#i have thought about this about a thousand times more than js ever did is all i'm saying

[mischas]

Would love to hear your thoughts on that scene in 3.01 ("you're not alone this time"). I always find it very upsetting that M has to remind R she exists, he doesn't ask how she is... somehow her trauma and everything she has been through becomes about him? Also LOVE the wordless phone call. M is especially brilliant in that scene.

I hear you! This got insanely long, like much more than you were probably expecting...

So my thing about this scene is that it's a favorite, if not my very favorite, outside of the episode's context. 3x01 tells us, not all that subtly, that Ryan wants to speak to Trey. He wants him to wake up. And I don't think Ryan even knows what he wants to say. And maybe that's reasonable, but we have to assume from context clues that Ryan thinks that because they fought it out and Trey's been in a coma all summer that they're square. Ryan tells Seth something along the lines of "I'd give anything for him to wake up" and yes that's his brother so it's incredibly complicated but also what the fuck.

The attack and shooting were intensely psychologically damaging for Ryan that summer but 1) the show never really attempted to treat it as such and 2) it impacted how he was able to identify with and console Marissa. It's pretty in character for him to keep things bottled up while she's all emotion and heart. Their similarly shared trauma is what bonded them in the first place but this was something they went through together, though having had different roles in each event. And somehow it's worse, because their coping mechanisms are different and there's a lot unsaid due to them being all-too-reliant on nonverbal communication. They are so separately traumatized in 3x01 that they've both contended that things will be okay when Trey awakes and probably not thought about anything beyond that. Ryan hasn't let himself consider Marissa's own trauma from the events because he already feels so, so bad that he brought Trey into her life in the first place. And that's not right, of course he should've given her perspective much more thought, but I think it's his way of coping. As Sandy says in 3x02, Ryan wanting to fix the situation is "the universal male instinct" rather than just sitting with Marissa and talking. The third season should've delved into this as they were trying to evolve the characters into adults anyway due to it being senior year.

As for the end scene you actually asked about (lol) I've chosen to see the scene as Ryan having seen Trey for the last time and lamenting the last real familial tie he had. Much of the Ryan we came to know is defined by his upbringing and frayed ties with his blood relatives. Trey's crimes are the whole reason Ryan ended up in Newport and I have to give that final scene credit for somehow bringing Ryan's complicated feelings toward his family full circle. I don't think he really knows what he's feeling but he's also just been in jail for a few days so he's probably been thinking about stealing that first car with Trey in 1x01 and everything that's come from it. Ryan's been confused and anxious all summer. The story he tells Marissa is an allegory for him feeling like a scared little kid again. As Theresa said in 2x23, "Trey's been kicking you around your whole life". Trey's crimes against Marissa are horrifying and I think Ryan's only way of acknowledging that was with his fist in that apartment. Because talking it out is something he was never raised to do. Ryan has alluded to basically raising himself but "It was always me and Trey against the world" is telling too. Ryan not only thought of him as a brother but as a protector. We saw in s2 how complicated Ryan's feelings are about his brother and we saw how Trey could manipulate Ryan pretty easily. I think 3x01 is an example of Trey pulling those strings again with just his presence. Him being around discombobulates Ryan so much and there will always be a power imbalance between them. Because Trey has the ability to make Ryan feel like a scared little kid.

Ryan sharing the story with Marissa means a lot because we never see him share much about his home life beyond little comments to Seth and an anecdote here and there. Even though Ryan doesn't have the emotional maturity to talk through everything with Marissa, she's still the one he's closest to emotionally. And he knows she'd never judge him for feeling lost and small. They get one another in ways that are overwhelming yet comforting and it's part of why they keep coming back together. This scene promises a closeness and Marissa's "You're not alone this time" is very key in this vulnerable position Ryan's found himself in. We never see him like this, and we have to assume Marissa has seen it infrequently too. Marissa's saying "I'm scared with you, if you're that scared little kid I'm right there too, we'll be scared together" and it's so simple. Because ALL Marissa wants is to walk through this with him. Even this schtick they have of "if we stick together, things will be okay" in the first three episodes is so much clinging to the other so they don't drown. And it's not just Ryan who wants to avoid it. Marissa wasn't taught how to process her feelings or trauma either. They enable one another sometimes because they're also afraid of that same vulnerability and even culpability; it comes out a bit in their 3x02 fight (Marissa knows Ryan lowkey blames her for Trey leaving and Ryan is still very confused about those things so he doesn't even consider them and is instead defensive). It's really the last time we see them actually discuss what happened in 2x24 (2x21 is barely discussed in 3x01) so we have to piece together a few things.

But resolving to stick together isn't in itself unhealthy, and they're so so young that it makes sense that they think (or at least wish) that clinging to what they've built together will resolve their problems. It's actually incredibly romantic, and I think goes to the root of why I love them so much. They're deeply traumatized characters who see those same things in one another and are constantly trying to survive.

[honeybee-babe]

Dialogue prompts 2 for Luther pls!! "Don't leave me" "Please stay" "I'm lonely" And number ~53, the one where Luther would be saying sorry for being sick and then being delirious bc of the fever. Thanks!!

Hey babe! Finally cracking down on these! As per our agreement, I’ll do separate fics for all of them. This one ended up WAY too long and the other ones will be way shorter, I promise. I felt like I had to explain all my headcanons which is a big part of that. Now that they’re listed here I won’t need to explain them again in later fics lol.~

ALSO: This fic is a sequel to the Lunya hug fic I wrote last week, so I would recommend reading that first. It’s really short.

I couldn’t really remember how the saying sorry one is supposed to go (I can’t find the prompt list cause it’s buried on my blog) so this might technically count for that, but I’m not sure.

Anyway here is a WAY TOO LONG response for “Please Stay.”

~

Vanya was worried about Luther. The day after he told her his news, he skipped out on dinner for the first time in a month. Klaus reassured everyone not to worry, Luther was probably just having a rough day and wanted to isolate himself (still a coping mechanism for ). Klaus had met a lot of people with eating disorders during his various stints in rehab over the years.

But when Luther didn’t come down for dinner the next night either, suddenly Klaus’ argument switched to the “relapses are normal” argument, and Vanya felt the panic hat had dissipated two nights earlier come back full force in her chest. She went to bed worried about Luther.

But when she woke up sweltering just an hours later, her was the farthest thing from her mind.

Fever was the word that flashed through her mind as she kicked the blankets off her body and changed out of her sweatpants into a tank-top and shorts, stumbling blindly into the bathroom, still rubbing sleep out of her eyes. She wondered how she’d missed the signs. She’d always been pretty in touch with her body, and this didn’t make any sense.

She’d been a little sick two days earlier, but it was just your standard cold: a stopped nose, a bit of sneezing. By the time dinner rolled around, she’d felt completely fine. She didn’t even tell her siblings about the illness. She preferred to stay out of their hair when she was sick, and besides, it was just a little cold.

Or, so she’d thought. But now she was standing in the bathroom with the thermometer under her tongue, hoping she didn’t have a fever more for the sake of not having to tell her siblings to stay away from her than for the sake of her own health.

When it beeped, her brows raised at the perfect 98.6°F displayed before her. Huh. That made no sense. She was wearing a tanktop and shorts and still sweating. And it was the middle of the night, in October. There was no way it was this hot in the house. Unless…

Shaking her head, she stumbled back into the hallway, and checked the thermostat.

“What the fuck?” she mumbled to herself. Who the hell had set the thermostat to 78°F? WIth a little huff she turned it back down to the 70°F she was used to; the way dad used to keep it, anyway.

Her first thought was Klaus – he always felt cold to the touch anyway, he probably felt cold, too. She’d text him in the morning, reminding him of the existence of blankets. For now, she’d go back to her room, and wait for it to cool down a bit so she could fall back asleep. But she was stopped in her tracks by a sound from down the hall.

“Huh’KSCH-NXGTchiew! HIhhh…Hh’NXXT! HhrrENXGT-chu!”

Vanya flinched, and then immediately frowned. The tired, congested-sounding sneezes came from Luther’s room, but that wasn’t the way he usually sneezed. That was the way he sneezed when he’d already been sneezing for a while and didn’t have the energy to hold his violent explosions back anymore. And instead of his normal two, it had been four.

Shit.

Vanya had only even thought about Luther’s sneezing so much because she’d heard him sneeze about a thousand times in the past seven months. Luther had been sick five times in that time, and two of those five times, he’d ended up in the infirmary with a high fever. The last time Luther was sick, Five hadcome to the conclusion that he was immunocompromised from isolation on the moon for so long. Isolation at the hands of their father. The same thing he’d put Vanya through all her life. Hearing that made her feel sick herself.

She’d felt oddly protective of him ever since. She’d always viewed him as strong and stoic, never putting his feelings into perspective. Never been able to think of him as fragile. Now she felt like he might break.

And as she walked down the hallway to his room, stopping on the way to grab and disinfect the thermometer, she cursed himself for not thinking to warn him about her cold. And for automatically assuming he had only missed dinner because he was relapsing. She needed to put more faith in him, he really was trying.

“Luther?” she called out softly when she reached his door, knocking gently.

“Come in,” came a hoarse voice from inside.

She pushed open the door tentatively, face falling when she saw the sight before her.

“Oh, Luther…” He was buried under his comforter, curled up in a ball, and barely fitting on his bed. A giant human burrito, only his head stuck out of the blankets. A thin sheen of sweat coated his flushed face. “You look awful.”

“ ‘m okay,” he mumbled, voice gravelly and barely there.  “Dn’ worry about me.”

“Did you turn the thermostat up to 78 degrees?” Her tone was a bit more accusatory than she’d intended.

“Yeah, cause it’s freezing,” Luther mumbled, hugging his blankets tighter around his shoulders. He shivered violently underneath the covers as if to prove his point.

“No, Luther, it’s really not.” Vanya sat on the end of his bed. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah. Js’ tired.” He punctuated the sentence with a wheezy cough, the beginnings of something wet rattling in his chest.

“Yeah, right.” She gently reached out a hand to feel his forehead, which was unsurprisingly burning. He shivered profusely when she touched him, but didn’t make an effort to move. That was not a good sign. “How long have you been feeling shitty?”

Luther’s shoulders shrugged under the blankets, making the whole burrito move.

Vanya reached for the thermometer. “I think you just have a fever. Will you let me check?”

“No, I don’t. ‘M okay, don’t worry.” Nonetheless, he made no move to stop Vanya from putting the thermometer in his mouth, nor did he try to stop her from reading the results.

“103.1. Jesus, Luther. Why didn’t you-” she cut her rant off when she saw how miserably he was, looking up at her with those big, sad blue eyes. She brushed back the sweaty hair clinging to his forehead. How was his hair even long enough to do that? 

“You should have said something sooner, Spacey.”

Luther just looked down at his blankets. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

Vanya sighed and stroked his cheek gently. “Well now I’m even more worried!”

Luther turned his head away from Vanya’s touch and buried his face into his pillow. “I’m sorry.”

Vanya bit down on her lip when she heard him sniffle. “Luther?” When his breath started to hitch, she put a hand on his shoulder. “C’mon, Lulu, don’t cry-”

“Hh’GNKtchiew! Hahh-nXXGT! Hihhh! Hih… hih!”

Oh.

Vanya couldn’t help but giggle, so loud she didn’t even notice the third budding buildup. 

“Bless you. I thought you were-”

“Hh’kTSCHIEW!-ugh, sorry…”

Vanya brought her hand to her chest. “Goodness, bless you! Nearly gave me a heart attack!”

Luther finally turned his head back around and blinked tiredly at her, flashing her a sheepish little smile. His nose was running like a faucet. She reached for the tissues on his nightstand and dabbed at his upper lip.

“Thanks,” he muttered, and wheezed, which quickly dissolved into a coughing fit.

Vanya pat him on the back until it was over. “You poor thing,” she cooed. He really did look pretty run down. “Let’s get some medicine in you.” 

She got up to leave, when she felt a hand on her wrist, pulling her back Even sick, Luther could easily restrain her. It was a feeling that still struck panic in her heart, even after all these months. She turned back to look at him, eyes alert. “What?”

Luther was giving her those big sad blue eyes again. His grip on her immediately slackened.

“Please stay.”

Vanya softened again, all her anxiety fading into tenderness as she bent down so she could be at eye level with him.

“I’m not going anywhere, Lu.” She brushed his hair back from his forehead again. “I’m just gonna get some things for you, and then I’ll be right back, okay?”

“Promise?”

She booped him on the nose. “I promise.”

Luther scrunched up his nose and buried his face into his blankets, cupping them over his mouth with his hands. “Hhh’GNK-Nn’XXT!” Vanya giggled at his reaction, and even more so at the little glare he shot her when he finally lowered the blankets, snot dribbling down his chin now. She wordlessly wiped at it again.

“Okay,” Luther mumbled with a thick sniffle after a moment’s repose. “But be quick.”

Vanya pulled an extra two blankets up to his chin before she quietly slipped out of the room.

When she returned, he was already half-asleep, just barely coherent enough to accept the medicine before he opened up his arms for his little sister to climb into.

Uncomfortable as she felt surrounded by the heat that was radiating from Luther’s body, Vanya felt satisfied when she felt his arms stop shaking around her frame, relaxing into the sleep he so desperately needed.

She waited for the sound of his congested snoring to be sure he was really asleep. Then she slid easily out of his arms and out the door, making sure to ruffle his hair once for good measure and pull the blankets up to his chin one last time before leaving him for the night.

[chocolatemillkk]

Christmas Shopping (JS)

Request: could you write an imagine where joe and reader are best friends and reader helps him with buying zoe, alfie and his friends’ christmas presents. joe mentioned in one of his vlogmas vlogs that he hates christmas shopping so i thought of this, can you make it not romantic in any way pls, that they are just best friends? thanks xx

This is my first platonic imagine I think, hope it was done well! I imagine goofing off involved in a scenario like this with Joe ;) 💙

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

I drop by Joe's flat after work, a bag of takeout in my hand as I ring him with my phone in the other.

"Pick up," I mutter. I was standing outside waiting for him to buzz me in but he wasn't answering. I call him again and finally a sleepy voice picks up.

"Let me in please! It's cold and I have food?" I say.

I'm buzzed in and am greeted with a warm hug from Joe. Joe and I have been best friends ever since he moved to London and we lived on the same floor of our apartments. His crazy pranks with his friends had me helping out on a couple occasions but over time it became more than that, and now I couldn't imagine life without him.

"Were you asleep?" I set the food down in the kitchen and look at Joe's Christmas decorations. "You've finally gotten this place decorated!"

"Yeah, decided not to put it off any longer. Unlike my Christmas presents, I hate shopping for those." Joe scratches the back of his head as he peeks at all the food I lay out. "You didn't have to get all this."

"It's nothing! Back to the important thing: have you not done your Christmas shopping?!"

"It's so hard! And annoying," he groans.

"Joe Sugg there is a week until Christmas! What are you waiting for?!"

"I'm waiting for a few packages from online. And then I'm waiting for a miracle."

"Joe," I grab him by the shoulders. "You and me. Christmas shopping. Now."

"No! Y/N come on I'm hungry, and it's late! You're probably busy too..."

I was not putting up with this. Every year Joe complained about shopping for presents but somehow he managed to get very good gifts even though it cost him his sanity going so last minute. I would try to help this year....after dinner.

"Have you done your shop?" Joe asks me as I shove his coat into his arms as soon as we've finished eating.

"Basically all done, just buying wrapping paper and whatnot."

"Y/N you probably bought all your presents two weeks ago." Joe jokes.

"Actually, I started in November," I say and his expression makes me laugh. "Let's go! Off your bottom into the car!"

Joe grumbles but he follows me out. We drive to Stratford but Joe doesn't get out of his car.

"There are so many people," he stares at all the families walking to and from their cars.

"Joe, are you serious? You've talked in front of thousands of people and you make videos for millions daily!"

"Not daily," he corrects me. I roll my eyes. He was stalling so I do what I have to do. I unlock his door and drag him out. Anyone looking at the scene would probably have called us crazy but Joe and I often behaved ridiculously whether we were public or not. This was just one of those times. Once we make it in, we hit up so many shops I lose count and Joe has to borrow my arms to carry some of his load. He gets most of his friends off the list, we try on a few ugly Christmas jumpers and even buy one for Caspar. He finds a dainty chain for Jack and some lens accessories for Oli. We shop until it's time to find the big gifts for his family.

"What about this for Alfie," Joe holds out a cologne for me to smell and I nearly gag.

"That's rank!" I sputter out as I try to get a good breath in.

"I know!" Joe bends over laughing.

"You knew! I hate you!" I joke. "You watch yourself Sugg I'm getting you back!"

"I'm gonna see it coming," the prank king says smugly. I would though.

"We have to put these bags back in the car if we're continuing," I say once we get most of the gifts and he agrees so we make the trek to the parking garage and I feel so much lighter but I can tell Joe wanted to go by now.

"Tackiest Christmas item," I turn to tell him.

"What?" He asks.

"Find the tackiest Christmas item for each other. 10 pound limit though! Meet me back at that fountain in a half hour."

"I'm gonna win!" Joe shouts as he rushes off to the end of the floor. I head into the closest one, let's see...

•••

"You first!" I squeal. Joe stands with his hand in a bag and a glint in his eye.

"We forgot to say what the forfeit is," he reminds me.

"Okay, loser has to actually use the gift!"

"Deal," Joe whips something out and at first I'm lost in all the colour but then it focuses. A shiny red and green elf hat. As in it had an actual elf head on it. It came with matching elf ears.

"No way, that is horrible!" I laugh.

Joe puts it on his head, "I don't need these ears though do I?" He jokes and crouches down to put on a grumpy elf skit that has me in stitches. He still has another bag so I ask about it.

"Shh," he puts it behind him. "That's your gift."

"Ooh, what is it?" I try to peek but the top is covered in tissue paper.

"Oi," Joe covers it up. "You'll find out soon enough!"

"Fine, you ready for mine?" I ask but pull it out anyway. It was a beard made of tinsel but it also came attached with the world's tiniest hat. Joe's mouth drops open as he looks at it in all it's ugliness.

"I'd say we both did equally well..." he begins backpeddling.

"You are not getting out of this Joe!" I go to reach for him but he scurries out of the way. "Joe!" I shout and earn some irritated looks from passerbys. I go after him, dodging baby strollers and almost knocking down a few kids until I see him waiting for me. I run up, out of breath.

"We both have to wear ours," he pleads.

"Fine!" I grab the stupid hat and put it on knowing Joe was going to look even more ridiculous. Also knowing I popped into the store with the horrible perfume and lightly sprayed the beard. I make sure to take his vlogging camera from him to film his reaction. He puts it on and gags while I cry myself laughing and Joe cries too but it looks painful.

"At least none of your fans will recognise you," I pat his back.

"Y/N!" He complains. "This smells so bad!"

"I told you I'd get you back!" I say, not bothering to hide my victory.

"So you've managed a two-in-one then," Joe shakes his head. I nod, grinning ear to ear. "I have to respect that," he shrugs. Suddenly he pulls me into a hug and rubs the fake beard into my scarf until it smells too.

"Joe!" I cry. I yank the scarf from my neck trying to hold my breath.

"Nobody get the master prankster like that," he grabs my bag from the floor and begins walking ahead of me. I drop my hands in defeat, at least we were getting his Christmas shop done.

[randyk1m-blog]

This post may contain affiliate links. Florida is the perfect family road trip destination. The state is huge and has so much to offer from beaches to springs to Disney World! Our Ultimate Florida Road Trip will take you from one end of the state down around and back up to the Florida panhandle. Have you thought about renting an RV for your trip – we highly recommend it!

*Be sure to check out our FREE Ultimate Florida Road Trip With Your Family eBook below!

The Ultimate Florida Road Trip Map

St. Augustine

There are so many things to do in St Augustine Florida, it’s an amazing way to start your ultimate Florida road trip. We recommend 2 nights, but really you could stay a week. If you are staying 2 days visit:

St. Augustine Alligator Farm

You can spend hours here exploring all the different alligators, feeding them, and watching the shows. Plus for only $5 you can take your picture with a baby alligator!

Fountain of Youth

It seemed like such a tourist trap to us, but really there is more to it than just the fountain. The grounds are beautiful and filled with multiple history lessons – including the Timucuan Village and seeing them fire a cannon! The road to get to the Fountain of Youth is also amazing with a canopy of old oaks covering the street. Needless to say it is worth it to go.

St. George Street

You can end your day by visiting St. George Street. It is filled with restaurants and one of our favorite stops Hyppo for homemade popsicles! They even had a champagne flavored one. And yes, those are our dogs. St. Augustine is super dog friendly!

We also recommend checking out: https://www.historictours.com/staugustine/index.php they offer great package and other ideas of things to do in the area. The trolley was an amazing way to get around town and really learn a lot about St. Augustine. It also meant we didn’t have to drive and find parking everywhere we went.

Visit our post about St. Augustine Where to Stay:

RV Park:  St Johns RV Park – http://www.stjohnsrvpark.com/ Let me tell you up front there is NOTHING special about this RV park. And to be honest when we first pulled in we thought it might be a little shady . . . there are some permanent trailers where people live in the back of the park. Given the price we got (with Passport America) and how close it was to downtown St. Augustine it worked out great. Which is why we recommend it. We also had no problems when we were there and the staff was very nice.

Hotel: Hilton St. Augustine Historic Bayfront We did not stay in a hotel when we were there but given where this hotel is located we think it would be a great place to stay. If you stay here you could walk to a lot of the downtown attractions or easily get on the trolley.

If you are looking for a stop to make in between St. Augustine and Orlando check out Exploring The Local Life’s post below.

Ocala National Forest: http://www.exploringthelocallife.com/alexander-springs-ocala-national-forest-play-swim-snorkel-and-scuba/ Lyonia Preserve: http://www.exploringthelocallife.com/lyonia-preserve-florida-scrub-jay-habitat-native-florida/

Orlando

You can’t come to Florida and not go to Orlando. Plan on at least 3 days for all of these things to do in Orlando, Florida:

Magic Kingdom

Visit Magic Kingdom for 1 day. We have done it multiple times and really feel you can see the majority of the park in 1 day. We wrote a post about our tips for visiting in 1 day here: 11 Tips For Visiting Magic Kingdom In 1 Day Here are some tips from Global Munchkins: Disney World Tips & Tricks We always love finding unique things to do when we visit places. Check out Merlot Mommy’s post on: 6 Unique Things To Do In Walt Disney World

Plan on heading to Animal Kingdom? Our friends at We3Travel share what the best ride is in Animal Kingdom and all of Disney!

Discovery Cove is another cool place to check out: A Day At Discovery Cove.

Universal Studios

We had put off going to Universal Studios until our kids were a little older. Now that our youngest is 5 we figured it was a good time to go! We had an absolute blast and loved every minute of it. There was plenty to do with younger kids and the older ones could go on almost all of the rides. We also had a great time going to Volcano Bay and highly recommend if you are going to Universal plan a day at Volcano Bay!

Travel Babbo shares: Why We Prefer Universal Orlando To Disney World Great tips from Global Munchkins on visiting Universal: The Best Universal Orlando Tips From A Pro Have teens? Merlot Mommy shares: The Best Rides for Teens at Universal Orlando Resort

Tubing

Go tubing at Kelly Rock Springs and visit Downtown Disney. This has been one of our favorite things. The water is crystal clear and with all the beautiful greenery and perfect water it is a can’t miss destination! You start from the top of the spring on an inner tube and float all the way down to the beach. AMAZING!

You can learn more about it in our post: Tubing By Orlando The Best Non Disney Experience

Legoland

If your kids are 12 or younger we recommend also making a stop at Legoland Florida for a day. The size of the park is so much easier to manage then Disney World and in a day you can pretty much do every ride and see the shows.

Here is our post on Legoland and the Legoland hotel.

You could also look to plan a trip over to the Kennedy Space Center and maybe catch a launch!

Where to stay: RV Park: Orlando RV Resort – https://www.thousandtrails.com/florida/orlando-rv-resort/ With our RV we always stay at the Thousand Trails Orlando. Its proximity to all of the things we listed above is great and you are a little ways away from the hustle and bustle of Orlando. If you want a more glamorous place to stay then Disney’s Fort Wilderness is for you. We spent a day there and it was pretty awesome and we know other RVers who call it their FAVORITE place to stay in the whole US.

Hotel: Embassy Suites on International Drive If you are looking for a hotel and want to give your kids a special treat then stay at the Legoland Hotel. They have gifts for your kids once they complete a scavenger hunt in your room, all the legos you want to play with in the lobby and some amazing shows. Then of course there are all the Disney properties. To be honest we always look for ways to cut costs so we can take more trips and do more things. In that mindset we stayed at an Embassy Suites that provide breakfast was close to Disney – so that is always an option too.

Here are a couple other hotel options:

If you are looking to kick back with a big group or want to experience a luxury vacation home check out this Orlando Vacation Home! We stayed here for a week with friends and it was AMAZING!! Stuffed Suitcase shares their experience at Lake Buena Vista Resort Village and Spa in Orlando.

Travel Babbo shares their review of The Hotel That Made Us Skip Disney World If are looking for a few extra free things to do check out Real Mom Reviews: 5 Free Things To Do With Kids In Orlando, Florida. 

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Miami

Welcome to Miami! Miami has a very cool vibe to it. We recommend doing the following:

Little Havana

Miami has an amazing Cuban presence and vibe to it. Head into Little Havana and grab some ice cream at: Azucar and then walk down the street to see if you can hear any cuban music coming from the bar/restaurants and do a little dance in the street.

Wynwood

Next head into Wynwood and check out the amazing artwork on the sides of the building. This is an up and coming area in Miami and has an awesome vibe to it! You can also park and get out and walk around Wynwood Walls to check out the artwork and restaurants in the area.

South Beach

Go to South Beach and see what South Beach is really like! We didn’t get a chance to get out of our car due to how busy it was. But it was cool to drive down A1A and take in everything South Beach has to offer.

Miami Seaquarium

Yes they have an Orca whale – yes we have mixed feelings – but we still went and saw the show and it was a really cool experience to see an Orca Whale up close. The rest of the Seaqaurium has a lot of offer and some great shows.

Check out our post on: 7 Things To Do with Kids in Miami Where to stay: RV Park: Miami Evergaldes RV Park – https://www.crazyfamilyadventure.com/miami-everglades-rv-resort/ We stayed at the Encore RV park. We had to drive a ways to get into downtown Miami – but it was still worth it since the RV park was so nice and quiet. Plus they had a great pool, hot tub and mini golf course!

Hotel: Check out this highly rated family friendly hotel: InterContinental Miami

Another idea is to take a cruise when you are in Miami! The Carnival Vista looks amazing! If you do go on a cruise be sure to check out this great post on your family cruise packing list.

Florida Keys and Key West

Ever wonder the distance from Miami to Key West? Well, it’s about 160 miles. Crazy, right?! That 3 hour drive could be a road trip in itself! Well, now you know the distance from Miami to Key West, and along the way, check these amazing stops:

Feed the Tarpons

Stop at Robbie’s and feed the Tarpons. It is a really cool experience. For just a few bucks, you get a bucket of fish that you then feed to the large tarpon that hang out by the pier. So fun! Just look out for the Pelicans, they’re savage!

Grab lunch at Sunset Grille

This is a cool restaurant on the water that has a pool! It is a great place to stop, eat lunch and take a swim before heading on. Once you are done swimming walk up the stairs that go under the bridge and walk out on the famous 7 Mile Bridge.

7 Mile Bridge

You can’t avoid it on your way down to Key West, but I wanted to add it so you can be sure you have your camera ready. I love this bridge and the idea of the water surrounding you on all sides!

Key West – Fort Zachary Taylor

Explore the fort and spend time at the beach. The beach doesn’t have soft white sand, but most in the Keys don’t due to the reef but that’s OK. The color of the water and the ability to snorkel right off the beach make up for it! There is also a small restaurant here where you can grab lunch and a beer.

Key West – Mallory Square

Then head to Mallory Square for the Sunset Celebration. There are a variety of fun shows for the whole family. Yes, some of the comments can be a little crude (they do try really hard to make it family friendly) – but normally will go right over your kids head. We were able to drink from a coconut and enjoy some great food too.

Key West – Fury Ultimate Adventure

The Fury Ultimate Adventure is one of our favorite things we have done! Spend 6 hours on a large catamaran where they feed you all day and provide all you can drink soda plus beer and wine at the end the end of the trip. While you snorkel, parasail, jet ski and play on huge inflatables in the middle of the ocean. Such an amazing time!!

You can learn more at our post: The 4 Best Water Activities With Kids In Key West.

Key West – Dry Tortugas

If you can fit it in take the boat ride out to the Dry Tortugas. It is an amazing and magical place. Seriously, it is an island 70 miles off of Key West with the bluest water you have ever seen and a beach filled with conch shells. And the fort offers the best photo opportunities. Get Dramamine and be prepared for the long and bumpy boat ride.

Here is our post on it: Dry Tortugas – One For The Bucket List Or if you have enough time, plan on camping on the Dry Tortugas! We didn’t get a chance to do it but it is on our list to go back and stay for a few nights. Here is a post from a family of 5, Currently Wandering, who spent a few days on the Tortugas (lucky!): Family Camping In Dry Tortugas National Park You can check out: https://www.historictours.com/keywest/index.php for more ideas and discounted packages on things to do in Key West. We really enjoyed the aquarium and the kids loved being able to feed the sharks!

We spent 2 1/2 months in the Florida Keys. You can check out all of our posts on our time there on our: Florida Keys page.

Check out We3Travel’s post: Family Fun In The Florida Keys to learn more as well!

Where To Stay: RV Park: Boyds Campground – https://www.boydscampground.com/ We haven’t stayed here but we have heard if you want to be close to Key West this is a great place to stay with your RV. If you are looking for a less expensive option and somewhere that is in a quieter location, we recommend Sunshine Key – which is where we stayed. It is a good 90 minute drive into Key West so be prepared for that. Or if you can get in the Bahia Honda State Park is amazing – especially if you get right on the water.

Hotel: Casa Marina Resort, in Key West. The property is beautiful and not right in the middle of downtown Key West – which we think is a great fit for being with a family in Key West.

If you can stay in the Keys for longer we also recommend Hawks Cay! The only problem with staying here is you won’t want to leave but will instead want to stay at the hotel and enjoy all the amenities. So for a road trip it would be great for a couple day break but we really recommend it if you are looking for a week long stay in one place.

Everglades National Park

Shark Valley

Make a stop at the Shark Valley Visitor Center in the northern end of the Everglades and take a tram ride (may have to buy tickets well ahead of time for this) or if you have your bikes or want to rent them you can take the 15 mile bike ride into Shark Valley – which we recommend! You don’t need tickets to do the biking.

You can learn more about the tram and about renting bicycles here: http://www.sharkvalleytramtours.com/.

It is one amazing and wild ride as you pedal right past gigantic alligators!!! And depending on the weather you may even be riding through rain puddles with alligators sitting right in them. Once you reach the lookout you can climb to the top and have an amazing view of the Everglades. At 15 miles round trip it is a long ride, but the path is paved and flat – but like in our case – if it is windy, it can be challenging.

Be prepared when you get to Shark Valley Visitor Center that there may be a line to get into the parking lot. They have a small parking lot and they only let so many people in. We just sat in our car and waited our turn. It took about 20 minutes or so. A few other people parked on the road outside the entrance. If you have your bikes I recommend waiting for a spot in the lot since you will be there a while.

Check out our post on Shark Valley here: 7 Things To Do With Kids in Miami.

Where to Stay: RV Park: If you are up for National Park Camping we recommend Midway Campground  https://www.nps.gov/bicy/planyourvisit/midway-campground.htm It is a 21 minute drive from there to Shark Valley.

Hotel: Best Western Plus Kendall Hotel & Suites We did not stay here but do to its location it would be great for visiting Shark Valley. It is about a 38 minute drive to Shark Valley Visitor Center.

Highlands Hammock State Park

Looking for things to do in central Florida other than Orlando? Stop at the Highland Hammock State Park. It is a beautiful park and we recommend taking at least 1 of the hikes before heading out. The Cyprus Swamp – Highland Hammock Trail is one of our favorite hikes. A couple of our kids were a little freaked out about it but when it was said and done everyone had fun!

Here is our post on: Highland Hammock State Park. Where to stay:

RV Park: Highland Hammock State Park campground. We stayed here and it was great!

Hotel: The Inn On The Lakes  We did not stay here but due to its location we would recommend it.

Here is a post from a fellow travel bloggers the BareNeckers about their time at Highland Hammock.

Clearwater

Clearwater Beach

Voted one of the best beaches in Florida. Clearwater is a beautiful beach with white sand and aquamarine water and beautiful beach resorts. Just be prepared that it can be very busy. If you can spend a day hanging out at the beach and then head to the main street to check out the shops and grab dinner.

Dolphin Tale

Visit Winter from the movie Dolphin Tale at the Clearwater Aquarium and be sure to take the free boat ride over to the museum that is dedicated to the movie. And be on the look out for dolphins in the ocean on the ride!

Here is our post on Clearwater Aquarium.

Where to Stay: RV Park: It is a bit of a drive, but we stayed at Lazy Days and made the 1 hour drive into Clearwater Beach.

Hotel: Hyatt Regency Clearwater Beach Resort would be a great place to stay due to its proximity to the beach! Check out these three spacious Clearwater Beach resorts perfect for families too.

Destin

Finish your trip by stopping in Destin for a day of relaxation. If the weather is going to be warm enough when you go then get a hotel room on the beach and plan on just kicking back and relaxing for your last few days. If you aren’t ready to relax Destin also offers an amazing pirate boat adventure for the kids and a dolphin cruise. Plus there is under the sea bowling and a lot of yummy restaurants in the area.

The sunsets are amazing so be sure to catch it each night you are there!

Here is our post on Destin (we have stayed twice: 3 weeks one time and a month the next and we totally miss it!).

Where to Stay: RV Park: Camp Gulf on the beach! It is by far one of our favorite RV parks and we highly recommend paying the extra to stay on the beach.

Hotel: Hilton Sandestin The hotel is actually pretty close to the RV park. You can walk on the beach to the hotel from the RV park and get a drink at their bar/restaurant. A great way to watch the sunset!

If you are looking for more ideas on Florida check out our guest post on yTravel Blog: 18 Places To Visit With Kids In Florida

Airbnbs

Another option for lodging during your Florida Road Trip, check out some Airbnb options.

Florida has so much to offer. If you can, we recommend staying for months – we stayed for 6. But if that isn’t an option this road trip could take approximately 2 weeks depending on how much time you spend at each location. You will be covering a lot of miles but it will be worth it to see all of these amazing places and to get a real feel for what Florida is all about!

Be sure to check out Passport America if planning on camping throughout Florida, you’ll save a bundle!

Want more road trip ideas? Check out our post on 365AtlantaFamily: 20+ Things To Do In Florida On The Ultimate Sunshine State Road Trip

Looking for a Florida Beach focused trip? Check out our post on 365AtlantaFamily: Florida Beaches: 25 Best Family Vacation Destinations

Want some more tips on Florida? I told you this was the Ultimate guide :). Check out these amazing Places To Visit In Florida.

Looking for another Road Trip? Check out these great East Cost Family Vacation Ideas! 

Recommended Itinerary for 14 nights:

Download (XLSX, 26KB)

And if you want to get our free eBook on the Ultimate Florida Road Trip With Your Family click the image below. The ebook documents everything in this post, along with an area for notes under each city, so you can easily print it and use it for your planning and when you go on your trip.

If you have any questions on the Ultimate Florida Road Trip, let us know in the comments! Pin this for later:

     The post The Ultimate Florida Road Trip: 31 Places Not To Miss appeared first on Crazy Family Adventure.

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Work quickly: A genomic tour-de-force reveals the last 5,000 years of horse history — ScienceDaily

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Work quickly –

Each year on the first Saturday in May, Thoroughbred horses reach speeds of over 40 miles per hour as they compete to win the Kentucky Derby. But the domestic horse wasn’t always bred for speed. In fact, an international team now has evidence to suggest that the modern horse is genetically quite different from the horses of even just a few hundred years ago.

Their work, appearing May 2 in the journal Cell, constructs the genetic history of the domestic horse across the world over the last 5,000 years by using the largest genome collection ever generated for a non-human organism. The findings identify two new horse lineages that are now extinct and suggest that familiar traits such as speed were only selected for more recently in their history.

“The horse has impacted human history like no other animal,” says Ludovic Orlando, a research director with CNRS and the University of Toulouse and a Professor of Molecular Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. “If you look at the historical record from the Bronze Age onward, horses are always part of the equation up until very recent times, connecting civilizations and impacting transportation, warfare, and agriculture. Our goal was to understand how humans and their activities transformed the horse throughout history to fit their purposes — and how these changes in biology influenced human history.”

The team responsible for this project consisted of 121 collaborators, including geneticists, archaeologists, and evolutionary biologists from 85 institutions around the world, and examined genome-scale data from 278 horse specimens from across Eurasia over the last 42,000 years.

“Such a large collection of data means that we can build a much more precise understanding of horse domestication and management through space and time,” Orlando says. “But it was truly an interdisciplinary effort because of course it takes a lot more than just DNA to understand such a story. We had to integrate all these social, historical, and geographical aspects.”

Overall, the team’s findings suggest that equine history was much more complex than was previously realized. Today, there are only two known lineages of horses, the domestic horse and the Przewalski’s horse. But the researchers here identified two additional now-extinct lineages of horses, one from the Iberian Peninsula and one from Siberia, both of which still existed 4,000-4,500 years ago. “We found two lineages of horses at the far ends of Eurasia that are not related to what we call the domestic horse today, nor to the Przewalski’s horse. They are a sort of horse equivalent of what Neanderthals are to modern humans,” Orlando says.

The researchers also found a major shift in the genetic makeup of horses in Europe and Central Asia in the 7th to 9th centuries and say this shift probably corresponds to Islamic expansions. The horses common in Europe before that time are now only found in regions such as Iceland; the new European horses after that time were much more similar to horses found in Persia during the Sassanid Empire. When the team performed a scan to identify genes that had been selected for in these Persian horses, they found evidence of selection in genes associated with body shape.

“It was a moment in history that reshaped the landscape of horses in Europe. If you look at what we today call Arabian horses, you know that they have a different shape — and we know how popular this anatomy has been throughout history, including in racing horses. Based on the genomic evidence, we propose that this horse was so successful and influential because it brought a new anatomy and perhaps other favorable traits,” he says.

The researchers found that there have been additional significant and recent changes in the domestic horse. Similar selection scans indicate that only in the last 1,500 years did traits such as ambling and speed over short distances become more actively sought. And when they looked at the overall genetic diversity of the domestic horse, the researchers found a sharp decline in the last 200 to 300 years. They believe this decline corresponds with new breeding practices that were introduced with the rise of the concept of “pure” breeds.

“What we picture as a horse today and what we picture as a horse from a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago was likely actually very different. Some of those traits that we are most familiar with are only a modern invention, and in the last few hundred years, we have actually impacted the horse genome a lot more than in the previous 4,000 years of domestication,” says Orlando.

He believes that this research can tell us a lot about both the past and the present. “Our findings show that the past is a lot more diverse than we thought it was and that it cannot be imagined or inferred through modern-day variation. But ancient DNA tells us a lot about today as well, because it teaches us about the consequences of some shifts in breeding practices,” he says. And that, he believes, can also affect the way we think about conservation and modern agricultural practices.

Of course, our understanding of the domestic horse’s history is far from complete. Orlando acknowledges that there are geographic and temporal gaps in his story. Perhaps mostly glaringly, we still don’t know when and or where the horse was domesticated. “Horse domestication is central to human history, and in 2019, we still don’t understand where it started. That’s mind-blowing,” he says.

He looks forward to filling in those blanks. “Whenever I’m asked about what finding I’m most excited about, I always say, the next one. Because this research opens the door for so many possibilities to be studied now.”

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Work quickly: A genomic tour-de-force reveals the last 5,000 years of horse history — ScienceDaily

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[coin-river-blog]

The Indian crypto community is ramping up its efforts to bring about positive crypto regulation and an end to the banking ban imposed by the country’s central bank. There are several ways Indian crypto enthusiasts can join in on the efforts, the CEO of a local crypto exchange, who has been running a popular social media campaign for the two causes, has shared with news.Bitcoin.com.

Also read: Indian Supreme Court Set to Hear Crypto Case on March 29

File Right to Information (RTI) Requests

As the Supreme Court of India prepares to hear about the country’s crypto regulation from the government, the Indian crypto community is accelerating its efforts to positively influence crypto regulation and lift the banking ban imposed by the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Nischal Shetty, CEO of local exchange Wazirx, who started the “India Wants Crypto” social media campaign, shared with news.Bitcoin.com Sunday several ways Indian crypto enthusiasts can join in on the efforts. One is to “Ask the right questions to RBI (through RTI),” he began.

Tweeting to his 56.3K followers last week, Shetty urged them to file RTI requests asking the central bank two questions. They are: “Did you have any solid data that led to implementing banking ban on crypto transactions?” and “Do you have any data to prove banking ban on crypto transactions has led to reduction in money laundering?”

“[I] want it to be a group effort,” he continued, adding that together is better than alone. At the time of this writing, several people have agreed to file an RTI; one person already has.

The central bank revealed in response to an RTI filed in July last year that “it conducted no research or consultation before the implementation of restriction in April. The RBI also responded that no committee was ever formed for analysing the concept of blockchain before the decision,” the Economic Times reported. In August, there were reports that the RBI had created a dedicated unit for crypto, blockchain and AI, which it subsequently denied.

Engage in Social Media Campaigns

Another way anyone can help is by participating in one or more social media pushes such as Shetty’s India Wants Crypto campaign. Since Oct. 31 last year, he has been tweeting to ministers daily, calling for positive regulation and explaining to them how crypto can benefit India. One of his tweets reads:

Positive crypto regulations in India will help create wealth and jobs for millions of Indians. Millions of youth in India want to see positive crypto moves by the government.

Shetty detailed, “Let’s get the attention of our finance minister whom we’ve voted to power so that he can help us. We need to present to him hard facts about crypto so that he can understand why millions of Indian youth are opting for crypto.” He emphasized, “This is a movement that can never be accomplished without everyone.”

Last month, he shared his campaign’s stats and revealed that “Every day there are 100s of retweets and likes and thousands of views.” Over a period of 99 days, his campaign generated 1.48 million impressions, resulting in 57,374 user interactions such as retweets, replies, and likes.

Participate in Meetups

The third way to help effect change is to “Participate in meetups to spread awareness of [the] banking ban and how it’s not justified as [the] ban was done arbitrarily, without any data to back it up,” Shetty conveyed.

Crypto awareness organization Blockchained India, for example, holds monthly meetups in Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. In addition, the group has held open town hall meetings in Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. The next meeting will be in Bengaluru on March 30. Urging the community to join in on the roadshow and voice their opinions regarding crypto regulation, Blockchained India cofounder Akshay Aggarwal affirmed:

The intentions with this roadshow are pure. We want to help the good folks hustling day and night from the crypto space.

Industry participants and crypto enthusiasts who attended the group’s past roadshow meetings shared their thoughts and ideas on crypto regulation for India. According to the group, the best ones will be submitted to the government.

Educate and Spread Knowledge

Two other ways that could help involve educating people and spreading the cause. Shetty recommends for anyone with friends in the media to educate them about crypto because “their viewpoints reach the government faster,” he believes. Furthermore, he suggested that anyone can “Blog about why the banking ban in India is shortsighted and hurting innovation in the Indian crypto ecosystem,” concluding:

All in all, the more Indians and Indian media cover the fact that banking ban by RBI was done without any data, the better our chances of reviving crypto in India.

What do you think is the most effective way to help influence crypto regulation and lift the banking ban? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

Tags in this story

Bitcoin, BTC, campaign, crypto, Cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency, Digital Currency, India, Indian, Nischal Shetty, RBI, rbi ban, Regulation, rti, Virtual Currency

Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects and the intersection between economics and cryptography.

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Democrats' memos about delay of GOP judicial pick for affirmative action case resurface

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=9578

Democrats' memos about delay of GOP judicial pick for affirmative action case resurface

A long-forgotten set of memos from Senate Democrats details how they sought to delay a Republican president’s judicial picks in order to skew the outcome of a key affirmative action case at the behest of the NAACP.

Yet now those memos are back in the news for a very different reason.

They were taken by a GOP Senate staffer from a computer in less-than-above-board fashion, and shared with the White House — including a lawyer named Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Fifteen years later Judge Kavanaugh is in line for a seat on the Supreme Court, and Democrats say his handling of what they call “stolen” property should disqualify him from reaching the high court.

The claims are the latest attempt to derail Judge Kavanaugh, and come after accusations that he was complicit in sexual harassment, that he’s a Trump plant to derail the special counsel’s Russia probe, and other attacks have all fallen short.

Some liberal activists go even further and say not only should he be blocked from confirmation, but he should be impeached and removed from his current seat as a judge on the circuit court in Washington, D.C.

So far the accusations haven’t appeared to resonate beyond people who were already opposed to Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, but Democrats are rallying around the narrative.

“Kavanaugh used stolen documents and lied about it for personal gain,” tweeted Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, adding that made the nominee “unworthy” of a seat on the Supreme Court.

At issue are thousands of memos a GOP staffer was able to access on the Democratic side of a computer server shared by Democrats and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee early in the previous decade. The staffer shared the memos, which detailed Democrats’ strategy, with Manuel Miranda, who was the point man for judicial nominations for the GOP’s leadership.

Emails made public at last week’s confirmation hearing show the contents of some of those memos were shared with Judge Kavanaugh, who was told they were “intel” on Democrats, or was told the information was “highly confidential.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who was among the senators whose office memos were taken, told Judge Kavanaugh he considered the matter “a digital Watergate.”

The judge said he never knew the sources of the information but it sounded like the sorts of things staffers shared among themselves all the time. He said it never raised any red flags with him.

“It all seemed consistent with the usual kinds of discussions that happen,” he said. “That just seems standard Senate staff.”

For his part Mr. Miranda says Democrats have got the facts of the story wrong, and are unfairly tarnishing Judge Kavanaugh.

He said in a statement last week that the documents were on the shared server “without protections.”

“Nothing was stolen or hacked. Republican senators should not continue to surrender their words to those with malign intent,” he said.

He admitted he and another GOP staffer “exploited” the access to learn Democrats’ plans — including what he described as “unethical conduct” in trying to subvert the nomination process.

“Among other things, the staff of Sen. Leahy met regularly with outside groups in meetings and allowed them to vote as to which nominee would get a hearing and who would not,” Mr. Miranda said.

He said Judge Kavanaugh was one of several White House lawyers who worked with the GOP staffers to confirm President George W. Bush’s judicial picks, and he said Judge Kavanaugh was “intently ethical in all my experience with him.”

“Contrary to the malign intent of Senators Leahy and Durbin at Senate Judiciary hearings, I can confirm that Brett Kavanaugh knew nothing of the source of any information that we obtained. Nor did I ever meet with him privately nor publicly to discuss it,” Mr. Miranda said.

Among the documents surreptitiously obtained by the GOP was a 2002 memo from an aide to then-Sen. Edward M. Kennedy detailing requests by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to delay action on a Bush pick, Julia Smith Gibbons.

She was considered uncontroversial and had been nominated to sit on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, just as key affirmative action cases from the University of Michigan were pending in that court.

The NAACP thought — and Democratic staffers agreed — that if they could delay another Bush appointee reaching the court, it could help them win the case.

But at the time, the way the documents were obtained drew more attention than the conduct the memos revealed.

That was also the case over the last week.

The NAACP, which had orchestrated the subversive approach to nominees, released a statement accusing Judge Kavanaugh of lying to Congress — and said they wanted to see him investigated for perjury.

“Any other course of action at this time would be an abdication of the Senate’s advise and consent role and threaten the integrity of the Supreme Court itself. The nation has the right to expect the truth from a sitting federal judge and Supreme Court nominee,” the NAACP wrote.

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How Content Can Succeed By Making Enemies – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Getting readers on board with your ideas isn’t the only way to achieve content success. Sometimes, stirring up a little controversy and earning a few rivals can work incredibly well — but there’s certainly a right and a wrong way to do it. Rand details how to use the power of making enemies work to your advantage in today’s Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re going to chat about something a little interesting — how content can succeed by making enemies. I know you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends with my content.” Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.

So, in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all kinds, efforts of all kinds tend to do really well when they get people on their side. So if I’m trying to create a movement or I’m trying to get people to believe in what I’m doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my site. One of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something else, basically try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.

A few examples of content that makes enemies & allies

I’ll give you a few examples, because I think that will help add some context here. I did a little bit of research. My share data is from BuzzSumo, and my link data here is from Ahrefs. But for example, this piece called “There Are Now Twice as Many Solar Jobs as Coal Jobs in the US,” this is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies. It makes enemies with sort of this classic, old-school Americana belief set around how important coal jobs are, and it creates, through the enemy that it builds around that, simply by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.

Same is true here. So this is a story called “Yoga Is a Good Alternative to Physical Therapy.” Clearly, it did extremely well, tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking keywords for it. But it creates some enemies. Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case. Despite the research behind it, this is frustrating for many of those folks. So you’ve created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors. You’ve also created enemies, potentially those folks who don’t believe that this might be the case despite what the research might show.

Third one, “The 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms in America,” I think this was actually from The Observer. So they’re writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around “best PR firms” and all those sorts of things. They have thousands of shares, thousands of links. I mean 11,000 links, that’s darn impressive for a story of this nature. And they’ve created enemies. They’ve created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 most powerful, who feel that they should be, and they’ve created allies of the people who are in there. They’ve also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check out.

“Replace Your Lawn with These Superior Alternatives,” well, guess what? You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else, grass lawns in this case. This piece didn’t do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms of links. This was on Lifehacker, and it ranks for all sorts of things, 11,000+ links.

Before you create, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this, and why?

So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies. But when you’re creating content, if you can go through this exercise, I have this rule, that I’ve talked about many times over the years, for content success, especially content amplification success. That is before you ever create something, before you brainstorm the idea, come up with the title, come up with the content, before you do that, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this and why? Why will they help?

One of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the people on my side, and who are the enemies I’m going to create is that the “who” becomes much more clear. The people who support your ideas, your ethics, or your position, your logic, your data and want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers. The people, the detractors, the enemies that you’re going to build help you often to identify that group.

The “why” becomes much more clear too. The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs in people, that’s a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you’re attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers. I’ve found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.

Some dos and don’ts

Do… backup content with data

A few dos and don’ts if you’re pursuing this path of content generation and ideation. Do back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion. That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world, as you go down this path, to not do that.

Do… convey a world view

I do suggest that you try and convey a world view, not necessarily if you’re thinking on the political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of things. I think it’s okay to convey a world view around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple angles of appeal.

So if you’re saying, “Hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives,” don’t make it purely that it’s about conservation and ecological health. You can also make it about financial responsibility. You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other ones. So now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.

Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs. If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that world view.

Do… collect input from notable parties

Third, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish this content, especially if the issue that you’re talking about is going to be culturally or socially or politically charged. Some of these fit into that. Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs/coal jobs one, that might be something to run the actual content that you’ve created by some folks who are in the energy space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and the political space if you can.

Don’t… be provocative just to be provocative

Some don’ts. I do not urge you and I’m not suggesting that you should create provocative content purely to be provocative. Instead, I’m urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle it using this framing of mind rather than saying, “Okay, what could we say that would really piss people off?” That’s not what I’m urging you to do. I’m urging you to say, “How can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions, data, stories, whatever content and how do we angle them in such a way that we think about who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy-in, how do we get that amplification?”

Don’t… choose indefensible positions

Second, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can’t defend against. So, for example, if you were considering a path that you think might get you into a world of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that. Likewise, if your positions are relatively indefensible and you’ve talked to some folks in the field and done the dues and they’re like, “I don’t know about that,” you might not want to pursue it.

Don’t… give up on the first try

Third, do not give up if your first attempts in this sort of framing don’t work. You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice, iterate, and do this multiple times before you have success.

Don’t… be unprofessional

Don’t be unprofessional when you do this type of content. It can be a little bit tempting when you’re framing things in terms of, “How do I make enemies out of this?” to get on the attack. That is not necessary. I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it from a non-attack vector mode.

Don’t… sweat the Haterade

Don’t forget that if you’re getting some Haterade for the content you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the Haterade online, they run. They think, “Okay, we’ve done something wrong.” That’s actually not the case. In my experience, that means you’re doing something right. You’re building something special. People don’t tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations for no reason. They do so because they’re a threat.

If you’ve created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something special for your allies and the people on your side. That means you’re doing something right. In Moz’s early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEOmoz, for years and years and years we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.

So I look forward to your comments. I’d love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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[anonymouslyonedirection]

A little bit of NSFW and feels warning. :-]

Woman ~ Renee x Louis

it is over a thousand words so not so much a drabble but for fuck’s sake who can refrain from writing a novel for ( forever & always ) js

“I’m selfish, I know… But I don’t ever wanna see you with him.”

Louis didn’t know what the hell he was doing. It certainly didn’t feel right. The body, while in beautiful form, didn’t feel proper underneath his hands. The portions weren’t serving his senses correctly, and he doubted they would satisfy; ever since he had met you, being satisfied had become a far cry from what it should have been.

As his lips parted and pushed against this stranger’s repeatedly, he should have been tingling with the burn of passion. He should have been tasting your cherry lip balm instead of the tinge of rum that he had bought earlier. He should have been aching to hear her moan and feel her swell against his body as he tangled himself with her underneath the sheets. Instead, he felt nothing.

And it should have been you.

“I hope you can see the shape that I’m in while he’s touching your skin”

But how could it have been you? You didn’t love him anymore. You loved someone else. Louis wasn’t sure how much time it would take for the heavy hand of reality to slap him back into shape. It surely should have as the burly, tattooed man he had seen you giggling at and dancing on in the bar wasn’t him. Even though he wished with all his might, it wasn’t him. That man had taken everything from Louis and was there with you because Louis couldn’t be. Louis was not good enough. That was what what hurt the most.

Every feeling you’d given him during the relationship was incomparable. The heavy heart from guilt or fear, the pleasure, the emotional weight of adoration all but left him. You were the only one that could conjure those emotions with such intensity. Of course, the one that was the most powerful was the pain. He felt so numb to everything. The only thing he had left to feel was the ache of faded happiness that came with memories of you. And he knew he was numb to all feeling but pain because there was another girl.

There was a girl—a different girl—all over him. Her lips were pressed against his throat and her body kept him steady between the wall of the bathroom, keeping him victim to the underwhelming situation. She was trying so hard to please him, to make him give in to the temptation, but she didn’t know he was too empty. It was hard for Louis to reciprocate when the person he was constantly thinking about wasn’t right in front of him. How could he give anything back when this girl didn’t have the same innocuous stare that made him want to give in to temptation? How could he kiss her neck if her moans didn’t make him want to keep going and giving until he tired completely?

If only he could get you off his goddamn mind.

Woman.  

 Evidently, this wasn’t the way to do it. As the stranger began to lower herself, popping buttons on the way and leaving kisses in her wake, his spine tingled in mere disgust. Louis was sure you did this the exact same way, but it just felt different. It wasn’t that this stranger was doing it wrong, it was just that she was wrong for him. Nothing was happening. He almost felt as if he was watching himself get blown but reaping none of the sexual benefits. There was no gratification.

God, if she had been you. That was all he could fathom. If she had been you, each kiss down his chest and stomach would have felt like bullets of desire, shattering every piece of his patience until his hands were in your hair and forcing you and your lips impossibly close to where he wanted them the most. And you would like it. You would have loved it and displayed that by teasing him further. Your hands would play with the band of his briefs and you would even giggle, tucking your lip between your teeth as if to tell him to be more patient.

Instead of tugging his pants down in heated hurry, you would take your time. Your large eyes would take swallows of him in inches which made his heart race. With you, he could always tell he meant something along with the moment without the use of words, and the thought put his heart in his throat. 

This girl, whoever she was, didn’t truly care for him. Louis could easily admit it was rightfully so, but it only made him miss you more. The kind of desire he had for you was the purest form. This was simply spite.

As the blonde took hold of him in her foreign grip, Louis pressed his lips together and closed his eyes, trying his damnedest to imagine it was you. There was no avoiding the thought of you; you were truly the only one that could satisfy him, and because that was true, he felt it best to just accept it and use it to his advantage.

What provided him some comfort was seeing the man at the bar and knowing that despite the fact that he was your date, you’d never quivered underneath his body while being overwhelmed by your orgasm. He’d probably never know of the perfection that was the little gasp for breath you’d need whenever Louis had his tongue trace the delicate shape of your nipples. And if Louis knew you well enough, he knew that the man he saw you with would never be privileged enough to know what it was like to be made for you. He’d never know how damn good it felt to roll his hips into you over and over and know there was no one else capable of getting and giving something so exhilarating and amorous.

If only she could be you… The thought could not stop itself from resurfacing and making itself more important than the current situation. If only he could open his eyes and see you on your knees in front of him. You wouldn’t just be trying to get him off. You would be reveling in the sounds he made, wanting to please him, wanting to give him something, trying to express your care for him on a level deeper than simple kisses and hugs. If it were you, you’d love him again. 

But it wasn’t you—even if it was always you that was on his mind.

[coin-river-blog]

On Feb. 19, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, Mark Karpeles, gave an interview on the Youtube show “What Bitcoin Did”. In episode 76, Karpeles discussed the platform’s insolvency, Coinlab’s monstrous claim for $16 billion, and Brock Pierce’s attempt to revive the defunct exchange.

Also read: Mt Gox Restitution Process Frozen Due to One Man’s $16B Claim

Karpeles Discusses Two Important Subjects: Coinlab and the Gox Rising Plan

Mark Karpeles is well known for his role as the CEO of Mt. Gox before the trading platform was hacked and collapsed into bankruptcy. Over the last few years, Karpeles has been through a lot dealing with the bankruptcy proceedings and his own trial where he’s been accused of embezzlement. However, at the beginning of his latest interview, Karpeles emphasized that he wanted to discuss two very important subjects during the filming.

“Considering the situation with the Mt. Gox bankruptcy there are two things I want to make sure are known. One is about Brock Pierce and these claims … or rather what he’s trying to do with Mt. Gox, which I’m not sure of. And the other thing I want people to know about is the Coinlab claim,” Karpeles said during his opening statements.

The former CEO of Mt. Gox detailed that the deal between Mt. Gox and Coinlab never came to fruition because Coinlab failed to meet the contract’s requirements. Karpeles says that the deal between Mt. Gox and Sunlot Holdings is also nonbinding because it failed to meet the approval of the Tokyo court in 45 days.

Karpeles remarks that the last few years have been “very busy” since the initial bankruptcy started on Feb. 28, 2014. From there he started working with the court trustee, but in 2015 Karpeles detailed that the Japanese police thought Mt. Gox was an “inside job” and they arrested him. The former Mt. Gox CEO also said that U.S. law enforcement has been involved with Mt. Gox case, specifically the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was “the main entity.” Karpeles says he spent 11 and ½ months in detention and during that time he had no contact with the outside world. He remarked on how he followed some of the news surrounding what was happening with the bankruptcy proceedings from inside jail, but couldn’t do anything until he was released on July 14, 2016.

A few weeks later the alleged Btc-e operator Alexander Vinnik was arrested in Greece. At the time Karpeles says he was personally investigating the missing 600,000 Mt. Gox bitcoins. Karpeles believes Vinnik’s arrest is a step in the right direction toward finding them. When the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed in the fall of 2017 there was an issue with the bankruptcy as Mt. Gox had more asset value than liabilities. But by 2018, after the price crashed, “things didn’t look so good” Karpeles noted, but everything was starting to look better when the case entered civil rehabilitation. Karpeles further emphasized that after things were somewhat solved through the transformation of the civil rehabilitation, there was “no surplus” by then.

Coinlab’s Compliance Struggle Clearly Violated the US Contract With Mt. Gox

Karpeles then discussed how Mt. Gox made the initial deal with Coinlab but explained the agreement required Coinlab to meet the U.S. license requirements. According to Karpeles, the company found out Coinlab couldn’t get compliance to run Mt. Gox operations in the U.S. and the deal faltered. He said Mt. Gox representatives tried to contact Coinlab but the business did not respond to requests about the situation. Karpeles said Mt. Gox then asked Coinlab for a timeline on how they would comply with getting U.S. licensing and a few months later they filed a lawsuit against Mt. Gox. Because Coinlab couldn’t get a license “it was a clear violation of the contract and a huge risk for Mt. Gox,” the former CEO explained.

Karpeles further discussed a few of the so-called mining operations Coinlab claimed to operate at the time, and stated:

I don’t think Coinlab ever had a running business, ever.

Karpeles then detailed how Coinlab filed the firm’s initial bankruptcy claim with the trustee which was subsequently rejected. He also explained in detail on how Coinlab filed the claim again during the civil rehabilitation and this time asked the court’s trustee for a whopping $16 billion.

Coinlab has made a claim for $16 billion.

Karpeles Insists the Sunlot Deal Is Not Binding in the Eyes of the Courts

The interview then moved on to the Brock Pierce-backed Gox Rising plan and Karpeles stated that there was no binding agreement between Pierce and Karpeles over his Mt. Gox shares. Pierce disagrees and gave his opinion on the same Youtube show “What Bitcoin Did” episode 79. Furthermore, the episode before Pierce’s appearance involves a discussion with Kim Nilsson, the author of the report Cracking Mt. Gox. Karpeles described the initial Sunlot deal with Brock Pierce as nothing more than written intentions that fizzled into nothing binding after the idea failed to meet the approval of the Tokyo district court.

“We actually don’t have an agreement with Brock,” Karpeles highlighted during the discussion.

Brock Pierce believes he owns Karpeles’ portion of Mt Gox and has plans to revive the defunct exchange in order to pay back victims.

Karpeles says Pierce [Sunlot Holdings] approached Mt. Gox in late 2013 and talked about expanding the company in China and explained he could make the exchange work over there. When Mt. Gox went into bankruptcy proceedings, Karpeles says Pierce approached the company again and offered to take over the bankruptcy process and give the defunct exchange a “good ending.” The first step was to try to buy all of the Mt. Gox shares, but Karpeles said it also required the approval of the Tokyo district court. According to Karpeles, the deal between Pierce’s company Sunlot and Mt. Gox never really moved past the letter of intent (LOI) stage and ultimately failed to meet the approval of the Tokyo district court. The LOI agreement’s requirements had to be settled within 45 days on condition of approval by the court, but a settled agreement never came to fruition within that time span.

Karpeles then responded to the recent statements Pierce had made detailing that he doesn’t want to see any surplus money given to Karpeles from the civil rehabilitation proceeds. He said Pierce was very nice to him at first and wanted to revive Mt. Gox from the ashes and even told Karpeles he could take care of the Coinlab claim. However, a few weeks later Karpeles read an article which described Pierce painting Karpeles as the bad guy. Immediately it became clear to Karpeles that Pierce was making unfactual claims about owning his share of Mt. Gox. He said “he had to respond on Twitter” to tell the public that it was not true and the Sunlot deal between Mt. Gox never moved past the LOI stage. A second letter was sent to Pierce rescinding the first LOI and Karpeles cited that the Tokyo court did not approve the deal. This would make the agreement null and void and completely nonbinding. Karpeles further remarked that he didn’t see how Pierce would make the Gox Rising deal work other than using an initial coin offering (ICO).

The second letter that was sent to Pierce rescinding the first LOI agreement. This was signed by Karpeles in March 2014 but Pierce did not sign this letter.

Brock Pierce Disagrees With Karpeles’ Analysis

Pierce appeared a few days earlier on the Keiser Report on Feb. 16 with host Max Keiser and explained he didn’t like Karpeles. “The only reason Mark Karpeles should care about who owns Mt. Gox is because he cares who potentially is the beneficiary of that potential surplus,” Pierce explained. Pierce believes Karpeles looks to gain $700 million from the bankruptcy and told his Twitter followers that the former Mt. Gox CEO appears “to be the man behind the curtain controlling the bankruptcy process.” “Pretending to be a saint all the while hoping the Tibanne trustee will score you a big payout,” Pierce told Karpeles on social media.

What do you think about Mark Karpeles’ statements about Coinlab and Brock Pierce? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Scribd, What Bitcoin Did episode 78, Youtube, Goxxdoxx, and Pixabay.

Verify and track bitcoin cash transactions on our BCH Block Explorer, the best of its kind anywhere in the world. Also, keep up with your holdings, BCH, and other coins, on our market charts at Satoshi’s Pulse, another original and free service from Bitcoin.com.

Tags in this story

Bankruptcy, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core, Brock Pierce, BTC, civil rehabilitation, claims, Coinlab claim, creditors, Empty Gox, GOX Rising, ICO, Letter of Intent, LOI, Mark Karpeles, Mt Gox, Mt Gox Claims, Mt. Gox shares, N-Featured, Peter Vessenes, Sunlot Holdings, Tokyo Court, Trustee, Twitter

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written thousands of articles for news.Bitcoin.com about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

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[toothextract]

How Content Can Succeed By Making Enemies – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Getting readers on board with your ideas isn’t the only way to achieve content success. Sometimes, stirring up a little controversy and earning a few rivals can work incredibly well — but there’s certainly a right and a wrong way to do it. Rand details how to use the power of making enemies work to your advantage in today’s Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re going to chat about something a little interesting — how content can succeed by making enemies. I know you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends with my content.” Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.

So, in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all kinds, efforts of all kinds tend to do really well when they get people on their side. So if I’m trying to create a movement or I’m trying to get people to believe in what I’m doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my site. One of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something else, basically try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.

A few examples of content that makes enemies & allies

I’ll give you a few examples, because I think that will help add some context here. I did a little bit of research. My share data is from BuzzSumo, and my link data here is from Ahrefs. But for example, this piece called “There Are Now Twice as Many Solar Jobs as Coal Jobs in the US,” this is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies. It makes enemies with sort of this classic, old-school Americana belief set around how important coal jobs are, and it creates, through the enemy that it builds around that, simply by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.

Same is true here. So this is a story called “Yoga Is a Good Alternative to Physical Therapy.” Clearly, it did extremely well, tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking keywords for it. But it creates some enemies. Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case. Despite the research behind it, this is frustrating for many of those folks. So you’ve created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors. You’ve also created enemies, potentially those folks who don’t believe that this might be the case despite what the research might show.

Third one, “The 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms in America,” I think this was actually from The Observer. So they’re writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around “best PR firms” and all those sorts of things. They have thousands of shares, thousands of links. I mean 11,000 links, that’s darn impressive for a story of this nature. And they’ve created enemies. They’ve created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 most powerful, who feel that they should be, and they’ve created allies of the people who are in there. They’ve also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check out.

“Replace Your Lawn with These Superior Alternatives,” well, guess what? You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else, grass lawns in this case. This piece didn’t do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms of links. This was on Lifehacker, and it ranks for all sorts of things, 11,000+ links.

Before you create, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this, and why?

So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies. But when you’re creating content, if you can go through this exercise, I have this rule, that I’ve talked about many times over the years, for content success, especially content amplification success. That is before you ever create something, before you brainstorm the idea, come up with the title, come up with the content, before you do that, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this and why? Why will they help?

One of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the people on my side, and who are the enemies I’m going to create is that the “who” becomes much more clear. The people who support your ideas, your ethics, or your position, your logic, your data and want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers. The people, the detractors, the enemies that you’re going to build help you often to identify that group.

The “why” becomes much more clear too. The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs in people, that’s a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you’re attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers. I’ve found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.

Some dos and don’ts

Do… backup content with data

A few dos and don’ts if you’re pursuing this path of content generation and ideation. Do back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion. That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world, as you go down this path, to not do that.

Do… convey a world view

I do suggest that you try and convey a world view, not necessarily if you’re thinking on the political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of things. I think it’s okay to convey a world view around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple angles of appeal.

So if you’re saying, “Hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives,” don’t make it purely that it’s about conservation and ecological health. You can also make it about financial responsibility. You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other ones. So now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.

Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs. If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that world view.

Do… collect input from notable parties

Third, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish this content, especially if the issue that you’re talking about is going to be culturally or socially or politically charged. Some of these fit into that. Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs/coal jobs one, that might be something to run the actual content that you’ve created by some folks who are in the energy space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and the political space if you can.

Don’t… be provocative just to be provocative

Some don’ts. I do not urge you and I’m not suggesting that you should create provocative content purely to be provocative. Instead, I’m urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle it using this framing of mind rather than saying, “Okay, what could we say that would really piss people off?” That’s not what I’m urging you to do. I’m urging you to say, “How can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions, data, stories, whatever content and how do we angle them in such a way that we think about who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy-in, how do we get that amplification?”

Don’t… choose indefensible positions

Second, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can’t defend against. So, for example, if you were considering a path that you think might get you into a world of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that. Likewise, if your positions are relatively indefensible and you’ve talked to some folks in the field and done the dues and they’re like, “I don’t know about that,” you might not want to pursue it.

Don’t… give up on the first try

Third, do not give up if your first attempts in this sort of framing don’t work. You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice, iterate, and do this multiple times before you have success.

Don’t… be unprofessional

Don’t be unprofessional when you do this type of content. It can be a little bit tempting when you’re framing things in terms of, “How do I make enemies out of this?” to get on the attack. That is not necessary. I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it from a non-attack vector mode.

Don’t… sweat the Haterade

Don’t forget that if you’re getting some Haterade for the content you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the Haterade online, they run. They think, “Okay, we’ve done something wrong.” That’s actually not the case. In my experience, that means you’re doing something right. You’re building something special. People don’t tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations for no reason. They do so because they’re a threat.

If you’ve created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something special for your allies and the people on your side. That means you’re doing something right. In Moz’s early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEOmoz, for years and years and years we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.

So I look forward to your comments. I’d love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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