#i really missed seeing them like this in producer mode altogether

[wordswhisperinthedark]

I LOVE THEM SO MUCH💛😭

[bladekindeyewear]

Boots reads Homestuck Epilogue(s) Part 7 - Meat Page 26

==>

Back on to Jade swimming into the singularity or something.  (And trying to stop thinking that maybe Candy ends with a giant polyamorous relationship and/or orgy, because I don’t imagine Rose would have acted so tamely if that’s what she saw.)

Yes, Time is the complement of Space, that was already confirmed in comic if it wasn’t super incredibly obvious all along anyway.

Gah, I’m getting stomach cramps again.

Yeah, too much Space makes Time invisible and vice versa? Or...

Maybe Dave broke her heart a little, and he keeps doing it too, no matter how many different timelines they try out.

D:

God damnit these CRAMPS.  Reading further.

Like a garden, where Jade used to spend so much of her time with her hands in the earth and her head in the clouds, dreaming about flowers that bloomed in six colors and grew when she played them a song. Was that real? It’s hard to tell. But it made her happy, didn’t it?

FUCK are you going to start making me doubt the reality of the liFe we saw her living early in-comic?????  Cut it out, it’s unsettling!

Alright, alt!Callie is taking the reins from Dirk on this narrative he so smugly thought he could completely consume.  That’s good/bad.

slutty adult Jade

FUCKING YIKES!! FUCK YOU DIRK!

FUCK I DIDN’T NEED HER DEATH DESCRIBED IN SUCH DETAIL EITHER.  Also alt!Callie’s really embodying Death here.

==>

Pff.  Calliope’s writing the story now, in a sense, like she always kind of wanted.

Also pff, this version of her doesn’t know how to describe human stuff colorfully.  :)

An adversarial dichotomy between your opposing goals, huh?  This might end up as a “none of us can really write the ending” ending that DOES leave it up in the air for everyone else to decide instead.

Fuck, now you’re having THIS Jade suffer by proxy by experiencing the other Jade’s memories.  This metatextual ascension’s happening to everyone isn’t it.

Yeah, she’s done it before and stuff--

when jade turns to look at roxy, her eyes are completely black.

FUCK.

my presence shall mitigate, if not altogether subdue, the corrosive effect on reality and the will of its occupants by those who would manipulate the way events are telegraphed for their own megalomaniacal objectives.

Well, fuck.  Jade’s been temporarily hijacked for the rest of the story AGAIN, like back in Condesce days, this time as a plot device to keep Dirk from overreaching with his god powers and stepping over everyone’s wills like an Ultimate Riddle style villain.  Dirk, I mean.  Being the villain.  And alt!Callie just doing what she has to to put this back on track.  Man I HATE it when Jade’s will doesn’t get to be on full display.  Her will is awesome.  (Also, alt!Callie just tacitly confirmed that the will of reality’s occupants matters, if that wasn’t obvious already, so ha.)

despite his pretensions to a greater design, the prince of heart cannot be allowed to continue to exert unchecked control over the authoritative recitation of events on this side of my horizon. it cannot be overstated the extent to which he represents a threat to the continued existence of both this world and corporeal life itself.

Yeah, it was indeed looking that way earlier.

Ooh, alt!Callie is really spot-on with her pronoun use.

Alright, Dirk’s voice is shrinking away, and my stomach still feels half-clenched.

Wow, alt!Callie’s really mad at what Dirk’s been doing with this epilogue.

==>

“EPILOGUE FIVE”?????

Did I miss the titles for one, three, and four??? Yeah there were probably there and I just missed them or something.

Pfffff, John looks/smells like shit.  :D

...too fresh??

Fuck you John for thinking Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a masterpiece.  :P

terezi tips her head to one side, with what john personally regards as a cute expression, one he believes is unique to her. whether he’s correct or not, it’s his belief that there is no one else who emotes in this manner. it’s both quizzical and mocking, two descriptors that he considers to be an apt summation of her personality as well.

Niiiiice.  Nice linguistic description of her “>:?” expression.

have no desire to interject thoughts into others’ minds, or to sway intent. nor do i see value in masking the reality of the emotions that i transcribe. this is how he feels. his mind, however, has made a habit of being less clear about his thoughts than i am willing to be.

Oh thank fucking god, I don’t have to question everyone’s thoughts anymore.  Until Dirk comes back or something, I dunno.

Oh my fucking god, alt!Callie, you total voyeuristic nerd.

he fears he is in danger of seeming like the type of creepy human male who is likely to collect large pillows bearing the illustrated images of japanese earth females. to me, this idea means nothing. but it is causing him to sweat.

This is one very relatable snippet of text.

Feed Terezi Feed Terezi Feed Terezi

WHY is the gold tooth poisonous???????  ...Wait, Caliborn affixed it to his mouth intentionally.  He had every right and motive to make it poisonous for no good reason.  Ugh.

Beep beep, let’s find Vriska.

==>

WHAT

WHAT JANE

WHAT THE FLYING FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN DOING

JESUS

Using Trickster Mode as a drug to further one’s political performance.  That’s fucking horrifying.  No wonder it was on the triggers list.

additionally, it prevents one from dwelling on any given personal problems, or the greater implications of any political statements one might make.

Pff, mhmm.

Problematic, huh?  Jane seems like the slightly-old-fashioned sort of person who thinks it’s getting kind of ridiculously silly how much people are caring about stuff being “problematic”.  And yet that stuff DOES matter, and ignoring it DOES hurt people, and she not only isn’t seeing that but is drugging herself to see it LESS with that goddamned lollipop.  Holy shit.

she turns around promptly, her body jolted by the surprise of her sudden reversal. she bends over, cradles the lollipop reverentially, and situates it carefully in a place signifying respect: atop the mantle, after clearing space for it by shoving several brittle, worthless objects to the floor.

PFFF.  Okay, so alt!Callie ISN’T above altering characters slightly from their narrative course when it comes to one of the few things she deems important.  Heh.

Having “his control of a shared vehicle fully suppressed”, huh?  Does alt!Callie only mean the narrative, or maybe Rose too with whatever weird bullshit he did to her?

Uh, “while the seer both diminishes and ascends”???  D:

--Oh, oh shit.  He was planning to NARRATIVE CONTROL Jake into going along with things.  D: D:

Yeah, Jake would want to bang all the aliens, really.

Sendificator rifle, or something like that.  Got it.

==>

How fucking long is this epilogue, anyway?????  I mean, the length is appropriate from an objective point of view, I’m just frustrated because I’m going to have to spend every waking hour liveblog-reading it until I’ve reached the end or I’m likely to fucking explode, and I didn’t want this to be my entire day/weekend/existence again AAGH HOMESTUCK YOU BLACK HOLE

anyway yaay karkat in a suit.

Alluding to assassination attempts?  What, is that red rifle going to try and fulfill that old “through the silver screen and straight into my heart” unused foreshadowing-herring from act six, or five, or whenever it was? Five, I believe.

Pff, super pacs, yeah.  Dave’s nearly as political as me now or something.  Except he actually acts on it here instead of just sitting around talking about it and thinking he’s right all the time, like me.

Wait, JANE ACTUALLY WENT THROUGH with smearing Jake??!???  Holy shit she’s lost touch.

KARKAT: SWEET BRO AND HELLA JEFF IS ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS SUBJECT MATTER FOR PRODUCING CAMPAIGN ADS! KARKAT: NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, OR WHAT POINTS YOU’RE TRYING TO MAKE! DAVE: yeah its awesome

Pfffff.

...yeah, Jake isn’t thinking of ANYTHING except Dirk right now, really.

Oh huh, Dirk HAS been as controlling of Jake as he used to be, now that alt!Callie’s pointing it out.  Just with an even more insidious mechanism.

Oh cool, Karkat’s version of the policy pitch!  :D :D :D  Can’t wait can’t wait reading

(dont lie karkat you totally know shes hot)

Pff, stop making it seem obvious that Dirk wanted to assassinate Jake for political purposes.  Heck, even if that WAS his plan it’d just be a temporary death that he’d resurrect from and then they’d try to turn it into... what, some media spin on how Karkat might have been responsible? Or a troll?? That latter part would make things MUCH more xenophobic.  I’m starting to get seriously into the politics of this.

==>

Pff, now ‘rezi’s eating tobacco.

...okay, is Terezi REALLY going to go for a real conversation with just an honest ask for one?  I don’t think so--

--aaand there she goes laughing, as expected.  At least at first.

Yep, Terezi’s wearing the shoes.  Nice date gift.

--And yep, Terezi remembers all that.  She managed to do the nigh-metatextual mind merge with her other selves WITHOUT even needing God-Tier.

Yeah, Vriska always seemed fit to abandon the kismesis you deserved when it suited her, ‘rezi.  :(

JOHN: even worse, i might have tried to fix things MYSELF! TEREZI: OH D34R GOD JOHN: yeah!!!

Yeah I cackled out loud at that.

TEREZI: 34RTH C 1S P3RF3CT 1SNT 1T? TEREZI: BUT NOT FOR YOU TEREZI: YOU DONT *F33L* 1T

john swallows a thick breath. he reminds himself that he never wanted perfection, never asked for it. and yet he feels guilty every day for failing to enjoy it as much as he believes he was supposed to.

Holy shit.  John’s survivor’s guilt from all the doomed timelines he witnessed and escaped is keeping him from feeling their victory has been real, and making his “squandering” of it gut his self-esteem too.  God damnit.

Roxy and John wouldn’t have worked out????? Hey Terezi, quit it! >:[  That’s not fair, just very plausibly and authoritatively dismissing a ship we’d hoped for offscreen like--  Oh, shit, she’s alluding to something that happened in the Candy side I haven’t read isn’t she.  She would DEFINITELY have an idea of what happened on the other side of that Choice Split with her hero role.  Fuck what am I in for

....pfff, that Callie vs Dirk bit.  It’s like revenge against Doc Scratch, which it kind of IS, really.

I didn’t expect this much time to be spent dwelling on really intimate John/Terezi scenes.  It’s really refreshing!  Making this kind of meaningful no matter whether it’s black or inexplicably red they end up with or whatever, and equally meaningful if they don’t end up in any sort of relationship at all, really.

even without the aid of a juju, he is fortunate enough to be blessed with the only true form of divinity. to be released from the prison of nonsensical inhibitions which so often psychologically hobble the more primitive forms of life.

Alt!Callie, are you causing this?  I thought you wanted to be impartial.

Okay, THAT finally brought things suitably closer to the black side of romance like I would have expected.

==>

their finger hovers over dirks number for a moment, but... no. that would not be a good idea. they don’t know why they suddenly think it’s a bad idea. it just is.

Okay, THAT shred of influence is fair.  You DID say you were going to countermand his influence, so yeah.

Good excuse to get narration of her thoughts, if flimsy.  :)

Lord save me from this fake woke nightmare.

Pfffff.  Fuck you, Dirk.  ;)

ROXY: guess ill just open the damn curtains and let some light in here

FUCK you’re going to kill JADE aren’t you???? You’re giving Jade a TEMPORARY DEATH just to deny alt!Callie’s proxy?!?? That’s fucking insidious!  Fuck you, Dirk!!! That one wasn’t a loveable joke this time, that was an ACTUAL fuck you.  This epilogue is really good at making him out to be the villain now that his powers have expanded to the narrative.

Reading reading reading...

...Huh.  Is Roxy talking about coming out as non-binary and getting advice on it?  Hm!

Alright, and she’s defs a little gay for Callie from what she’s saying if it wasn’t clear before.  If “gay” even has any relevance when you’re talking about a pair of non-binary... yeah whatever.  :)

Alright, time to hear Dave talk about it all some more I guess.

--Yep, he’s only mostly gay.  Called it.  There’s a whole spectrum.

...and yeah, I mean... why NOT let it go beyond quadrants with Karkat and never slap an official label on it?  You’re just two people who love each other and want to spend time together in any capacity, be it positive or negative.  It doesn’t have to result in anything formal unless you want it to, much less boning down or something.  Dirk, stop getting creepy with how hard you’re shipping them, that’s the fanbase’s job.

Jade and Roxy are visible from this location, right?  Wasn’t it mentioned that they live in a tower in Carapaceville or whatever?  Has Dirk successfully conned alt!Callie into having her vessel shot through?  Probably.

the ongoing corruption of his cerebrally impaired daughter.

Eewwwwweweewww

Anyway yeah here comes the plot twist or whatever...

Yeah, Callie gets it wrong, and--

......ah, a tranq?  That makes more sense and is more than slightly less evil, if still ultimately evil given his eventual presumed goals or whatever.

DIRK: Like the bitch she is.

FUCK YOU

Oh, Jade’s going to be asleep for the rest of the story?  AGAIN?!????  FUCK YOU SO MUCH, DIRK.

Jesus christ.  How long is this epilogue anyway.

Taken your leave?  From this planet???  What the fuck, are you--

Oh.  Oh shit.

When Dirk ascended into absorbing the memories of all his various split selves, did he get a heaping helping of DOC SCRATCH in there too???  Was Doc Scratch’s ambition actually for POST-victory ascension in this very manner? FUCK.  Either way, him sharing some of those memories puts a pretty unique spin on his descent into goddamn evil, here.

Reading on... oh shit, did Callie write the candy half??

==>

Huh, postcoital; we actually went there.  Cool.

Ah, she gives up on Vriska?  Better find Vriska really fast, then.

Oh, you’re really going? Or, trying, anyway.

==>

Really committed to this whole ascending to literal godhood schtick, aren’t you, Dirk?

(Hm.  Makes me almost think that this situation with Rose is going to end up with someone splitting her essence entirely in two to save her; her raw Seer-ness getting forced into a convenient vessel (cueball, wonk wonk) and herself returning to consciousness a slight bit more mortal than she was before, ie not going completely insane.  Hmm.)

Oh, “Vast Fuck” sorta-maybe-confirmed..??

Stop tacitly insulting Jake as you puppet him, Dirk.  He’s a dumbass but not THAT much of a dumbass.

beta-bitch

FUCK YOU, DIRK.

She loves you, Jake, more than anything, and you toyed with her heart. 

Fuuuuuuck you.

could subsume your entire personality

Shit, he IS trying to pretty much consume them all.  Swallow their individuality and take total control of all their actions.  All Prince of Heart on the whole world.  Dirk you need to fucking DIE.

And to love Dirk is to obey him.

There isn’t a Fuck You large or loud enough to what I feel about the mental violation Dirk is inflicting on Jake right now, and everyone else around him, and I sincerely and selfishly hope this epilogue is almost over because I don’t want too many pages to stand between this one and seeing Dirk fucking PAY.

Jake opens his big, dumb mouth to make the only important contribution to the plot he ever has or ever will make in his whole sad, pointless joke of a life.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU

Let’s hope that in your hubris your looking away managed to let him say something different or some such.

==>

You try to remember if you’ve ever been revived by Jane before. You honestly can’t recall. So much shit has happened. Maybe?

Yeah, I don’t recall either really.

The poison needling through you is antithetical to narrative relevance. You’re not dying, John. You’re being erased. Cherubs don’t fuck around. We’ve both been learning that the hard way.

Okay, fuck?  How the hell?  Is this just because Dirk says it is, or???

I guess it’s tragic, though maybe not in the conventional sense. My view is, the real tragedy with you, John, is that you never mattered all that much.

Yeah, Dirk’s first fucking rant when he took over the narrative officially was about John being a you-insert nobody average guy, and the DISDAIN he shows to everything about who John is is pretty goddamn insulting.  He has NO concept of how John managed to bring everyone together or... UGH!

even though you knew both then and now that it was the only choice you possibly could have made.

Dammit, so it probably WASN’T a full timeline-bisecting Mind split.  Just a side branch that wasn’t as likely, because just like with his Denizen, John’s will was tilted toward this part of the choice.  D:

I see how some of this seems to be going, or at least think I do... Dirk thinks that John needs to die heroically “for the good of the story”, and something’s potentially going to come in and say “no”?  That the whole reason they WON was to essentially be free of that cruel logic once and for all, and that Dirk is gonna get one hell of a smackdown for trying futilely to enforce it in their new post-victory domain??

She listens to him bleed while she smells him die.

--That, and fulfilling bits of foreshadowing for shits and giggles.  >:(

Huh, “friable”, didn’t even know that was a word.  Just looked it up; you learn something new every day.

Okay what is Dirk planning with the fucking body.

==>

Jane swept the election, of course. I told you I was going to win. After Jake’s incoherent and scandalous heel-turn at Karkat’s ill-fated rally, no amount of esoteric, three-dimensional jpeg artefacts could have salvaged the Vantas campaign. 

Ah, but is that what REALLY happened, or what you’re saying happened, about to be overwritten?

Mainly that their BFF Jade has been in a coma for an entire month. They’ve been in and out of the hospital handling her affairs. Her next of kin is listed as John Egbert, and no one’s seen him in ages. It’s like he just disappeared suddenly. Like some great hand came out of the sky and crossed his name off the big list of guys we ever need to give a shit about anymore.

F U C K  Y O U

Roxy, after all, and since her big heart-to-heart about the personal politics of queer onion metaphors, and ten stages of galaxy-braining through the many vicissitudes of the phrase “no homo,” Roxy has decided to really step up her gender experimentation. I guess at this point she’s gone beyond Stage Ten. Which I imagine is somewhat like reaching Super Saiyan 2 of gender, and then going even further beyond.

Holy crap, she’s going full Dave Lalonde.  That’s pretty sweet.

...Isn’t Terezi like obviously covered in blood and stuff?

ROXY: they stay home all day with the blinds drawn paintin some weird ass shit on the walls

Oh my fucking GOD real!Callie please save the plot.  Nuke this self-indulgent Dirkshit.

ROXY: like lotsa nasty purple blood and um ROXY: nudity???? TEREZI: >:? ROXY: yeah yikes ROXY: but MOST of it is cute stuff like... various combos of all of us being happy and gettin married and shit ROXY: anyway thats kept callie kinda busy

...This is an allusion to the Candy side I haven’t read, isn’t it?  Maybe THAT’s part of what she supplants this bullshit with.  Or since it mentions “various combinations”, she’s restoring the possibility to everything that the ending was supposed to have?

This is potentially a real fucking indictment of the idea of a narrative-driven ending when what actually mattered was the characters’ escape from said narrative.  :)

ROXY: its like theyre traumatized ROXY: and they think ill drag whatever possessed jade back into our home with me

Okay fuck maybe Callie ISN’T helping.  Maybe she’s just so worried about the alternate history she could have lead that she’s retreating into every Candy-like fanfic she can think of.  :(

What’s with the phone buzz?  The intervention we’ve been hoping for, since Dirk’s making her ignore it?

Oh cool, figures Terezi’s been hearing the narrative all along and just politely not acknowledging the fact that she hears it!  Maybe SHE’LL help unfuck this mess.  (And according to her, Roxy’s gone full “him” too!)

Fuck fuck fuck Terezi don’t listen to him go against his bullshit instead

Where, canon? Is that where you’re planning to escape back to or some such, with yourself as the author? Is that orange Andrew actually you or some BS?

Dammit.

==>

FUCK, “new body”????

The new body I’ve made for her won’t have much use for her usual ensembles. That’s all I was saying.

FUCK FUCK FUCK it IS the cueball isn’t it.  Holy shit.  That’s even worse than a robot.  FZUCZK

Okay calm down.  The Rose part of Rose can be cut away and rescued from this fate somehow, if she isn’t just whole-hog rescued entirely which would also be good.  FUCK DIRK

...look purple? What?

DIRK: What’s happening here is the best thing for everybody.

Yeah, go fuck yourself.  This shit had better be undone soon.

To finally face the truth. If Rose has been spending more time with me than you, if she���s realizing she resonates more with me due to our natural similarities and finds my presence more rewarding than yours, then what does that say about YOU, Kanaya?

PFFFF. YOU’RE GONNA BREAK UP THE PAIRING JUST SO YOU CAN STEAL HER?  HAHAHAHAHAHA NO.

Okay, after THAT page’s last bit of horrid manipulation, this can’t end in any way that doesn’t involve ages of existential and literal torment for Dirk, forever.

==>

Epilogue Seven, huh.  One last thing he wants to take care of before getting out of dodge, huh.  I see Karkat and Dave’s text colors on screen.  Is he going to try to force them to finally bone down or confess?  This would be the perfect place for his plan to get fucking stopped.

Homestuck, stop making my fucking stomach clench so hard.

That’s a hell of a disaster Dirk thought up for these guys on that stage.

Part of this whole shitshow might be to tell us that this ending, this “fanfic” of dubious authenticity of an epilogue that Dirk is giving us is how DIRK believes it would end best for everyone involved, but not how everyone else would, ignoring their wills... while also discarding the idea of the epilogue that any individual reader of Homestuck would want in favor of the possibilities he meant to leave open with the ending.

Alright, here comes Dirk NOT forcing them to bone down but rather trying to persuade-brainwash them into a relationship talk.

DAVE: so what youre saying is you believe in me who believes in you

Dave. Please.

Hey, the Gurren Lagaan reference went WAY too long unsaid.  Even if Andrew literally didn’t know a thing about said anime when he made the character designs.

I look Dave right in his mind’s eye and tell him to cut it the fuck out. He wants it, you want it, so just go for it, my man. It’s now or never.

DAVE: oh DAVE: same

I feel every brain cell in my immortal body begin to perish in real time.

BAAHAHAHAAHHhahahha FUCK YOU Dirk.

I mean, I want Dave and Karkat together as much as the next guy but FUUUUUUUCK YOU DIRK!!! I want everything you ever wanted to go wrong and shit on you.  Their equivocating soft-nearly-mance is strong enough to go even against you, who thinks yourself the narrative fucking Sun.

Oh this is fantastic

I’ve literally been decapitated and that was less unbearable than this.

YES KEEP FALLING APART

You see that twinkle? That’s devotion, you unbelievably dense neutron star of a dumbshit.

Nice callback to... what was it, Dave’s first rant at Tavros to troll him back or whatever?

radially effervescing kaleidoscope of more hot boy peckers than you could ever imagine.

Yep, DEFINITELY a callback to that. I’ll never forget the sick flow of that metaphor.

DAVE: i just keep having thoughts i know id never think

SAVE US DAVE

Dammit, near miss.

The privilege of a Strider Eye Moment is about the most earth-shattering experience a young man will ever have in his life. 

Pfff

DAVE: GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HEAD AND JUST LET ME DO THIS MYSELF!!!

yaaaaaayyy

I mean we didn’t save the whole story yet but at least Dirk got fucked over and we still get Davekat intimacy.

That’s pretty classy actually, not getting into detail and just sounding blown the fuck away by it even though he’s Dirk.  That’s pretty good.

==>

Something about the height of Rose, roughly Rose-shaped, and wrapped in a cloth. I know she’s gonna love it the first time she sees it.

Oh so it IS a robot body.  Well, fuck you a little less than it potentially being the magic cueball, but STILL fuck you.

I may have already mentioned, but I’m a bit too deft at this for my own good. Doing the thing where I tug at the part of someone’s latent thought process that already knows they adore me. That if someone would just pull the stops from their sense of inhibition, they’d realize they would do anything for me.

It’s called killing their soul with your role abilities you ASSHOLE

I hope this crush you filled him with bites you in the fucking ass now that he’s here.

DIRK: I won’t be coming back, Jake.

Oh, so you’re just going to drop the truth on him like that? Let’s see how that works out for you, asshole.

DIRK: Jane needs you now more than ever.

Oh fuck you.  This is “best for everyone”, huh?????

DIRK: You’ll just be, you know. DIRK: Her candy boy? JAKE: CANDY BOY??? DIRK: Yeah. Being on call. DIRK: Serving a multimillion-year term of giving her the right kind of “presidential action” she needs to keep going. To keep her morale up and such. DIRK: To provide her with many heirs. DIRK: Doesn’t that sound cool? JAKE: HEIRS??

Um.  What the fuck?  Is this even Dirk anymore?  It’s not Condesce intervention, I’m not going to try and suspect that just from the callback or anythiiiii-----

Fuck, we DID just get an alive Meenah dropped into a universe somewhere.

Maybe this IS Condesce intervention. Just a different Condesce.  o_O

Two ticks longer than he ever deserved.

Gah???

DIRK: But I’ll never let you break my heart again.

So this was all just revenge for dumping him??????????????

==>

Guh, back to Kanaya-- wait, why does Dirk want Terezi around, anyway?

Jade wakes up and then-- Okay. Okay my eyes flitted down to the green halfway down the page and I saw this phrase before I actually got to it.

JADE: DIRK STRIDER HAS TO BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!!!

Thank FUCK.

Anyway reading the in-between...

The scope of her awareness, she now understands, is truly staggering. Memories are suddenly accessible that are almost impossible to believe. Some of them are unspeakably marvelous to her. Others, deeply disturbing.

FUCKING COOL she got Ultimate-Selved!  Now she knows too much about what’s going on to stop her!  Get fucked, Dirk!!!!

No, more than just disturbing. She lingers in the dark recesses of her consciousness. There were things she saw, things she was told... Her mouth twists into a silent snarl. She’s been angry plenty of times before. But never so angry that she stopped being cute. She’s not cute this time.

YEAAAAAHHH JADE GET ANGRY

This had better not be Dirk intentionally riling her up since he still has control of the narrative though.

Next post.

[newstfionline]

How journalism got so out of touch with the people it covers

By Sarah Jones, Columbia Journalism Review, Spring/Summer 2018

To become a journalist, Rajaa Elidrissi knew she would need a strategy. Growing up in a low-income household in Elmhurst, Queens, she started collecting clips at age 13. “I went to a high school that was not a high-ranking high school, and I was pretty aware that it was really hard to get into a good college,” she explains. After graduating in 2016 with an anthropology degree from Wesleyan University, she knew she needed to be practical--she couldn’t afford to take an unpaid internship; she had to start working--and looked for where the jobs were. That year, the jobs were in video. Currently a producer for CNBC, Elidrissi is on a secure track, for now at least. But if the industry should pivot away from video any time soon, she’s ready. “I see a lot of jobs for social media editors,” she says, so she’s started studying content analytics tools. She knows she has to stay smart and keep moving if she wants to continue as a journalist.

Elidrissi’s calculus is familiar to me--coming from a low-income background, I entered journalism by looking for where the jobs were. I graduated from a blue-collar public high school in Appalachian Virginia, and attended a conservative Christian college because, with scholarships, it’s where I could afford to go. To get a job out of college, I deliberately built a skill set to supplement a résumé deficient in elite degrees or high-profile internships, and became a social media editor--Elidrissi’s backup career--and eventually, a staff writer. From where I sit, I don’t know many national journalists who have a background like mine. In fact, the industry sometimes seems designed to keep us out of newsrooms altogether.

Differences do separate me from Elidrissi. My parents aren’t immigrants, and I don’t belong to a cultural or religious minority; overall, society placed fewer obstacles in my path. But anyone coming from a low-income background runs similar mental calculations: How do we get into journalism? And if we do get in, how do we afford to stay in? Your background shapes your path into your chosen field. And if your background includes poverty, that path contains boulders.

The first hurdle was paying for college. So I studied very hard. I got scholarships. I worked two or three jobs to pay the bills while I was in college,” says Sarah Smarsh, a Kansas-based independent journalist who has been covering class, inequality, and red-state politics for 17 years. Smarsh comes from a working-class family, and she knew that just making it to college signaled the start of a longer battle. “I didn’t know anyone in a newsroom who was picking me out of the pile for an internship,” she says. “I convinced newsrooms to bring me in as an intern.”

“I would say the second hurdle was social capital,” she adds. “Even though I made it to college, I still didn’t possess social capital.”

Like Smarsh, I knew I had to earn scholarships, and once in college, I quickly learned that my Walmart wardrobe set me apart in all the wrong ways. To achieve social mobility, the poor must culturally assimilate. You have to dress a certain way, speak a certain way, and get to know certain people. The third is impossible unless you accomplish the first two goals. Even if you manage all three, you may not experience true social mobility. Assimilation may grant you a certain degree of social capital, but social capital does not inevitably bestow its financial equivalent. Real capital--wealth--remains the surest way to survive journalism’s fluctuations. But by entering journalism at all, low-income people agree to extend their precarity for an indefinite term.

Smarsh felt that precarity keenly when she went freelance six years ago. “I had no savings and no family financial cushion to lean on. I didn’t have a bread-winning husband,” she explains. “It was just me, and literally nothing in a bank account. Hustling. Sending pitches. Being uninsured.”

Possession of a “cushion”--wealth, again--can become necessary to stay in the field. To shore up their positions, some would-be journalists go on to advanced degrees. A lack of social capital means a need to take on debt, just to get to square one. “As a black woman, I didn’t have a choice not to go to J-school--and that’s a sentiment shared among many of my classmates. Journalism is an industry rife with nepotism, where career trajectories are determined more often by the people that you know rather than the quality of your work,” notes Slate’s Rachelle Hampton. After paying her way through journalism school at the University of Kansas, Smarsh also took on debt to earn an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University. “That might seem foolish to someone who even grew up middle-class, because of the risk inherent in taking on such debt to enter a field that hardly assures the sort of income that’s going to pay it off,” she says. “For me, in the context of poverty, it was like I had nothing to lose.”

Getting that first job is a partial victory. There are bills to pay afterwards, and collectors don’t care about your prose. But let’s say you get that first job, and then a second. And let’s say, for argument’s sake, you keep going, and now you’re based in a national newsroom or some other big-name outlet. You could cover pop culture, or review books, or turn numbers into charts. You’ll still be an outlier, working a newsroom that may consistently miss the class angle to stories, if it covers class at all.

A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project found that in 52 major newsrooms, poverty accounted for less than 1 percent of coverage every year from 2007 to 2012. “Journalists are drawn more to people making things happen than those struggling to pay bills; poverty is not considered a beat; neither advertisers nor readers are likely to demand more coverage, so neither will editors; and poverty stories are almost always enterprise work, requiring extra time and commitment,” Dan Froomkin wrote for the Nieman Center. Journalists who cover class exclusively tell me they sometimes have to convince editors that their stories are even newsworthy.

“I have heard so many times: Where’s the surprise?” Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA, says. In Rivlin’s telling, editors frequently want a sensationalistic angle if they’re interested in the story at all. “I try to tell stories of payday lending. The only way to sell a story of payday lending was a contrarian take that said, well, it’s actually a good thing. The only problem is that it’s not a good thing. It’s a rip-off.”

Other journalists say they’ve had similar difficulties placing pieces on class and poverty. Smarsh tells me she’s woven a class sensibility into her work since her first days in a newsroom more than 15 years ago. “When I started being more pointed and overt about class, even five years ago, I had a hell of a time getting the pieces picked up,” she says. “And interestingly, I found that what editors at top US outlets turned down, almost inevitably a top British outlet would pick up.”

“It became such a pattern that I did develop a little bit of a theory that the UK has centuries on us, as a society or as a political unit, in reckoning with the concept of class and in finding a language to discuss it,” she adds. “We are in a country that has been telling itself, falsely and hypocritically, since its very foundation, that this is a country where your economic origins do not determine the outcome of your life.”

Smarsh’s statement seems obvious: I know from life and from reporting that American society is boldly, unrepentantly rigged against its most marginalized members. But this fact, while clear to me, may not be to everyone else. America is wedded to the myth of its own greatness. It insists it has created a meritocracy, which it sustains through the power of assertion. This has a knock-on effect: Journalists inhabit a skewed society, and not all of them realize it. The industry therefore suffers from structural inequalities that reflect its surroundings. Women, people of color, and people with disabilities are relatively absent from newsroom leadership for the same reasons they are relatively absent everywhere. These absences impact coverage in every respect, and poverty reporting is not exempt.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Fear of Falling, tells me that even with decades of experience, she’s always found it difficult to convince editors to cover poverty. And when outlets do assign a piece, financial hardship can complicate the reporting process. “I got an assignment from The New York Times in 2009 to write a series of essays about the effects of the recession on people who were already economically struggling,” she explains, “because at that time, the typical Times article was about people who had to drop their private pilates class.” So Ehrenreich hit the road, collecting stories from working-class Americans across the country--only to encounter a financial roadblock.

“I realized I was not going to make enough money from my payments from the Times to cover my expenses,” she continues. “My next great realization was that the only people who get to rage about poverty and economic hardship are people who are not experiencing it, who have some kind of buffer and savings.”

Jenni Monet, an independent journalist who covers indigenous stories, got her start working in a tiny newsroom in the Four Corners region, where covering Navajo tribal events was part of the daily beat. “It wasn’t until I started working in places like New York City [that] I started to see the extreme disconnect that exists,” she adds. “It’s realizing the enormous amount of explaining involved.”

Those failures became particularly clear during the 2016 coverage of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Here you have the largest indigenous-led movement of our modern time,” says Monet. It started with an environmental agenda deeply rooted in race-based politics that dealt with segregation, that dealt with cyclical poverty based on government decisions that have gravely affected tribal communities for decades.

“And guess how the media responded?” Monet asks. “At first, they didn’t show up. When they finally did, it was all novelty-based. Look at this camp, they have teepees and kitchens and they cook and it’s cute!” Standing Rock, as Monet recounts it, was a missed opportunity for the national press, an inevitable failure for such a whitewashed industry, whose coverage of the intersection of race and poverty is uneven at best.

Journalists who aren’t from low-income backgrounds aren’t necessarily hostile to the poor, but class prejudice can manifest as a form of blindness. Based on my own experiences and the experiences others related to me for this piece, simple ignorance is much more common. It’s more that certain experiences, like poverty, are opaque to people who have not lived them.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, journalism’s class blindness showed everywhere: Story after story reinforced Trump’s self-appointed role as the champion of white working-class America. The vast majority of Trump voters, as we now well know, boasted an income of $50,000 or higher. Suburban America is Trump Country. Though there have been some corrective pieces, the average Trump Country profile still stars low-income whites--who, shock of shocks, still support their candidate, no matter the swing in the news cycle. These profiles don’t produce any real news, and they don’t bring readers any closer to understanding the reasons for Trump’s victory, more than a year later.

For once, it’s not so difficult to convince editors to cover poor people. But meanwhile, the other true stories of working-class America struggle to break through the noise.

It’s hard to see how this will change as long as Trump is the most popular hook. The stories of the poor possess their own texture and weight. Poverty is a series of surprises, most of them horrible; life, for the poor, means careening from one plot twist to another while the world looks straight through you.

It shouldn’t be this way. These stories deserve everyday attention for what they tell us about the cracks in America’s façade. Make it easier for poor folks to enter your world, and we’ll even tell those stories for you. We’re resilient, after all, and we make damn good journalists.

[intotheblackhq]

Isa

( Ben Barnes, 35, cis-male) Word around the quadrant is that (ISA) is originally from (UNKNOWN), but have been on the Terminus for (LESS THAN A WEEK). If you’re in a pinch, he is a talented (ANDROID). Is that why he’s the (GOFER)? Anyway, everyone says he is (CALCULATED) and (PERCEPTIVE), but don’t get on his bad side because he’s (GUARDED) and (SELF-PRESERVING).  Oh shoot, don’t look now! He has his (STUN CHARGES) out! (ooc: Ky, 28, PST, they, none) 

WORLD BUILDING:

—-> Name: The Yards

—-> Located On: Erebus, near the capital city of Keres

—-> Brief Description: If the Outpost is secretly not so bad as it looks, the Yards are not-so-secretly worse than they appear; most visitors realize that fast, and the hard way. No matter what you want, if it’s in Keres - hell, if it’s in the system - you’ll probably find it here, amidst the smugglers and fences who’ve made their home among the shipping complexes that keep Keres clean, fed, and stocked up with every manner of luxury. Surrounding the ports themselves is a warren of chop shops, seedy clubs, black market hole-in-the-walls, and ever-shifting gang territories. Stay sharp, pack heavy, and watch your back. 

  That’s about it for “vital” locations for Isa, but here’s a few more I thought of while writing him up. Could be red herrings when it comes to exploring his backstory, could just be fun places to visit! 

  —-> Name: Yariyna 

—-> Located On: Rasvet

—-> Brief Description: Some call Yariyna an unlikely city; it’s easy enough to see why. The capital of Rasvet, a large planet some middling distance from Erebus, crowns an archipelago of rugged islands - one of the many rising out of the cold, windswept seas. Yariyna, and Rasvet in general, isn’t exactly a tourist destination. Not just for the sake of the climate, either. The locals are notoriously hard cases, suspicious and well armed. Fairly, perhaps. Beneath the surface of Rasvet’s dark oceans and scattered amongst its island chains are rich deposits of much-coveted minerals, the legacy of a volcanic past. These ores are in high demand for everything from surgical implements to shuttle shells to stone-studded jewelry, from fringe planets to the Company capital. Nobody was surprised when Rasvet was one of the first planets the radicalized Company targeted. But everybody, the locals included, was shocked at how quickly it happened. A few bombing strikes crippled the most crucial underwater mining operations, cutting them off from surface supplies and leaving thousands to die, slowly, cruelly. The surrender was complete, and bitter. Since then, those who’ve aligned themselves with the Company have quickly risen to the top, leaving their resentful brethren far below. It’s only a matter of time, they say, before Rasvet rises again…

  —-> Name: Vostov Securities 

—-> Located On: Rasvet, in the capital city of Yariyna  

—-> Brief Description: Once a well-established but fairly unsophisticated Rasvetan security firm, protecting rigs and depots for paranoid foremen, Vostov Securities sacrificed solidarity for a silver spoon - and has yet to regret the decision. The firm’s board shook hands with the Company as their planet was battered into submission, and has since taken over the security of all Company interests on Rasvet. Of which there are many. We’re talking guards, checkpoints, barriers, surveillance, the whole package. With a thick dossier of off-planet customers and a flagship line of security androids - the Sokol - serving throughout the system, Vostov is one of those traitorous corporations that sit pretty as the people of Rasvet struggle to get by under the Company’s thumb. 

  ROLE DEVELOPMENT:

—-> Important History: So this was a bit tricky, given I can’t be sure where androids stand in terms of technological development and social reception… hope it works for you lovely folks! 

  Where exactly Isa was made, and who for, is something of a mystery. To be expected, really, of an android found in the Yards of Keres. Not a place where you prod on the subject of provenance. Especially for an illegal ‘bot; if you want a second-hand android through the proper channels, you go to a certified reseller. But, then you pay more. And there’s paperwork. Certifications and new serial numbers are easy enough to fake, anyway. Isa would know. He did his forgeries himself. After dispatching the choppers who’d started the job, that is.

Four members of the Kowalcyzk trafficking ring found dead in their garage isn’t the sort of news that leaves the Yards. Though it might be, if anybody knew it was an android that had done the killing. Not that it’s unheard of. There have been bloody system errors before, accidents chalked up to sloppy programming. That must be what this was, too. A short string of accidents, resulting from improper adjustments to Isa’s software as his drives were scrubbed. Must be it. His system has isolated the corrupted data, he’s happy to report. Whatever went wrong shouldn’t happen again.

As for how he got there in the first place, well… that’s not clear, either. Cheaper androids - fight-ready ‘bots, most of all - are common enough in the backrooms and dark corners of the Yards. Even if they’re too damaged to sell off, there’s always something of value to strip from the carcass. But that’s not what Isa is. One look at him, maybe two, and it’s obvious that he’s both a recent and high-end model, in fine working order. Why anyone would discard something like that is an open question. An unsettling one, for some aboard the Terminus. Others prefer to take their new crewmate - or appliance, however they see him - as a fortunate windfall. Somebody’s loss, their gain. Means not having to bust their backs hauling freight in and off the ship, right? All the better.

Based on what they’ve seen so far of his skillsets and domain knowledge, this crew has no particular reason not to believe that Isa is just what his falsified serial info says: a new Vostov Sokol, a brand of security ‘bot favoured by the Company. How long that will last really depends on how good he is at playing the part… which isn’t something androids are supposed to be able to do, is it? Points to some expansive artificial intelligence. In addition to his exceptionally durable, powerful substructure. And a technorganic shell, one of those uncannily life-like ones seen on high end prosthetics. Altogether, he’s an odd mix of features. Whatever he was actually meant for, Isa was definitely a special order. An expensive one. Nobody knew Vostov was bothering with that sort of customization, but… they’ve always played it close to the chest.

Most firms who produce custom androids are famously jealous with their intellectual property, loading buyers’ contracts with protective clauses. They have reason to be so obsessive. Industrial espionage runs rampant in the field, with companies trying to one-up each other and corner the market on their respective planets. It’s something of an open secret that unscrupulous technicians will pay top dollar to get their hands on any unusual models from their competitors. However it was that Isa wound up at that chop shop, he can guess what would have happened next. Somebody was going to turn a fat profit selling him to the highest bidder, to be picked apart for the sake of professional curiosity - a gruesome fate, one he’s glad to have escaped.

Still, Isa didn’t reach the Terminus entirely undamaged. There’s a mod drive missing from his internal docks, a fact that’s made stranger by how little, if any, impact it appears to have had on his ability to function. More troubling is the loss of precisely those memories that would explain how he got to the Yards in the first place. While that scrubbing process only made it through his flash memory before activating an anti-tamper protocol, rousing him from maintenance mode, he did lose the last twenty-four hours prior to waking up surrounded by those Kowalcyzk mechanics. That’s not what he’s told the crew, though. Working in half-truths and winding through loopholes, Isa has managed to keep a great deal of his past to himself. Imaginative, for an AI. He’s not the first android to intentionally mislead a human being; while typically checked by a user command to force honesty, high-empathy personal units can sugarcoat, downplay, and tell socially appropriate white lies. They wouldn’t be terribly fit for their work if they couldn’t, would they? People lie to each other all the time. Not always for the wrong reasons. Are Isa’s reasons good, though? He thinks so.

Having spent barely a week onboard, Isa is still a very new addition to the crew, and he’s well aware of where he stands - on the fringes. He safely assumes that his coworkers don’t consider him good company, or, in some cases, even a coworker at all. But androids don’t take things personally, do they? He’s doing his best to keep up the act, even if it chafes. Keeps him safe, though. For now. In the meantime, Isa’s tried to make himself useful. Not as much as he could, if he offered the full extent of his services; these people haven’t earned more, not yet. And he couldn’t answer the questions they might ask if he showed them what he’s capable of, not in a way that would keep him off that auction block he was likely bound for. So he waits, and sees, and learns…

—-> Headcanons:

Humanization protocols are common enough on personal-grade androids; not so much on the Sokol. Vostov has generally considered a certain level of unblinking stonefacedness to be beneficial, when it comes to security ‘bots. Not that they can’t be modded to be a little more, well. Subtle. That’s what Isa’s faking in the direction of. While it can be a bit unsettling, he’s finding he doesn’t especially mind. He’s not here to make humans feel comfortable. That’s not what he’s being paid for, as they say. (Not that he’s being paid at all.)

Androids aren’t supposed to get bored. Isa knows that, and so he does his best to conceal his lack of interest in the incredibly dull tasks he’s being trusted with on board the Terminus - heavy lifting, simple errands, and so on. In the long run, he’ll want something more to do with himself. What, exactly, remains to be seen. The model he’s pretending to be, the Vostov Sokol, isn’t a standard shipboard unit; that’s a security ‘bot, and a top quality one at that. He could probably do plenty to help out with the dirty work of bounty hunting… but is that all, really?

As for what Isa actually can do, well, he’s no more a standard ship ‘bot than a real Sokol would be. His knowledge of the system and its planets is largely cultural, political, and economic; beyond in-atmosphere and shuttle transit, he seems to have no programming related to piloting or navigation, certainly none at the interplanetary level. He’s no technician, but exhibits diagnostic-grade sensory features, and has enough medical knowledge to provide at least basic stabilizing care. Not that he’s mentioned this to the crew. A Sokol doesn’t come with any of that. He can only push the lie of post-sale modifications so far before they get suspicious. Better to stack crates and not attract too much attention, if he can help it. What they have noticed, inescapably, is that he can’t interface remotely with the Terminus itself - or any system, in fact. Meaning he has to interact with technology directly, as in, like a human being would. So, less conveniently, thoroughly, and quickly than most ‘bots. It’s an odd feature, suggesting a bizarre amount of paranoia on the part of his owner. But Sokols are bodyguards, right? To the wealthy and nervous. The story holds out, even if the inconvenience irritates some of his crewmates. What’s the use in a shipboard ‘bot who has to do things manually? He finds their impatience a little funny, honestly. Humans. So spoiled. 

While he might try to hide it - which androids also aren’t supposed to be able to do - Isa not only experiences boredom, but curiosity. He enjoys learning, simply for the pleasure of knowing and doing something new. Just, a Sokol wouldn’t. So. He’s got to be careful, and come up with good excuses. Luckily, people love talking about what interests them, don’t they? It’s easy enough to get a good explanation if you ask the right questions. He just can’t ask too many…

  —-> Key Relationships: 

  The In(s) *This could be one or two characters. All up to interest! 

Wrong time, wrong place - or was it just the opposite? All about perspective. This character stumbled into the aftermath of what Isa did in the Yards, and didn’t call the proper authorities, like a good citizen. Mostly because they’d have to explain what they were doing in a gangland den packed with black market arms and tech. Awkward. As for why they thought it would be a good idea to convince Isa to come along back to the Terminus with them, well, that’s their business. Could be technical curiosity, or raw opportunism… or compassion, even. Regardless, this person or persons is well-respected among the crew; their word went a long way towards getting Isa on the roster. He’s quite certain they have ulterior motives of some sort, but that’s a given, isn’t it? So long as their angles don’t cut across his own, he’s willing to entertain the notion that he owes them one, and, just possibly, that they’re allies. They’re probably the closest thing to a friend that he has at the moment, even if he’s not quite sure what that means.

  There’s An App For That 

On the other hand, there’s this crewmate. No matter how useful he might seem or what The In(s) has to say in his favor, There’s An App For That doesn’t want Isa around at all - and they haven’t been shy about saying so. They might not like or trust androids in general, or simply have taken a particular dislike to Isa. An android shouldn’t be hard to read. Perhaps his story’s not so unsatisfyingly simple as it’s been made out to be. Others might say they’re being overly suspicious, but There’s An App For That figures they’re just sensible. Isa could be trouble, in all sorts of ways. Couldn’t he? 

Whatever the cause, prejudice, or fear at the roof of it, this person hopes Isa’s stay on the Terminus won’t be long. Whatever he can do, a simpler, stupider android could do… well, not better, maybe, but just fine enough. Whose idea was this, anyway? They’re probably not happy with The In(s), either. 

  —-> Wanted Connections: Meet the Maker If it fits with the flow of our collective plotting, I’d love to dig back into who Isa’s owner is and the circumstances that led to his abandonment. I have a storyline in mind, but I’m much more interested in seeing how this connection could link up with larger plots in ‘verse, so I’m happy to leave it pretty open for the time being. The only points I’d like to stick with are that his owner is at least 30+, and that they are well-positioned in some respect - they’d have to be, to afford this kind of android. They might have criminal ties of some kind, a little corruption going on. That missing mod drive and its contents are directly important to this individual; did they take it, or are they still on the look out for their missing property? Whatever the case, the loss of that drive seems to have impacted Isa’s memories of them specifically; he’s unable to fully recall their voice or appearance. If an android can be haunted, Isa’s owner is his ghost. 

ADMINISTRATIVE: 

—-> How Did You Find Us: Tumblr ads! 

—-> Anything Else: Nothing in particular, but have this pinterest board, I guess!

About time you showed up, ISA, we were just about to take off without you. Stow your gear and make sure you send in your account and finish off the checklist within the next 24 hours, or else we might have to dump you out the nearest airlock. BEN BARNES has now been claimed. Oh yeah, did I forget to say welcome aboard?

[wciblackbeltacademy]

Hi, Dai-Shihan Miller here. In this online ninja training lesson, I want to explore how the ninja's self defense art approaches the idea of dealing with your opponent's attacks. Regardless of whether we're talking about handling punches, kicks, or grabbing attacks, the ninjutsu student approaches the concept from an "outside-the-box" perspective, rather than doing it "just like everyone else" but with a different "style." It's important for you to remember that, the art of Ninjutsu is not about "style," it's about having options, and the ability to produce results with the least amount of energy, effort - and the least amount of wear-and-tear on yourself in the process! Rather than attach oneself to the concept of "our way," the ninja practitioner prefers to have multiple ways for dealing with the same problem. That way, if one method or approach isn't working, he or she can simply change modes and come at the problem from a different angle, perspective, mindset, skill, weapon, or strategy. In this article, I want to share with you the four primary methods, or footwork patterns, that Ninpo-taijutsu (the Ninja's armed and unarmed self defense system) teaches for successfully avoiding and dealing with an assailant's incoming attacks. These footwork methods are introduced to beginning level students as options, and then each is explored in much greater depth as you progress towards the Black Belt levels, and toward eventual Mastery of the art of Ninjutsu. Of course, not every method is the best answer for every given situation. And that's really where the Ninja's self defense art shines - in recognizing that there are different types of attacks, and therefor different "best" answers for handing each "type." Just as there are different types of attacks, there are also different emotional states that can come up within ourselves as we are forced to deal with different attacker mindsets and personality types. Where one person and situation might have us holding our ground with firm confidence, a different attacker and circumstance might have us pulling away, defensively as we try to increase the time and space between ourselves and our attacker - while at the same time covering and protecting our exposed targets. This recognition of the different variables that can arise in a self-defense situation has, over the centuries, created a unique situation within the martial arts world, where the past masters of the art of ninjutsu have passed down not style, but strategies - each giving the ninja student another option for successfully surviving a dangerous situation with the least amount of energy necessary. Here are the four modes or methods that modern Ninjutsu students use to evade, avoid, and deal with the incoming, attacking limbs of their aggressors: 1) Slight shifts of the feet, coupled with a dropping of the knees to stabilize the body and jam the incoming attack. This is NOT the same blocking or so-called "horse" stance positioning of certain karate styles, but rather a calm, commanding ability to use proper positioning and posturing of the body and its limbs to crush the incoming attack altogether. In fact, instead of always using a stylized, forearm block against the incoming limb, the Ninja's method allows for the use of any body weapon - even the body itself - to be used to counter-attack or jam the incoming attack! 2) Defensive, angular, back-peddling that pulls the body back and away from danger at strategic angles. This footwork takes advantage of both the instinctive "backing away," and the side-shifting evasion tactics that we might see being used by more conventional fighters. However, rather than be confined to this 2-dimensional, front-back, or side-side kind of movement, the Ninja combatant combines the two and uses diagonal movement that provides the benefits from both realms. 3) Forward, piercing attacking footwork that charges forward into the encounter and takes the advantage. But, rather than being a "tough-guy" charging blindly into the fight kind of tactic, this footwork pulls the ninja forward and inside the arc of circular and flailing type attacks. So, instead of trying to hold our ground and block that incoming hook punch, or tae kwon do style crescent kick, we simply slip forward into the "eye of the storm" where our new position causes his attack to miss, and us to be in the perfect place to seize the advantage! 4) Circular, evasive shifting footwork that simultaneously allows you to skip, flank, and be in the perfect position. I usually describe this strategy to my beginning students using the using either the analogy of either the "bullfighter with the red cape," or the comedy movie scenario where "someone is trying to bash in a door." In either case, there is a last-second shift that causes the bull to miss, or the intruder to fall forward when the door is suddenly opened. In either case, the attacker is left in a position where they are bewildered, fighting for positioning, and completely exposed to a follow-up attack. Again, it's important to remember that, even though you can find each of these methods at the center of any number of fighting styles and self-defense programs, none of them should be seen as being the "best" or only way of doing things. The Enlightened warrior understands that the key to success is in having more options than your opponent. And, knowing when to use each of those options to produce the outcome that you are looking for!

[viscountessevie]

After Happily Ever After Eady’s Elite Edition: Henri

The Elite: Ean & Hale | Fox | Gunner | Kile

A/N: I really wanna thank @illean-queen who has quickly become one of my really good friends who brought attention to my Where Are They Now one shots and inspired me to write sequels so here we are! Warning: Lots of angst towards the middle. Special thanks to these lovely friends of mine who I named the kids after: @not-your-dear, @illeaslockedbluebox and @prince-consort-lolz.  Also translations are below and after a while I realised if I translated too much, Google Translate would screw me over so I decided to italise the English dialogue that is originally in Finnish (you’ll see what I’m talking about later). I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! 

****

You know their story, they lived together for a while before pursuing their feelings for each other but what happens after happily ever after? Even though they lived with the rest of the Elite for most of their relationship, they soon decided to move out. Especially after Henri proposed which was a whole other funny ordeal altogether.

It was a typical ring-in-the-food type of proposal and his friends warned him not to put the ring inside the food because of a choking hazard so he took precautions to place the ring on top of the cake he had baked for her. It was the same chocolate cake he had baked for her the first time she moved in with him. The ring was hard to miss, yet she did. She came home late from teaching and was completely exhausted so when she saw the chocolate cake, she completely inhaled it, not noticing the ring at all. Until it lodged itself in her throat. When Henri heard her choking, he thought she had found the ring and was choking back tears and took it as his cue to come out to surprise her. His girlfriend turning purple was not what he expected to find. He immediately went into super-boyfriend mode and performed the heimlich maneuver on her. She threw up the ring with little chunks of chocolate cake. They cringed at the sight before Skye laughed.

“Well that’s the last time you put anything inedible in food.” “Deal.” They hooked pinkies just like the first time they met.

*

The Wedding

A year after the engagement ring incident - in which he proposed properly a week later after having the ring thoroughly clean - Skye was running around making sure everything was perfect. She was a bit of a perfectionist and it did not help that the Queen who was also her future husband’s ex fianceé would be in attendance. Skye knew she couldn’t upstage the Queen, no one could but she was damn well going to try for her own sake. She had picked a soft blue theme matching her name and Henri’s favourite colour. Annika and Clara were trying to calm down their blushing bride. The only reason she was blushing so hard was because she was overworking herself and her face was turning red.

“We are your bridesmaids, tell us what you need us to do. You need to be calm before you walk down the aisle, honey.” Clara advised her calmly, surprising both the bride and Annika, the maid-of-honour. Clara was the brash and snarky one while Annika was the opposing calming force in their little group of friends.

“There is nothing to do and that’s stressing me out!” Skye burst out, catching her friends off guard. They knew Skye had a little controlling problem but this was worrying. Then came along Alice to save the day. She produced a stress ball and a glass of water. She coaxed Skye into drinking the water while she squeezed the hell out of the stress ball.

“Come on, Princess. We need to get you to make up and help you into your dress.” Alice linked arms with the bride while Clara and Annika joined on Skye’s other side. The woman of the day visibly calmed down by the time they sat her down for make up. Skye smiled easily when she saw Neena, who they had borrowed from the Queen for this day as their make up artist. Neena was always so nice and helpful with the wedding even though she really had no obligation to. Skye could feel them being fast and good friends. Their bride spoke a mile an hour while Neena painted her face.

“What if he gets cold feet? Entä jos huulipuna tulee koko kasvoilleni suudelman jälkeen? What if my heels break in the middle of the aisle? Entä jos mekko saa kiinni jotain ja repeytyy? What if I fall? MITÄ KUNINKAAN PÄÄTETÄÄN HENRI HÄNEN PALAA??” While the girls were used to Skye panicking and subconsciously switching languages, they did not see that outburst coming. Since Annika was the only one who could understand her in both languages, she tried calming her down. Annika ran her fingers lightly through her sister-in-law’s hair and muttered soothing Finnish words into her ear. Skye breathed easily just as Neena put the final touches.

“I'm so sorry I'm so difficult to deal with today. I'm just so jittery.” She gave them her first real smile of the day.

“Well that's one way of putting it.” Clara said dryly and her friends elbowed her in response.  Skye could only laugh at their protectiveness and waved off Clara’s comment. They were able to slip her easily into her dress and brought her to the mirror. The moment she wore the dress and stood in front of the mirror, Skye felt invincible. No one was going to ruin her day. It was hers for the taking. She and Henri would start a new chapter of their lives from this day on.

“I'm ready to be Mrs. Henri Jaakoppi.” With that the girls lined themselves up in order of how they'd walk down the aisle. Once they were in position, Skye’s father entered the dressing room to walk his daughter down the aisle. She grinned at him. Her Daddy who always there for even when she needed get away from the overbearing family. She remembered how intimidated Henri was by him when she first brought him to meet the family. It was funnier still when Henri mistook him to be her older brother instead of her father. Her fiance attempted to bond with her father as brothers-in-law would. It was an understatement to say that Henri was embarrassed after finding out who he really was.

“You still have time to change your mind, my little pearl.” She smiled at her father’s pet name for her. It was derived from her birthstone,  the pearl seeing that she was a June baby. She giggled at her father’s joke and nudged him.

“Daddy! I love him and he makes me so so happy.” Skye’s father couldn't bring down the light that had graced her face when she talked about Henri. He did, however, gave his daughter some parting words. “And if he fails to do so, tell me and I'll kill him.” “Daddy!” She exclaimed in a reprimanding manner as they were given the cue to start walking down the aisle.

When Skye entered Henri’s vision, his lips parted slowly and gasped loudly. His bride was absolutely stunning in her dress. It was steel blue with ruffles of varying shades of blue and Skye shone through in that dress. He couldn't believe he was marrying a goddess. She could only giggle at his reaction. He didn't look so bad himself. In fact, she couldn't wait to jump his bones after the ceremony and reception. When she finally reached her future husband, they clasped their hands together, never wanting to let go. Her father gave him a steely glare as if warning Henri not to hurt his little girl. Henri gulped and nodded.

Without the pressure of her father, the couple looked deep into each other's eyes. A stranger on the outside looking in could tell how in love they were. It wasn't just the romantic love, it was the amount of respect, admiration and acceptance both of them held for the other in their hearts. It was also reflected in their eyes as they gazed upon each other. The couple looked to King Consort Maxon and nodded. He started the ceremony. They went through the motions of the introductions and then they came to the exciting part of the wedding, the part that mattered the most. The Vows.

What was so unique about Skye and Henri was that they planned to deliver their vows in their second language. Skye would say them in Finnish while Henri said his in English. Skye went first. She cleared her throat anxiously. She was terrified of messing up. She accidentally caught the eye of Queen Eadlyn who smiled at her encouragingly and all feelings of being threatened by her disappeared.

“My Dearest Henri,

I stand before you today and give you my heart and soul in this beautiful union.  In doing so I also vow to do the following things until death do us part.

I promise to love and accept you as you are for as long as we are alive and together, even in death because that's how much I adore you Henri Jaakoppi. I promise to always be by your side especially when you're cooking; through the hard recipes and easy recipes as well times in our lives.

I promise to always read to you every night without fail because I know how you love it when I read to you, those are the times I really cherish my time with you.

I promise to be patient with you and always help you with your languages and I can only hope that you’ll be the same with me.

Most of all, I promise to be your best friend and beloved equal till the end of time.”

Henri started out slow. His English was amazing since Eadlyn’s Selection but he was no master so he was going to take this slow and steady and not mess up.

“My Darling Skye

I stand before you today and give you my heart and soul in this beautiful union.  In doing so I also vow to do the following things until death do us part. .

I promise to support you in everything that you do every step of the way for the rest of our lives.

I promise to be patient with you especially when you are in your writing moods or one of your tempers. I will make you tea and cake to calm you down

I promise to always tell you are beautiful and wonderful when you are feeling down because you always deserve to know how amazing you are.

I promise to love and accept you as you are until the end of our days because you are more than enough for me. Most of all, I promise to be your best friend and beloved equal till the end of time.” Both of them had harsh tears gracing their faces and were both happy to have included food jokes. They were ready to start the rest of their lives together.

*

The couple were still breathless from their wedding ceremony. It was an intense ceremony. They bared their souls to one another in such an intimate moment which was displayed to 100 of their closest friends. They went into Skye’s dressing room and started helping the other change. It was quick and efficient and also gave the couple time to themselves before they were pulled away by distant relatives asking about how soon and how many kids they’ll have.

“Well that was a success!” She commented as he pulled her dress up.

“I'd say and I love that I can now call you Mrs. Jaakoppi.” She beamed at how far they had come. There was a time where she promised herself she wouldn't get married because that seemed to be the only goal her parents had for her. But look at her now; she achieved her ambition of being a linguistics professor at The Illéan College, the most prestigious academic institution in the country. Afterwhich she fell in love with Henri and she didn't care about rebelling against her family, she just wanted to spend the rest of her life with this man she loved with her very being. Not to mention how Henri could barely string sentences when he first came to Angeles and now he could speak like a Native Illéan.

“Isn't Mrs. Jaakoppi your mother?” She teased him.  He shook his head amused with her and started tickling her. She yelped.

“HENRI NO I WILL PEE!” She repeated that in Finnish to get through his thick skull. Their tickle fight was interrupted by a knock. Annika spoke from the other side of the door.

“The guests are waiting,Veli ja Sisko ”

“We're coming!” They chorused as they quickly changed into their reception outfits and exited the room hand in hand.

“Aww don't you two look adorable!” Annika cooed at the newlyweds. They blushed in response and went ahead to the reception hall, ignoring Annika fangirling over them. Just like they predicted, the moment they entered the Hall, they were separated by their relatives and various guests who suddenly wanted to know every aspect of their life. They didn't like being away from each other. Henri, while his English has improved greatly over the years, he was terrified there might be a language break down with Skye’s relatives. Skye, on the other hand, hated personal questions and she knew these distant relatives of hers won't stop until she tells them everything. This usually lights her short fuse and Henri was always there to calm her down. Just something about his presence instantly calms her down.

After half an hour of entertaining personal questions and invasion of personal space, they were reunited when the Queen asked to see them. Skye gulped. While Henri told her that Eadlyn was actually a lovely person, Skye still found her intimidating. With interlocked hands, Henri was practically dragging her forwards. Skye just wanted it to stop. She thought she had put all the insecurities to rest when she and Henri started dating but they all surfaced when she saw how majestic the Queen. How could have Henri given up all of that for a simple life with her? She could feel the panic attack coming on. She suppressed it for Henri’s sake. He looked ecstatic to see the Queen and her family. He picked up little Kerttu who was bouncing up and down going,

“Happy Wedding, Uncle Henri!” Anyone would have found that little ball of energy endearing and cute but Skye felt repulsed. Did Henri see Kerttu as a symbol of everything he could have had? She heard muffled voices calling out to her but she didn't want to hear it.

“Excuse me, please!” She finally choked out. She ran out of the Hall with such speed, neither the bridesmaids or Henri could stop her. He was bewildered. He had seen The Runaway Bride but Julia Roberts ran before getting married. After getting over the initial shock, Henri excused himself from Eady and ran after his wife. He saw her crouched down on the floor a few rooms from the Hall with her head in her hands. He sat down beside her and spoke softly.

“Darling, what's wrong? Please talk to me.” He spoke in his native tongue knowing it calms her down. She raised her tear streaked face to look at him.  

“I know I shouldn't but I have this paranoia that you'll realise I'm not good enough for you. When you could have had all of that.” She gestured at the door, referring to Eady in a resigned manner. He wrapped his sturdy arms around her and held her close to his chest where she could feel his heart racing.

“Do you hear that, my love? That is for you. Eadlyn never loved me like I love you and you love me. You're not just my wife, you're my best friend Skye and I wouldn't settled for less. I love you.” At this point she was sobbing into his suit jacket and he didn't mind. He knew she needed to get it all out. When she finally recovered, she giggled a little remembering how worried she was in the dressing room.

“I was stressing about little things and I was so panicked the girls told me I switched between Finnish and English without realising it.” “You were worried about cake too?” “What? Henri no.” She gave him the summarised list of what she was so worried about. Henri could only frown at that.

“I know everything was going to be perfect because you never miss a single detail. I was worried the cake wasn't good enough.” She threw her head back and laughed. That's her Henri alright. She snuggled closer to him and rested her pretty little head on his shoulder. They were more than happy to be in that little corner together away from the rest of the world.

***

7 Years Later

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddyyyyy!” Look what I made!” Erik held up the cheese soufflé for his father to inspect.

“Erik, it's Wednesday.” Henri reprimanded in Finnish. Wednesdays were one of the days the Jaakoppi children spoke Finnish. While Erik inherited his father’s looks and culinary skills, he leaned more towards his mother’s native language. In fact the only child in the family who spoke Finnish and loved it was little Rory. Erik pouted childishly.

“I don't care! I hate speaking Finnish!” He ran off to his room. Henri could only sigh. Where was Skye when he needed her? She was the only one who could coax the kids into speaking Finnish.

“I speak Finnish for you, Papa!” Rory’s blonde little head popped up from behind the counter. He felt comforted by her toothy grin.

“This is why you are my favourite.” She giggled before skipping off. Henri counted off his kids in his head.  He had seen Eikko “Erik” Christian and Aurora Courtney. That was two out of three kids. He furrowed his eyebrows and searched the apartment high and low for his eldest child, Aline Rose. He started to panic when he couldn't find her. Just when he was about to call up his wife to break the bad news, Skye came home and yelled his name. She was not happy. Attached to her side was their eldest daughter.

“HENRI JAAKOPPI! What the hell, Henri! You didn't even notice that she was missing!” Then Skye proceeded to curse her husband out in Finnish, causing Aline to cover her little sister’s ears.

“WHAT PART OF IT IS WEDNESDAY DO YOU PEOPLE NOT UNDERSTAND? Speak Finnish!” Yelled Henri. Skye rolled her eyes. Usually they would try to compromise and not yell in front of the kids but they have both been agitated the last couple of weeks. Henri had lost his job as head chef because the restaurant was infested with mice and had to take over the role of the main homemaker (before his retrenchment, both Skye and Henri shared responsibility of raising the kids). Now Skye had to take a full time job at the College to make up for her husband’s previous pay. Screaming matches at each other seemed to be a daily part of the children’s routine.

This wasn't something Aline wanted to get used to and she was sick of her parents being at each other’s throats and being unhappy as of late. So she spoke up.

“It wasn't Daddy’s fault! I want to be just like you so I snuck away in the car. I'm sorry don't be angry at Daddy.” Even at the ripe age of 10 she knew how to manipulate her parents into getting what she wants, so she let her bottom lip tremble in a sad pout. Of course her parents couldn't resist that and rushed forward to hug their kids.

“We weren't fighting my dear, we were just judging who could yell louder.” Skye attempted to make a joke out of it while Henri glared at her for speaking English. She sighed and whispered to the children to get ready for bed. “Henri darling I know you want us to desperately speak Finnish today but I'm frustrated and exhausted, can you let it slide?” She spoke softly to let him know she wasn't mad at him and wanted to make up. Her husband refused to budge. She huffed and crossed her arms. “Fine. Two can play the game!” She turned away from him. Then he burst out in full Finnish.

“I hate how since I lost my job, I've become secondary to you. We are supposed to be equals, Skye.” She knew better than to speak in English now. “What are you talking about? Being a full time father doesn't make you any less than me. We are still and always will be equals.” She interlaced their hands.

“It took us having a fight to get you to speak Finnish. Erik refuses to and Aline only does it to please you. It's like this family doesn't care what I think.” Her eyes widened at how raw his tone was. The damage had been done, she couldn't undo it. So she did the next best thing. She pulled him close into her arms and said to him the same thing he said to her on their wedding day.

“I'm so sorry I made you feel that way. You hear that racing heart of mine? That's for you. You're not just my husband, you're my best friend and you mean the whole world to me. I'll be better from now on.” His previously stiff body relaxed as he snuggled up against his wife. The kids came out to them from hiding.

“Yay!! Mummy and Daddy love each other again!” Rory announced happily as all three kids jumped on their parents. The couple cuddled their children and Skye remembered her big news. She was going to tell the family the moment she first came home if it wasn't for her horrid boss giving her shit for it and then finding Aline in the backseat of the car.

“You three are going to have another brother or sister!” It took them a moment to register that information. The children celebrated while Henri was deep in thought. “Henri?” She asked worriedly, the children took their cue to say their good nights and head to bed. “What's wrong?” “We can't afford another child, Skye.” She grinned slyly. “I have it figured out. I dropped your name with the principal and she offered you a job as a Home Econs teacher. That was after she gave me shit for doing pregnancy tests at work.” Henri’s lips lifted when his wife made the deadpan joke.

“I'll think about it.” “That's all I ask. We will work it out, we always do. I love you, Henri.” “I love you too.” They fell asleep cuddling each other.

Life did work out for the best for the Jaakoppi family. Henri loved being a cooking teacher and he was doing so well that he was always getting a raise. Over the past year, his relationship with Skye improved tremendously. The whole family took the Finnish speaking days more seriously. The children were growing up to be more beautiful and wonderful each day. Aline was a splitting image of her mother and still hasn't stopped trying to be just like her role model of a mother. Erik was a marvelous chef and writer; he had the best of both worlds. Rory was just like her Daddy Dearest, she spoke Finnish constantly which was a joy for Henri but her English was worrying but she was working on it and she could whip up a meal better than her brother.

Skye and Henri watched their kids adoringly as the three older siblings formed a circle around their newest sibling’s crib. Who knows what kind of person little Risto would grow to be?

*** A/N: Also yes; that is the same Erik in this post 

Translations:

Entä jos huulipuna tulee koko kasvoilleni suudelman jälkeen? - What if my lipstick is all over my face after the kiss?

Entä jos mekko saa kiinni jotain ja repeytyy? - What if my dress catches on something and tears apart?

MITÄ KUNINKAAN PÄÄTETÄÄN HENRI HÄNEN PALAA?? - WHAT IF THE QUEEN DECIDES SHE WANTS HENRI BACK?

Veli ja Sisko - Brother and Sister

[thetldrplace]

Consumerism

 I don’t live under a rock, so I’m aware of the term consumerism, but I’ve never really taken the time to think about what it is… or what people mean to do about it when they criticize it.

So I’m going to try and get my head around what it means and what some of the efforts to counter it consist of.

 One definition I found is consumerism, on a more individual level, is the preoccupation with consuming more and more goods and services. It is driven by a chronic dissatisfaction with what the consumer currently has. Some of the evils concomitant with consumerism might be greed, selfishness, mistaking getting something new for getting something good, ungratefulness, dissatisfaction, jealousy, focus on things…

From Wikipedia (the fount of all knowledge…), I read that on a societal level, it can be correlated with the growth imperative and overconsumption, which can have larger impacts on the environment, like overexploitation of natural resources or large amounts of waste.

 While consumerism might foster the aforementioned individual vices, it doesn’t invent them. Those things exist in the heart even for those not in consumerist societies. Reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, he spoke of stopping in the Cape Horn region of southern Chile to revisit some Indian tribes there. Their mode of living was such that they shared everything at a mostly subsistence level. When one of the Indians, who had been brought to England, came back and gave his mother a coat, the next day it had been ripped to pieces with each member of the community getting a section. Why? Because if they didn’t share everything, jealousy would arise. Those evils of human nature exist without a consumerist culture.

The bible says God created us to live in and enjoy the world. Deuteronomy 26:11 :

“Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household.”

The trick is to enjoy the material goods we have, while acknowledging they came from the Lord. Enjoy your stuff, and put the Lord first, not the stuff. In doing so we will avoid the greed, selfishness, jealousy, dissatisfaction, and ungratefulness that accompany just storing up goods.

From a Christian perspective, I get the wariness about consumerism. I try personally to avoid it, but I’m gonna drop a truth bomb here- I too like stuff. I do, however, take measures to avoid being overly attached. I drive a 2009 Honda fit with about 170,000 miles on it. I could afford a new car, but the one I have works fine. I don’t worry about trying to get something cooler because, to be honest, I have better places to spend money. My wife and I contribute …. Well , a lot of money to various ministries and charities, and we give when we can. We’ll pay for dinners, give to those who might want to go on various mission trips, etc. The Lord has blessed, so we feel our abundance of finances is our opportunity to give back. I applaud all you who are giving back in the recognition that- God has given in order for us to give to others.

But on a political level, I’m not sure what we should do about it. I have issues with the growth imperative- the insistence on never-ending growth, overconsumption and exploitation too. Exploitation of resources seems like something we can regulate legal. Curbing the theory of the growth imperative or overconsumption is another issue altogether.

So when did consumerism really take off?

Looking at wikipedia’s page, the industrial revolution dramatically increased the availability of goods at lower prices. When goods and services become widely available, more people, even at the lower classes can afford what was at one time out of their reach.

The Marxists, for example, were perturbed by this. By the late 1920’s the proletariat had not rebelled against the system, as the Marxist had thought. Instead they were improving their lot through cheaper and more widely available goods. They were increasingly happy with their lives. Antonio Gramsci called this false consciousness. Here’s the deal though, the plebes only thought they were happy (according to the Marxists), when they were really just being duped by the capitalists. Rather than being truly set free to appreciate great art and music, great learning and culture, the stupid plebes were happy with cheap crap and football games; bread and circuses, as the ancient Romans might have put it. Gramsci wanted them to realize how impoverished they were, so they could finally rise up, throw off the oppressive yoke and realize the communist utopia he had planned. But plebes, being stupid and all, were just too happy with their junk.

One might be inclined to think there is something deeply elitist of these intelligentsia thinking they know best for everyone else, and plotting to ruin the lives of the working class so they, the elites, could provide them with basic levels of subsistence, and feed the plebes THEIR ideas of high culture, which they knew was much better than what the plebes were choosing themselves. Hold on to this idea, because this freedom to choose versus what some people think OUGHT to be chosen, is at the heart of the divide, in my most humble opinion.

 The free market has certainly spurred innovation to produce more and better stuff than ever in the history of mankind. Part of the trade-offs that inevitably happen in complex systems is a series of negative effects that are the flip side of every coin.

As an example, when I was in leadership at a local church, one of our pastors was extremely laissez-faire in his management style. I personally considered that freedom-to-operate to be a great positive. The negative side was that communication was often deficient. But that communication deficiency was the necessary flip side of the freedom-to-operate. That’s the nature of trade-offs inherent in any system. And.....given the nature of the differing ways of measuring success humans have, it is impossible that everyone in a society will be fully happy about the way things are, and almost assured that everyone will be dissatisfied with some aspects of society. Trade-offs.

 Returning to problems with consumerism, what would it take, for example, to reduce overconsumption by producing quality TVs, rather than cheap TVs? (and this is going to be the most deficient descriptive scenario you’ll probably see all day, maybe all week, and maybe..... well, we’ll leave it at that.)

The company would have to make some decisions: the quality will be better, so they will be more expensive. That means they can’t sell as many. Which means they’re either going to have to pay employees less, make less profit, or fire excess employees no longer necessary. Making less profit will immediately appeal to those who stand to lose nothing by the suggestion, but what if the profit margins were already thin to start?

The end result will be the price of TV’s will rise, pricing them out of the range of lower end markets.

Now poor people have less options. (Which might be good because they need to understand how miserable their lives are so they can rise up and overthrow the capitalist system!)

Innovation suffers because people buy less tv’s because tv’s last longer, and there’s less reason to push them to buy newer ones.

On the positive side, less cheap tv’s thrown into the waste dumps means less…. Well… waste.....

So, trade-offs. Hooray!

 I’m also not sure how we can practically encourage less overconsumption without getting into really invasive laws. But there’s a lot I don’t know, so I’ll just add this one to the list.

In short, I see some problems, but I also think I understand that solving for one problem inexorably means increasing others. Democratically resolving these through a free market means people will almost inevitably choose short term gain over long term good. Free markets are great at figuring out how to do things, bad at figuring out what needs to be done. But I’m interested in hearing other thoughts on this subject. It’s new to me, so I’m undoubtedly missing all the good parts of the discussion.

[anounceaweek]

An Ode to the Death and Life of Benjamin

The death of Benjamin occurred curtly past the midnight of November eleventh. Twelve years, a short amount for those of his kind, have lasted longer than the love of the young marriages told about in the stories of my grandmother. The inevitable Graying, she used to say, once a thing like this happens to you, unfolds in moderation, but does not fail in succession. First, the wood of the tocador will lose its sensuous concentricity. The kamagong will soon look more like a yakal, made dull, lacklustre, cheapened. Once dense, it will turn hollow; a knock on its side will reverberate a distant echo in approximately the key of B minor. The smooth, unfinished walls of cement, she iterates, already gray, will gradually turn into a shade of domestic eggshell; a tone similar to the walls of the public clinic, of which the kidneys of my father consistently avoids. The floors, despite any effort with a walis tambo, or any dusting with an old abandoned shirt by way of jerking the foot back and forth in a wiping motion, will gather more dust than was ever possible for an enclosed space. You will sneeze at once, you will sneeze again, and you will sneeze infinitely. The space, she adds, in fact will cease to be enclosed; windows of capiz, once emanating a gentle eerie light with its tiny frames of mollusk (who thought oysters could double as a kind of glass?), will at once fall off its hinges, shattering on the ground below as if they were never connected in the first place.

Just as she had described, upon Benjamin’s death, it all happened. In the beginning, it wasn’t so terrible. The cavernous drawers were altogether manageable, and though the walls had an air of malaise, it was really the taste of nausea that was the bother. The floors, at first merely gathering dust, in time were swarmed with long strands of hairs, too. In trying to walk too quickly, a bundle of strands would trip me over; though, the pain of falling was none compared to the feeling of ticklish tresses between the gaps of my toes. In an attempt to combat the cold, I plastered large posters on the wall. Darlings and idols, accumulated and amassed over the years, have finally come to some sort of use. Except, nearly every evening, a strong gust of wind would blow a hole straight through them, as if a ghost; thereby, at once, I came upon the idea of manufacturing a Frankenstein plug to fill the break, in gluing together: an anthology of Spanish poetry, Blood on the Tracks, a Björksnäs bed frame, some heavy blankets, socks with avocado print on them, and a number of knick-nacks collected in a trip to Europe about four years ago (which I had originally meant for a scrapbook, but then got lazy, and then I stopped caring about the whole experience, and the whole endeavor was senseless anyway).

I would be lying if I said that I didn’t try to revert Benjamin’s death. I heard once that you could fashion a real, working heart, by putting together an unopened can of liver spread, processed cheese, some fried galunggong, all soldered together with bits of bronze. Careless that I was, I forgot the part about it needing to be consecrated; and though it was in vain, I remembered that I had lost the phone number of my pastor anyway (it was useless, of course, to ask a stranger to bless your makeshift heart). Then, I remembered the uncle of my grandfather, who was said to be a katalonan. I imagined him, as my father had once told me, whispering mysticisms to the foreign occupiers in the jungles of Luzon, rendering him invisible to their eyes and ready to strike. (If a tree falls quietly in the forest, maybe it was never there). Or how, in demonstrating the grit of the spirits residing in his body, he would bite the head of beer bottles with his bare teeth, ingesting the shards of glass with a measly gulp. (I am, therefore I bite). And so, with these in mind, I called for his magick: in silent appeal for nearly a day and a half, I prayed to the ancestors of my ancestors. And to no avail. Hence, I made up my mind that, perhaps through time, due to an insincere intention, or due to a pure lack of faith, the magick of the ones who gave me my name, in fact, perchance, had an unprecedented date of expiration of which my father had, swept in the emotions of his recounts to me, forgotten to disclose.

Still, in feverish and mad hopes to revive my only and beloved Benjamin, following a number of other futile shortcuts and tactics, I had finally decided to consult an expert on the matter. Upon a lengthy discussion of options (of animation, which was a no, on his part; of modifications, which also resulted in a resounding no, on my part; and naturally, I refused to submit Benjamin to any kind of freezing or skin-mounting), we eventually came to an agreement on an affordable and yet luxurious Memory Foam™. As I do anticipate, the temporary depression upon any kind of petting will inevitably deform the look of Benjamin. The incremental return to its original state however, following the slightest bit of pressure, shall have the effect of Benjamin responding as if in vital motion (an advantageous feature).

Admittedly, when I was told that it would be difficult to hide the scars of the incision, I could not hide my dismay. I did not, by the slightest means, want to be reminded of his cadaverous state. I knew that my wishes, however dire, were idealistic- quixotic even. As such, the expert offered me a kind of compromise: if I truly wanted this illusion to be grounded in reality, I must then commit the ultimate sacrifice of renouncing the privilege of having both of my two eyes. Through the surrendering of one eye, one measly eye, for the benefit of Benjamin, I would then be rewarded in two ways.

The first is that, in seeing through only one eye, the left eye, my perspective would be entirely skewed in a sense that I will no longer be able to, so much as I try, notice the scars of the incision. No matter which angle I attempted as a point of vantage, I shall not see it; it will not be there. In retrospect, I had forgotten to ask what else would be amiss, and in this report from having completed the operation in question, I suppose I haven’t missed much, yet, or at least, of anything that I am aware of. The second is that, in donating my other eye, the right eye, to take the place of Benjamin’s right eye, I shall have the rare and gratuitous honour of, as well, seeing the world as it appears from the perspective of Benjamin. Dubious, I know. I was also curious about how this would unfold.

Nonetheless, I had consented to the operation before the expert could enclose to me as to how exactly it would transpire. What can I say, when the serpent gives you fruit, what else are you to do but to squeeze the juices out of that fruit until it runs dry?

As you are reading this, I can only imagine that you are anticipating the the results of my decision. I shall make no further delay in telling you: this double vision, a kind of simulated mirror of the world, as an effect of having each eye in two separate locations, has been miraculous and has entirely transformed the procession of my life. I have become the cinematographer of my own perception; a kind of omnipotent ad hoc God. At any given point, I can choose to close my right eye and view an event from the West, or close my left eye and view it from the East, or see through them both in concurrent discord (which, I have to say, produces a refraction of lights, colours and shadows, most pleasing to the senses). The mode of having such a malleable and manipulable vision is quintessentially surreal- the possibilities of which, as I imagine in both eyes now, are incalculable. Its application in any sort of activity involving the visual is manifold; its resources, inexhaustible until I perish (and I have Benjamin’s immortality, now, to thank as well).

My preoccupation in testing the limits of this newfound ability has, as an understatement, served well to pass the time. Things do not quite appear the way they used to; they are different, the same, and yet different, but in the good sense. The Graying was still there, though somehow, the double vision (a miracle) made it appear less pitiful, more ephemeral. If I shut one of my eyes, I could fully neglect half the room. Best of all, not only have I encased Benjamin into an ultimate and solidifying permanence, (and lately, I have also been considering my very own transition) but I have also acquired this cutting-edge vision: effervescent, imprecise, absolute

to which, not even the latest model

of a mirrorless Canon© can compare to.

[popcultureacademy]

Ten Songs to Prepare to Listen to Life

You could be forgiven for having forgotten about Culture Club over the last several years. The band’s last proper album, Don’t Mind if I Do, dropped nearly twenty years ago, and it’s been even longer since the band’s true glory days, when they ruled the world with their first two albums, Kissing to be Clever (1982) and Colour by Numbers (1983). The band have a brand new album out October 26, Life,  and a shiny new single -- “Let Somebody Love You” -- that’s doing well in the charts. Now seems like as good a time as any to revisit the group’s best work, to relive the mark they made on the music industry.

Oh...and you can expect a full review of the new album early next week!

10. Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?: If you’re going to take a tour through Culture Club, you might as well begin at the beginning. Part of what made Boy George so appealing was the irony of his perpetual broken heart juxtaposed with his larger-than-life personality. How could someone with his hair and makeup always seem so wretched and misused, so plaintive? In “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” he’s torn between the “fire” burning in his heart and the “words that burn.” But the metaphor of heat is only a front for the fragile personality that lies beneath, the one that wonders “How Can I Be Real,” and who wants only to “choose my color find a star.”  Heavy reverb and some echo effects in the bridge help cement our pity for his character.

9. More than Silence: From the beginning, shuffle to the end: follow Culture Club’s earliest hit with their most recent track, “More Than Silence,” which comes from the abortive album Tribes, an album that was shelved in 2014, but which, rumors suggest became the foundation for the upcoming Life. Here, a more mature George reflects on his earlier self with some degree of weary wisdom. The moves remain the same: “You play a cold game,” he tells his lover. Yet here he owns his own emotional trauma, accepting he is the “wounded soul,” crying “bi-polar tears.” Bonus points here for a strong ending guitar solo from Roy Hay, who spent most of his time in the 80s blending rather than starring.

8. Mistake Number 3: One of the prettier songs in Culture Club’s catalog, “Mistake Number 3” fuses two sorts of heartache, the kind we feel over lost loves and the deeper kind we feel when the world has let us down. The title refers to the possibility of a third world war, and the album it comes from, the band’s third -- Waking Up With the House on Fire -- follows a pattern of new wave artists turning to less materialistic and more global concerns (see Band Aid in 1983 and Live Aid the following year). In addition to this gem, Waking Up contains the minor hit “War,” which makes its case more overtly. Here, over heavy synthesizers that manage to shimmer rather than oppressing, George sings, “How cynical are people?” Though “you can stand them on their own,” “they will fall to pieces.”

7. Love is Love: “Love is Love” finds Boy George in full romantic mode, focusing on the positive side to relationships. While in a song like “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” heartbreaks seems everywhere, here the world is all sunshine and smiles: “Love is everywhere you go.” The straightforward emotion of that sentiment is balanced by an easy going track that touches Culture Club’s roots in soul music and features strong, if understated, 70s-inspired guitar work from Ron Hay.

6. Miss Me Blind: Culture Club’s first album, Kissing to be Clever presented George as a hapless character when it comes to love; the follow-up album, Colour By Numbers offered an altogether different hero, one who sits on top of the world. That attitude is readily apparent in “Karma Chameleon,” but it can be found scattered throughout the album, as here, where George plays the gracious figure who tells his lover not to leave: “you’ll miss me blind,” he warns. Yet he’s also eager to graciously welcome his lover back: just “grab my golden hand,” he offers like a god, and “I’ll teach you” all you need to know about love.

5. Victims: More than any other of the band’s songs, “Victims,” is all George, an anthem featuring his rich vocals primarily backed with piano until near the middle it builds with chorus and  a pounding drum beat into full ensemble. One of Culture Club’s most lyrically sophisticated songs, it finds solace in loneliness by seeing that we’re all victims in one way or another. The metaphor of the marionette that weaves its way through the song adds an extra layer of pathos to this plea for solidarity among all of us who feel despair.

4. I Just Wanna Be Loved: Though it didn’t produce either the buzz or the hits of Culture Club’s early work, their 1999 album, Don’t Mind if I Do showed off a more mature quartet. Something of the uneven energy is missing of course, but that is replaced by a sense that this is a band at the top of their game, in complete control of what they’re doing. The lyrics of “I Just Wanna Be Loved,” suggest that, with the speaker owning his own faults: I “want to beg you baby, but I’m much too proud to shout.” Self-knowledge comes hand-in-hand with another piece of wisdom: the desire for stability: “Fortunately I got wise this time.” Love isn’t about excitement -- “I don’t want to fight” -- but rather about making peace.

3. Karma Chameleon: Everyone knows “Karma Chameleon,” one of the essentials of the 1980s. That has a lot to do with the song’s musical elements. It manages to capture both the soul and reggae elements Culture Club fused together so well. The lyrics are full of that energy missing from the later “I Just Wanna Be Loved.” In this case, the speaker admires for the ever-changing bad boy, knowing all the while his feelings will only lead him to heartache. For now, before everything tips over into chaos, love spreads itself out like a fan of colors. “Every day is like survival,” but there’s something magical in that. Judd Lander’s harmonica work rises above it all, giving the song its distinctive sound and reminding us to be playful in the face of our fears.

2. Church of the Poisoned Mind: In many ways “Church of the Poison Mind” feels like a follow-up to “Karma Chameleon.” The sentiment in the lyrics is much the same: the lover here both” used and made my life so sweet.” The harmonica blends perfectly as well. What gives “Poisoned Mind” the edge is a slower beat and some wicked bass work from Mikey Craig. Karma Chameleon feels like a party; with those three opening bass notes, “Church” feels like a statement.

1. Time (Clock of the Heart): It’s no secret that most of George’s lyrics were driven by his tempestuous relationship with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. By all accounts Moss struggled with the public nature of his relationship to George, and in particular his celebrity identity as a homosexual. George’s lyrics throughout the Culture Club cannon vacillate between a sort of idol worship of Moss, an attempt to accept the instability of their relationship, and feelings of crushing defeat when that relationship frequently fell apart. Both “Karma Chameleon” and “Church of the Poisoned Mind” capture the high energy of being on the edge of that relationship, balancing precariously between emotions, but no song perfectly captures that sense of balance like “Time (Clock of the Heart).” As George sings plaintively, time makes other “lovers feel that they’ve got something real.” The speaker here longs for that feeling, and literally begs his lover to give it to him, but at the same time he shrugs the pain away and revels in the love of the moment. He’s both trying and failing to accept the time-worn truism of “Better to have loved and lost.” Craig’s bass line creates a solid foundation while a sweet synthesizer and Hay’s jangling guitar create a sweet counterpoint in which the balance of voices is almost as heavenly as that of the emotions.

[thegoing-gayhoax-blog]

“Ars Ratio” Reflection (Second Draft)

Kara Ireland

WRIT 3160

Reflection

 What's in my portfolio? In my portfolio are various modes of the depiction of how the myth of going gay functions in society. I've compiled a series of gifs, pictures, and scenes from various shows. These shows include MTV’s Faking It, ABC’s Glee, FOX’s Scream Queens, and Freeform’s The Bold Type. My argumentative piece follows these depictions. I used MTV’s Faking It pilot episode as my main source of scrutiny. I listed numerous discrepancies I had with the show. Mainly, I wanted to highlight how damaging the very first portrayal of lesbians on mainstream television since The L Word was. It was revolutionary for me because I was struggling with my own sexuality at the age of fifteen. Seeing two women in a same sex relationship at any stretch was good exposure for me, it increased my sense of normalcy. It wasn't until I got older, got more experience, and a wider world view that I began to see how awful the show’s premise was. My argumentative paper ventures into how I felt it missed the mark. I then have a comedy skit that will be supposedly performed at Atlanta’s Gay Pride. This original piece is modeled after the kind of comedy I'd seen at my own experience at Pride 2017. Most of the comedy was made at the expense of heterosexual people. In a safe environment full of people who have had similar experiences, it was okay to poke fun at the majority. The skit touches on inappropriate touching, unrequited crushes, and personal experience with girls supposedly going gay. It addresses some of the bothersome situations lesbians often run into in a lighthearted way.

My third argument was a series of tweets I’d composed in response to real-life depictions of “going gay.” I searched buzz words on twitter, such as “be gay, go gay, try girls” etc. to reply to. Though confined to 140 characters – even less, because of the handle, I felt that I’d used Aristotelian appeals accurately to challenge their beliefs.

 The gif set from The Bold Type contrasts the problematic tropes shown in both Faking It and Glee. It supports a stereotype, then dismantles it. In the first gif set, Kat is shown identifying with the lesbian experience, but saying that she didn't think she could get past “all this” referencing to the female anatomy. The lesbian character of the show, Adena, countered her statement with “it's not about all this. It's about this” in reference to her heart and emotion regarding a person.

 I believe this is relevant to my discussion because Kat admitted that the sexual nature of their budding relationship was offputting, as she did not identify as a lesbian. She was merely exploring her sexuality, and she'd done so by kissing Adena. They hadn't gone further, and she didn't think she could pursue a relationship because of the sexual barrier that existed between them. Adena validated it, but also said that it wasn't about the body. Being in a relationship transcended sex and the parts involved. It rested solely on the heart and the emotion surrounding the couple that determined it's sustenance. This was the point I was trying to convey, myself through my argumentative paper. Too many people believe that “going gay” is about sex, when it is only a mere part of the exploratory experience. To truly give oneself to a same sex relationship, it needs more substance than an attraction and willingness to explore. The Bold Type executed this well.

 ABC’s Glee enacted several stereotypical tropes about lesbians and gays throughout their series, but it was mostly for educational purposes to highlight and identify bigotry. Nevertheless, the openly lesbian character, Santana, was made out to be predatory in several instances. Quinn was one of her best friends, and they eventually had sex together. The scene where it happened was on prom night, when they were both single and feeling lonely. Alcohol was featured heavily in the episode. It implied that intoxication can make someone “go gay”. Quinn then emphasized the fact that she'd never slow danced with a girl before, and Santana smirked at her. This is the predatory lesbian fallacy being portrayed. The scene then cut from Santana leading her away by the hand from the party to a suggestive morning after scene. Additionally, with prior knowledge from the season, Quinn had gone through a rebellious bad girl phase, and this was amongst the last things she did. It was never explicitly said that this was part of her regime, but it can be interpreted that way.

 FOX’s Scream Queens was a satirical show that was made to offend people in the masses. There was no stroke to identify why the quotes were problematic, but it was understood by most that it was satire. There was one butch lesbian on the show, who was one of the first killed during a serial killing. She was dubbed Predatory Lez immediately, and we never learned her real name. In her brief duration, she developed a superficial relationship with Chanel #3 based on lewd jokes. Naming a character Predatory Lez does not help the view that lesbians really are predatory and infringe on boundaries. Viewers never got insight on the intricacies of their peculiar relationship, but at one point, Chanel #3 begs the killer not to kill her because she was “sort of gay now too”. Beyond the implication that a few kisses and explicit jokes made between one another changed someone's sexuality, it was also used as a discriminatory saving grace. She partially identified as a member of the LGBT community to be pardoned. She denied it later. This abrupt change makes it hard for people to come out. Though the show is based on satire, it does have parallels to real, ignorant people that think this way.

   Through this class, I have discovered that argument transcends pro and con. Essentially, everything is an argument. Commercials, designs, font choice, music, inflection, gesture, clothing, hairstyle – everything has the potential to be an argument. Anything can be designed to persuade. After analyzing various shows, I began to consider them differently. Words are not the only mode of argument because everything has the power to make a statement.

 I have learned that the color scheme of a product or an advertisement serves to persuade someone, years prior. Since being in this class, I have learned that the mere existence of the product is an argument within itself. The product serves an argumentative purpose initially. It was difficult to wrap my mind around, but throughout the semester, my mindset has been malleable. It has increasingly made more sense. In reading Heinrichs, mostly, I was offered several new perspectives through relatable material. I would like to thank you, Dr. Harris, for assigning such a book – rather than a text that is purely academic. It was much easier to read and retain. By reading Heinrichs, it has become more apparent to me that argument lives in everything.

 The philosophy of argument and writing is something I’m not entirely well-versed in. I understood it minimally when I came in, and I still have a tentative hold on it now. When I was a junior in high school I learned for the first time what ethos pathos and logos were. At Chamblee, Coach Smith taught it to us. It’s funny because we never even did anything with that information. I think we might’ve had one project or assignment that incorporated it, then I put it on the backburner. We learned the basics. When I came into WRIT 3160 three years later, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t plan on delving into Aristotelian appeals because I didn’t know about them and truthfully, I didn’t care about that stuff. For every argument I’ve made in the past, every persuasive paper, it was solely the rights and wrongs and do’s and don’ts. It was all pros and cons. Never once did I think that my delivery itself was part of the argument, that my rhetoric was just as influential as my facts.

 I didn’t care about the technicalities of argument. I didn’t care about the impact of pathos, logos, and ethos in real life situations. It was fascinating to discover that they’re all around us all the time. Reading Heinrichs was tedious for me at times because even though he made it relatable, I still couldn’t get engaged. This class was good nevertheless because it kept me writing when I didn’t want to and often times I resented the fact. As a writer and an author, I needed that push. This can now be used in my books, because my communication can be stronger.

 The concept of rhetoric is still somewhat lost on me, just because it encompasses so much. I would not say that I’m an expert, nor that I could effectively explain it to someone new. It’s still confusing for me, but this class has offered a little clarity. Assigning a weekly riff and response forced me to read for comprehension. I would skim Heinrichs, then have to go back and read it over again because the meaning was lost on me. Because rhetoric is all new to me, it was hard to absorb and apply the information. However, creating a riff and understanding how an author initially wrote their piece turned out to be the key to comprehension for me. This was an incredibly original recurring assignment. You forced us to read for interpretation, and you can’t effectively interpret something that you don’t understand. The riff and response held me accountable for my reading. Without it, I very well may have skipped the readings altogether because being introduced to new topics I haven’t had any prior knowledge about intimidates me, and I just opt out of participating. The riff was easier to produce than the response, for me.

           I learned about syllogism and can decipher it when it happens. I have noticed that people use syllogism incorrectly, more often than not. The most recent one I can remember hearing and identifying was on the premise of who can say the N word and who can’t. Essentially, the argument was: Black people are people of color. People of color say the N word. Mexicans are not black, but they are still people of color, therefore they can say the N word. People were using this syllogism to defend their right to say a word that didn’t pertain to them. I’ve also been noticing fallacies since being exposed to the different types.

Since discovering the intricacies of rhetoric, I have subconsciously been noticing and labeling certain moves as such. I’ve been decoding people’s decorum and spotting disingenuous advances. I’ve seen it a lot at work with my managers, the difference between their interactions with the customers at Target and their interactions in the break room. I can identify more deadly fallacies when I speak to people. The main ones my counterparts fall victim to are tautology, slippery slope, and the red herring. They love to change the subject. I’ve seen all of the Aristotelian appeals in play at work as a cashier, ranging from children using logos to get a toy, parents using ethos to justify their refusal to buy said toy, older adults using pathos to get a discount, people using Kairos to justify their splurging (“It’s on sale!”).  I’ve noticed code grooming a lot too, especially within mixed racial crowds. White people’s decorum shifts when in a predominantly black environment, they begin code grooming. Those are the few from Heinrichs that have stayed with me, those that I can readily identify. Without this class, those behaviors would not be blanketed by any academic terms. The child would be whining, the parent would be annoyed, the old people would be trying to mooch, and the splurgers would be irresponsible. My managers would’ve just been fake, just as the mixed crowds. I’m glad that I can pinpoint all of this as forms of rhetoric, even though they are not the conventional argument we automatically think of. Being in this class and reading these books give me a stronger sense of interpretation as I go through the world. It’s one of the more valuable things I’ll take from any class since I’ve been in college.

As far as my e-Portfolio is concerned, it is not ideally what I wanted. When I was first assigned this project, I was excited because I got to create a blog regarding something personal to me. I had already been using tumblr for most of my teenage years, so I thought it would be easy enough. My use of tumblr consisted of me, mostly reblogging relevant pictures and quotes. I’d never focused on the posting and the organization of it all. That was a more daunting task than I’d expected. My gifs did not post accordingly, in the grids I’d always seen them. They took up way too much space and required too much navigation. Originally, I had the vision of having my gifs with explanations and analyses beneath them, but the reflection wouldn’t allow me to do that effectively. I also didn’t have the tabs that I thought I would. Everything is just straightforward and narrow. I thought it would be more exciting, but the material was more important that the aesthetics of it all, so I left it alone.

[andrewmrudd79]

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question.

As someone who’s been in online business for almost a decade now, I’m grateful to have met and built friendships with many amazing people, such as Amanda Bond and Greg Hickman, who’ve been successfully selling products online for years. I’ve learned so much from these people over the years, and have been truly inspired by all of them.

I’ve poured all of that learning and inspiration into my recent online course launches: Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting. I’m so thankful for that.

As I continue to learn more (there’s always more to learn!) about selling and promoting products online, there’s one question that I keep asking myself (and, as I’ve realized, I’m not alone in this). That question is:

Open cart or closed cart?

When it comes to the promotion of your product, is it better to leave the cart open all the time and work on an automated long-term promotion sequence? Or should you pack the promotion and campaign into a shorter time period and have a closed cart during specific times of year?

Which is better? That’s what we’re going to tackle in this post today.

An Open Cart Is an Open Opportunity

When you keep the cart open, you can continually promote your product with the goal of getting more people to buy it. That makes sense in a lot of ways. If people want your product, why would you want to close the cart and deny them the opportunity? The truth is that you don’t, of course.

Another positive reason for keeping your cart open is the generous timeframe you have to focus on building funnels and sequences that can help promote your product as soon as people enter your email list. After those funnels and sequences are constructed, you can really hone in on marketing and getting people to jump excitedly into that sales funnel.

With an open cart, you can also keep tweaking the sequence over time, like a scientist testing a hypothesis again and again. By doing that, you’ll collect a lot of valuable data, which will allow you to more fully understand what works and what doesn’t.

You’re also going to decipher the times of year that are best to promote and sell your product. Summertime between June and August may work well, and perhaps it’s slower during the winter months. These are details that will inform your strategy going forward.

You will also begin to learn how outside marketing channels might affect your sales. With an open cart, you have all the time to figure out what external factors can do to your selling and promotion efforts. And with time comes data, and with data comes opportunities for making tweaks.

Once you really nail down those sequences after tweaking and testing based on the data you’ve collected, you’re going to have a much more successful go at converting the people who enter your funnel into customers.

With that said, I have to mention two recent guest posts on the Smart Passive Income blog that do an amazing job of explaining sales funnels and how you can use sales funnels to fuel your business:

A Beginner’s Guide to Predictable Sales Funnels by Greg Hickman of System.ly

How to Fuel Your Predictable Marketing Funnel with Facebook Ads by Amanda Bond of The Ad Strategist

Special thanks again to Greg and Amanda for your knowledge and insight!

The Disadvantages of Having an Open Cart

Like with anything, there’s also a downside to having an open cart. One disadvantage is that you limit the opportunity to include scarcity into your marketing efforts. Scarcity instills the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) into your audience. This is done in a few different ways–either by giving your audience a specific timeframe to purchase your product, or emphasizing that there is a limited amount of whatever you are selling. The FOMO increases the number of people who will take action, especially those who are on the fence. When your cart is open all time, you don’t have that sense of urgency. We will discuss more about how to create scarcity when we talk about the advantages of having a closed cart in the section below.

Another downside of having an open cart is that there’s a possibility that you may, if you don’t carefully construct your sequences and your funnels, overwhelm your subscribers. If your subscribers feel like you’re always promoting, it’s easy for them to take it for granted. and they won’t really ever take action. If you always have the opportunity to buy something, there’s always going to be time to make excuses to not buy.

You also risk coming off as overly aggressive in your promotion. Nobody wants that, especially if they don’t necessarily need what you’re offering at the moment, which is all the more reason why it’s important to know exactly what’s going on with your email list.

With an open cart, with everything automated and hands-off, there’s also a chance that you’ll forget about your cart altogether. You won’t forget about sales, obviously, but there’s definitely a chance you will, once things are automated and set in motion, become a little complacent about improving the workflow or fine-tuning the sales funnel. Things may be working, to an extent, but think of how much better they could work if you took the time to analyze the process you’ve set up, in addition to having some automation.

Mining Gold in a Closed Cart

The approach that I’ve used, and I think successfully, is the closed cart. And by that I mean there’s a specific timeframe in which the cart is open and closed. Part of the time, the cart is open. Part of the time (most of the time), the cart is closed. And in both time periods, you’re strategic about the timeline, the process, and whole funnel.

The pros in going with a limited open cart and then a deadline closed cart are that you can, as I mentioned earlier, inject a feeling of scarcity. So there is a time limit in a closed cart, and that has the potential of inspiring a rush of people to buy before they’ll no longer have access. Let me give you an example:

Here’s how it went during my recent Smart From Scratch launch.

The cart was only open for a specific period of time, and my audience knew when it was going to close. But, even with that knowledge, a whopping 44 percent of total sales came in on that last day because of the sense of scarcity I injected into an email:

Here’s a screenshot of the gross sales from the launch. As you can see, on that last day, Friday, a big spike in sales.

Note: As you can also see, there were some sales on Saturday, after the cart close date, but those were individuals who were having technical difficulties prior to the closing, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t punish them for something that was out of their control.

It’s also important to honor the deadlines you create. It just adds more clarity to the process, for your audience and for business.

In addition to creating scarcity and FOMO, with a closed cart setup you are more able to make an event out of it, because it’s not something that happens all the time. You can pour your energy into it, build momentum, promote it across multiple platforms and touchpoints before the cart closes. A closed cart also empowers you to be more persistent and regular with email communication and promotion to your audience. Since you have an end date, people will know that your promotion and emailing has an end date too.

One aspect of the closed cart approach I really love is it allows you to work closely with your students, or new members, or new customers after the launch period (i.e., open cart) is closed. You can keep your focus on the students (if you’re selling an online course) or your customers. You can be there for them, making sure that they are having a great experience, that the course or product is living up to their expectations. And, if you get feedback from your customers that it’s not doing what it needs to be doing, you have the time to make sure that things improve without actually worrying about the marketing side at the same time.

The Challenges of an Open-Closed Launch

Before I go any further, I just wanted to clarify here that I’m leaning heavily on selling and promoting an online course, specifically. That’s what I’ve had the most experience with so far (with a physical product experiment happening now!), so that’s what I’ll be talking about for the most part.

To be more accurate about what I’ve done for previous product launches, I’ve really used an open-closed cart launch. Because, at times it’s open, at times it’s closed—and everything in between is thoroughly planned and managed.

So that’s the challenge of an open-closed cart launch like that. It’s exhausting. It takes a ton of energy and time from myself and the team. It’s an “all hands on deck” approach to creating, promoting, selling, and managing your product funnel for the long-term.

Another facet of the open-closed cart approach is that it demands more hands-on attention. While the cart is closed, especially as it pertains to an online course where you have students (and more so if you have office hours, which I do for my courses), you spend a lot of time in customer service mode—giving everyone an opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s through live chat or on social media or through email.

The quicker you can get to the questions from your audience, the more likely it is they will follow through on purchasing your product because they’re going to know a person (you and/or your team) is actually there on the other end paying attention to them.

Open-Closed Variant

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by an open-closed cart launch, there is a middle ground. It’s a way to produce what feels like an open-closed situation, just with a little added boost of automation from a tool called Deadline Funnel, which helps to add scarcity even in an evergreen sales funnel.

David Siteman Garland, of the Create Awesome Online Courses Cheat Sheet, originally recommended Deadline Funnel to me. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] He was a guest on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session 136.

Deadline Funnel allows you to, as people come into your sequence or email list, create time-based promotions. So, after someone comes into your sequence or email list, Deadline Funnel creates scarcity by giving them only a specific amount of time to take action before that opportunity disappears. So it’s an automated form of scarcity.

And that’s your open-closed cart variant. Again, you can try that out with Deadline Funnel.

Closing Your Cart on a Digital Product

You may be thinking perhaps, “why would you close a digital product when it could be open all the time?” Let me reiterate why I recommend, based on my experience, going with an open-closed cart approach.

First, if you’re going to market your product—which is a must if you want to get it in front of people—you need to inject scarcity into the funnel, and create moments that say, “you need to take action now.”

Second, it’s much easier to manage your customers and ensure they get the support they deserve. You’re there with them, taking feedback, answering questions, making improvements for an additional product down the road.

Third, it works. I can only speak to my experience (with my online course launches most recently, Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting), but the open-closed cart approach has worked well. It takes a lot of energy and time, but sometimes those most challenging approaches are the most validating and rewarding.

I know some people who have started with open-closed cart approach, and then have converted their courses to more of an evergreen kind of launch. That’s definitely something that I’m willing to experiment with as well.

Now it’s your turn.

To You: Open or Closed? Share Your Experiences!

I know there are a lot of you in the SPI audience who know even better than I do what works and what doesn’t when it comes to open and closed carts. So, I want to give you the opportunity to share those experiences!

In the comments below, tell us: What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Share your advice. I really want this to be a collaborative, ongoing discussion. One of the greatest joys about the Smart Passive Income audience is that it’s a learning environment. It’s a place to learn, for me and for you! That aspect of the community is so important to me.

That’s what SPI is all about. Learning from each other. Learning from our experiences. Learning on our paths toward bigger and brighter things.

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question. originally posted at Homer’s Blog

[williamjharwick]

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question.

As someone who’s been in online business for almost a decade now, I’m grateful to have met and built friendships with many amazing people, such as Amanda Bond and Greg Hickman, who’ve been successfully selling products online for years. I’ve learned so much from these people over the years, and have been truly inspired by all of them.

I’ve poured all of that learning and inspiration into my recent online course launches: Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting. I’m so thankful for that.

As I continue to learn more (there’s always more to learn!) about selling and promoting products online, there’s one question that I keep asking myself (and, as I’ve realized, I’m not alone in this). That question is:

Open cart or closed cart?

When it comes to the promotion of your product, is it better to leave the cart open all the time and work on an automated long-term promotion sequence? Or should you pack the promotion and campaign into a shorter time period and have a closed cart during specific times of year?

Which is better? That’s what we’re going to tackle in this post today.

An Open Cart Is an Open Opportunity

When you keep the cart open, you can continually promote your product with the goal of getting more people to buy it. That makes sense in a lot of ways. If people want your product, why would you want to close the cart and deny them the opportunity? The truth is that you don’t, of course.

Another positive reason for keeping your cart open is the generous timeframe you have to focus on building funnels and sequences that can help promote your product as soon as people enter your email list. After those funnels and sequences are constructed, you can really hone in on marketing and getting people to jump excitedly into that sales funnel.

With an open cart, you can also keep tweaking the sequence over time, like a scientist testing a hypothesis again and again. By doing that, you’ll collect a lot of valuable data, which will allow you to more fully understand what works and what doesn’t.

You’re also going to decipher the times of year that are best to promote and sell your product. Summertime between June and August may work well, and perhaps it’s slower during the winter months. These are details that will inform your strategy going forward.

You will also begin to learn how outside marketing channels might affect your sales. With an open cart, you have all the time to figure out what external factors can do to your selling and promotion efforts. And with time comes data, and with data comes opportunities for making tweaks.

Once you really nail down those sequences after tweaking and testing based on the data you’ve collected, you’re going to have a much more successful go at converting the people who enter your funnel into customers.

With that said, I have to mention two recent guest posts on the Smart Passive Income blog that do an amazing job of explaining sales funnels and how you can use sales funnels to fuel your business:

A Beginner’s Guide to Predictable Sales Funnels by Greg Hickman of System.ly

How to Fuel Your Predictable Marketing Funnel with Facebook Ads by Amanda Bond of The Ad Strategist

Special thanks again to Greg and Amanda for your knowledge and insight!

The Disadvantages of Having an Open Cart

Like with anything, there’s also a downside to having an open cart. One disadvantage is that you limit the opportunity to include scarcity into your marketing efforts. Scarcity instills the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) into your audience. This is done in a few different ways–either by giving your audience a specific timeframe to purchase your product, or emphasizing that there is a limited amount of whatever you are selling. The FOMO increases the number of people who will take action, especially those who are on the fence. When your cart is open all time, you don’t have that sense of urgency. We will discuss more about how to create scarcity when we talk about the advantages of having a closed cart in the section below.

Another downside of having an open cart is that there’s a possibility that you may, if you don’t carefully construct your sequences and your funnels, overwhelm your subscribers. If your subscribers feel like you’re always promoting, it’s easy for them to take it for granted. and they won’t really ever take action. If you always have the opportunity to buy something, there’s always going to be time to make excuses to not buy.

You also risk coming off as overly aggressive in your promotion. Nobody wants that, especially if they don’t necessarily need what you’re offering at the moment, which is all the more reason why it’s important to know exactly what’s going on with your email list.

With an open cart, with everything automated and hands-off, there’s also a chance that you’ll forget about your cart altogether. You won’t forget about sales, obviously, but there’s definitely a chance you will, once things are automated and set in motion, become a little complacent about improving the workflow or fine-tuning the sales funnel. Things may be working, to an extent, but think of how much better they could work if you took the time to analyze the process you’ve set up, in addition to having some automation.

Mining Gold in a Closed Cart

The approach that I’ve used, and I think successfully, is the closed cart. And by that I mean there’s a specific timeframe in which the cart is open and closed. Part of the time, the cart is open. Part of the time (most of the time), the cart is closed. And in both time periods, you’re strategic about the timeline, the process, and whole funnel.

The pros in going with a limited open cart and then a deadline closed cart are that you can, as I mentioned earlier, inject a feeling of scarcity. So there is a time limit in a closed cart, and that has the potential of inspiring a rush of people to buy before they’ll no longer have access. Let me give you an example:

Here’s how it went during my recent Smart From Scratch launch.

The cart was only open for a specific period of time, and my audience knew when it was going to close. But, even with that knowledge, a whopping 44 percent of total sales came in on that last day because of the sense of scarcity I injected into an email:

Here’s a screenshot of the gross sales from the launch. As you can see, on that last day, Friday, a big spike in sales.

Note: As you can also see, there were some sales on Saturday, after the cart close date, but those were individuals who were having technical difficulties prior to the closing, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t punish them for something that was out of their control.

It’s also important to honor the deadlines you create. It just adds more clarity to the process, for your audience and for business.

In addition to creating scarcity and FOMO, with a closed cart setup you are more able to make an event out of it, because it’s not something that happens all the time. You can pour your energy into it, build momentum, promote it across multiple platforms and touchpoints before the cart closes. A closed cart also empowers you to be more persistent and regular with email communication and promotion to your audience. Since you have an end date, people will know that your promotion and emailing has an end date too.

One aspect of the closed cart approach I really love is it allows you to work closely with your students, or new members, or new customers after the launch period (i.e., open cart) is closed. You can keep your focus on the students (if you’re selling an online course) or your customers. You can be there for them, making sure that they are having a great experience, that the course or product is living up to their expectations. And, if you get feedback from your customers that it’s not doing what it needs to be doing, you have the time to make sure that things improve without actually worrying about the marketing side at the same time.

The Challenges of an Open-Closed Launch

Before I go any further, I just wanted to clarify here that I’m leaning heavily on selling and promoting an online course, specifically. That’s what I’ve had the most experience with so far (with a physical product experiment happening now!), so that’s what I’ll be talking about for the most part.

To be more accurate about what I’ve done for previous product launches, I’ve really used an open-closed cart launch. Because, at times it’s open, at times it’s closed—and everything in between is thoroughly planned and managed.

So that’s the challenge of an open-closed cart launch like that. It’s exhausting. It takes a ton of energy and time from myself and the team. It’s an “all hands on deck” approach to creating, promoting, selling, and managing your product funnel for the long-term.

Another facet of the open-closed cart approach is that it demands more hands-on attention. While the cart is closed, especially as it pertains to an online course where you have students (and more so if you have office hours, which I do for my courses), you spend a lot of time in customer service mode—giving everyone an opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s through live chat or on social media or through email.

The quicker you can get to the questions from your audience, the more likely it is they will follow through on purchasing your product because they’re going to know a person (you and/or your team) is actually there on the other end paying attention to them.

Open-Closed Variant

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by an open-closed cart launch, there is a middle ground. It’s a way to produce what feels like an open-closed situation, just with a little added boost of automation from a tool called Deadline Funnel, which helps to add scarcity even in an evergreen sales funnel.

David Siteman Garland, of the Create Awesome Online Courses Cheat Sheet, originally recommended Deadline Funnel to me. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] He was a guest on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session 136.

Deadline Funnel allows you to, as people come into your sequence or email list, create time-based promotions. So, after someone comes into your sequence or email list, Deadline Funnel creates scarcity by giving them only a specific amount of time to take action before that opportunity disappears. So it’s an automated form of scarcity.

And that’s your open-closed cart variant. Again, you can try that out with Deadline Funnel.

Closing Your Cart on a Digital Product

You may be thinking perhaps, “why would you close a digital product when it could be open all the time?” Let me reiterate why I recommend, based on my experience, going with an open-closed cart approach.

First, if you’re going to market your product—which is a must if you want to get it in front of people—you need to inject scarcity into the funnel, and create moments that say, “you need to take action now.”

Second, it’s much easier to manage your customers and ensure they get the support they deserve. You’re there with them, taking feedback, answering questions, making improvements for an additional product down the road.

Third, it works. I can only speak to my experience (with my online course launches most recently, Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting), but the open-closed cart approach has worked well. It takes a lot of energy and time, but sometimes those most challenging approaches are the most validating and rewarding.

I know some people who have started with open-closed cart approach, and then have converted their courses to more of an evergreen kind of launch. That’s definitely something that I’m willing to experiment with as well.

Now it’s your turn.

To You: Open or Closed? Share Your Experiences!

I know there are a lot of you in the SPI audience who know even better than I do what works and what doesn’t when it comes to open and closed carts. So, I want to give you the opportunity to share those experiences!

In the comments below, tell us: What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Share your advice. I really want this to be a collaborative, ongoing discussion. One of the greatest joys about the Smart Passive Income audience is that it’s a learning environment. It’s a place to learn, for me and for you! That aspect of the community is so important to me.

That’s what SPI is all about. Learning from each other. Learning from our experiences. Learning on our paths toward bigger and brighter things.

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question. shared from David Homer’s Blog

[judithghernandez87]

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question.

As someone who’s been in online business for almost a decade now, I’m grateful to have met and built friendships with many amazing people, such as Amanda Bond and Greg Hickman, who’ve been successfully selling products online for years. I’ve learned so much from these people over the years, and have been truly inspired by all of them.

I’ve poured all of that learning and inspiration into my recent online course launches: Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting. I’m so thankful for that.

As I continue to learn more (there’s always more to learn!) about selling and promoting products online, there’s one question that I keep asking myself (and, as I’ve realized, I’m not alone in this). That question is:

Open cart or closed cart?

When it comes to the promotion of your product, is it better to leave the cart open all the time and work on an automated long-term promotion sequence? Or should you pack the promotion and campaign into a shorter time period and have a closed cart during specific times of year?

Which is better? That’s what we’re going to tackle in this post today.

An Open Cart Is an Open Opportunity

When you keep the cart open, you can continually promote your product with the goal of getting more people to buy it. That makes sense in a lot of ways. If people want your product, why would you want to close the cart and deny them the opportunity? The truth is that you don’t, of course.

Another positive reason for keeping your cart open is the generous timeframe you have to focus on building funnels and sequences that can help promote your product as soon as people enter your email list. After those funnels and sequences are constructed, you can really hone in on marketing and getting people to jump excitedly into that sales funnel.

With an open cart, you can also keep tweaking the sequence over time, like a scientist testing a hypothesis again and again. By doing that, you’ll collect a lot of valuable data, which will allow you to more fully understand what works and what doesn’t.

You’re also going to decipher the times of year that are best to promote and sell your product. Summertime between June and August may work well, and perhaps it’s slower during the winter months. These are details that will inform your strategy going forward.

You will also begin to learn how outside marketing channels might affect your sales. With an open cart, you have all the time to figure out what external factors can do to your selling and promotion efforts. And with time comes data, and with data comes opportunities for making tweaks.

Once you really nail down those sequences after tweaking and testing based on the data you’ve collected, you’re going to have a much more successful go at converting the people who enter your funnel into customers.

With that said, I have to mention two recent guest posts on the Smart Passive Income blog that do an amazing job of explaining sales funnels and how you can use sales funnels to fuel your business:

A Beginner’s Guide to Predictable Sales Funnels by Greg Hickman of System.ly

How to Fuel Your Predictable Marketing Funnel with Facebook Ads by Amanda Bond of The Ad Strategist

Special thanks again to Greg and Amanda for your knowledge and insight!

The Disadvantages of Having an Open Cart

Like with anything, there’s also a downside to having an open cart. One disadvantage is that you limit the opportunity to include scarcity into your marketing efforts. Scarcity instills the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) into your audience. This is done in a few different ways–either by giving your audience a specific timeframe to purchase your product, or emphasizing that there is a limited amount of whatever you are selling. The FOMO increases the number of people who will take action, especially those who are on the fence. When your cart is open all time, you don’t have that sense of urgency. We will discuss more about how to create scarcity when we talk about the advantages of having a closed cart in the section below.

Another downside of having an open cart is that there’s a possibility that you may, if you don’t carefully construct your sequences and your funnels, overwhelm your subscribers. If your subscribers feel like you’re always promoting, it’s easy for them to take it for granted. and they won’t really ever take action. If you always have the opportunity to buy something, there’s always going to be time to make excuses to not buy.

You also risk coming off as overly aggressive in your promotion. Nobody wants that, especially if they don’t necessarily need what you’re offering at the moment, which is all the more reason why it’s important to know exactly what’s going on with your email list.

With an open cart, with everything automated and hands-off, there’s also a chance that you’ll forget about your cart altogether. You won’t forget about sales, obviously, but there’s definitely a chance you will, once things are automated and set in motion, become a little complacent about improving the workflow or fine-tuning the sales funnel. Things may be working, to an extent, but think of how much better they could work if you took the time to analyze the process you’ve set up, in addition to having some automation.

Mining Gold in a Closed Cart

The approach that I’ve used, and I think successfully, is the closed cart. And by that I mean there’s a specific timeframe in which the cart is open and closed. Part of the time, the cart is open. Part of the time (most of the time), the cart is closed. And in both time periods, you’re strategic about the timeline, the process, and whole funnel.

The pros in going with a limited open cart and then a deadline closed cart are that you can, as I mentioned earlier, inject a feeling of scarcity. So there is a time limit in a closed cart, and that has the potential of inspiring a rush of people to buy before they’ll no longer have access. Let me give you an example:

Here’s how it went during my recent Smart From Scratch launch.

The cart was only open for a specific period of time, and my audience knew when it was going to close. But, even with that knowledge, a whopping 44 percent of total sales came in on that last day because of the sense of scarcity I injected into an email:

Here’s a screenshot of the gross sales from the launch. As you can see, on that last day, Friday, a big spike in sales.

Note: As you can also see, there were some sales on Saturday, after the cart close date, but those were individuals who were having technical difficulties prior to the closing, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t punish them for something that was out of their control.

It’s also important to honor the deadlines you create. It just adds more clarity to the process, for your audience and for business.

In addition to creating scarcity and FOMO, with a closed cart setup you are more able to make an event out of it, because it’s not something that happens all the time. You can pour your energy into it, build momentum, promote it across multiple platforms and touchpoints before the cart closes. A closed cart also empowers you to be more persistent and regular with email communication and promotion to your audience. Since you have an end date, people will know that your promotion and emailing has an end date too.

One aspect of the closed cart approach I really love is it allows you to work closely with your students, or new members, or new customers after the launch period (i.e., open cart) is closed. You can keep your focus on the students (if you’re selling an online course) or your customers. You can be there for them, making sure that they are having a great experience, that the course or product is living up to their expectations. And, if you get feedback from your customers that it’s not doing what it needs to be doing, you have the time to make sure that things improve without actually worrying about the marketing side at the same time.

The Challenges of an Open-Closed Launch

Before I go any further, I just wanted to clarify here that I’m leaning heavily on selling and promoting an online course, specifically. That’s what I’ve had the most experience with so far (with a physical product experiment happening now!), so that’s what I’ll be talking about for the most part.

To be more accurate about what I’ve done for previous product launches, I’ve really used an open-closed cart launch. Because, at times it’s open, at times it’s closed—and everything in between is thoroughly planned and managed.

So that’s the challenge of an open-closed cart launch like that. It’s exhausting. It takes a ton of energy and time from myself and the team. It’s an “all hands on deck” approach to creating, promoting, selling, and managing your product funnel for the long-term.

Another facet of the open-closed cart approach is that it demands more hands-on attention. While the cart is closed, especially as it pertains to an online course where you have students (and more so if you have office hours, which I do for my courses), you spend a lot of time in customer service mode—giving everyone an opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s through live chat or on social media or through email.

The quicker you can get to the questions from your audience, the more likely it is they will follow through on purchasing your product because they’re going to know a person (you and/or your team) is actually there on the other end paying attention to them.

Open-Closed Variant

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by an open-closed cart launch, there is a middle ground. It’s a way to produce what feels like an open-closed situation, just with a little added boost of automation from a tool called Deadline Funnel, which helps to add scarcity even in an evergreen sales funnel.

David Siteman Garland, of the Create Awesome Online Courses Cheat Sheet, originally recommended Deadline Funnel to me. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] He was a guest on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session 136.

Deadline Funnel allows you to, as people come into your sequence or email list, create time-based promotions. So, after someone comes into your sequence or email list, Deadline Funnel creates scarcity by giving them only a specific amount of time to take action before that opportunity disappears. So it’s an automated form of scarcity.

And that’s your open-closed cart variant. Again, you can try that out with Deadline Funnel.

Closing Your Cart on a Digital Product

You may be thinking perhaps, “why would you close a digital product when it could be open all the time?” Let me reiterate why I recommend, based on my experience, going with an open-closed cart approach.

First, if you’re going to market your product—which is a must if you want to get it in front of people—you need to inject scarcity into the funnel, and create moments that say, “you need to take action now.”

Second, it’s much easier to manage your customers and ensure they get the support they deserve. You’re there with them, taking feedback, answering questions, making improvements for an additional product down the road.

Third, it works. I can only speak to my experience (with my online course launches most recently, Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting), but the open-closed cart approach has worked well. It takes a lot of energy and time, but sometimes those most challenging approaches are the most validating and rewarding.

I know some people who have started with open-closed cart approach, and then have converted their courses to more of an evergreen kind of launch. That’s definitely something that I’m willing to experiment with as well.

Now it’s your turn.

To You: Open or Closed? Share Your Experiences!

I know there are a lot of you in the SPI audience who know even better than I do what works and what doesn’t when it comes to open and closed carts. So, I want to give you the opportunity to share those experiences!

In the comments below, tell us: What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Share your advice. I really want this to be a collaborative, ongoing discussion. One of the greatest joys about the Smart Passive Income audience is that it’s a learning environment. It’s a place to learn, for me and for you! That aspect of the community is so important to me.

That’s what SPI is all about. Learning from each other. Learning from our experiences. Learning on our paths toward bigger and brighter things.

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question. originally posted at Dave’s Blog

[davidmhomerjr]

Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question.

As someone who’s been in online business for almost a decade now, I’m grateful to have met and built friendships with many amazing people, such as Amanda Bond and Greg Hickman, who’ve been successfully selling products online for years. I’ve learned so much from these people over the years, and have been truly inspired by all of them.

I’ve poured all of that learning and inspiration into my recent online course launches: Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting. I’m so thankful for that.

As I continue to learn more (there’s always more to learn!) about selling and promoting products online, there’s one question that I keep asking myself (and, as I’ve realized, I’m not alone in this). That question is:

Open cart or closed cart?

When it comes to the promotion of your product, is it better to leave the cart open all the time and work on an automated long-term promotion sequence? Or should you pack the promotion and campaign into a shorter time period and have a closed cart during specific times of year?

Which is better? That’s what we’re going to tackle in this post today.

An Open Cart Is an Open Opportunity

When you keep the cart open, you can continually promote your product with the goal of getting more people to buy it. That makes sense in a lot of ways. If people want your product, why would you want to close the cart and deny them the opportunity? The truth is that you don’t, of course.

Another positive reason for keeping your cart open is the generous timeframe you have to focus on building funnels and sequences that can help promote your product as soon as people enter your email list. After those funnels and sequences are constructed, you can really hone in on marketing and getting people to jump excitedly into that sales funnel.

With an open cart, you can also keep tweaking the sequence over time, like a scientist testing a hypothesis again and again. By doing that, you’ll collect a lot of valuable data, which will allow you to more fully understand what works and what doesn’t.

You’re also going to decipher the times of year that are best to promote and sell your product. Summertime between June and August may work well, and perhaps it’s slower during the winter months. These are details that will inform your strategy going forward.

You will also begin to learn how outside marketing channels might affect your sales. With an open cart, you have all the time to figure out what external factors can do to your selling and promotion efforts. And with time comes data, and with data comes opportunities for making tweaks.

Once you really nail down those sequences after tweaking and testing based on the data you’ve collected, you’re going to have a much more successful go at converting the people who enter your funnel into customers.

With that said, I have to mention two recent guest posts on the Smart Passive Income blog that do an amazing job of explaining sales funnels and how you can use sales funnels to fuel your business:

A Beginner’s Guide to Predictable Sales Funnels by Greg Hickman of System.ly

How to Fuel Your Predictable Marketing Funnel with Facebook Ads by Amanda Bond of The Ad Strategist

Special thanks again to Greg and Amanda for your knowledge and insight!

The Disadvantages of Having an Open Cart

Like with anything, there’s also a downside to having an open cart. One disadvantage is that you limit the opportunity to include scarcity into your marketing efforts. Scarcity instills the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) into your audience. This is done in a few different ways–either by giving your audience a specific timeframe to purchase your product, or emphasizing that there is a limited amount of whatever you are selling. The FOMO increases the number of people who will take action, especially those who are on the fence. When your cart is open all time, you don’t have that sense of urgency. We will discuss more about how to create scarcity when we talk about the advantages of having a closed cart in the section below.

Another downside of having an open cart is that there’s a possibility that you may, if you don’t carefully construct your sequences and your funnels, overwhelm your subscribers. If your subscribers feel like you’re always promoting, it’s easy for them to take it for granted. and they won’t really ever take action. If you always have the opportunity to buy something, there’s always going to be time to make excuses to not buy.

You also risk coming off as overly aggressive in your promotion. Nobody wants that, especially if they don’t necessarily need what you’re offering at the moment, which is all the more reason why it’s important to know exactly what’s going on with your email list.

With an open cart, with everything automated and hands-off, there’s also a chance that you’ll forget about your cart altogether. You won’t forget about sales, obviously, but there’s definitely a chance you will, once things are automated and set in motion, become a little complacent about improving the workflow or fine-tuning the sales funnel. Things may be working, to an extent, but think of how much better they could work if you took the time to analyze the process you’ve set up, in addition to having some automation.

Mining Gold in a Closed Cart

The approach that I’ve used, and I think successfully, is the closed cart. And by that I mean there’s a specific timeframe in which the cart is open and closed. Part of the time, the cart is open. Part of the time (most of the time), the cart is closed. And in both time periods, you’re strategic about the timeline, the process, and whole funnel.

The pros in going with a limited open cart and then a deadline closed cart are that you can, as I mentioned earlier, inject a feeling of scarcity. So there is a time limit in a closed cart, and that has the potential of inspiring a rush of people to buy before they’ll no longer have access. Let me give you an example:

Here’s how it went during my recent Smart From Scratch launch.

The cart was only open for a specific period of time, and my audience knew when it was going to close. But, even with that knowledge, a whopping 44 percent of total sales came in on that last day because of the sense of scarcity I injected into an email:

Here’s a screenshot of the gross sales from the launch. As you can see, on that last day, Friday, a big spike in sales.

Note: As you can also see, there were some sales on Saturday, after the cart close date, but those were individuals who were having technical difficulties prior to the closing, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t punish them for something that was out of their control.

It’s also important to honor the deadlines you create. It just adds more clarity to the process, for your audience and for business.

In addition to creating scarcity and FOMO, with a closed cart setup you are more able to make an event out of it, because it’s not something that happens all the time. You can pour your energy into it, build momentum, promote it across multiple platforms and touchpoints before the cart closes. A closed cart also empowers you to be more persistent and regular with email communication and promotion to your audience. Since you have an end date, people will know that your promotion and emailing has an end date too.

One aspect of the closed cart approach I really love is it allows you to work closely with your students, or new members, or new customers after the launch period (i.e., open cart) is closed. You can keep your focus on the students (if you’re selling an online course) or your customers. You can be there for them, making sure that they are having a great experience, that the course or product is living up to their expectations. And, if you get feedback from your customers that it’s not doing what it needs to be doing, you have the time to make sure that things improve without actually worrying about the marketing side at the same time.

The Challenges of an Open-Closed Launch

Before I go any further, I just wanted to clarify here that I’m leaning heavily on selling and promoting an online course, specifically. That’s what I’ve had the most experience with so far (with a physical product experiment happening now!), so that’s what I’ll be talking about for the most part.

To be more accurate about what I’ve done for previous product launches, I’ve really used an open-closed cart launch. Because, at times it’s open, at times it’s closed—and everything in between is thoroughly planned and managed.

So that’s the challenge of an open-closed cart launch like that. It’s exhausting. It takes a ton of energy and time from myself and the team. It’s an “all hands on deck” approach to creating, promoting, selling, and managing your product funnel for the long-term.

Another facet of the open-closed cart approach is that it demands more hands-on attention. While the cart is closed, especially as it pertains to an online course where you have students (and more so if you have office hours, which I do for my courses), you spend a lot of time in customer service mode—giving everyone an opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s through live chat or on social media or through email.

The quicker you can get to the questions from your audience, the more likely it is they will follow through on purchasing your product because they’re going to know a person (you and/or your team) is actually there on the other end paying attention to them.

Open-Closed Variant

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by an open-closed cart launch, there is a middle ground. It’s a way to produce what feels like an open-closed situation, just with a little added boost of automation from a tool called Deadline Funnel, which helps to add scarcity even in an evergreen sales funnel.

David Siteman Garland, of the Create Awesome Online Courses Cheat Sheet, originally recommended Deadline Funnel to me. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] He was a guest on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session 136.

Deadline Funnel allows you to, as people come into your sequence or email list, create time-based promotions. So, after someone comes into your sequence or email list, Deadline Funnel creates scarcity by giving them only a specific amount of time to take action before that opportunity disappears. So it’s an automated form of scarcity.

And that’s your open-closed cart variant. Again, you can try that out with Deadline Funnel.

Closing Your Cart on a Digital Product

You may be thinking perhaps, “why would you close a digital product when it could be open all the time?” Let me reiterate why I recommend, based on my experience, going with an open-closed cart approach.

First, if you’re going to market your product—which is a must if you want to get it in front of people—you need to inject scarcity into the funnel, and create moments that say, “you need to take action now.”

Second, it’s much easier to manage your customers and ensure they get the support they deserve. You’re there with them, taking feedback, answering questions, making improvements for an additional product down the road.

Third, it works. I can only speak to my experience (with my online course launches most recently, Smart From Scratch and Power-Up Podcasting), but the open-closed cart approach has worked well. It takes a lot of energy and time, but sometimes those most challenging approaches are the most validating and rewarding.

I know some people who have started with open-closed cart approach, and then have converted their courses to more of an evergreen kind of launch. That’s definitely something that I’m willing to experiment with as well.

Now it’s your turn.

To You: Open or Closed? Share Your Experiences!

I know there are a lot of you in the SPI audience who know even better than I do what works and what doesn’t when it comes to open and closed carts. So, I want to give you the opportunity to share those experiences!

In the comments below, tell us: What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Share your advice. I really want this to be a collaborative, ongoing discussion. One of the greatest joys about the Smart Passive Income audience is that it’s a learning environment. It’s a place to learn, for me and for you! That aspect of the community is so important to me.

That’s what SPI is all about. Learning from each other. Learning from our experiences. Learning on our paths toward bigger and brighter things.

[wciblackbeltacademy]

Hi, Dai-Shihan Miller here. In this online ninja training lesson, I want to explore how the ninja's self defense art approaches the idea of dealing with your opponent's attacks. Regardless of whether we're talking about handling punches, kicks, or grabbing attacks, the ninjutsu student approaches the concept from an "outside-the-box" perspective, rather than doing it "just like everyone else" but with a different "style." It's important for you to remember that, the art of Ninjutsu is not about "style," it's about having options, and the ability to produce results with the least amount of energy, effort - and the least amount of wear-and-tear on yourself in the process! Rather than attach oneself to the concept of "our way," the ninja practitioner prefers to have multiple ways for dealing with the same problem. That way, if one method or approach isn't working, he or she can simply change modes and come at the problem from a different angle, perspective, mindset, skill, weapon, or strategy. In this article, I want to share with you the four primary methods, or footwork patterns, that Ninpo-taijutsu (the Ninja's armed and unarmed self defense system) teaches for successfully avoiding and dealing with an assailant's incoming attacks. These footwork methods are introduced to beginning level students as options, and then each is explored in much greater depth as you progress towards the Black Belt levels, and toward eventual Mastery of the art of Ninjutsu. Of course, not every method is the best answer for every given situation. And that's really where the Ninja's self defense art shines - in recognizing that there are different types of attacks, and therefor different "best" answers for handing each "type." Just as there are different types of attacks, there are also different emotional states that can come up within ourselves as we are forced to deal with different attacker mindsets and personality types. Where one person and situation might have us holding our ground with firm confidence, a different attacker and circumstance might have us pulling away, defensively as we try to increase the time and space between ourselves and our attacker - while at the same time covering and protecting our exposed targets. This recognition of the different variables that can arise in a self-defense situation has, over the centuries, created a unique situation within the martial arts world, where the past masters of the art of ninjutsu have passed down not style, but strategies - each giving the ninja student another option for successfully surviving a dangerous situation with the least amount of energy necessary. Here are the four modes or methods that modern Ninjutsu students use to evade, avoid, and deal with the incoming, attacking limbs of their aggressors: 1) Slight shifts of the feet, coupled with a dropping of the knees to stabilize the body and jam the incoming attack. This is NOT the same blocking or so-called "horse" stance positioning of certain karate styles, but rather a calm, commanding ability to use proper positioning and posturing of the body and its limbs to crush the incoming attack altogether. In fact, instead of always using a stylized, forearm block against the incoming limb, the Ninja's method allows for the use of any body weapon - even the body itself - to be used to counter-attack or jam the incoming attack! 2) Defensive, angular, back-peddling that pulls the body back and away from danger at strategic angles. This footwork takes advantage of both the instinctive "backing away," and the side-shifting evasion tactics that we might see being used by more conventional fighters. However, rather than be confined to this 2-dimensional, front-back, or side-side kind of movement, the Ninja combatant combines the two and uses diagonal movement that provides the benefits from both realms. 3) Forward, piercing attacking footwork that charges forward into the encounter and takes the advantage. But, rather than being a "tough-guy" charging blindly into the fight kind of tactic, this footwork pulls the ninja forward and inside the arc of circular and flailing type attacks. So, instead of trying to hold our ground and block that incoming hook punch, or tae kwon do style crescent kick, we simply slip forward into the "eye of the storm" where our new position causes his attack to miss, and us to be in the perfect place to seize the advantage! 4) Circular, evasive shifting footwork that simultaneously allows you to skip, flank, and be in the perfect position. I usually describe this strategy to my beginning students using the using either the analogy of either the "bullfighter with the red cape," or the comedy movie scenario where "someone is trying to bash in a door." In either case, there is a last-second shift that causes the bull to miss, or the intruder to fall forward when the door is suddenly opened. In either case, the attacker is left in a position where they are bewildered, fighting for positioning, and completely exposed to a follow-up attack. Again, it's important to remember that, even though you can find each of these methods at the center of any number of fighting styles and self-defense programs, none of them should be seen as being the "best" or only way of doing things. The Enlightened warrior understands that the key to success is in having more options than your opponent. And, knowing when to use each of those options to produce the outcome that you are looking for!

[projecteve1]

New Post has been published on Project Eve

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9 Writing Habits to Help You Succeed

Writing is involved in every bit of work you do as a blogger.

But your writing habits don’t go quite well with your writing requirements. You are not able to finish that e-book; that sales page is in draft mode for a few weeks now.

The guest post that you planned to write in March is still in progress in May. You were determined to leave meaningful comments in your favorite blogs but before you could jump in, those blogs already got about 50 comments to start with.

So where is the problem? It is with your writing habit. You need to practice effective writing.

As a blogger, if you don’t improve your writing habit, you will suffer big time. This is no joke because your writing habit will directly impact your blog’s growth.

Without further delay let me put forth 9 effective writing habits that will help boost your blogging career.

#1 Write everyday to build an effective writing habit

If there’s only one advice that I can give you to drastically change your writing habits, it is this Simply write every day.

I know it is easily said than done. But it is not something that is impossible. All it takes is a bit of push and lots of discipline.

The discipline is what you need in the long run. But initially you need a little push to get it going.

It is not necessary that you have to publish everything you write. But it is absolutely necessary that you write every day, even if it looks gibberish to you.

Over then time, you will train yourself to be more spontaneous.

Initially you will need the push to get started to sit down and write that first (scary) sentence. But once you stick to doing this uncomfortable thing, you will find that it becomes easier for you, over the time, to kick start your writing process.

And, yes discipline. It is easy to find an excuse to postpone writing. It is easy to skip your writing schedule altogether by finding an excuse. But only if you are determined and disciplined you can do it consistently.

The initial few days will be highly challenging. But once things start to roll, you will get used to spontaneous writing.

Writing daily is nothing but exercising your writing muscles. Initially you will get muscle cramps and you will also get stuck over lack of ideas and flow of words.

But once you get used to it, your writing muscles will get a lot smoother and you won’t find the cramps anymore. And you will find your words to flow like running water.

How will this tip help you become a successful blogger? Well, blogging requires consistent publishing of content. And your daily writing habit will help you avoid staring blank screens and skipping publishing for weeks together.

#2 Take writing seriously

Writing is not something you do when you get the time. You have to make time for writing. As if it is an important appointment with your doctor that you cannot miss.

Given that blogging requires lots of writing, if you treat blogging as a business (if you’re serious enough), you should also treat writing seriously.

Not just for blog posts, but you will need the work of your writing nerve for stuff like writing blog comments, sales pages, landing pages, product descriptions, social media updates, courses/e-books and much more.

Even if you are a vlogger or a podcaster, you still need to write your scripts and write content for the landing pages.

In short, you cannot escape writing if you are a blogger. So you have to schedule writing time in your daily routine.

Don’t tell yourself that you’ll get to writing when you finish this and then that. You will never get the time, or if you do, it will be already an hour past YOUR bedtime.

I’ve said YOUR bedtime because, you might be a night owl working long hours into the night after the family and friends have gone to bed. But if you get the time to write only after YOUR bedtime has reached, there is no use!

Schedule a specific amount of time exclusively for writing and stick to it (no excuses).

You should choose this time when your mind is fresh, and calm and when you can be more productive. Only you know that time of the day. So schedule accordingly.

#3 Practice various forms of writing

Writing one type of content continuously can lead to boredom. And when boredom occurs you can’t be productive with your writing!

Bored writing is hard to keep up. And bored writing usually ends up producing crappy content. Which is why you need variety.

You could also write for your landing pages. You could write interactive type posts. And case studies, tutorials and the like.

As you can see, it is not all about writing blog post after blog post.

Oh and if you have a practice of writing a diary everyday that’d be so cool. It need not be your standard hard bound paper diary. There are various online diaries where you can record your everyday thoughts and achievements.

Whenever you are stuck and not in the mood to write, you can do brain dump. That’s nothing but opening up a plain document and writing whatever comes to your mind. The end product will not be useful but the whole process helps you open up, break the ice and get into the momentum of glorious writing.

#4 Keep yourself motivated to get in the writing game

Writing can become a chore if you are not motivated enough. You need to keep your motivation up all the time.

Being upset or not being in the mood can easily become excuses to bypass your writing schedule.

It is your responsibility to keep your spirit high. Do whatever is needed to accomplish that. I cannot advice you on that because what motivates you is unique to you.

You could keep this post bookmarked and get your daily dose of motivation. You could subscribe to websites that send you daily motivational quotes.

You should also have motivational posters pasted in your vision board, if you have one.

#5 Effective writing sprouts from keen observation

Observing helps a lot with improving your writing. What to observe? Well, there is literally no limit you have to set the limit.

You can observe and learn a lot of things from just about anything that is around you and that happens around you.

When you learn to stay calm and observe, you can learn a lot of things. Those “things” usually act as inspiration to your writing. They can also help you to come up with ideas to creating your content.

Only if you have the attitude to observe, learn, and relate, you can do this. And this practice will improve your writing skill in a fun-filled way.

#6 Train yourself to hone your effective writing skills

As you might already know writing might not be a pleasurable thing if you don’t enjoy it. Or if you are not prepared or trained for it.

Can you just start running a marathon if you are absolutely not a runner? You will fall flat and you will certainly damage your muscles and ligaments. You won’t have the stamina and you will give up much faster!

Which is why you need the training. You have to train yourself slowly and consistently over the time to prepare yourself for that event.

Writing daily is a good start to train yourself for consistent blogging. When your writing muscles get fluent with writing, you won’t feel writing be a painful thing anymore.

If you train yourself properly you can write at any time, even if you’re not in the mood.

#7 Do not combine writing and editing

This one is a crucial advice if you want to speed up your writing process. Writing and editing simultaneously will pull you backward.

When you treat writing and editing as two different, completely independent tasks, you will find your writing speed skyrocket.

Well I understand that it is tempting to correct that typo, or format that paragraph. But you have to realize that your brain functions in two completely different modes when you are writing and editing.

When you write, you are in a producing mode. When you edit you are in a polishing mode.

Writing and editing put your brain to 2 different modes. Don’t combine them!

When you are in a producing mode, you just need to let yourself to go with the flow. You should not interrupt your flow by correcting that typo or thinking about a better word to replace that mediocre word.

Writing is when you produce a draft. You are certainly not going to publish that draft. So don’t worry about editing at this stage.

Now all you need to do is get your idea out on that draft. You can edit it later.

#8 Go distraction free while writing

How often have you started that blog post only to leave it abandoned (as a first draft) for browsing cute cat videos on Youtube? Or for doing the infinite scrolling on Facebook? Or participate in pointless chats?

Distractions are everywhere, especially online. If you are not disciplined enough, you will never get to serious writing.

There are various online tools to restrict yourself from accessing distracting websites like Facebook while you are doing some serious writing. Cold Turkey is one such browser extension.

I use Scrivener in full-screen mode and have the word count (the target for the day already set) by the side. So I literally see my own progress which is really motivating.

You could totally cut off the internet which is a much better option!

#9 Use tools and systems to assist you in the process

We live in the age of tools. There is no shortage for tools! There are software, apps and systems for just about anything, literally.

If you don’t use those tools for your writing advantage you are missing out.

For instance, I use Evernote to collect all my blog post ideas (read in ONE PLACE) so I don’t have my ideas scattered all over my house; I also don’t lose any idea!

Since I have Evernote in my Mac, and in my Phone I always have it handy. I can fire up the app in one click and record my idea, no matter where it occurs.

For writing I use Scrivener. It helps me stick to my schedule. I have all my writing in one place. I will write a dedicated tutorial on how I use Scrivener for writing.

Of-course you might have to invest on the tools. There are also lots of free tools that are available.

For instance, Evernote operates on a freemium model I find the free version to be enough for me. On the other hand, I have invested (twice, once for my PC and then for my Mac) on Scrivener. I am typing this very blog post on Scrivener and I can say that my money is well spent. SITE123 is another one which lets us create a stunning and responsive website without having programming skills. I love it!

Without the right tools, you will be wasting your time in lots of other things.

How are you going to build your effective writing habits?

Congratulations, you have made it to the end of the post. If you’re still reading it I can understand how important it is for you to practice effective wiring so you can use it in your day to day blogging tasks right from creating content for your blog to writing effective emails.

Writing is something that you cannot bypass if you are in the blogging business. The tips I’ve shared here will help you develop effective writing habits.