getting it off the net and can expect clones of consoles using its own source codes to be produced and marketed in certain countries.

Regarding the emulation scene, it's a bit more complicated. In 1999, source code and documents relating to the Nintendo 64 leaked from Silicon Graphic Inc, a company that produced processors for the Nintendo 64. Known as the Oman Archive, this content was used in the early days of Nintendo's system emulation, which led to quick results. But this use of an illegally obtained code subject to intellectual property law was also a liability for the emulation scene of this machine, which took years to get rid of. Most of the other emulators available online are legal since they were developed with their own code. It's to avoid breaking the law that console BIOSes often have to be downloaded separately (like the source code, BIOS are copyrighted). The appearance of the Wii source code is therefore a poisoned gift for developers of amateur emulators. It may allow them to understand how Nintendo has done this or that, but they can't reuse it even partially without breaking the law.

Nintendo has probably already apologised to Capcom, Konami and M2 whose files have also ended up on the web. As for the rest, we can only speculate. Will publishers become aware of the interest of a part of their audience in the making of their games and offer more content to satisfy this curiosity (videos from their archives, books, making of, etc.) or, on the contrary, will they lock the doors of their archives by throwing the key into a well? Will security and control on the net increase, further restricting the distribution of certain types of content, be it fan games, ROMs - two categories that Nintendo has been fighting hard against in recent years - or Youtube videos showing things that publishers would prefer not to see on the net (like, say, glitches from Animal Crossing: New Horizons)? Or maybe nothing will change.

Sources : Sonic 2 https://web.archive.org/web/20051104100754/http://xbox.gamespy.com/articles/654/654750p4.html https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Team_interview_by_Kikizo_(November_30,_2005) Hidden Palace http://info.sonicretro.org/February_23,_2008_Proto_Release Pokémon Gold 1997 prototype (2018) https://twitter.com/sanquii/status/1002107775651057664 Pokémon 2019 leak https://lavacutcontent.com/pokemon-beta-leaker-statement/ https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/ April-May 2020 leak https://resetera.com/threads/the-nintendo-leak-saga-continues-biggest-nintendo-leak-in-history-full-source-code-design-files-for-wii-released-online.196683/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-nintendo-leak-saga-continues-biggest-nintendo-leak-in-history-full-source-code-design-files-for-wii-released-online.196683/post-32917584 https://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-suffers-huge-leak-source-code-and-design-files-for-wii-appearing-online/ https://twitter.com/Zetsuboushitta/status/1256320740527239168 https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1256543745794879488 recent leaks: 1 Ryan Hernandez https://www.thegamer.com/man-leaked-nintendo-switch-prison-charges/ https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/california-man-who-hacked-nintendo-servers-steal-video-games-and-other-proprietary 2 Tillie Kottmann https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/source-code-from-dozens-of-companies-leaked-online/ 3 Zammis Clark https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/28/18286027/microsoft-nintendo-vtech-security-hack-breach-researcher-guilty https://lavacutcontent.com/pokemon-beta-leaker-statement/ Mail sent by Impero to Zammis Clark - Wack0 https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-fRcZ1TWHaDkwz-Ea/Letter%20to%20Mr%20Zammis%20A%20Clark%20dated%2013%20July%202015_djvu.txt BroadOn + iQue https://wiki.mariocube.com/index.php/IQue#BroadOn July 2020 leak https://boards.4channel.org/vp/thread/44305551/ppg-leak-time-fuck-ganix https://www.resetera.com/threads/update-super-mario-64-and-oot-source-leaked-massive-nintendo-data-leak-source-code-to-yoshis-island-a-link-to-the-past-f-zero-and-more.254724/page-62 Aleste and M2 https://twitter.com/M2_STG/status/1014031712672571393 Collection of Mana https://gameinformer.com/preview/2019/06/11/decades-in-the-making Vice, Lemonde.fr and Nintendo https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kp7bx/a-massive-leak-of-nintendo-source-code-is-causing-chaos-in-video-games https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2020/07/31/nintendo-ce-que-l-on-sait-de-la-fuite-supposee-de-documents-lies-aux-jeux-video_6047809_4408996.html Cuthbert and Starfox 2 https://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/status/1286789583061934080 Mario World sprite sheet https://topics.nintendo.co.jp/article/cb34ab17-9135-11e7-8cda-063b7ac45a6d Luigi in Super Mario 64 https://shmuplations.com/mario64/ Adult Mario in Yoshi's island http://shmuplations.com/yoshi/ Super Mario Kart before Mario https://twitter.com/toruzz/status/1287400639165861888 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/mariokart/0/0 Mario Kart 64 circuit http://shmuplations.com/mariokart64/ https://twitter.com/AeroArtwork/status/1288299965954088966?s=19 Zelda II SFC in 3D http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/1 Zelda OOT in Ganondorf's Castle https://twitter.com/AeroArtwork/status/1287524648222105607 7 day cycle in Zelda: Majora's Mask https://twitter.com/Zen64_/status/1287582698085777408 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/majoras-mask-3d/0/0 https://www.polygon.com/2015/2/18/8064257/majoras-mask-three-day-timer-week DragonFly https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/14/pilotwings-snes-proto/ Sonic 1 fan recreation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHtzXzu2BDA Argonaut https://twitter.com/corentin_lamy/status/1286932458173276161 https://www.resetera.com/threads/update-super-mario-64-and-oot-source-leaked-massive-nintendo-data-leak-source-code-to-yoshis-island-a-link-to-the-past-f-zero-and-more.254724/post-40826655 Unreal Championship 2 https://twitter.com/Sinoc229/status/1288680503801860096 https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/06/11/epic-games-website-forums-hacked Akka Arrh https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/after-a-lost-atari-rom-leaks-retro-fans-ask-was-it-stolen/ Galaxian https://www.4gamer.net/games/999/G999905/20180313040/ Firsts emulators https://emulation.miraheze.org/wiki/History_of_emulation Namco's Archive Project https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1205387.html Spy Hunter http://web.archive.org/web/20110925185703/http://www.ppl-pilot.com.nyud.net/mame.aspx Prince of Persia https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II On the CNJV, Musée Bolo and BNF : "colloque: la conservation du patrimoine vidéoludique" (2017). Nintendo Power, Internet Archive https://www.polygon.com/2016/8/8/12405278/nintendo-power-issues-disappear-from-free-online-archive http://blog.archive.org/2020/06/01/four-commercial-publishers-filed-a-complaint-about-the-internet-archives-lending-of-digitized-books/ Nintendo ROMs https://www.resetera.com/threads/tomohiro-kawase-mightve-been-hired-by-nintendo-to-put-rom-headers-into-vc-updated-dec-1-2018.64755/ https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1045348387174977536?s=19 https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9msl9j/update_did_nintendo_actually_download_roms_for/e7iemhb/ GDC 2016 https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023470/-It-s-Just-Emulation The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening source code https://www.neogaf.com/threads/it-bothers-me-that-nintendo-keeps-ignoring-links-awakening.931702/page-2 Mii https://unseen64.net/2008/04/14/mii-nes-prototype/ https://www.nintendo.fr/Iwata-demande/Iwata-Demande-Nintendo-3DS/Vol-5-Interview-de-Miyamoto-san-a-la-veille-de-la-sortie-de-la-console/2-Faire-des-personnages-Mii-un-standard-international/2-Faire-des-personnages-Mii-un-standard-international-210297.html Yoshi and a horse https://www.nintendo.co.uk/News/2017/October/Nintendo-Classic-Mini-SNES-developer-interview-Volume-5-Super-Mario-World-and-Super-Mario-World-2-Yoshi-s-Island-1290850.html Multiplayer mode in SMB3 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/mario25th/2/3 Super Donkey - Mario Maker https://twitter.com/dbMisadventure/status/1286751468293414912 Dylan Cuthbert https://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/status/1286822093703622656 Sonic 1 prototype https://www.gamesradar.com/super-rare-1990-sonic-the-hedgehog-prototype-is-missing/ Oman Archive https://sm64-conspiracies.fandom.com/wiki/Oman_Archive Animal Crossing: New Horizons vidéo https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7j7yb/nintendo-takes-down-youtube-video-of-fan-showing-animal-crossing-glitches

#Gigaleak preservation emulation and content dissemination

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evien-stark · 5 years ago

Text

✧I Need You✧ Chapter 64

And so it went. Tony very quickly learned the importance of not arguing with you about bedtime. While you would have liked to take solace in that, he decided to be stupid in other ways. Because going to bed with you but then getting up roughly an hour or two later to go back downstairs to the lab to work wasn’t really doing either of you any favors. It didn’t help you sleep. It didn’t put your mind at ease. And who even knew how much sleep he was barely surviving on at this point.

You woke up alone in the middle of most nights, and if not in the middle then in the very early mornings. Sleep seemed to be escaping the both of you, even if one of you was trying harder than the other. You kept promising to yourself that you weren’t going to get frustrated with him, and certainly not angry, but… some days were harder than others.

June dragged on into July the same. Empty nights and restless days. More often than not you weren’t sure you were a real person anymore. You certainly didn’t feel like it. And nothing seemed to want to convince you otherwise. Certainly not Tony, who spent more time in the lab now than he did doing almost anything else. Every time you ventured down to drag him to a bed he would not stay in he seemed to be working on yet another different suit. You’d stopped keeping track around number fifteen- mostly because he’d started being a wiseass about it.

“This one is called Heartbreaker.”

“How apt.”

Not frustrated. Not frustrated. Not frustrated. Yet you were letting little passive aggressive notes slip between the two of you. That was no way to do things. No way to act. But every other time you turned around it was something different.

Cassanova. Tiger. Hot Rod.

Gamma, which was an absolutely ugly green and slate color. He really was truly losing his mind, you thought, when you’d seen that one. And what were they all for, anyway? Certainly not for personal use. What would he need with so many? Sure, when you’d asked, he’d started rambling off how different the specifications were for all of them. That they all had one solid purpose that made them different-

But even that served to show you how crazed he was getting. What were they for? What were they for? You kept asking yourself, but found yourself too afraid to ask him. Because you knew the answer. You just didn’t know how to handle it. Worse yet, how to help him handle it. That was far beyond you. You could love Tony Stark with all your heart, all your ability, but that would never heal the pain and trauma he’d been through.

And that was the toughest thing of all to live with.

Another bombing slipped by the two of you, and the only reason you knew that was because Tony had it on one of the wide monitors as you’d come downstairs one night. And he’d been too tired to even realize he’d let himself get caught doing the thing you and Rhodey (hell, even the President) had asked him not to do. It was only when you very pointedly, and tiredly, stood there for too long a time just staring at that screen full of info he wasn’t supposed to have or see that he finally took notice of his own faux pas and turned it off.

Too much time was slipping by. But how to even start shopping for therapists? Did ones even exist for this sort of thing? Rhodey had said he’d help you find someone- JARVIS, had, too. But… the idea was too daunting. Too huge and horrible to even begin to tackle. Not even just for yourself, but for him. And the thought of even if you did find someone, he’d just kick and drag his feet and wear you out and down until you gave up anyway…

Was this really a way to live life? Was this what life was supposed to be? Was this what all superheros felt like? Bruce seemed to be doing alright. And Steve, too. But you and Tony?

Drowning. Endlessly it felt like.

As August crept in you let yourself get pulled. You didn’t want to go back, but you couldn’t stay here, either. Stuck between two worlds that you were falling apart in. You stood in the doorway of the lab for far too long. He was working on another suit. Something even uglier. Orange and red and yellow and…

“I have to go back to New York.”

He didn’t even look up. “Why? Pep can’t handle it over there? Or did Banner blow something up?”

A sigh built up in your lungs without your permission and you had to do your best to keep it from escaping too dramatically. “I sent you an email about it. We have a PR press campaign on the 10th. You didn’t forget, did you?”

How could he forget something he didn’t even know?

“Of course not. So, what, you need me to just do a fly-by? I can do that.”

“I need you to be there with me. Take questions. Show off some of the clean energy we worked so hard to get off the ground.” Right before aliens attacked and the two of you had fled. What a great start to that story.

“So I’ll be there.”

He was barely listening to you. Just saying whatever it took to make you stop. That was what it felt like, anyway. “I’m going to a proof of concept meeting at the office, and then I’m taking the jet.” Because you just couldn’t… while he was busy building hundreds of them, the thought of getting back in your own suit made you nauseous. Something else to bury and not think about.

He still had yet to look up once. “Who’s proofing what concept?”

“It’s a presentation. No tech to even demo. You signed off on the papers. Beck, I think. You remember?” No. There was no way that he did.

“Sure.”

Not frustrated. Not frustrated. Not frustrated. And not angry. But you were. And in the middle of both those feelings you were also incredibly hurt. It was like the two of you had gone back to merely co-existing. Like you were his personal assistant, running a company he no longer cared about. Because he was too busy being Iron Man.

Losing himself. Losing him. That’s what you were doing.

The door slipped shut as you walked all the way into the lab, taking him by the shoulders and pulling him enough to get his wheeled- stool moving with his weight still atop it. You dragged him into the center of the room, taking him away from those terrible suits he was becoming more a part of every day, and waited. You waited for a long time as he looked up at you and you looked down at him.

And finally he spoke first. “...there something you wanna talk about, honey?”

“I need you to be here with me, Tony.”

He gave a cautious look around the room before looking at you again, arching a brow. “I’m literally sitting right in front of you. Where else would I be?”

“You’re not here. You haven’t been here in a long time. I don’t know where you are. But it’s not here with me.” Trying. Trying your hardest to impart these feelings without accusatory tone. Without malice. Without bitterness. You were sad. You were terribly sad about how things were. Everything else came second.

“Look, I…” His glance dropped and you feared you might have unjustly infected him with your feelings, which wouldn’t help. You needed him to start being honest with himself, that couldn’t come if he just felt what you were feeling. His hands smoothed up the back of your thighs. For a moment you foolishly hoped he was going to be real with you. That the two of you would finally get to the bottom of things. Start healing. But, instead, he looked up again with a half grin. “When I slip into a different plane of existence, I think you’ll be the first to know about it.”

That was that. He was going to continue to ignore everything. Might as well. So were you.

Reaching up, you cupped the sides of his face in your hands, and didn’t know whether to feel relief or even more heartbreak as his hands moved to grasp at your wrists. Holding you there. Melting into that one simple touch. “I love you.” Reminding him. Just in case.

“I love you, too.”

Easing in, you laid a long, lingering kiss to his forehead. Staying there for probably too long a time. “Don’t leave me waiting in New York. I can’t do it without you.”

“I’ll be there. I promise.”

The two of you looked at each other. Probably staring right through. Then you had to force yourself to leave. In the car, you kept the visor rolled up, hoping Happy wouldn’t report back that you’d cried the whole way to the office.

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

It was a blessing that it took you less time to clean up in the restroom than you thought it might. Being late for a proof meeting wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it was rude. Giving your hard working employees the idea that you didn’t care about them, or the kinds of things they were developing, was the last thing you really wanted to do. Especially because their other boss hadn’t even been on the property in months.

Your secretary helpfully slipped you a file as you walked in, and you took a moment to say hello to some of the board members who had come down (probably because they were bored and had nothing better to do ((also probably hoping Tony would show up)) ), and the tech department before shaking the hand of the man who had brought you all there for at least thirty minutes that day.

Quentin Beck, his profile read. He’d been working with Stark Industries for a little while now. And while you’d told Tony he’d okay’ed the patent requests for the Stark Tech, it was actually your name on the bottom line. When had that happened? You couldn’t even remember. His had probably been signed with several others in the same day, same week, same month…

He was radiating nervousness, but curiously also a bit of aggressive arrogance that had yet to actually show itself. You hoped for his sake it wouldn’t, but you knew better.

“What have you got to show us, Mr. Beck?” Deciding not to wait too much longer. The sooner this was over with, the sooner you could grab your things and head to a city that would only exacerbate your condition. Hooray.

“I want to thank everyone for coming. I know you’re all very busy. So I’ll get right to it.”

Getting right to it actually consisted of a computer failure that ate up ten minutes of his window as he had to reboot and restart powerpoint. His transitions were cheesy, his thoughts were kind of all over the place… the tech stuff was just a touch over your head. For something like this you really would have preferred Tony be in the room to confirm or deny all the things coming out of this guy’s mouth.

He was pursuing some sort of brain image scanning�� pattern reconciliation or… something or other. Your lack of sleep was definitely not helping you right now. But science and tech mumbo-jumbo aside, you got the actual crux of what he wanted this tech to do. And that’s where it got dicey.

The plan being to implement tech that could replicate someone’s worst thoughts, or maybe not even their own thoughts. Maybe just whatever you wanted them to think- ah, but of course once he saw your disapproving look, he tried to save face by saying it had other practical uses…

Once he was finished the room fell silent and all heads turned to you. How to put it delicately… “Well this is all very impressive, Mr. Beck, and it’s clear you’re working hard on this, I’m not sure this is a technology Stark Industries should be utilizing in its current form.” With the current man behind the curtain. Beck seemed a little too antsy. A little too eager to use it to do… well… “It seems very weaponizable-”

“But that’s the thing. It isn’t a weapon! Can’t you see the application? No physical harm is done.”

“Physcological torture is still torture.” You felt you might have been an authority on this. As you lived pretty much every day that way, now. “Stark Industries hasn’t been in the business of selling any kind of weapons for quite some time.”

He was getting angry. Angry because clearly you didn’t see or understand his vision. And because you were shutting him down. “Right, that’s why you and Mr. Stark fly around in metal suits with laser beams, right?”

A few fools failed to read the room right, chuckling once or twice before being elbowed by their much smarter companions. You kept your stare very much dead-eyed. “What are you implying, Mr. Beck?”

“Nothing- I just… I think we’re getting off to the wrong start, here. Look. There’s a lot of practical applications for this. Won’t you at least have Mr. Stark look over it before passing on it?”

Because Tony would know better. Tony would know better than you. That’s what he was saying. Utter nonsense that that theory was. Tony would back you. And, knowing this… “Sure. Of course. I’ll pass it along to him and we’ll let you know.”

Beck brightened at this. “Thank you! Thank you. You won’t regret this.”

Yet you had a feeling you definitely would.

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

Dvahli was about your only saving grace as you boarded the jet with her in tow. She was becoming quite the seasoned traveler for such a little thing. All the better, because you really needed a companion to get through the mess that had become your life. Your other life partner was just too absent.

A thought you chose not to dwell on too hard as you descended back down into New York City. You lied to yourself that the nighttime lights were just too bright for your poor eyes, you were tired after all, and you just weren’t that interested in looking at the city. So after drawing every shade shut in your private cabin, you sat back down and really focused hard on brushing Dvahli’s coat out. Couldn’t have her looking like a slob as you touched down. Everything to do with that and nothing at all to do with all the noises buzzing around angrily in your head.

The flash of camera bulbs only exacerbated your feelings further. Happy was quick and efficient in swatting the press away and getting you into the private car. He’d become really good at that, in fact, something you knew you should thank him for. A thought you spent too long thinking about until you found you’d pulled up to the Tower.

And one you wished you’d hung on to as you stood there, stock still, staring up at it. The repairs had been finished. No longer Stark Tower, now just the A standing atop your building proud and just. Something that you had hoped had become a beacon of hope for the city. And yet…

As you continued to look at it all you felt creeping up was an insurmountable horror.

Happy startled you, with a hand on your shoulder, and you put your hand up to him. Then realized. Then apologized. For the hundredth time. He pretended to look the other way on it. So did you. Not saying a word except a minor apology. And then up you went.

While you wanted nothing more than to bypass the actual offices and go right to bed, Pepper had let you know there were some exceedingly important documents on your desk that needed signing. So as you stepped onto the floor and several people vied for your attention, you put your hand up to them, too. More authoritative. Less out of control. As you should be. “I’m just grabbing something from my office and going upstairs. Consider me not here.”

Enough of a statement to shut out most of the voices. Save Pepper’s. “Your six o’clock is in your office.”

And then you wondered how far gone you were that you had an appointment you couldn’t remember. “I’m sorry?” Asked as your hand had just turned the knob on the door.

The man sitting in your office stood with all the unenthused flare he could muster. Which quickly turned into ire. “It’s about time. I’ve been here for fifteen minutes waiting for you. Not surprising, considering.”

You tried desperately to think if you’d ever seen this man before. He had a very distinctive face, one you were sure you would remember, and yet… “I’m sorry, Mr…?”

“Doctor. And, two for two aren’t we? Let’s consider for a minute you hadn’t scheduled a consultation, which I’m doing you a favor by even being here by the way- but we’ve been running in the same circles for years. I’ve been at the last ten Family Firefighter Galas.”

Your nerves were chafed. And this man pretending he was the leading presence in the world was not doing you any favors. “The Firefighter Fund has only been running for six years.” As dry as you could make it. “And I didn’t schedule an appointment with you.”

“Consultation. It’s fine. I’ll make this brief. I’m only here on behalf of some of my colleagues, anyway. Everyone’s scared to say no to the Starks. Not me. I wouldn’t be wasting my very precious time here if I didn’t have a point to make. Every hospital is in the city is extremely busy thanks to Stark Industries’ usual business.”

Stepping further into your office, letting the door finally swing shut, you approached him, shoulders squared. “And you’re implying?”

He grinned. “Mr. Stark might be able to change the name of the game, but we’re all still servicing the people the same way, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but The Avengers stopped an attack on New York.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

You squared up. “Feel free to get off my property any time you’d like, Mr…?” Doing it again. Because it upset him.

Easy to see as his eyes narrowed in a brief twitch before he hung his head, shaking it, scoffing. “Doctor. I won’t tell you again. Strange. By the way. You would know that, since you called me.”

“Trust me. I didn’t. So there’s the door. Goodbye.” Brushing by him as you moved to go to your desk.

“Let me at least give you my diagnosis. I’m wasting time to be here. And I wasn’t even charging.”

You sat down, opening the folder you’d come to get. The papers in there were inconsequential, really. But now you attended to them like they were the most important thing in the world. “Knock yourself out, Dr. -...Strange? Really? Are you serious?” Looking up at him again with only the judgiest of faces.

“How childish of you.” Sneering at you as he came close to the desk, laying a hand on it. “Like I said, time is money, and I’m wasting millions being here. So let me say this, stop calling looking for someone to take Stark’s surgery. Nobody will. That’s coming from the top down.”

You had to hold very still. Very. Very still.

Surgery? Tony was looking for surgery? You couldn’t think of anyone else who would’ve made that call. But why wouldn’t he tell you? Was he sick again? Was he-

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Keeping your voice level, holding it all in. You were getting better at that.

“Playing dumb really suits you. Sleeping with the highest bidder might make you the boss here, but you’re not in charge of anyone else. You can’t bully your way into my world. Even if a surgery like that was 100% risk free, which it’s not, and even if we had the technology required, after all the damage he’s done some people consider it just retribution.”

“So which is it, then? Too much of a risk or we’re playing saints at the hospitals? I thought you were supposed to help people in need? Didn’t you take an oath or something?”

His grin showed itself again as he barked out a laugh. “Rich coming from somebody like you. And him. Why do you think nobody can do it? Stark’s been clean for years now, yet I haven’t seen a single medical patent hit my hospital floor.”

“We have hundreds. Just because they aren’t run by you doesn’t mean they’re not happening. And which one is it- you can’t? Or you won’t?”

“Does it matter? Both, if it makes you feel better. I wouldn’t touch Stark’s surgery with a ten foot pole. My record is worth more than his life. And worth more any notoriety it would bring. Which is obvious, isn’t it? Why do you think nobody’s called you?”

Holding steady yet again with a deep breath, you stood slowly, perching your palms on the desk and leaning in to him. “So it’s not that you can’t, it’s that you won’t. Thanks for clearing that up. Doctor with a record more precious than life. What a headline. Can’t save people because you’re too scared to-”

“Don’t attempt to talk down to me. You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know everything about you, Mr. Strange. I’ve met thousands of men like you. We call them cowards.” The pleasure you felt backing him up away from your desk as you rounded it was brief. None of this felt good. “Get off my property. And, for good measure, why don’t you stay fifty feet away from all Stark property for the foreseeable future?”

He made a face at you. “You can’t be serious. What, did I hurt your feelings?”

“Get out. Before I call security, and let me assure you, there are dozens of reporters waiting for a good story on the sidewalk. Don’t make me give them one. Your precious record might not live through it.”

He tried to stare you down but you stayed firm, unblinking, unmoving. Until finally he did, much as it clearly pained him to be pushed around. He probably wasn’t very used to it. His mistake, for coming here. No matter who had called him. With an extra huffy scoff he turned on his heel and tromped his way out of your office, out through the reception floor, and into the elevator. You waited maybe two minutes to make sure he was out of earshot before you hung your head out your door-

“If anyone else makes any personal unsolicited appointments on my behalf like that again, I’ll fire this whole floor. Do I make myself clear?” And while there were scared murmurs of agreement, you eyed Pepper, who looked half as scared as the rest of them. Silently, you asked her, you?

And silently with a look she told you, I would never.

When you shut your door again, you asked, “JARVIS who made an appointment with Mr. Strange?”

“I believe he said he was a doctor, ma’am.”

“I really couldn’t give a fuck less what he thinks he is. Who made it?” JARVIS had access to everything. He would know. And if he didn’t know right now, he would find out. And then you could make this right. Because nobody had business scheduling an appointment- a consultation- a whatever for surgery on Tony’s behalf. You’d wring their neck.

“I have a file for you, on your computer.” Apparently done running his calculations.

Already you knew you weren’t going to like what you saw. And it was a good thing you were sitting down, because what played on screen shred your last ounce of strength. Tony. In the lab. Working on one of those stupid suits. An electrical misfire. Tony falling to the floor, silent. Shrill sounds of machinery going off. DUM-E obscuring the camera. The sound of Tony gasping in relief.

The clock moved forward in a cut of the surveillance. Tony had a drink in his hand. And, with the way he was swaying, as he still worked- on a different suit, you noted- he had had more than that one half empty bottle sitting at his desk. When had he started drinking again?

Drinking like that? A monster the two of you had never tackled. Foolish you. As much of a coward as Mr. Strange. Never addressing it. Just pretending he’d gotten better. Because that’s how alcoholism worked, right? It just went away?

“That can’t happen again, JAR… VIS. JAR head.” Laughing to himself as he slumped down onto his stool, sloppily refilling his drink.

“What should you suggest we do, sir?”

“Find me … someone. Someone good. The best. I think we can look into it- I’d do it myself but… not really my forte- I think… machine parts are easier than… I mean I probably could-”

“I would not recommend attempting to perform heart surgery on yourself, sir. Regardless of your estimation of your abilities.”

��Probably right. Well. So… go ahead then.”

“Sir, you’re violating the Drunk Me protocol. You know I can’t.”

He waved his drink around in the air. “You can- what was the… peaches and cream right? That’s it, right? See? I’m not that drunk. Do what I’m askin’ you. Please. It’s important. We’ll just look. We don’t have to … we don’t have to… uh… commit.”

“...yes, sir.”

“She can’t know about this.”

“Why not, sir?”

“Because.” Tony’s voice in the office spooked you nearly half to death. You jumped right up out of your chair, looking at him as his voice blended with the one in the video. “She has enough to worry about.”

“Tony- jesus fucking christ- don’t scare me like that!” Trying to catch your breath.

He came in from the doorway, head half hung, hands in his pockets. “Spying, are we?”

“I thought someone else had brought that asshole here. I was going to fire them out of a cannon into the sun. But now that I know it’s you, maybe I’ll just throw you into the Arctic Circle.”

His smile was tired. “Huh. Bad news then, I take it? That’s fine. I was too drunk to be serious about that, anyway.”

“What happened in the lab?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. Got shocked, muscles locked up. Heat from the electricity melted a wire and the housing unit got loose. JARVIS would know that. So I don’t know why he’s going around acting like it’s a big deal.”

JARVIS cut between the both of you, “You said the password, sir.”

“Oh please. I probably had a BAC of .30 that night. You knew better.” He stopped when you were just in front of him, on your feet again somehow- you didn’t even know how. You felt very near the verge of passing out. “So. What’s the verdict? Sufficiently worried?”

“Wouldn’t you love to be right about that?” Sitting on the edge of the desk for your benefit, you drew him in between your legs, taking hold of his face as he came close.

“I love to be right about everything. You know me.” His nose brushed yours, eyes closed.

“I used to.” The threat of tears nearly overwhelmed you, saying this, but you bit them back. Pulling him in all the way, you wrapped your arms around him, and took solace in him holding you back. Tight. “These days I think we’re both a little out of sorts.”

“Yeah… war will do that to you.” He couldn’t let that statement hang, quick to keep speaking. “That’s what Rhodey keeps saying to me, anyway. He check up on you as much as he does me? It’s starting to get annoying.”

He was offering you an out. A joke about Rhodey being a pest. So easy to feed into. Instead, you pretended you were strong enough to ask the next thing out of your mouth. “What are all the suits for, Tony?”

He squeezed you so hard then you could barely breathe. “Protection.”

“Protection from what? One isn’t enough anymore?”

“No. Not with- ...not- ...I… I saw something- something up there. We’re not alone anymore.”

Your smile against his chest was bitter. “You’re starting to sound like Fury.”

“Maybe he was on to something. But unlike him, I’m not looking to nuke the whole of outer space. Just the uh… just the one time is enough, I think. And that wasn’t my fault. Really.” Rambling just a little.

Easing back you looked up at him again and let your eyes close as he took your face in his hands next. Staying strong was a losing battle. “And the surgery?”

“Who cares? Guy said no, right? What was his name even? I never thought to ask JARVIS.”

An angry sort of breathless laugh escaped you. “He said a whole lot of stuff, nothing worth listening to. And a name that’s just as unimportant.” If you never had to see that man again it would be too soon. Looking up at him, the two of you fell into a less than amicable silence. Not knowing what to say next. How could you fix this? Fix him? Fix yourself? Any of it? Impossible. Too impossible. So you became every bit that coward you already knew you were. “Can we go to bed?”

“Yeah, honey.” He followed your lead. “Let’s go lie down.”

Sleep wouldn’t solve any of your problems. But at least you had him for one night. No lab to escape to- ...at least not one to build suits in, anyway. And when you woke up the next morning, seeing him still lying aside you made you feel like maybe this wasn’t unsalvageable.

Maybe the two of you could be fixed.

You just didn’t know how.

#Tony Stark #Tony Stark x Reader #INY Chapter Sixty Four

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akocomyk · 5 years ago

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“I don’t like it.”

For some good two seconds, it felt like the earth started crumbling down to its end...

• • • • •

When I was in 3rd year of high school, we had a project for our MAPEH subject. Our class of 44 students was divided into six groups, pre-determined by our professor. In my group, there were seven members and we named ourselves “D’Cookies” because we preferred David Cook over David Archuleta—the good ol’ days of American Idol. My groupmates assigned me to be the leader for this specific project.

When all groups had their leaders, our professor called the six chosen ones to the front for a short discussion on what we were to do.

The project mandated us to report to the class about the music of a specific Southeast Asian country. Other than that, we also had to briefly discuss facts about the country itself—there was a long outline of requirements that we needed to meet.

Our professor then asked us to draw from two sets of paper strips: one set for the country and one set for the order of reporting (only one group shall do the presentation every week). Thailand was the country for my group and we would be the fourth to present—meaning we have at least a month left to prepare. If I remember correctly, the other countries were Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

We were given options on how we could do the presentations. It can be in Powerpoint, traditional Manila paper reporting, videos or movies, a play or some skit, and even puppet shows. I was immediately intrigued by the idea of a puppet show since it’s one thing that I’ve never done before and I thought it would be fun to make for its crafty nature. But I didn’t like the idea of doing a puppet show in front of the class, so I thought it would be better to simply record it then make it a video.

We were also given “bonus instructions” to add a little spice to our projects. One: we don’t only have to please our professor, we have to please our classmates. At the end of each presentation, the non-presenting students shall rate a group’s presentation on a scale of 1–10 with 10 being the highest. The second bonus instruction is that if the group was able to sing a song in the native language of the country they’re reporting about, an additional five points to the final grade will be given.

The six leaders were sent back to their groups to discuss the project internally. To my surprise, my groupmates were down with my idea so we pushed through with it.

I daresay, we took our time even though I didn’t like the idea of cramming stuff up. We had an endless number of school projects and I simply can’t judge how everyone’s availability is limited. And I always wanted to make beautiful projects for the hell of it, not primarily for the sake of grades. Also, I’m more inspired to do better when my I’m grouped with my high school crush (get what I mean?). Don’t know if it’s coincidence or what, but I always do better when I was grouped with her.

Anyway... Two of us wrote the script and searched for animal characters that we can turn into paper bag puppets. We did everything in my house. The following weekends, we made the puppets and colored the forest background that my great-uncle asked a friend of his to draw. When the script was finished, we started recording our voices. We were rarely complete, that’s why we only got to record a few scenes and continued recording once the others were available.

We started shooting the scenes when all the materials were made, even when the audio wasn’t complete yet. We did those for a good two weeks and I was stitching them up using Windows Movie Maker as we went along. We were shooting until the day before our presentation, and while I was combining the scenes altogether, I had them learn the Thai song that we’re going to sing.

It was getting late, so my classmates had to go home—even my mother was concerned about them. Of course, I allowed them even when I knew I had to do everything else on my own until I finish the video.

Rendering of the video took hours—we had a bad PC, technology wasn’t as good then, and I was only using the default Movie Maker. I couldn’t even fathom the problem why the program couldn’t render the entire video as one file which lasted around 30 minutes, so I resorted into splitting them up into four parts: Intro, Thailand’s Culture, Music of Thailand, and Ending. I slept while each part was rendering. It wasn’t even a sound sleep because of the anxiety and the possibility that the video would not render properly due to errors.

Fortunately, everything succeeded. It was 4 o’clock in the morning. I had two hours of anxiety-less sleep before I woke up to ready myself for school.

Presentation time. We were in costumes made to look like the traditional attire of Thailand. We used the sarongs that my father had collected during the time he worked in ASEAN countries. We also brought the puppets—just for fun and as proof that we’re the ones who did our project.

My classmates were watching intently at the video. They laughed at the funny scenes. Some had their notebooks open, jotting down the facts from our video.

By the end, there was applause... And some laughter—I included some BTS bloopers during the end credits.

And we sang our song. It was a very uninspired song performance… but we still did it for the sake of the extra five points.

The bell rang right at the end of our presentation.

Our professor didn’t have time to give a comprehensive review, but before he dismissed the class, he asked everyone to stay for a moment.

He said, in a very serious tone, “I didn’t like it.”

For some good two seconds, it felt like the earth started crumbling down to its end… I could feel the WTF reactions of my groupmates.

“...I LOVE IT,” our professor continued.

And our screams erupted.

#HS Throwback

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kateblock15990-blog · 5 years ago

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Mp3 To Wav, Mp3 To Wave Converter, Mp3 Converter, Mp3 Software, Mp3 Encoder

QQripper is the autoloader software to automate the ripping of a stack of music discs (to transform audio tracks from music CD to digital information) to supported storage devices similar to exhausting disk, iPod or MP3 player. Free obtain the skilled WAV Compression app - iDealshare VideoGo ( for Home windows , for Mac ) , then click the downloaded package and follow the on-screen directions to install and run it, the next interface will pop up. Attempt Zamzar on-line converter for wav to mp3 conversion. I can understand your want to convert to MP3, however am undecided how a lot assist I can be. Perhaps I can do some checking. Within the meantime, have you tried audioshare? I can't bear in mind if it should convert without the cloud, but thought it could convert information. Just don't keep in mind for sure. I'll perform a little googling and get again to you. Submitting a podcast to the iTunes Store is a distinct course of than exporting an Audacity file to an iTunes library. See our Tutorial on Tutorial - Mixing a Narration With Background Music and m4a mp3 converter free mac our Wiki page on Easy methods to publish a Podcast for more assist with creating and publishing a podcast. Link to audio converter product is within the present notes. It additionally helps you change m4a mp3 converter free mac to MP3, AC3, WMA, DTS, CAF, AIFF, FLAC, etc. Similar toWAV recordsdata,AIFF recordsdata could be very massive as a result of the data is uncompressed.

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

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MENLO PARK, Calif. — In a glass conference room at its California headquarters, Facebook is taking on the bonfires of hate and misinformation it has helped fuel across the world, one post at a time.

The social network has drawn criticism for undermining democracy and for provoking bloodshed in societies small and large.

But for Facebook, it’s also a business problem.

The company, which makes about $5 billion in profit per quarter, has to show that it is serious about removing dangerous content. It must also continue to attract more users from more countries and try to keep them on the site longer.

How can Facebook monitor billions of posts per day in over 100 languages, all without disturbing the endless expansion that is core to its business? The company’s solution: a network of workers using a maze of PowerPoint slides spelling out what’s forbidden.

Every other Tuesday morning, several dozen Facebook employees gather over breakfast to come up with the rules, hashing out what the site’s two billion users should be allowed to say. The guidelines that emerge from these meetings are sent out to 7,500-plus moderators around the world. (After publication of this article, Facebook said it had increased that number to around 15,000.)

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself, The New York Times has found.

The Times was provided with more than 1,400 pages from the rulebooks by an employee who said he feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes.

An examination of the files revealed numerous gaps, biases and outright errors. As Facebook employees grope for the right answers, they have allowed extremist language to flourish in some countries while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Moderators were once told, for example, to remove fund-raising appeals for volcano victims in Indonesia because a co-sponsor of the drive was on Facebook’s internal list of banned groups. In Myanmar, a paperwork error allowed a prominent extremist group, accused of fomenting genocide, to stay on the platform for months. In India, moderators were mistakenly told to flag for possible removal comments critical of religion.

The Facebook employees who meet to set the guidelines, mostly young engineers and lawyers, try to distill highly complex issues into simple yes-or-no rules. Then the company outsources much of the actual post-by-post moderation to companies that enlist largely unskilled workers, many hired out of call centers.

Those moderators, at times relying on Google Translate, have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to “jihad,” for example, forbidden? When is a “crying laughter” emoji a warning sign?

Moderators express frustration at rules they say don’t always make sense and sometimes require them to leave up posts they fear could lead to violence. “You feel like you killed someone by not acting,” one said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

Facebook executives say they are working diligently to rid the platform of dangerous posts.

“It’s not our place to correct people’s speech, but we do want to enforce our community standards on our platform,” said Sara Su, a senior engineer on the News Feed. “When you’re in our community, we want to make sure that we’re balancing freedom of expression and safety.”

Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, said that the primary goal was to prevent harm, and that to a great extent, the company had been successful. But perfection, she said, is not possible.

“We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems,” Ms. Bickert said. “At that scale, even if you’re 99 percent accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.”

It’s a long article. Give it a look.

#facebook #censorship #corporate censorship #internet #technofascism

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loadthat73 · 3 years ago

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Pmd To Pdf Converter Free Software

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2020-11-28 10:23:59 • Filed to: Online PDF Tools • Proven solutions

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supershanzykhan · 4 years ago

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Event organization: How to make the process easier for your client

One of the most stressful occupations in 2017 is the event organizer, and your client must not feel it

Event organization is one of the most stressful parts of public relations. It's a job that requires a high level of concentration, the ability to multitask and a focus on detail that creates the difference between a good event and a top-notch event. Precisely because of the complexity of this work, it is important to make the process as easy as possible for the client – from the initial planning phase to the realization itself.

It all starts with a good brief

Any joint entry of the client and the agency into the event organization process requires a certain range of activities on both sides, all starting with a good brief and predefined goals that are to be achieved. If it is the client who initiates the process of organizing the event, he should know well what he wants to achieve, what goals the event needs to achieve and convey to the agency its idea as specifically as possible. A good brief allows the agency to understand its task fully. So it's very simple – the better the client brief, the better the agency will deliver a better idea.

Characteristics of a quality event organizer

At the project planning stage, it is important that the event organizer shows the client all his expertise and expertise in carrying out the agreed work. This is a priority whether it is a new or permanent client. Once built, a client's trust in the agency must not be undermined. From the very beginning of the project, the client must feel absolutely sure that the agency, i.e. the project manager, will carry out the work responsibly, professionally, in detail and precisely. The Agency must think about how to integrate the event with appropriate communication channels and tools and thereby achieve added value with what has been agreed. This step is more a sign that the agency is thinking proactively and that it does not only want to do the job, but also give one additional nuance that will highlight the event from the others.

How to make it easier for the client?

There are a number of tools used in the event organization process with the aim of quality service delivery and process facilitation:

Regular meetings and reporting on the progress of the project. It is important to always be ready for a "plan B" and have another option if the supplier does not deliver the agreed or the client changes his mind. A detailed forward plan by which the client can follow all phases of the project and everything that has been executed and what has not been done. The term plan also lists the items for which the customer is responsible in order to know in time at what point something more will have to be included in the process Detailed bill of quantities for the entire event Compile a list of items that the customer needs to confirm within specified time frames to make the whole process work smoothly Deliver visual solutions to give the client an insight into what the final product will look like "I'm not going to be a key person in the project," he said. It is desirable for a client to be present at such meetings in order not to omit key information that must be Project Cost Report Final report after the event showing whether the objective has been met Accountability on both sides

While the agency has the main task and responsibility for delivering a top-notch event, the client has an obligation to deliver accurate and timely information to the agency. The necessary things that the client needs to approve are:

Confirmation of creative idea/concept, bill of quantities and event scenarios Participation in the creation of a database of guests Briefing with event moderator, photographers, cameramen Regular meetings with the agency Partnership and feedback as the key to success

With this approach in mind, the agency, together with the client, will organize an event that will achieve a good result and predetermined goals. The partnership between the client and the agency is a formula for success, and upon completion of the project we must not forget about the feedback. Just as a quality brief is an ideal start, high-quality feedback is the ideal end of any collaboration, at least as far as this project is concerned. It is desirable if the client explained as specifically as possible what he was with and what he was not satisfied with so that the agency would better understand his needs and during the next cooperation even better implement the project. With feedback, the agency learns, progresses and grows, and the client gets even better cooperation during the organization of the next event, which he will talk about for a long time to come.

Teams Live Event Organizer Checklist Microsoft Teams Setting up devices (not webcams) If your event requires you to have your own non-Webcam cameras, make sure you have the right equipment:

Cameras

Microphones

Video absorption converter in your computer

Tripod

Drawstrings

Event Information Basic information

Title

Date

Location

Description

Invite anyone who will produce or present (including Q&moderators) as part of the event group. Wait until you create your event and have a link to an attendee.

If someone is going to share PowerPoint, invite them as a producer or presenter.

Event Settings Carefully set up access to your live event. This is very important if you plan to share sensitive information.

Select Q&A if you want to have one.

If you select Q&A,make sure that someone has planned to moderate it (and that you can make it a producer or presenter).

Make sure that the support link points to the correct support information for attendees.

Select a record available to attendees if you want attendees to be able to watch an on-demand event record.

Select a record available to producers and presenters if you want to get an MP4 record file after the event.

Invite participants Send the event link to all participants as you know – Share it on a Teams channel, send an email, share it on a website, or add it to a collaboration group.

Performance test Make sure all facilities work and the connections are solid.

Connect your Madewell (or other converter) to your USB port and try out the audio and video. Make sure your audio and video are set correctly in your device settings.

Make sure you have good illumination. We recommend that you choose a room with natural light.

DO NOT click Start during testing. You cannot stop and restart the event later – you will need to schedule a new document to send to attendees. (If you want to try this out, we recommend that you conduct a live rehearsal a few days before a small group of people.)

Check the participant link wherever you sent it to your audience.

Your link should point to the actual event. If you follow it, you should see a blue screen that says "The live tournament is not started."

Make sure that you and all presenters have content of the event that is ready to share.

Courtesy:event organizer in lahore

#corporate corporateevents corporateidentity corporateevent CorporateGifts corporatelife CorporateDesign CorporateGift CorporateVideo corpora

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joanprimmer21 · 4 years ago

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Your Email Can't Be Sent? Let's Fix It Ourselves

There is limited shortage of autoresponders available for sale. If you do not believe me, just call at your favorite online and have a look. However, there are number of that are good for the average home site owner who searching for to boost their MLM or network marketing business. I might like to review just a few things to be able to for when choosing an autoresponder or bulk email prepare.

When a computer virus or trojan has infected an user's computer, it will likely open a 'backdoor' enable hackers use the infected computer for malicious purpose the actual owner facts. This infected computer is called zombie. Furthermore, the hacker can sell the target computer associated with others and others can use if in relation to own role. If a spammer has gained an access to the target computer, it employs it to send out spam.

I did say video; most digital camera will shoot video. The Exilim, as a little older, shoots AVI (lower resolution) video. Much of the cameras shoot MPEG files which are higher judgment. smtp server gmail

A spyware is software used by hackers and advertisers acquire information a person. When visiting certain websites, you're motivated to install might be the sort of software or updates that will need and the updates you installed turn out to be spyware. Spyware can also install itself in your and it consumes memory usage and often will slow down your internet.

Because seo you check out the Internet, you get yourself a different IP, so quite often you will get a new dynamic IP, the actual reason blocked from your block-lists and you will have no capability to email.

Google Documents has evolved into a real boon. The rii the skill to upload and open Word, Excel and PowerPoint posts. Two key points - again comprise one quite simply can grow to your documents from any computer. But secondly, perform easily collaborate on a document or spreadsheet with simple 'sharing' on coursesmart. You can share a single document or maybe entire folder of credentials. Great for collaboration, bulk email server you can create word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Have you been on the site, and noticed the sales pitch you are reading never mention Precisely what PRODUCT OR SERVICE was being sold? Then you probably may have. They paint this beautiful picture about fancy cars and mansions; trips to exotic paradise resorts, and the only thing can be yours?! Umm, not quite. This type of person selling you the "Dream" of experiencing a wealthy lifestyle. The domain name of these programs are 'Multi-level Marketing schemes'(MLM), or they may be called 'Pyramid schemes'. Results in to aid recruit individuals want by feeding them the same dream an individual were fed. The only ones making a real income are the creators of the program.

There are in all likelihood hundreds of variations from this theme. I do not claim is actually because perfect on the other hand does allow me to do a thing I do in my office anywhere I venture.

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e-dash-lace · 7 years ago

Photo

It’s actually probably a little late for this because most people have already bought their laptops. But hey you know what I’m gonna do this anyway.

I was lucky when I bought my laptop. My dad was big into Microsoft and taught me to be very wary and serious about buying a laptop for college. There’s a lot to consider and it’s important to know all of the laptop jargon and everything when you’re looking for a laptop. I never got an honest student-to-student guide on laptops so I wanted to make one.

Preface: Rules for Looking at Laptops

1. Consider what you will use your laptop for first. Almost all college students will use their laptop for these things:

- Typing

- Watching videos

- Reading

- Messaging

If you plan to use your laptop for gaming or video production or photo editing, you need to consider the specs of your computer and the system requirements for the products you want to use. Consider getting a computer that has expandable storage or purchasing an external hard drive. When buying a computer, don’t forget that the operation system and preinstalled programs will take up some of the listed storage.

2. Do your own research.

Write down all the things you think you want to be able to do with your laptop. Read reviews, go to more than one store. Go to the Apple Store on a weekday and ask them questions about the laptop. I’ve found that the Apple employees tend to be kind of vague unless you pester them and it’s easier to do that when the story is less crowded. They assume that if you’re in their for a laptop, you’ll easily buy it just for the logo on the back.

3. Look for student discounts and consider a protection plan. Also consider your school’s tech store and your school’s location to the nearest specialist for your computer. Do not buy a laptop that you would need to send away to get fixed if you can help it. There’s nothing like your harddrive giving out the day before an essay is due. Apple and Microsoft both offer like a 20% student discount if you give them proof or a student email.

4. Check to see if your school will give you the Office Suite for free. Pages and Google Docs are great but Google Docs is kind of painfully unprofessional looking and pages is kind of annoying so I recommend that you get access to Microsoft Office for Word, OneNote, and Powerpoint. Chances are your school may also offer Photoshop CC and Final Cut for free so know what you can get for free from your school and the specs you’ll need to use those if you want to. In some cases you can also get these programs for free to use on library desktop computers.

5. AN IPAD IS NOT ENOUGH. Tablets are great but you’re going to HATE YOURSELF for your first all-nighter. If you want a tablet that bad, consider buying a 2-in-1 or bringing a tablet along with your laptop. I have known people who bring only IPads and they did not have a fun time writing essays.

Now that you know the rules let’ s get on the laptops.

I want to say that I don’t really know that much about laptops. Like I know the basic basics but like you know whatever. I’m gonna do my best so please let me know if there is something I said wrong or something I should add.

Processors and RAM

Processor: Your computer’s brain. How fast can your computer do things? the higher the number the better. i5 or i7 are usually the most common for college students.

RAM= Random Access Memory : How much shit your computer can do at one time. The higher this number, the more things you can run at once. This is why when you have 35 apps open on your phone it gets too hot and slow. It doesn’t really have that kind of RAM. 8 GB of RAM is usually the base but if you do more, you can go up to 16.

College Kid Computers

I’m a big PC gal so I will vouche for that real hard. But I’m trying to be fair.

There are generally five laptops (or laptop adjacents ) you will come across in college: MacBook (including the Pro), SurfaceBook, the Surface, Chromebooks, and Razers. Othe alternatives include Lenovo Yogas (which are cute as shit), Surface Laptops (I don’t believe in these because they have fabric on them but they come in cute colors), and the HP Spectre.

MacBooks are usually best for video and audio editing. They have fantastic displays and you can get great support for them on campus because they are so common. However, they have very little ventilation and even though on campus help is common, due to the way Apple likes to conduct itself, they will need to be sent away if you’re having a serious problem. They can also get expensive so don’t cop out and try to buy a cheap model with low storage because YOU WILL REGRET IT. I had a friend who did that and she had to lug around an external hard drive because she didn’t have enough storage to do projects on her laptop. There are two types: the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The Pro is probably the better option but it costs a lot more. However, the keyboard is better and it is a little sturdier so it will probably last longer.

Surface Books are really nice. This is the laptop I have. It’s best for photo editing and like design because it has the pen. The Surface Book separates into a tablet and comes with the Surface Pen. They’re windows computers so they come with Office and if you use a windows computer at home, it’s easiest to adjust and transfer over important files. It also separates into a tablet and has a crazy nice battery life because it has two batteries. This computer has pretty decent ventilation and directs all of the heat it generates to the battery on the screen of the computer so it will not burn your thighs! However, these computers are super new so there is no IT support for them on most campuses. These computers are also HELLA ‘spensive because it is a 2-in-1. It start at like $1500 I think. Also, because of the tablet bit, they have a weird hinge that makes the computer gap when closed which is kind of ugly.

Surfaces are often considered to the best college PC. They have an adjustable kick stand and a nice keyboard. They come with the pen and they’re nice and lightweight. Since they aren’t really laptops though they don’t make good computers for lap work and again, because they’re on the more uncommon side, IT support on campus is weak.

Chromebooks are kind of weird. They’re nice and cheap which is cool but that’s really about it. There are my least favorite laptops. If you’re going to bring a desktop to school, this is a great idea because it’s simple and it will get the job done. But it cannot run anything in the Office suite or any other programs you might need for class like statistics software or even Arduino. It can only run web apps and chrome extensions. While Google Drive apps are great for group projects, they aren’t the best for writing papers and making presentations so take that into consideration.

Razer Blades are the most high end of the laptops. They are fucking MONSTERS. These are great for everything from design to video gaming. I haven’t heard anything bad about these computers to be honest. They're gorgeous machines with rainbow keyboards that come with presets for how they light up which is lit as fuck. They can run League of Legends pretty smoothly and I really don’t know anyone who has had a problem with them. I do suggest you have some knowledge of computers before you order one of these though because I think it’s more common to order them online. If you plan on playing a lot of games on your laptop while you’re in college this is probably your best bet. ALSO IF YOU WANT A DANK KEYBOARD OMG THIS WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE. The click of a Razer Chroma Keyboard is the music of my dreams.

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kaawilliams-blog1 · 4 years ago

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TPE 4.8: Use digital tools and learning technologies across learning environments as appropriate to create new content and provide personalized and integrated technology-rich lessons to engage students in learning, promote digital literacy, and offer students multiple means to demonstrate their learning.

My classroom I am teaching in is a first grade classroom at Bell Avenue Elementary School in the Robla school district. 90.8% of our school demographic is categorized as socioeconomically disadvantaged by the SARC reports. Our students are predominantly Latinx, followed mostly then by Asian and, Caucasian, then other. Our school goes from preschool to 6th grade, and we have a wide variety of support staff, including enrichment teachers, special education teachers and aids, and Hmong outreach liaison. After looking at technology at my school, this is what I saw.

-Shared Vision: I have not seen a shared vision surrounding technology school wide. However, every student at our school get technology class once a week, all classrooms have technology in varying forms in them, and the teachers on my 1st grade team meet and discuss how technology will be used across their lessons.

-Empowered Leaders: The different levels are encouraged to be leaders in different ways. One of the teachers on my team right now is being a leader by powering several different curriculum programs, giving the teachers I work with opportunity to have input on what curriculum they use in the classroom. Students at our school are also involved in student government, which allows them more of a voice in the school, and many classrooms have class representatives for the same reason.

-Implementation Planning: I have seen cooperation between different grade level teachers and the technology teacher. The technology teacher asks grade teams their opinions on programs he should use with their students, and how it should be done, giving both sides input.

-Consistent and Adequate Funding: From what I have seen, all classrooms have chrome books, the technology teacher has enough iPad for a class at a time, and he is able to purchase programs when necessary.

-Equitable Access: My school is in a very underprivileged area; however, all students and staff have great access to technology at almost all times. The school library is also open several days after school, and there are computers in there families could access.

-Skilled Personnel: This one seems to conflict itself a little at my school. Some teachers seem to know some parts of their technology well, for other parts they seem to rely on the technology teacher, and for first year teachers they seem to rely on the help of others because they did not seem to be trained.

-Ongoing Professional Learning: As I noticed for the above, there does not seem to be continuous technology training for teachers that I have seen.

-Technical Support: I have not heard of district wide technology support, however the school’s technology teacher does a lot of technology support for staff. However, this poses an issue if he is teaching a class that makes him unavailable for real time assistance.

-Curriculum Framework: The technology teacher works with each grade level team to make sure what is being taught in technology class is not only building the skills students have surrounding technology, but that the lessons also support what is being taught by the teachers.

-Student-Centered Learning: In the individual classroom I am in, technology is used more so as a way to feed information into the students. However, in technology class the students become much more active in their own learning through technology.

-Assessment and Evaluation: Technology is definitely a positive asset in teaching the academics, and teachers seem overall successful in using the technology in this way. However since I work in first grade, the students do not have a lot of access to technology themselves to aid in their own learning.

-Engaged Communities: Many teachers at the school use communication apps to have constant contact with families, emails are sent out to families, social media is used to connect with families, and a lot of the curriculum programs have stories and games kids can have access to at home to build on their learning in the classroom.

-Support Policies: I have not seen any explicit support policies in place.

-Supportive External Content: Our school makes sure to stay up to date on policies and standards, but I have not seen a direct connection between this and how technology functions in the school setting.

Focusing on my school’s technology usage was very interesting! In the Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wins article (Cuban, 1993), he states “the seemingly marginal use of computers and telecommunications in schools and classrooms is due less to inadequate funds, underprepared teachers, and indifferent administrators than to dominant cultural beliefs about what teaching, learning, and proper knowledge are and how schools organize their instruction”. Reflecting on this quote in relation to my school made me think about how a lot of the upper grade classrooms are set up for frequent technology use by students, but now all of the rooms are like that, such as mine. This is relating to how my school organized their instruction. One thing I do see a lot of at my school is using technology as a way to track students’ work and progress, and that is one thing the COSN 2017 report discusses as a benefit. One suggestion I would make for my school’s technology use is having more hands on activities with technology. The way my school uses technology reminds me of the reverse or a flipped classroom, where lectures are pre-done and activities is more about where the learning is done (Educause, 2012). I think that if technology was used as a more hands on activity for my students’ learning, it would benefit them.

Cuban, Larry. Computer Meets Classroom: Classroom Wins. Teachers College Record Volume 95 Number 2, 1993, p. 185-210. http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 82, Date Accessed: 10/31/2019

EDUCASE. (2012). 7 Things You Should Know About… Flipped Classrooms. Retrieved October 31, 2019, from https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2012/2/eli7081-pdf.pdf

(Links to an external site.)

Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., and Hall Giesinger, C. (2017). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K–12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

ITSE. (2019). Essential Conditions. ITSE.

Reflection: For this TPE, I provided two pieces of evidence. The first piece that is shown is two screenshots of a lesson I taught over zoom to a group of students that demonstrates different means of expressing their learning. In the screenshots, you can see that the students were able to handwrite their thinking and use Flipgrid to upload their graphic organizers to me. Students were also able to dictate their thoughts to me that I typed into a shared powerpoint to give them another way to demonstrate their knowledge without having to write something. This is evidence of the technology tools closing the equity gap, since students were able to use the tool to have multiple means of expressions (Hwang, 2019). The second piece of evidence is evaluating technology usage at Bell Avenue Elementary, the school I did my student teaching at. This evaluation focuses on technology use in the classroom before distance learning, which enables me to assess technology usage across environments my students are being asked to learn in; both the classroom and school and now their own home online, through the lens of the ISTE standards (ISTE, 2019).

Hwang, K. (2019, April 18). 4 ways to improve digital equity in your classroom. Common Sense Education. https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/4-ways-to-improve-digital-equity-in-your-classroom

ITSE. (2019). Essential Conditions. ITSE.

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puterimayathings · 5 years ago

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Profitable Webinars Made Easy

Webinars are a profitable and popular way to disseminate information to a lot of people at one time. It's just like an in person seminar except that it's performed over the Internet. You give presentations just like you would in person with slides, handouts, and other companion information. It is essentially a web based seminar. You can teach a class, deliver a lecture, conduct a workshop, and host an interactive Q & A event via webinar.

The technology allows event hosts to deliver their information to multiple locations at the same time because the attendee simply needs to be able to sign on to a computer terminal with Internet access to participate in the event. Usually attendees can participate in a variety of ways from chatting in a chat room, to raising their hand electronically to speech, by using a microphone.

If you have a lot of information you want to disseminate to a number of individuals or groups but don't want to spend a lot of money doing it, a webinar is your answer. Participants can join from anywhere, home, work, any country -- as long as they have a computer and an Internet connection they can join.

They are economically feasible for small or large groups. What's more, they are secure, in that unauthorized people cannot enter the webinar. In most cases the participants only have to download a small program to help them access the event, have ear phones with a microphone, the special link or password to join, and they are in.

Why Have a Webinar?

Many reasons for having webinars were mentioned above, but let's get specific. Hosting a webinar can advance your business to the next level. It can jump start and excite affiliates, and customers alike. Face it, events are fun but they can be expensive and hard to plan. Webinars can be planned from the comfort of your home office, or from any location with computer access and an Internet connection.

Lead Generation

Webinars are an effective way to generate more leads. But you'll need to book speakers that excite your target audience. A targeted topic will also help draw both speakers and attendees. By providing targeted content through a webinar platform with planned speakers you will position yourself to become a thought leader who provides credible, valuable and usable information about your niche.

To generate leads with a webinar you'll need to ask for information at registration. That information should be sent to an email marketing mailing list segmented for potential webinar attendees. In this way you will be collecting leads via your webinar sign up process. By marketing the webinar, you're marketing your email list.

Earn More Money

Another great reason to host a webinar is to make more money. Even if your initial goal is to get more subscribers, with more targeted subscribers you're going to generate more income in the long run. But, if you charge for your webinar you could make more money in an hour than you thought possible. Imagine if you sold the hour for just 10 dollars each. If just 100 people attend the webinar you will have earned 1000 dollars for the hour. Granted you have to spend time developing the event, but imagine if you perfect the event and create a series conducting weekly webinars. How will that add to your bottom line?

Advance Content Marketing

The other thing that webinars do is simply disseminate content in a new way. From one hour long webinar you can create a year's worth of content all from one event if you set it up right. Just get four to six speakers, record the event, then repackage the event in multiple ways to generate almost unlimited content all year long.

Once a webinar is over you can break it down to shorts that you use in your email marketing blurbs or as an eCourse. You can also transcribe it and create an eReport out of the event. Some people are creating Kindle books out of webinar materials. The sky is the limit with the amount of and different forms the content can take from just one webinar event.

Customer Satisfaction

Sometimes your goal is simply to improve customer satisfaction over a product. You might invite only people who have bought your product or service to a webinar that is exclusive to them. Your goal in this case is perhaps to conduct a Q & A to help customers utilize a product or service more fully.

Your objectives for having the webinar can be more than one of the above, but it’s better if you focus on just one or two objectives in order to create marketing materials that work. Determining objectives and setting goals indicates what metrics to study when deciding whether your event was a success or a failure. Having metrics to look at will assist you in perfecting future webinar events by identifying what works and what doesn't work. By doing so, you'll be able to develop a best practices manual for webinars of your own that is fully targeted to your unique market.

Choose Your Technology

Once you've decided your topic, objectives and goals it's important to choose what kind of technology you need to market the webinar, perform the webinar and follow up after the webinar in order to reach your stated goals.

Webinar Technology

You'll need to choose which type of webinar technology you need based on your goals for the event and your budget. Keep in mind that you want it to be user-friendly, look professional from the viewpoint of the customer, and fit into your budget.

To determine what type of webinar technology you want to use think about how you want it to function and what type of presentation you're going to give. Then choose the software that best fits with what you need right now. You can always switch webinar technology later.

Most webinar software offers some or all of the following features:

Break-out Sessions

Enabled to Present Slides (Power Point)

File Transfer

Polls and Surveys

Recording Ability

Screen or Desktop Sharing

Sharing of Hyperlinks

Text Chat

Tracking of attendance

Two Way Audio

Whiteboard

Ability to Charge for Event

There are many inexpensive webinar technologies available such as Zoom, Click Webinar, GoToWebinar. Each of these has various parts if not all of the features listed above. No matter what other people recommend, it's important that any technology you choose works for you.

ü Zoom -- For about $54.99 per month you can host meetings for up to 100 attendees. Broadcast to Facebook Live or YouTube, participant chat and polling, desktop sharing, PowerPoint and multiple file types are supported.

ü Any Meeting -- The non-ad supported cost is about $78.00 a month for up to 100 attendees. This meeting software has basic features such as custom registration forms, email invitations and ticketing when integrated with PayPal. You can record events.

ü Click Webinar -- Touts itself as the "world's easiest webinar software" offers rebranded systems for up to 100 attendees for 55.00 per month. There is moderated and private chat available as well as browser sharing. You can record events.

Which technology you choose will depend on your goals, your budget, and what features you believe that you need. Most of these offer a free trial so that you can try out the technology before you buy. Try the technology out well before the event, buy the technology and have a practice run on the event in advance.

Word of Caution: To perform a profitable webinar, don't try to use free software. You really do need, at a minimum, the ability to avoid advertising during your event, the ability to present slides, two-way and one-way audio choices as well as the ability to record the event for us later. While free can sound good, it's never a good idea when it comes to hosting profitable webinars.

Tip: If you don't want to deal with the technology aspects you can outsource to a Virtual Assistant who specializes in coordinating, planning and hosting webinars on your behalf. With a Webinar VA you'd simply have to give her your materials and agenda and show up while someone else handles the technology.

Shopping Cart Technology

To have a profitable webinar you also will need some form of shopping cart technology. If your webinar software doesn't come with the ability to charge for the event, or you're selling something during the event that you want people to buy due to the event, you'll need to choose a shopping cart technology.

There are many different choices and like the webinar technology, you need to understand your purpose and goals before you choose. This is the only way to know what features that you must have, and what features are optional. In fact, even if your webinar software has the ability to sell tickets to your event, you'll still need an outside shopping cart for attendees to purchase products and services that you are recommending.

Features to look for in your shopping cart technology:

Affiliate Management

Customer Login

Digital Downloads

Discount Coupons

Email Marketing Ability

Great Customer Service

Marketing Ability

Mobile Friendly

Multiple Payment Processing Options

Online Store

PCI Certified

Social Media Integration

Tracking & Metrics

Upsell & Cross Sell Features

You have many choices, but three that you can look at are, Volusion, 1shoppingcart.com, and E-Junkie are very different choices but you can probably find something that you can afford and make work for your business. Again, don't choose the cheapest thing and expect it to work for you long-term.

Word of Caution: Choose the software with the features you need and that can grow with you. Switching shopping cart technology later can be done, but if you pick something that can grow with you now, you will be happier. Choose something that has a track record of providing services long-term and has had recent updates.

Tip: There are professionals who will set up your shopping cart software for you. If you simply do not have time to learn the technology, or just don't want to, look for a Virtual Assistant or service provider who specializes in offering assistance with shopping cart technology. If you know you want a specific type of cart, be sure to check that your service provider works with that particular technology.

Mailing List Technology

You also need some sort of mailing list technology. This will enable you to keep a list of everyone who signed up to attend the webinar so that you can send them information pertaining to the webinar before the webinar, give them reminders about the webinar so they don't miss it, and then follow up after the webinar for an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell other merchandise.

Features to look for in your mailing list technology:

Social Media Integration

Double Opt In Ability

Contact Management

Subscriber Segmentation

Email Templates

Autoresponder Features

Tracking Features

Excellent Customer Support

There are a few choices of mailing list technology for you such as Aweber, MailChimp, and iContact. These three give you pretty much all the features you would expect from mailing list software. The best software is cloud based so that you don't have to host it yourself. While sometimes the thought of more monthly fees can get to you, it's more than worth it for peace of mind and easy access to the software.

Word of Caution: Mailing software is difficult to change once you get started. It's hard to get people to switch from one list to another so choose a software that can grow with you and that has a proven track record of longevity.

Tip: At the very least get email software that allows for segmentation, double opt-in, automated subscribe and unsubscribe features, and easy to understand reports and metrics. Like with the other software you can hire experts who will run your entire email campaigns for you, uploading emails, and dealing with the technology for you.

Determine Your Webinar Topic

To choose an effective topic study your target audience. It's important to understand all the demographics of your audience in order to be able to get the topic right. It also helps to be up-to-date about industry news. You can also survey your current audience to determine topics that they'd choose to attend. To get started thinking of different topics, try brainstorming some ideas by asking these questions.

What are the problems that you can address and solve that might cause them to be interested in your webinar?

Do you already have a blog post or an eReport that involves a numbered list of tips to help solve a particular problem that your target market has?

Do you have some case studies that describe client success following an eCourse or eBook that you've put out previously?

Are you aware of current trends within your industry that you would be comfortable expounding on in a webinar?

Do you have a new product launching soon?

Any topic that fits your niche audience and addresses and solves the problems that they experience will be a success. Remember always, that in anything you do for your audience, it's about them, not you. They want solutions. If you can keep that fact straight as you formulate your topic and the information that you will present, you'll have a very successful webinar.

Find Speakers & Presenters and Keep Them Organized

It's really uncomfortable to do a hour long webinar on your own. Plus, it can get boring to the attendees. So, instead of doing that find speakers and presenters for your webinar. More speakers will mean more information, plus more attendees because each speaker will attract their own audience. This works best if the speakers aren't direct competitors but promote complementary products and services to the same target audience.

Look to Your Network

You can find speakers in a variety of ways depending upon your topic. Some topics are easier to come up with speakers than others. But you can find them through your networks, and plan the event together, or you can plan the event, and the topic, and then invite people whom you've identified as movers & shakers within your target audience community. It is highly suggested that for your first multi-speaker webinar that you plan it in advance and invite the presenters.

Set Expectations in Advance

When you invite anyone to present it's important to set expectations in advance with some kind of formal agreement. It's a good idea for you to have content approval and deadlines for participants to produce. In addition, set dates for and require attendance to practice sessions. If you have open communication and set expectations from the beginning you'll have few problems.

Send Information ASAP

If you are going to use any collaboration software, or any other software that requires special logins it's important to send them to the presenters as soon as you get them. If you've received questions from your target audience from your email marketing campaigns your presenters need to know what they are. Any information that you should share, do it immediately so that the presenters have plenty of time to act on it.

Keep Open Communication

Set up a shared calendar for all speakers for the event. In addition, it will help to have a space for all information, handouts, special offers, and presentations to be uploaded. A shared Dropbox might work, or a project management system like Basecamp will work well too. Add them to an automated email list that will send out reminders and information leading up to the date of the event so that no one forgets to show up or do their part. This is a great way to put on a professionally produced webinar event.

By choosing people that you know, or know about, setting expectations in advance of them even agreeing to participate in the event and keeping communication open throughout you're sure to experience few problems with the presenters for your event.

Develop Webinar Registration Procedures

Do you understand how attendees will register for your webinar and what happens to the information once they register? This part takes great understanding of the technology that you are using to conduct the webinar. You want the process to be simple and easy. If it is too complicated people will not join. Ensure that the system works and is sending confirmations to attendees.

Create and Collect Webinar Presentation Collateral

Every speaker or presenter should be responsible for their own presentation collateral in terms of PowerPoint slides, video that they want to use, and images for all the sales pages. Set up a schedule of when each part is due so that everyone can do their part to ensure that tasks are completed on time. Have a repository such as Dropbox or Basecamp for all the information so that each person can grab what they need to complete their tasks.

Determine Your Webinar Marketing Strategy

When you decide to have a webinar it's important to know why you're having it and what your goals are in having it. You must know who your target audience is. Knowing what they want and need is an important factor in marketing your webinar.

If you don't know who your target market is, you need to figure that out before going further. Ask yourself, "Who has bought from me in the past?" or "Who do I want to buy from me in the future?".

Then, design your marketing to match. Once you've determined your audience and your topic then you'll need to get on with determining your webinar marketing strategy.

Decide Webinar Objective

Is your objective to gather leads, make a specific number of sales, increase customer satisfaction, or something else entirely? Be very specific about the objective of the webinar so that you set up all aspects of the webinar with the objectives in mind. Write down your objectives.

Set Sales Goals

You may actually have zero sales goals in terms of product sales. Your goal might be to get 500 new email subscribers. Whatever your goals set them now based on your webinar objective. Write down your sales goals.

Set the Date & Time

Choose a time and date that most of your target audience will be available. Having the time and date in advance is essential to planning a successful webinar. Try to choose your date six weeks down the line so that you have enough time to plan and market the event. Document the date and time in your event calendar.

Identify Resources

What contacts do you have already? Consider past event attendees, customers, guests and current email list subscribers. Aside from people resources, how much money and time can you spend putting on the webinar? Know in advance what you have, so that you can work within those restrictions. Write down your budget in a small spreadsheet so that you can keep track of your expenditures. Later you'll be able to include your sales from the event to track profit.

Create Your Special Offer

Each speaker should have a special offer for attendees, it needs to be created as soon as possible because it needs to be mentioned in the sales copy. The special offer should be applicable to the event and the target audience and not outside, unrelated products and services.

Write Sales Copy

Sales pages, pay per click ads, social media ads, affiliate marketing ads, etc... all need to be created as soon as you know the topic, speakers and date.

To create a good sales page and emails remember this: Intro, body with bullets, conclusion and call to action such as a registration button. Inside each areas you should have keywords. Test out different CTAs to ensure that everyone who wants to will sign up. Also include social media buttons so that people can share the information.

Create Graphics

All speakers should have headshots, a blurb about them, and information about what part of the even they will be presenting. Plus, if they are giving out any handouts, freebies, or other information graphical representations should be created. Other graphics would be banners and buttons for advertisements and images to use within your own presentation. You can ask that your presenters contribute their own graphics to the event.

Obtain Testimonials

Ask for testimonials from people who have already used your products and services or attended one of your events. Having these testimonials on your sales page with headshots and links back to their own websites will encourage more attendees. After this event is over, send a survey to people who attended the event and ask for testimonials. Do this as soon as possible.

Follow Up

The real value for you in webinars is what happens after the webinar. Whether your goal was to gather more leads, or sale more product and services you will at the very least get sign ups from people who registered for the event. Now, you can market to them via email in a way that can't be done by a one off advertisement.

Planning in advance every aspect of your webinar event from pre-event preparation to post event is an important part of conducting a successful and profitable webinar. You really can't wing it for a webinar event. There are too many things to coordinate from the speakers to the technology, to how you will follow up with the attendees.

Conduct Your Webinar: Best Practices

It's important to understand how to conduct a successful webinar. Your actual tasks will depend on your technology and the help that you have but in general these tips will be important to learn if you want to conduct a profitable webinar. Consider these webinar best practices.

Remember Time Zones

It happens that sometimes people get mixed up with the time zones and miss a webinar even if they're speakers or the organizer. Ensure that you understand the time zones and that your computer is set correctly. You can use Google Local Time Feature to find out what time it is elsewhere. In the search box type "time location".

Remind Everyone

Using the email list software set up reminders that count down to the event for both attendees and speakers. You can even insert reminders to the speakers to "send tease to your list" or "hey today your content is due send it to xyz now please" and so forth. Reminders never hurt anyone and will ensure a better turn out all the way around.

Practice, Practice, Practice

You and the other presenters need to practice with the technology before the event. Do a complete dress rehearsal. You can even invite a special audience for the dress rehearsal to make it even more complete with audience participation.

Test the Technology

Ensure that you have good Internet service and that your speakers understand the Internet requirements. Often, using wireless can mess up VOIP, sometimes it's okay. It depends on what technology you chose. Read their requirements and conduct a test to ensure it works. Test your local tech too, such as your speakers, ear phones, desk top and anything else you plan to use during the presentation.

Choose a Moderator

This can be your webinar specialist, you, or someone else who is good at time management. The moderator is going to be responsible for ensuring that everyone sticks to their time limits and Q & A doesn't get too carried away. Sometimes moderators are also in charge of technology, so be sure that everyone knows what they're doing.

Google My classroom Video training guide

Provide an Agenda

In one of your reminders before the event provide an agenda to the attendees. They'll appreciate seeing what is going to happen during the event and it will get them excited to attend.

Start on Time

All speakers and presenters should arrive early to the event even though it's a webinar so that you can start exactly on time. Guests will not like having to wait on anyone to get started. If someone is late, have a plan in place to switch the order of events. Attendees will get frustrated and leave if you wait around for people who are tardy.

Be Human

One thing that webinars sometimes miss that in person events don't is the humanity. Sometimes people giving a presentation online are more stilted and guarded than they would be in person because they are taking in the audience's reaction. With an online webinar you cannot see anyone's face. A good suggestion is to suggest that each speaker / presenter post a mirror where they can see themselves talking so that they can maintain a human connection. Sounds weird, but it works.

Use Video

Mix up presentations from just PowerPoint to other types of information by adding in some video to your presentation. A lot of webinar software today allows the group to watch and hear YouTube.com videos or to upload video to the system for hearing and viewing. This will create more interest and make the presentations more exciting.

Open Group Chat

Many webinar software offers the ability for the attendees to chat among themselves during the event. The reason this is a great feature is because it offers the social proof that other people are there attending, right now. People will feel part of a group instead of alone. This is one huge way in which webinars different from in person events where talking during the event is discouraged.

Ask for Audience Participation

It can get boring sitting there looking at a screen. If each speaker offers a short Q & A session after their presentation the audience will feel more awake and in tune to the event. Most webinar software also allows for instant surveys and polls to be performed during the event, make use of these at least once per speaker for best results. Plan in advance how many questions, or pick a time limit and stick to it. The moderator should be in charge of ensuring that the time is managed appropriately.

Get Assistance

It can't be said enough but putting on an event, even a webinar can be challenging and time consuming. Depending on your own comfort zone you may want help with the technology, or you may need help getting all the materials prepared to the highest possible quality, or both. There are many virtual assistants who specialize in webinars who are ready and willing to help.

By incorporating these webinar best practices into your planning, you'll create a situation where you cannot have anything but a successful, profitable webinar. After all, you want to succeed with your webinar.

Create an Email Marketing Follow Up Campaign

As you see, the webinar marketing strategy is not over when the webinar is over. You must follow up with both attendees and those who missed it to get the full benefit out of conducting a webinar in the first place. Let's go a little more into following up.

Most of the money making occurs after the event is over, during the follow few weeks and even years later if they remain on your mailing list. Many sales will occur within the first week of the event when the attendees go over the material, look at the special offers, and utilize their coupons. There are ways to increase sales both directly after an event, and in the later weeks and months past the event.

Offer the Recording of the Webinar

Once the event is completed you can offer the recording of the event either for free to attendees or as an up-sell after the event. Whether you offer it free or for a fee will depend on whether the event was a paid event or a free event. If it was a paid event up-selling access to the recording is a good option. If the event was free, it's better to just send the entire recording to all subscribers as well as post it on your website.

Optionally, you can offer another event as a viewing of the recorded webinar with a Q & A session after the recording is shown. This gives you an opportunity to have another quasi live event without having to do the entire thing over again. Any of the speakers could do this on their own with a copy of the recording hosting their own Q & A after.

Send a Survey to Attendees

It was mentioned earlier, but it's important enough to mention it here. Create a survey prior to the event to be sent out automatically a few hours after the event is complete. Ask them questions about the seminar and ask for feedback regarding possible topics they'd like to see in the future.

Offer an additional incentive such as a percents off coupon or an unannounced special offer or freebie to people who complete the survey. A good idea might be to have each speaker create a check list or one page of information such as step-by-step instructions for their topic then package that together as an incentive.

Send a Thank You to Attendees

Within 48 hours of your webinar send an email Thank You message. If you promised any additional information during the webinar this is a good place to include it. For instance, during a live event it's possible that someone asked for information during the Q & A that you needed to send out, do it now. Everyone will be happy that you are sending the information and that you heard them during the live event.

This is also a good place and time to send out a link to or an invite to the recorded event. Some people like watching events over again, especially if they got distracted during the event by something at home or in the office. Being able to see it again will reinforce anything that was taught or brought up.

If you made contact with any one individual that wants a personal follow up, based on the Q & A, or the survey, follow up within 7 days to be most effective. People have short attention spans, the first week after the event is very important so be prepared in advance with the content loaded into your email marketing system in advance as much as possible.

Wrap It All Up

Conducting a profitable webinar takes planning to accomplish. But, once you do one, you'll see for yourself how easy it is to build your mailing list, attract new audiences, and reap the benefits of increased profit. Whether you use webinars for training, product help, list building, or to promote new products is up to you, either way you'll discover that webinars are simple, fun and profitable.

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