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skyeet-the-writer · 4 years ago

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The Love Among Us

Chapter 1-- I’d Never Snitch On Daddy

so i haven’t seen many corpse husband x reader stories on here, so i decided to upload one myself. i’ve been watching jacksepticeye’s among us videos and when i heard corpse talk for the first time, i was like, “hol up” and now i’ve been obsessed with him. also, go stream his music on spotify, it’s amazing. enjoy! x.

corpse husband x female!reader

summary: while playing among us, y/n watches corpse kill felix in o2. when his body is reported, however, she doesn’t tell who killed him.

word count: ~3.6k

warnings: swearing, mentions of death (not real death), mentions of murder (not real murder)

EDIT: before i wrote this and after i published it, i did not know that corpse did not like to be referred to as “daddy”. had i known this, i would have not even thought of posting this. and since i know now, i won’t refer to him as such in the future. thank you. (10/19/2020)

EDIT 2: this is the first part to my corpse x reader series. i will be adding chapters as we go!

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4 rounds before the incident

“I was in coms with PJ!” Sean exclaims.

“He is doing the liar voice!” Felix shouts with a laugh.

“I’m not,” Sean tries to say, but everyone talks over him and the voting time ends. Everyone left alive, though it was only four people, had all voted for him and he yells at them as he gets ejected.

stinky was not the imposter

2 imposters remain

The round ends and everyone unmutes themselves.

“Lizzie, you saw Felix kill me and you did nothing!” Roomie yells as soon as the round ends and the imposters are revealed.

“Yeah, because I was the other imposter.”

“Oh. Okay, well that makes sense.”

Everyone laughs and Ken starts the round again.

“Wait, can I invite y/n to play? She’s doing her twenty-four-hour stream and she just finished playing Monopoly with Mark, Bob, and Wade,” says Lizzie, looking down at her phone as they all appear back in the waiting room.

“Yes,” Corpse blurts out and there are a few laughs and chuckles.

“You were quick to answer, Corpse,” Sean teases.

“Shut up,” Corpse mumbles and there are even more laughs.

Lizzie smiles and taps into her phone. “I’m gonna invite her.”

“I can’t believe that you actually made that deal, y/n,” Wade is telling you after ending the second round of Monopoly that you’ve played with them.

You smile and cross your legs on your chair. “Look, I was going bankrupt and it seemed good at the time. Besides, Mark was going to win anyway, he owned half of the board.” Your phone buzzes beside you on your desk and you pick it up. “Lizzie texted me.” There’s a sound effect that plays in your headset and you look up at your screen and smile. “Thanks to _lorieplays _for donating a hundred dollars, that means a lot. Thank you so much.”

“Do you want to play another round?” Marks asks.

You shake your head, reading the text from your friend in England. “No, I don’t want to lose to you again.” You laugh. “Nah, Lizzie wants me to play Among Us with her and a few others. It was fun playing with you guys.”

“It was even though you took all of my money,” Bob snaps.

You laugh. “Yeah, yeah. See you guys later.”

“Bye,” says Mark.

“See y--” Wade begins but you cut him off when you disconnect from the call.

“Oops.” You put a hand over your mouth and laugh. “Sorry, Wade. Okay.” You straighten up and glance over everything, making sure it’s all working properly. “I have to pee and I think my roommate ordered pizza, so we’ll be back after this short break. Enjoy this live feed of my pet rats.” You giggle and switch the stream over to a view of your two rats in their cage where you have a camera set up. You take your headset off and head out of your recording room.

Every two months, you have a twenty-four-hour livestream where you play games with your friends from all around the world. Despite being only twenty-five, your Youtube channel had grown exponentially in the past three years and you’ve had the chance to meet lots of other Youtubers like Markiplier, PewDiePie, and your close friend, LDShadowLady.

Currently, you’re on hour twenty of twenty-four and you’re beginning to feel the effects of not sleeping for a whole day. You had been drinking coffee and energy drinks for the past four hours and that seemed to perk you up for two hours max. But your roommate had ordered pizza and that would hopefully wake you up.

After going to the bathroom and grabbing an entire box of pizza, you return to your recording room and sit down. You put your headset back on and eat a slice of pizza before switching the views back to you. “And we’re back. I hope you guys enjoyed my rats because I don’t. They keep me up at night.”

You read a comment while loading up Among Us and laugh. “No, they’re not dead. They’re sleeping. They do that a lot when they’re not fighting.”

When you finally get into the game and entire the code, you spawn in. You also quickly join the Discord chat and wince when nearly ten voices hit you at once.

“y/n!” exclaims Lizzie and the other voices die down for a moment before rising to greet you.

You wince again but laugh. “Jesus, you guys are loud. Hey, Lizzie.” You move your character to the customize tab and go to try and switch your color. But then you frown and realize that you’re stuck with being dark blue. “Damn, I wanted to be white.”

“Do you want to switch?” Corpse asks.

Your eyes widen you your stomach flips. You hadn’t noticed Corpse was in this game. Immediately, your chat became flooded with keyboard smashing and lots of “omg my shipp” and “y/n rlly said ‘anna oop-’”

“Uh, yeah, if you don’t mind,” you manage to stutter out and take a bite of pizza as Corpse’s player comes over and the white option becomes available. You select it and also select the goggles in the hats menu.

“How’s your stream going?” asks Sean.

You shrug. “Pretty good. I’m super tired, though. I literally almost fell asleep while playing Monopoly with Mark, Wade, and Bob.”

“You went to college, right?” You’re pretty sure that’s Roomie.

“Yep,” you affirm with a nod even though they can’t see you. “You’d think that those all-nighters writing papers and studying for finals would make me able to do this.”

There’s a laugh in the group and the round starts.

3 rounds before the incident

You scratch your eyebrow and sigh in relief when you’re the crewmate. You mute yourself and slide up in your chair.

“I like being the crewmate,” you say, heading towards admin as a habit. “It’s a lot less stressful than being imposter.”

After doing your tasks in admin and fueling the engines, you stumble across a dead body in the lower engine and a vent closing.

“Oh,” you say, and press the report button. You unmute yourself and begin with, “So I saw a vent close but I didn’t see who went in.”

“Who died?” asks Lizzie.

“Felix,” says Sean.

You smirk. “It’s always yellow that dies first.”

“Where was the body?” Ken asks.

“Lower engine,” you reply.

“I was in medbay with Corpse doing the scan so it wasn’t him,” PJ says and Corpse makes a noise of confirmation.

This makes your cheeks heat up and you smack a hand over your mouth. Your chat explodes again but you decide to ignore it.

“And I was doing wires in cafeteria,” Lizzie says.

“Sean, where were you?”

“I was in reactor doing the simon says thing,” he answers.

You sigh. “I hate that one. What about you, Ken?”

“I was with Roomie in electrical doing the power thing. You know, the one where you have to divert it somewhere else.”

“So do we skip then?” asks Lizzie.

“No one is super sus, so I’m going to skip,” you answer.

When no one is ejected, you mute yourself again. “I dunno why, but Sean seems pretty sus. Because I didn’t see him on the way down from upper engine. But I guess he could have gotten there in time.” You shrug and run over to the trash chute in the cafeteria. “RIP to Felix, though.”

After doing the trash there, you head down to storage, running into Corpse doing the wires in there. You wait there to clear him and once you do, you run a few circles around him to get his attention and he follows you over to the trash in storage and watches you do that. After that, the two of you head over to electric together and do wires there.

Suddenly, there’s a body reported and you unmute yourself.

“Sean just killed Lizzie in front of me!” exclaims PJ.

“PJ killed Lizzie,” Sean retorts, flipping the blame. “I watched it, he didn’t realize I was there and murdered her.”

“I watched PJ do the scan in medbay, he’s cleared,” Corpse says and you find yourself smiling for no reason. “Sean, you killed Lizzie.”

“I knew he was sus,” you say, grabbing another piece of pizza. You look at the box and your eyes widen. Had you really already eaten half of it?

“Wait wait, how am I sus?” Sean asks.

You take a moment to swallow. “Because when I was doing fuel earlier, I was running down from upper engine and didn’t see you in reactor. Sure, maybe you could have gotten there earlier, but it was super weird.”

The discussion time ends and PJ immediately goes to vote for Sean as well as you, Corpse, and everyone else still alive. Sean ends up getting ejected.

stinky was an imposter

1 imposter remains

“You’re such a detective, y/n,” Sean says when he gets ejected.

You laugh. “I just play this game too much.” You then mute yourself and smile. “I am a genius.”

You end up finishing your tasks quickly after that and then stand in the cafeteria and eat another piece of pizza and read some of the chat.

“’ What am I going to do after this?’ I don’t know. I might play some Minecraft. Should I have a poll on Twitter? I’m stuck between public Among Us games, Minecraft, and taking random quizzes on Buzzfeed.” You smile and hear another sound effect and something pops up on the screen. “Thank you to coochie man for donating a hundred dollars, that means a lot.” You laugh at their name. “I love your name, by the way.”

There’s some rattling in the cage behind you and you turn around to see one of your rats drinking water. You turn back to the chat and read another comment. “’ Do you have a crush on Corpse?’” You blush and smile, biting your lip. “I mean, his voice is hot. I’ve never met him since he lives in San Diego and I live in h/t, but yeah, I guess I do. I’ve been listening to his music for the past few days and it’s really good, you guys should go check it out.”

You look up and unmute yourself when a body is reported. “Who died?” you ask. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Are you already done with your tasks, y/n?” Corpse asks.

God, even the way he says your name is making you blush. “Yeah, I get them done quick.”

“She does that,” says Lizzie, “She always gets her tasks done quick.”

“Ken is dead by the way,” says Roomie and your snort, smacking a hand over your mouth. “I found him in the hallway by navigation. Where was everyone else?”

“I was in cafeteria doing nothing,” you say, leaning back in your chair and spinning around just a little. “I think I saw PJ downloading while I was in there, but I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Yeah, I was downloading,” says Ken.

After more discussion, Corpse points out that Jaiden had been following him and it looked like she had been faking tasks.

“No I haven’t,” she says.

“That sounds like something the imposter would say,” you hum with a smirk. “That’s pretty sus, Jaiden.”

Everyone else agrees and you all end up voting Jaiden out.

jaiden was the imposter

0 imposters remain

You cheer as the round ends and a blue victory screen pops up for the crewmates. “Good game, guys,” you say and play again, waiting for the host.

1 round before the incident

“Oh my god, I’m imposter again?” you groan and sigh when you spawn back in. “I was just imposter, I don’t want to be it again. I’m so bad at it,”

After another short round of you and Felix losing to the crewmates, you all agreed to play two more rounds before Sean had to leave. So you move your character to admin where PJ is and fake the card swipe before moving over to the admin security thing where you could see who was around where. Luckily, no one appeared to be near admin, so you quickly kill PJ and escape through the vent and come out through medbay.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” you whisper over and over, running down to storage. “That was clean.” You fake getting fuel and go back up to the upper engine.

When PJ’s body is reported, you see that your fellow imposter, Sean, had reported it. You stay silent for most of the round and only say that you were in the fuel area when it was reported.

“Yeah, I saw her run past electrical earlier,” Corpse says. You blush and glance at your exploding chat and shake your head.

After everyone skips the round, you mute yourself once more and head towards navigation. “I hate this.” You drag the last syllable and watch Lizzie enter the room. You wait a moment before walking towards her and killing her, jumping into one of the vents. You let out a sigh and flex your fingers. “I’m so stressed.” You exit out of the vent into shields and your heart stops when you see someone else in there but you realize that it’s the other imposter, Sean, and you relax.

You run past him and go to the trash compartments and pretend to unload those. And that’s how the rest of the round goes. You kill someone, someone reports it and you vote someone off. Eventually, you and Sean do a double kill and end up winning the round.

You unmute yourself.

“Let’s go!” Sean exclaims and you smile.

“I can’t believe you killed me, y/n!” shouts Lizzie. “I thought we were friends.”

You laugh. “There are no friends in this game. I’m not loyal to anyone in this game. You could be my best friend and I would fucking murder you.”

“That’s cold,” says Roomie as everyone else spawns back in.

“Yeah,” you nod.

“Wait, PJ disconnected,” says Sean, and you all end up waiting for him to rejoin.

In that time, you look at your chat and say, “Hey, do you guys have any questions for who I’m playing with. I’m asking you, chat.”

“I swear if someone asks about my hands, I’m leaving,” Corpse says and everyone laughs.

You laugh louder when you read a comment and read it aloud, “_Ironlady _says that you should be a hand model, Corpse.”

“Okay, I’m leaving,” you hear Corpse say over everyone laughing.

“No, stay!” you exclaim, trying not to laugh. “C’mon, don’t leave.”

He sighs deeply and your brain goes fuzzy. “Fine. I’ll stay for you.”

You beam and your tummy turns. You ignore the whistles and remarks from everyone else and stand beside Corpse. You suddenly wish that the little bean characters could hold hands.

When PJ joins the server again, Ken starts the round and you cross your fingers, hoping to get crewmate.

0 rounds before the incident

You mute yourself and sigh when you’re a crewmate. “Thank god.” You let out a breath and go over to admin with everyone else. You swipe your card and go to the cafeteria to do some wires there.

The game turns out to be rather uneventful. A few people die and two people are voted off before the game gets truly interesting. And that happens when you walk in on Corpse and Felix.

“I’ve had this song stuck in my head for days,” you’re saying, walking from electrical over to O2. “And I can’t get it out of my head. Maybe singing it will help.” You hum the first part. “Don't go in there, you'll become one. Freaky creatures, monster party. Eyes of yellow, scales and feathers, tails in tethers. Turn the lights off. Bend the nightmare, you control it. Artful dodger, easy does it. Shut the closet, get under the covers. Snakes and lovers. Turn the lights off.” You do a little dance for a moment and continue hum the song, glancing at the chat as you go towards O2 after doing wires in storage.

“Like, I know the song, it’s just been stuck in my head,” you explain. “And it kind of annoys me--”

But you stop as you enter O2 and watch Corpse murder Felix. Neither one of you move and you don’t know what to do. “Uhhh.”

Then, without thinking, you turn straight around and make your way away from the scene of the murder. “I didn’t see anything!” you shout to no one. “I suddenly can’t see who murdered Felix.” You smack a hand over your mouth and stand in the middle of a hallway. “Oh my god, what do I do? I don’t want to snitch on Corpse, he’s hot.” You scratch the back of your neck and shrug, continuing on to reactor. “I didn’t see anything.”

You’re in the middle of doing the simon says in reactor when Felix’s body is reported. You unmute yourself and fidget with the sleeve of your hoodie. You know exactly who killed Felix.

“--was in O2,” says Jaiden and you focus back into the conversation. “And I didn’t see anyone around.”

“I saw you heading that way, y/n, but I know it wasn’t you because I saw you do the trash in storage.”

You look at the screen when Sean talks to you and you chew your lip. “I know who killed Felix.”

“Who?” asks almost everyone at the same time.

You close your eyes and swallow. It’s just a game, why are you taking this so seriously? Suddenly, a song lyric pops into your head and your stomach flips. You imagine yourself saying it and no one knows who you mean except for him.

You open your eyes. “I’d never snitch on daddy.”

There’s a laugh in the chat and you blush fiercely, your livestream chat blowing up once again.

“I think we know who it is, then,” says Sean, laughing.

“Yeah,” agrees Lizzie and your eyes widen.

“Wait, what?” you ask, watching everyone vote almost as soon as the discussion time ends. “Wait, hang on, who--”

“We know who you’re talking about, y/n,” PJ tells you.

You vote for yourself and your brain goes blank as you see that everyone voted for Corpse. He even voted for himself. They knew. They all _knew _about your feelings for Corpse.

The round ends with Corpse being voted out and the crewmates win. There’s some talking, but you stay on the victory screen. You’re trying to decide if your mad or embarrassed or both.

“I didn’t know you’d say that, y/n,” Corpse says, effectively breaking you out of your trance. “I thought you were gonna snitch on me.”

“You heard her,” teases Lizzie and you can tell she’s grinning. “She’d never snitch on you, Corpse.”

He laughs and you feel something in a certain place. “Oh my god, I’m gonna die of embarrassment.” You put your face in your hands, listening to your friends tease you in the chat. You suddenly want to jump out your window and run into traffic.

“Don’t die,” comes Corpse’s voice through the onslaught of teasing. “I’ll be sad.”

“Fuck!” you shout and slam your hand on your desk, shaking your equipment and scaring your rats. “I’m so sorry, Corpse, that was really weird, I--”

“Stop.” He interrupts you and the chat goes silent and you look up at the screen even though you can’t see him. “It’s okay. It was funny.”

Your eyes widen and then narrow. Funny? He thought what you said was funny? How could he think it was funny?

But then he speaks again and he sounds oddly flustered. “Uh, I gotta go. Um, it was fun playing with you guys. Bye, y/n.”

“Bye Cor--” but then he disconnects and you’re left talking to no one. “--pse.”

There’s a long moment of silence until Felix breaks it. “I can’t believe you just watched me die and didn’t do anything about it.”

There are some laughs and you smile faintly, rejoining the game. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that.”

“Are you okay, y/n?” asks Lizzie.

You blush and swallow. “I don’t know. God, I’m so weird.” You run a hand through your hair and adjust your headphones

“No, you’re not,” Roomie assures you. “He has a crush on you, too.”

Your eyes widen and you scoot up in your chair. “He does?”

“I mean, he called you pretty once during a game and said that he watches your videos a lot, so maybe.”

You groan and sink in your chair. “I’m gonna go, I need to run into traffic now.”

A few people laugh or chuckle and Lizzie asks you if you’re actually going to leave.

“Yeah,” you tell her. “But not to run into traffic. I’m going to go play Minecraft to soothe myself.”

“Aw.” You can practically hear her frown. “Okay. Bye, y/n.”

“Good luck with your stream,” Ken tells you.

You grin. “Okay, thanks, bye.”

When you exit the game and leave the chat, you scream. You actually scream and it’s loud. Your roommate even knocks on your door, asking if you’re okay.

You look at them and nod. “Yeah, totally fine. Probably about to have a mental breakdown, but I’m fine.”

“Okay,” they say and lean on the doorframe. “But I’m not cutting bangs for you again.”

You laugh and nod. “Yeah, okay, fine.” They leave and you turn back to your stream, feeling like you’re about to cry. Corpse knows you have a crush on him. And it seems like he has one on you as well, but now you’re embarrassed because you called him ‘daddy’ on stream.

You rub your eyes. “Well, now I know what’ll be streaming on Twitter tonight,” you tell the chat.

#corpse_husband #corpse husband #x reader #female reader #corpse husband x reader #corpse_husband x reader #jacksepticeye #among us #ldshadowlady #pewdiepie #fanfic

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weirdthingsphanniessay · 2 years ago

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Some thoughts on Dystopia Daily aka Dan's Last Attempt At YouTube.

"[Dystopia Daily] may not be daily" - Weird but ok.

"I am finally just gonna give the people and the algorithm what they ask for"; "I am here to create some fucking content (...) my way" - So which one is it, their way or your way?

"I would like to open each episode of "Dystopia Daily" with a monologue about the times that we live in. Something topical, personal, controversial, sexual maybe, I dunno, whatever." - So which one is it, rambling about the world or rambling about yourself?

"I dunno what I wanna do with my life because I don't know what I want." - You're a rich 31-year-old man, not a helpless teenager. Get off the internet, get intensive therapy, and get yourself together. Find hobbies and a job that actually fulfil you.

"More attention? God, please no." - Why are you still a public internet personality then?

"Money? Yeah, I've been ruined by stupid leftist YouTubers and Twitter accounts. And now I'm some bloody, low-key socialist that can't live without the guilt." - Get off the internet, leave your bubble, and use that money you feel guilty about to do good in the world.

"Is it just sex?" - Your sex jokes stopped being funny 5 years ago. Stop.

"after having my dreams disintegrated by an uncaring corporate cog in the machine, and thusly relearning how to be cripplingly depressed for a while after I literally wrote the book about looking after your mental health..." - You had to face rejection. Welcome to life. You're also a hypocrite, cool.

"The problem with everything I aspire to do with my life off social media is it has to be on someone else's terms, and their timeline" - Again, welcome to life you privileged dumbass. Do you think you're the first and only person ever who faces challenges and has to make compromises with other people and still gets disappointed every now and then? Who do you think you are?

"Every day, I am tempted to just go live in the woods, but you keep asking me to come back, trapping me in this liminal hell where I can neither fully follow my dreams or just frolic in the forest and finally be free." - Don't shift the responsibility. Go live in the woods if you want to, no one's trapping you. Stop acting like a martyr. Your fans will be fine.

"What I wanna know is what happens after [burning out]?" You either (1) quit for good, (2) reinvent yourself and your act, or (3) continue to spiral while the world is watching. I can think of several Youtuber examples for each option, and right now it looks like you're on the way to #3.

"I have developed a total phobia of social media, which as someone who is reliant on two apps to live is a bit of a fuckin' problem."; "I feel like I cannot tweet without…"; "On Instagram, my problem is…"; "I really dunno where to go from here" - Get help for your social media addiction and get off the internet.

"I am afraid to upload anything unless it's a fuckin' feature film"; "I have somehow pushed myself into a corner where I can't create a clip unless I got some kind of bomb to drop or trauma to mine for content."; "I care way too much about what people think and what it all means." - It means you need to grow thicker skin or get off the internet and get a job where you aren't exposing yourself to millions of people.

"have I just let various paranoias mutate unchecked and trap me in a prison of my own toxic thoughts?" - Probably.

"I am in terminally online rehabilitation, just trying to learn to shitpost again and find some serotonin somewhere. So this show here is a immersion therapy." - No, you should definitely try to find serotonin elsewhere. Offline. Actual therapy, and hobbies and work that have nothing to do with the internet.

"They say the best way to face your fears is head on. So I am here and I'm queer and I am just gonna force myself through the tears."; "I just wanna show the world and show you that even when every part of you is screaming not to do something, sometimes, you should just go for it" - Sometimes, the fear you feel is there for a reason and you should listen to it because it's trying to protect you. Again, stop being a martyr.

"[We're All Doomed]'s a show I made to just give me something to head towards to save my own life" - If this isn't a cry for help, I don't know what is.

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only2style · 4 years ago

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Making money using the Fiverr website

Fiverr is a very popular site where they provide you with a service for $ 5.

The "service" on fiverr is called "gig"

This can be anything from logo design or guitar tuning assistance to “I'll dress up in a baboon costume and dance like Michael Jackson to any song of yours for $ 5.Each gig has a title, description, time, in which the seller promises to complete the work; rating, rating of the seller, tags and reviews by gig. You can also optionally add video as an additional means of increasing sales.

Any service on a fiver costs $ 5. You can create 20 such services (gigs) in one account. That is, if you want to add more, just create a new account and that's it.For every sale you get $ 4, Fiverr takes a commission of one dollar for each transaction. Of course, in order to earn some more or less decent money, you need a certain business model. Strategic planning is important even in transactions as small as five dollars. It is unlikely that anyone will need to work for hours for $ 4. The fastest service in terms of performance is information about "how to do something. For example: - I will give you a Social Marketing Reseller Website for $5. - I will send 13 how to make money ebooks for $5; - I will send You My Diet / Workout Plan for $5; - I will teach you a card trick for $5; - I will send you my complete step by step guide to make money on Pinterest for $5; I advise you to start with such quick manuals, and it brings some income. What could be simpler: copy and paste the link to the client and forget, it's just 15 seconds. According to my statistics, such services give 3-4 orders per week. And in principle, 20 such offers are already a potential $ 1000 per month.

However, the most significant part of the profit comes from performing services. This is what most people come here for. And most importantly, people come here not just to watch, but to buy. The best selling services are services for increasing the number of likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter, views on YouTube, as well as all kinds of SEO. Graphic design is also going very well (creating logos for companies and websites, business cards, various photoshop) and so on. And, of course, creating video reviews for various online services and offers.

Please note this:

8649 positive reviews. This actually does not reflect the actual number of orders at all - the exact number cannot be known. And still not all buyers leave reviews. But at the same time, even 8649 orders (and in fact there are more than 30 percent at least) - this is about $ 35,000, i.e. this guy has earned and continues to earn more than $ 3000 per month on this one service. So if you are engaged in SEO, and there is a possibility of automating link building using such software, with a competent offer there will be no end of orders. Any such automation will play into the hands. As already mentioned, winding up likes / views / friends in social is especially great. networks. And if you search a little on fiverr, you can find a lot more interesting things as a base for your own offers. Now about their creation. It should be understood that thanks to the irrepressible traffic and popularity on the fiver, a huge number of services are created every day. And so that your offers don't get lost in this crowd, they need to stand out in a very high quality. The most important thing in this whole service is the reviews of people who have already bought the service. If you want to make good money from this site, you definitely need to constantly build up a lot of positive reviews. I think this is the main key to success on fiverr.

Therefore, the most difficult stage is the beginning. When your rating is “not rated”, and there are no positive reviews at all, people have a corresponding trust in this. Even if you have the best offer in the whole fever, you can wait a long time for the first order. And here is the next solution - register another account, buy an offer from yourself, and leave a positive review. Just one positive review is already a huge step forward, and there will be much more trust than if there were no reviews at all. Moreover, the rating will appear immediately, and it will be “Rated 100%”. Another option, or better in addition, is to look for people who also work with fiverr, and arrange a mutually beneficial exchange of reviews. You buy their offers and they are yours. Highly recommend! I even saw somewhere on the forums how people created topics for this very purpose. If a person does not work with a feaver, you can offer him to buy your offer, and then you will pay him a moneyback. So he will receive both your offer and his money, all for just one small tip. It's really worth it! There are never many positive reviews, and they will do a good deed for you in the form of an increase in trust from the buyers and the faver itself. On fiverr you can upload videos for your offers. If you want to achieve really impressive results, you definitely need to make a video for each of your offers. Yes, it will take longer, but you will actually double your chances.

Fiverr loves videos a lot.

Offers with them obviously rank higher in the search, increase your trust and allow you to stand out from the thousands of other offers. You only need to record about 30 seconds. You can use ready-made videos from services like VideoHive, just remake them for yourself. And be sure to mention in the video a couple of times that your offer is “exclusively for fiverr”, this will further increase the chances of success, because all videos are moderated. You can limit yourself to music from the video and your own lyrics, without voice recording. The main thing is to have your own video for each of your offers.

Next is the title. How many offers with headers like:

I will send 13 how to make money ebooks for $5.

I will give you a Social Marketing Reseller Website for $5. The fiverr rules (by the way, I advise you to read them) indicate that you can write only one word in a title in full capital letters. This should be used! I will send 13 AMAZING How to Make Money Ebooks for $5. I will give you my AWESOME Social Marketing Reseller Website for $5. This will allow you to stand out even a little. The time it takes to complete the work: of course, the sooner the better. Ideally, if you can make it within 24 hours of the receipt of the order, this is exactly what you should indicate. Not only will your offer be marked with a special “Express” badge, it will also appear in a separate “Express Gigs” category. Also, due to the fact that the offer will have a video, it will also appear in the “Haz Video” category. The more categories your offer has, the more chances it has for success! Description. You are allowed to use a maximum of 450 characters. The better and more detailed you describe your offer, the more you will improve the whole situation. Information about myself and an avatar. The best avatar is a human face. Increases the trust immediately. I think there will be no problems with finding human faces. Also try to fill in information about yourself to look like a professional in your field. If your area of interest is SEO and links, say “I'm a professional SEO consultant and backlink builder” etc. Be unique. You are not only selling your services, but also yourself. The more unique and creative you and your offers look, the more people will find and buy them. Always try to have all 20 offers available. If you have fewer of them, you are simply losing money! Look around the site - you can always find something else to offer people. Especially if it is just information, and not a service that is performed according to the principle “saw the order, dropped the link, got the cache”. Even if the offer only collects 2 orders per week, this is an additional $ 400 per year. And if there are 10 such offers, then this is already $ 4000 per year or $ 340 per month. And if there are 50 of them? By the way, when you need more than 20 offers, create additional accounts.

You are not limited in actions!

#fiverr #work #freelance #money #money online #earn moeny #online job #making money #making #fiverr website

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withered-rose-unbreakable-lotus · 5 years ago

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Let’s talk about quarantine streams and smartass fans

This might piss off some people, but I’ve had it so here we go...these past 2 months have been hard for pretty much all of us and the fact some visual kei artists chose to not leave us alone during this time means a lot. Several of them did their part in their own way and we should all be thankful BUT still, some fans of some bands seem to find it soooo fuckin hard to not throw poison, even during a time like this, and instead of just being happy about their bands being there for them, compare bands to theirs and belittle the effort of everyone else. So I felt like sharing what I noticed from other bands to enlighten some narrowminded fans and also to clear some things up. I am not going to cut this, this will be a long-ass post so you’ve been warned.

So let’s start with the two of the biggest names in the industry shall we?

The Gazette: Many of the Gazette’s fans are disappointed because the band hasn’t been around during this whole time, and many Dir en Grey fans feel like it’s the perfect time to post things like “Where’s your band now?“ or “Gazette who?“. For your information, Reita, Kai and Aoi have been around too, just not as much as other band members. They check on us. And anyway the other day that Reita tried to share an opinion on people sending hate to artists and generally other people, many fans attacked him. He didn’t tell you not to tell your opinion, people, he just said it’s good to filter your fuckin tongue before talking. Did anyone of you think, even for just one second, that he said that because of what’s going around about them right now? And at the end of the day none of the artists who even did spend sometime with us owed us this. Yes we support them, we buy their stuff etc etc, but the only thing artists owe us back for that support is more music and art, not spending their free time with us, nor being our personal psychologists. So yes, please and I mean that, by all means show your gratitude to those who did that these days, but don’t attack bands who didn’t. And I don’t mean JUST the Gazette. Many more bands didn’t do the whole free lives & broadcast thingy, but since they are a big name, they are getting named the most. About Ruki now. I see people saying things like, oh Ruki is hibernating etc, when many fans were yearning for a new album. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if when the whole quarantine is over, the Gazette will announce a new album. How do you know he is just staying inside doing nth? How do you know he is not caring for his own people or even working on new stuff around the very subject of the virus? I won’t speak about Uruha cause Uruha isn’t a fan of social media in general.

Dir en Grey: Dir en Grey is one of the bands that actually did a lot to stay by the side of their fans from early on during the quarantine, sth which filled their fans with joy. So I don’t understand why their fans then felt the need to start spreading hate to other bands, I really don’t. Dir en Grey were also one of the first bands that did a free live and in a huge arena like it was a full-scale show. I found that really remarkable and I was like whoa this is so amazing of them. But seeing their fans say things like “oh no other band does that, bitches“ etc, made me not care so much and overshadowed their kindness with hate and fans who really don’t deserve all that, in my opinion. I am not saying all fans are like that, in any way, I follow so many amazing Dir en Grey fans who are genuinely exhilarated about what they did and who just post about their happiness without hating on others, but yeah it’s really such a big shame to see the dark side of their fandom. Every fandom has a dark side but during this quarantine I got to see Dir en Grey’s one, as I am only familiar with the fandoms I myself am in. So for those bitter Dir en Grey fans I got one thing to say: not every band has their money to make such a show in such a big arena and hundreds more vkei artist actually stayed by their fans side during the whole quarantine. Shocking I know.

And now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about bands that were there too from home:

Kaya: Since the beginning of quarantine, Kaya has been online all the time, interacting with fans, doing various broadcasts, dolled up or casual, and telling everyone we are fighting this together and that he will be on our side no matter what. He’s been showering fans with love, he uploaded videoclips that hadn’t been uploaded so far on his youtube and some songs live. He is going through all kinds of things from fanarts to comments about anything and does so many broadcasts that I have lost count.

REIGN: Even though the band is disbanding at the end of May, during the whole quarantine, all four members have been twitcasting from time to time, with Ikuma being the overdoer as he streamed from 3-4 hours every few days, discussing about various subjects with fans. Even when they weren’t twitcasting, all REIGN members were on twitter, posting and being there for their fans. They also joined a 3-man live with Grimoire and Sick2′s side project at the beginning of the quarantine which they broadcasted for free. The live house wasn’t very big but it was good enough for the three bands performing and they also answered comments until the people working at the live house told them it was time to close for the night

D: D were more active for their paying fandom, but they sure didn’t leave those not belonging in their vip list hanging. They were on twitter the whole time, sharing videos of themselves playing music and even joining tag games that spread among vkei artists during the quarantine to pass their time, urging everyone to stay inside and stay safe. Also, Asagi took an active part in providing for charity during such times. Before the pandemic was announced it had already been decided D were working on a charity single that would send some of the earnings to Australia for the damage of the forest fires last year and, after this was done, he focused on providing money for live houses who were threatened to close due to lack of activity through a single that was written for everyone to know they are not alone. In case you haven’t heard, many live houses hosting vkei shows have been closing the last few years, making it harder for bands to find sometime during each week to perform somewhere. Once live houses are done, so will visual kei artists be, unless they of course turn to online performances. So Asagi focused on providing for the future of the live scene, which was very smart move at the moment and if I remember well some money went to providing people with more masks too. There is a new charity streaming happening at the moment for children, btw.

GLAY: GLAY donated 10 million yen and 5000 masks to medical institutions for COVID-19 relief. Need I say more? GLAY have also been active on their social media for their fans’ sake. I don’t know any more details, cause I don’t follow them that much, but they did things not only for their fans but also for their country.

Kamijo: Kamijo has also being active on social media but moreso lately, starting his own broadcasts to interact with fans. Until that point it seemed that he was working on various things and organizing them to have the form they have now. Kamijo also changed the lyrics of the lead song of his latest single Persona Grata so that the enemy mentioned in it is more of an invisible one instead of a story-focused one like he usually does. According to him, he did that so that the song can work as a hope provider against our current invisible enemy, the virus. He said he wanted to lift people’s spirits and use this song to spread hope, so he made that little change and let me tell you, it is an amazing and powerful ballad. Also, since some if not all shippings have been ceased at the moment, Kamijo uploaded the whole single on his youtube channel for free so that everyone can listen to it and hopefully find some strength to keep believing and maybe get lost in it and forget about the general chaos a little.

Gackt: No, I don’t want to hear it. If you are his haters and haven’t even tried to read or experience what he does for his fans, don’t bother coming for me. Gackt has already been trying to share funny moments with his fans and he hopes he does make it with that, through his instagram and youtube so I wasn’t surprised he kept doing that during quarantine. Last week, he uploaded all his live shows on youtube so that his fans can watch them during quarantine if they wish. He couldn’t provide us with a show during such days so he did give us every show he has done so far for free and so that we could enjoy a show from home. He also kept doing workouts to show us, encouraging us to stay inside and be hopeful and mindful of the people around us. He also started some accent lessons in English for Japanese fans, but I guess even that would be cringy to some of you so you will pass it like that. He’s been trying to spread laughter to his fans and I really appreciate that. And for the hate he got even for that, well, if you don’t like his humor, focus on your favorites and leave him and his fans be. :)

Sui/David: Sui had a performance arranged for Paris around this time but due to the pandemic, he couldn’t make it. He had even fundraised about it so he was really saddened he couldn’t make it. To make up for it, though, he went to a studio with just another person and performed for both his Paris and other fans live with a single phone recording. The studio was really small and, some of you might think oh well big deal, it was just one person, but the place was stuffed with furniture and equipment and on top of that, Sui isn’t very tiny, he is like 1,82 cm so, it was hard for him to move around. But yeah he still tried, he came all dressed up in his costume and even though there were no special effects, good lighting nor a band with him, he did his best to entertain his fans and I respect that. And I also had a good time. ^^ He had prepared enough songs only for 30 minutes that are given for free from twitcast as, obviously he didn’t expect many people to show up nor send him coins (points on twitcast to prolong broadcast) so after that, he cheerfully accepted to keep this going for 30 more minutes, singing a song one more time, then talking with us and closing his show with a Malice Mizer cover of Ma Chérie.

BPR bands: Well all BPR bands have taken over youtube the last one year, but even more so now, the bands kept posting videos to entertain the fans. They also did broadcasts in which they talked with other members online and also interacted with fans. I only follow Kiryu on twitter so I can’t speak for everyone but they sure continued being active on twitter on days like these and joke around to spread some laughs.

Alice Nine: Another band that has been online the whole time these days and broadcasting often. Tora has been taking his gaming channel very seriously these days and yes he has an option to tip him if you want, in fact several vkei artists do that because, like I said, not everyone has the money to survive without working these days, especially artists who can’t really sell their art at the moment, but his youtube lives are free, entertaining and a good company if you are feeling alone. He posts a new video every day or every two days, if sth comes up. Hiroto already had a radio show so I think he keeps going there, I haven’t checked, I’ve only seen his twitcasts but yes all the members have been twitcasting, for vip fans and not and recently they had a broadcast all together from home.

Other artists who also broadcasted a lot and/or did live shows are: RAZOR, Diaura, DOG inThePWO, Mana (Kozi and Yu~ki were more active in tweets not broadcasts), Zamb, Ryutaro (also mostly in tweets), Byo, Jin & Rui Takeru/Sleepyhead, Agato/Izumi (full father mode on his tweets ^^’), Versailles members and Vistlip, SHiSHi, Neth Priere Cain, i.D.A, Satoshi, etc etc.

Now be civil and nice and think before you speak. Enjoy your shows and broadcasts, be grateful and stop throwing poison.

#i am so done #the last 3 days have brought me to my limit with this bullshit #why are so many people so immature dammit #can't you just enjoy things without being a bitch about what others do #especially if you don't fuckin know what others do

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bbyboybrock--archived · 5 years ago

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Serendipity (C.B) | Chapter 2

Summary: Serendipity: (n) the chance occurrence of events in a beneficial way

Popular youtuber Isabella Hart, known as Bella to her audience, bends over backwards to separate her youtube life from her private life. Known for her overall clean content and her bubbly attitude, Isabella has a wild side to her that only those inside the youtube community know about. When Bella meets Colby during one of the trap house parties she finally meets someone she can be her genuine self with. When trouble arises after their meeting, will Bella be able to hand the pressure or will she destroy her relationship with Colby as well as herself in the process. [This starts in 2018]

Written: 2019

Word Count: 2,902

Warnings: swearing

Serendipity Masterlist

The day after the party, Sam and Colby left LA to go shoot a few videos for a week. The whole time they were away, I've been talking to Colby. Whenever one of us had free time we would text the other. Whoever ended the conversation the night before started the conversation the night after. My phone was going off more than ever. Normally I would only get youtube/ work related notifications and the occasional booty call from an annoying "big" youtuber on my Twitter DMs. Now, all my messages are texts from Colby.

I don't know what to label this feeling. I set a different ringtone for Colby so whenever I hear that tone my stomach somersaults. It can't be a crush, despite the fact that we've been talking nonstop I hardly know Colby. We planned on leaving the getting to know you questions for the date. That's not saying that I'm not into him. I definitely am. From the conversations I've had with him, I can tell he's more than just a pretty face. And for someone who's lived in L.A her whole life, I can attest that, that doesn't happen often.

But I still don't know how to label what I'm feeling? The nervousness that I'll somehow find a way to mess this up? Even if this doesn't work out as a romantic relationship with Colby, I hope that I can at least make a friend out of this whole situation. I don't have very many friends. If anything, I have one and everyone else I know is either an acquaintance, an old hookup, or someone that I collaborated with. Making friends in this industry is hard. You never know who's using you for views or to leech off subscribers.

One thing I know that I'm feeling for a fact is nervous for this date. Colby never told me where we were going. He insisted on keeping it a surprise. I did manage to get him to tell me what type of clothes I should wear. All he told me was "Olive Garden casual" but also being beach things just in case. I changed my clothes at least three times. I finally decided to stick with a white and floral romper with some sandals. I put my but length curly hair into a fishtail braid and called it a day. He also insisted on picking me up. So I spent all morning over cleaning my already clean apartment. I finally got myself to calm down enough to sit down and finish editing my video and thumbnail for Saturday.

****

I finish putting the final details on my video when I hear a knock on the front door. I jump so high that I nearly deleted the video upload. I put my laptop on my couch before going to answer the door. I open the door to reveal Colby wearing a white long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up and black jeans.

"Hi, come in. I'm just finishing uploading my video for this weekend. It'll only be a second more." I move so that Colby can walk in. I close the door and quickly grab my laptop and move it to the coffee table so Colby can sit

"Wow, nice apartment you got here. It's very homely." Colby says looking around. I finish the upload and close my laptop and see Colby wondering around.

"Thank you. The front area is just for show mostly, you know for the off chance I get guest. I can give you a small tour if you want."

"Sure. It's only fair, you saw basically the entirety of my house."

"Very true. So, over there is the kitchen. There are no guys there that show their id instead of carding you though. I hear that's one of a kind. We're standing in the living room slash tv room where I spend a lot of time when I'm not working or partying." I pick up my laptop and walk with Colby to the back of my apartment.

"I hear they fired the id guy. To be fair, he didn't know what he was doing but he was glad he did it." Colby mentions.

"To be fairer, I hear the girl who ratted herself out as underage felt the exact same." I turn to see Colby smirk. I turn back around and blush before opening the door on my right.

"This is my office and youtube room. I spend a lot of time working here." I place my laptop on my desk and plug it in before walking out with Colby.

"What do you keep in the closet?"

"Equipment for my hobbies that are not youtube related. In between both rooms is the guest bathroom. And the door right here leads to my bedroom. Complete with its own master bathroom and walk-in type of closet." I grab my bag from my bed and watch as Colby looks around.

Eventually, we leave and walk to his car. When we get in, Colby pulls out a blindfold.

"I know you don't know me that well but trust me when I say put this on." He holds the blindfold in front of me.

"Somehow, I knew this happen. Good thing I didn't put on makeup today." I take the blindfold and put it on.

"Wow, you're just going to do it. No questions or anything?"

"You haven't told me a single thing about this date all week. For all I know, you can be taking me somewhere to murder me for all I know."

"Very true. But that's not going to happen. I promise. Anyway, how long have you lived in that apartment?"

Even though I willingly put on the blindfold on, I'm still a little nervous. Colby senses this and slips his hand in mine.

"Uh, I moved in officially moved in on my birthday last year. I started moving my stuff in the month before."

"You're parents let you start moving out at 17?"

"That's a story for a later time. Um... why did you and Sam start in youtube?"

"Back then it was a way to reach out to our fans and get different content out their aside from our vines. Flash forward to now where we break into abandoned places or do overnights. I glad we started youtube though."

"Isn't that kind of dangerous or scary?"

"Yeah, but here's the thing..."

****

For the rest of the car ride, we kept talking about our channels and ourselves. There was a brief moment where we stopped somewhere and Colby left me in the car to grab something. When we finally reached where we are supposed to be, Colby placed my bag on my lap went to get the things out of the trunk before helping me out. We walk a few feet before Colby tells me I can take my blindfold off. It takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the light.

"Are we at the Santa Monica beach?" I ask after seeing the infamous ferries wheel on the pier.

"Yeah, I thought we could have a picnic on the beach and try to look at the stars?" I looked at Colby who was blushing a bit.

"Why did you phrase that as a question? Why do I feel like you aren't 100 percent sure about this date? I think it's a great date."

"I was just worried that you would think that it was too cheesy?"

"What part of me makes you think that I'd find this cheesy? Let's go, the sun is setting." I drag Colby closer to the water so we could set up the picnic.

****

Maybe it's because it's the beginning of February or maybe it's because it's Monday but there are hardly any people on the beach. It's vitally empty and it kind of feels like Colby and I are alone. Colby has actual picnic food, complete with chocolate covered strawberries. We spend the whole time talking and eating. Before the sun completely set we took pictures of each other. My favorites are the candids that I took of Colby when he wasn't paying attention. All the conversation and small talk that we avoided for the past week came out today. Colby had a speaker playing soft music in the background. It felt like every romance movie I've ever seen.

"Can I tell you a secret?" I asked while we looked at the sky. We had pretty much finished eating and the sun is completely set.

"Definitely."

"Well, it's not really a secret. I used to live near here before I moved out of my parents' house. Whenever I felt like life was getting to suffocating or the drama was too much I would sneak out here and just look out at the sky and listen to the ocean. I've actually forgotten how calming this was. I miss it." I adjust myself so my head is no longer supporting my head.

"I kind of know what you mean. Moments like this make me miss Kansas. I like nature and being submerged in it in a way." I turn my head and look at Colby who was already looking at me.

"What do you miss most about Kansas?" I adjust my body so I'm completely facing Colby.

"If I'm being honest? I just miss being around my family all the time. I can explore or find my own piece of nature anywhere in the world. I can't always be with them." Colby faces me completely too.

"Wow, you guys sound close."

"We are, in a weird way. What about you? Are you close with your family?"

"Um... to make an incredibly long and depressing story short, I am the black sheep of the family. Completely shunned and unwelcome. I could tell you the whole story but that probably wouldn't be first date appropriate."

"I get it. You can tell me anything though. When you're ready obviously. You probably can't tell but I can tell that we're going to be really important to each other."

"Really? You can tell that from one date and our super long talk at your party that I probably shouldn't have been at?"

"I know it sounds like I'm just trying to get into your pants or something, but I'm being 100 percent serious. There's something about us, we just click. Like we were made for each other."

I examine every part of Colby's face that I can. For once I feel like I actually met someone genuine. He doesn't sound like every guy that I've met who actually want to just hook up. He definitely doesn't sound like someone who would hurt someone or use them. I feel safe with Colby, something I don't think I've ever felt.

"Isabella?" Colby says breaking my concentration.

"Yes, Colby?"

"Do you mind if I kiss you for real this time?"

"Yes— I mean, I don't mind. You can kiss me for real."

We both sit up and I close my eyes and slowly lean in and only stop when my lips meet his. The kiss starts off soft but quickly gets more and more intense. We both pull away before things got too heated.

"Whoa..." we both said in unison. We were both quiet for a few seconds, trying to process what had just happened.

It was a perfect moment. At that moment I realized that I've never kissed anyone like that. Not sober, anyway. It sent a tingle down my spine and caused a wave of calm to wash over me. This kiss was real and I wanted more. Not just to kiss Colby more, but to feel more real things with him.

****

Colby takes me home about an hour after the kiss. We talked a bit more to get to know each other. The more we talked, the more I wanted to know Colby on a deeper level. I wanted Colby to know me more too, something I've never felt with anyone.

When Colby dropped me off I let him know that I would plan our next date, if he wanted there to be. He responded by kissing me again. When he left I lay on the couch and replayed the past few hours in my head. After that, I went into my bedroom and grab one of my empty notebooks. I choose the one with a tree carved into it and open to the second blank page. I write down everything from what happened and how I'm feeling. I even write about the events from the week before. As I write I set my photo printer to print out the photos from tonight. Even if things don't work out with Colby, I want to remember the first time I ever felt like this.

After I finish writing and taping the photos I take a shower and try to calm down. I place the notebook on my bedside table and go to take a shower. I climb into bed and try to decompress so I can sleep and wake up for my lectures tomorrow. I can't let my feelings for Colby make me late for classes. To help me calm down I go on my phone and scroll on my Instagram accounts. I have two, one for my fans and all business that is very public and a private one where I only let a few people follow. Right now, I'm only following Colby's private account. He has three: his public account, his fan appreciation account, and his private account. I check my public one and make a few comments and watch as people post about parties and birthdays. I get a few DMs from people asking where I wasn't at some party. I gave the same excuses of working on videos and switch over to my private account. On my feed a picture of me that I don't remember taking shows up. It's a candid of me from the beach. I'm laughing about something and the fading sun is hitting my face with my messy hair blowing in the wind. I see that Colby posted it and scroll to the caption. It reads: I can already tell my life is going to be better with you in it. Can't wait until next week.

I like the picture and quickly post my own picture of Colby with a cheesy caption. I switch back to my main account and see that I have a message from Brennen Taylor.

BT: Where were u tonite? Hooking up with some other insta-model?

Me: Actually, I was busy working tonight.

BT: Well, if you're not busy anymore do you want to hang out? The party was lame, I was hoping for sum fwb time.

Me: We're not friends and the benefits haven't been a thing for a while. Plus I'm seeing someone right now so the benefits are never going to happen again.

BT: We both know that that's not going to last long. Just come over right now and we can "talk" about it

Me: ...Night Brennen. Stop messaging me before I block you again.

BT: Goodnight sweet cheeks, I'll dream of the time we'll have a face to face convo again.

I close out of Instagram and plug my phone in. I make sure that my phone is charging before staring at the ceiling. At a party a few months ago, before I turned 18, I made the mistake of hooking up with Brennen. Ever since we've had an on again, off again hook up relationship. We were both in the same party scene. We would drunkenly hook up at parties, sometimes after I had just finished with someone else. After our first encounter, he found me on Instagram and would hit me up whenever he wanted to sleep with me, no strings attached. I would go only because he offered alcohol, sometimes weed. I would use him to get drunk or high and he would use me to get a quick lay. I didn't need him as much when I got my fake id but he did, even when he had a girlfriend. When I found out he was dating someone new I terminated our unspoken agreement. I wasn't going to be the reason his relationships failed. Still, he would hit me up every few days. If I'm being honest, he makes me feel uncomfortable and I try to avoid him at all cost. I never block him or expose him out of fear of being exposed myself. So I deal with it and I just tell him I'm busy or I was with someone else. It only works sometimes.

But now I met Colby and I really don't want to screw this up. I'm hoping Brennen won't screw it up for me. That sometimes happens at parties. I know that Colby and Brennen are friends. So I'm betting on the fact that Brennen wouldn't get in the way of his best friend's relationships, in every aspect of the word.

My phone lights up the room and I check to see a notification from Colby. He tells me that he got home safe and how much he enjoyed tonight. He also mentions that he's looking forward to next week. He ends with a good night. I type back a response with a huge grin on my face. I put away my phone and dream about the date over and over again.

#colby #colby fanfic #colby fan fic #colby fanfiction #colby fan fiction #colby brock #colby brock fanfic #colby brock fan fic #colby brock fanfiction #colby brock fan fiction

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uclaradio · 7 years ago

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Interview with City Girl

Interviewed by Jennifer Liaw

album art for Time Falls Like Moonlight, by vickisigh

City Girl is a rising LA-based lo-fi/chillhop producer that incorporates a lot of soft piano and guitar intertwined with electronic beats and vocals. Starting out on Bandcamp and Soundcloud only 10 months ago, they now have three albums out on Spotify, the latest being Time Falls Like Moonlight, released in April.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? What was growing up in that city like?

I grew up in California close to LA. To be honest once I found music I never really went outside. Before that I was just playing video games and watching cartoons. I guess the internet was more of where I grew up, as opposed to any geographical place.

What music did you listen to a lot growing up? What were your favorite artists back in like middle school, for example?

In middle school it was John Frusciante, all day everyday. Something about his guitar playing really inspired me. It was soulful and beautiful and just felt perfect, like every note was exactly where it should be. In high school my music taste exploded, but John Frusciante was the majority of the first music I learned and played.

Tell us a little about how City Girl first got started.

I uploaded on the train somewhere between my apartment and you 10 months ago on Soundcloud and just emailed a bunch of Youtube channels that were taking submissions. Aurarian music accepted that first release and put it out on Youtube and got the ball rolling so City Girl could get some attention back when it was only 10-20 followers.

How did you come up with the name City Girl?

To be honest, its in honor of “City Girl” by Kevin Shields from the Lost In Translation soundtrack. I’m a huge My Bloody Valentine fan and that song of his is just so amazing.

When did you first start making music? How did you get into it, and how did you first learn how to produce a beat?

I got into guitar playing when I was 12 or so. I just played because my older brother had a guitar. I took it and just Googled how to play guitar and taught myself songs and chords. It was the most fun I’d ever had. It felt so special. I didn’t start producing for like another seven years though. I would just record onto a Tascam tape recorder and jam with friends in garages. I had friends who made lofi beats waay back when it was like CULP and Simo and Onra and john wayne and stuff, but I never got into it, I was more focused on improvising and expanding my musical repertoire in a more performance-focused way.

Are there any instruments that you would like to try out incorporating into your music that you haven't tried yet?

I want live drums but I live in an apartment. If I could record drums that would be so cool, since I play drums too and I miss it badly.

Where do you usually record your music? Describe your studio space to us.

It’s about five feet no joke from my bed haha. It’s a desk and a midi keyboard and some guitars and other little instruments like the melodica. I have speakers and an old mic. It’s super cozy, my bedroom at my apartment is just covered with vickisigh’s art, like everywhere you look it’s just cute sexy ladies in pastel colors, I love it.

vickisigh’s (Vicki Tsai) artwork, from her instagram

How would you describe the lo-fi/chillhop genre and subculture to someone who’s never been exposed to it?

It’s just a bunch of people who love making music on their computers, and to be honest only one percent is unique and actually worth your time, but the same goes for all genres, 99 percent of it is just not that good. I would be more specific but at this point lofi stands for so so much that you can’t really go much further than that.

What do you think of the lo-fi hip hop/chillhop genre in general? It's really popular right now what with the YouTube 24hr lo-fi hip hop studying beats stream and the Spotify lo-fi hip hop studying beats playlists as well... There's literally probably thousands of really similar chillhop producers on SoundCloud... does that ever make you feel swallowed up, in a sense? Or does it feel more like a really large community? How do you try to stand out as an artist among all these other producers?

It’s a tough question to answer, because you can go from quickly, quickly to in love with a ghost and still call it lofi if you want to. These artists share playlists together and Youtube mixes. Who’s to say quickly, quickly isn’t just jazz? Who’s to say in love with a ghost isn’t just electronic music? It’s not so much a genre as it is a movement of instrumental music becoming the focus itself rather than the singer/rapper. Staying unique seems simple to me as I grew up playing and learning music by ear, so I just follow my interests/inspiration and play whatever seems cool.

Which artists would you say are your biggest inspirations or that you're just blown away by and really admire within your genre? How about outside of your genre?

Well in love with a ghost stands out, like most peeps I found them on Youtube. All the tracks from Let’s Go and Healing by them are amazing. Just super cool textures and melodies, really lovely and creative music. Kupla is amazing too, he’s an amazing piano player, all of his music is great. Outside of my genre I’d say Sheena Ringo, especially her album Kalk Samen Kuri no Hana - it’s pretty much game over, this album does everything better in every regard imaginable than any other music I’ve heard. Don’t know if you can get access to it in US tho, the copyright lawyers are hard at work on this one.

What artist outside of the lo-fi hip hop genre would you really really love to collaborate with? Can you describe the kind of track you'd want to make with them?

With anyone, well shit Beyoncé right? I mean she’s the best vocalist alive next to Frank Ocean. I would just want to make something really beautiful, some In Rainbows type stuff.

Being an artist based out of Bandcamp/Soundcloud in this day means a lot of your career is kind of born out of the internet. What are your favorite and least favorite parts about the internet and spending so much time on the internet/interacting with people on the internet/sharing yourself through the internet?

I love the internet because I can share whatever I want when I want. I don’t feel a lot of pressure because I don’t have any personal accounts on social media and never have, I always just read a lot of books and listened to records and stuff. I’m sure some people think it’s mysterious or whatever that I never cared for social media, instead opting to just read Sartre or watch old movies, but nowadays all I do is make music and play Skyrim so it’s all good. The internet gives me access to all that goodness so I can find it offline.

What are your top five favorite artists right now?

Tom Misch, Swell, quickly quickly, in love with a ghost, and Sam Gellaitry

What are your top five favorite female artists?

Sheena Ringo, Beyoncé, Aivi Tran, MISO (from club eskimo - a collective including Crush, Dean, offonoff, 2xxx!, millic, and more), and tiffi.

Do you have a favorite spot in LA that you wouldn't want to share with anyone else?

Wherever YAYAYI and JALENTUNA happen to be any given saturday night in k-town is a pretty special vibe that honestly can’t be shared even if I wanted it to be. God there was this $5 flat pho place on Western Ave. that was run by this old couple but it closed like 5 years ago, that was the best place ever and it straight up was ALWAYS empty, no one ate there. I think it was like Pho 36 haha one of those LA pho places that has a random number after it.

What are some things that you really enjoy doing for yourself? When you need to take a day for yourself, what are things that you'll usually do?

Skyrim is a go-to. It’s usually video games but a lot of times it’s just making music. You gotta understand music is like an addiction to me. I never stop thinking about sounds and I feel uneasy not making music.

So we know you like video games… what are some of your favorite video games of all time? Do you have any funny anecdotes from playing games online with strangers?

Favorite of all time is Psychonauts. Such a creative game and Scott Campbell’s art is the absolute bee’s knees. Right now my favorite is Skyrim as mentioned. I love RPG and adventure games, the immersion gets me good. I loved games growing up, played anything. I have a lot of anecdotes about gaming but I honestly can’t think of just one. Haha well when Xbox Live came out online gaming was brand new and I remember my dad getting on the headset asking people not to cuss (since I was just a kid) and THEY STOPPED. They were like “Oh sorry dude we didn’t know there were kids playing we will keep the cursing to a minimum.” Can you imagine that nowadays? It would never happen. That shit still blows my mind.

Do you play Fortnite? If so, what are your thoughts on it?

I played Fortnite with Chance, thrash, and Maru the other night and I hate it so much lol. The vibe is so terrible, the aesthetic makes me want to barf it’s so ugly. That was the only time I’ve really played it and it hasn’t been on my mind, the itch isn’t there so I guess no hype for me.

What are your favorite K-Pop bands or members?

SNSD was the OG. That old video of Sooyoung going “OP-EHHHH! OP-EH EH EH EH EH” lol that shit is so funny. I don’t follow it much anymore but MISO is the queen right now, she’s the best. I watched all of Jessica and Krystal when it came out too, that’s good stuff.

Ok I also saw on Twitter that you have a cat... tell us about your cat!

Ah yes, Seymour, the Russian Blue. He is a very handsome and beautiful man. He is a shadow in the night. Every part of him is gray except his lil tongue which is pink and his eyes which are green. He lives at my parents house so I don’t see him except at holidays, but he is my good soft boy. I think of him very often.

art from Snow Rose, by vickisigh

What would you say is your favorite track that you've produced?

“Anything Like Her” with tiffi is prob my fav. Tiffi is so cool and that song is really different sounding from other City Girl songs so I think it’s cool.

What is your favorite track off of Time Falls Like Moonlight?

“Sunset Lullaby” is probably my favorite. The second half with the acoustic and electric guitar just feels really special.

What was your inspiration for Time Falls Like Moonlight?

I make so much music, the inspiration doesn’t really ever make sense, I am inspired by everything in each moment, I am inspired by my own passion to make music. Not understanding what is going on is really important to how I work, it makes things exciting. I just want the music to make people feel loved and understood for who they are, that there is a purpose for them, a life they can live and be loved in.

When you make songs, are they ever about specific things, people, or events in your life?

Not really, it’s just all my emotions sort of bleeding into the computer. I don’t know if I could write about any particular thing, but I do enjoy imagining lots of people and situations to my music after I made it. Like oh this sounds like Moonlight Hill (from Kingdom Hearts) or this sounds like a tender look from someone or this sounds like a lonely plaza in the middle of some city. It’s all free and open to interpretation.

“Winter Fields” is one of my favorite tracks of yours... mostly because of the lovely violin part by mklachu. It's so dreamy and kind of reminds me of some of my favorite Ryuichi Sakamoto pieces, too. Can you tell us a little about this track?

It’s random but the track started as a like, flex? I was watching Joji’s Youtube aliases and god they are just awful I mean like him fucking with people and being super lewd and nasty I hate it but I was watching it anyway to like fry my brain and I thought it would be fun to make a nasty trap beat that would fit with his videos and I made “Winter Fields” (I know it doesn’t make sense at all). The song slowly got more romantic as I added piano layers the next day and then mklachu tweeted at me out of nowhere and I asked her to play over it and yeah it’s just what happens when you work on music all the time, everything going on makes it into the song.

Another one of my favorites is “Chateau Fountain.” I love the slow buildup, and then the talking portion that kind of just emerges and goes into like an acoustic drop... ahhhh.. I was wondering where that talking portion is from actually. The guy is like, "Take the flowers," and the girl is like "I’m all right!" and it sounds like an uncomfortable struggle...a common pattern in society where... men force women to do things regardless of their autonomy or feelings (ha ha). Does it have any significance to the meaning behind the track? What were your reasons for choosing to put that particular snippet in this track? It's interesting because for me, I think I'm more sensitive than the average person to these kind of power dynamics or like...oppression against women in all aspects of daily interactions or media that I consume, so when I listen to this track it's like a soft buildup to this point of conflict that is kind of grating, but then evolves back into a calming acoustic melody. That's personal, of course, but it's interesting.

DUDE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ATONEMENT? Omg that movie is so incredible. It’s James McAvoy talking to Kiera Knightley and they have all this tension because they love each other but they can’t be together and ooooooooooooooooooh it’s so good. Their love is so beautiful and honest but it’s injected with all this tension and conflict from society and politics. I felt that snippet fit so perfectly into the emotions of the song, it’s one of the few few times I’ve used movie snippets because I felt it actually added to the track in a creative way.

How do you think you've evolved from the first songs you put out on Bandcamp/Soundcloud, and your first album Loveless Shadows, to now?

I know a lot more about mixing, especially with bass and drums. I try to make more upbeat stuff now, but honestly I still end up making a lot of downtempo stuff. I know a lot more jazz piano than I did before so that’s nice too.

What are some artists that you think are really underrated that you'd like to give a shoutout to and encourage people to check out?

frenesi is criminally underrated.

What are your goals for City Girl for the next few years?

Just put out an incredible amount of music and keep building the world of City Girl. I want people to feel relaxed and loved and understood when they listen to City Girl. Honestly I just want to expand the harmonic and melodic depth of City Girl, I want people to head bump and cry in the same track, I want to find that fusion of beautiful and funky that all great music has for me.

I know you just released an album, but besides that, do you have any upcoming events or projects your fans should be looking forward to?

I have another album finished already, but with the way vickisigh (I won’t put out something without her art on it) works it won’t be out until probably another two-three months. So by the time that comes out I’ll have another album done and so on the process repeats. So just look forward to a new album every two-three months for as long as I’m rockin in the free world.

art from Loveless Shadows, by vickisigh

Check out City Girl’s latest album, Time Falls Like Moonlight, out on Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp! They also have two other albums, Snow Rose from December, and Loveless Shadows from August that are equally as beautiful. Follow them on Soundcloud for all their music updates and on Twitter for all their promo updates!

#vickisigh #city girl #time falls like moonlight #city girl interview #loveless shadows #snow rose #ucla radio #uclaradio.com #ucla #college radio #ArtistInterview

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fiction-phan · 7 years ago

Text

Rivals

Day 5 of the 25 Days of Christmas

Summary: Dan Howell and Phil Lester are both CEO’s at the same company. Even though their sectors work very well together, they hate each other. Their coworkers are used to their arguing and fights. Behind closed doors, it’s another story.

Words: 2.6k

Rating: Mature

Read it on AO3

A/N: I feel like I owed you guys at least one fic containing smut throughout the 25 Days of Christmas (which is why I actually added a rating today). I make no promises that it’s fantastic smut (you all know I love reading smut but feel strange writing it myself) but I did try my best. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it.

Dan Howell and Phil Lester were both CEO's at the same company. While Dan was in charge of the magazine they published every week, Phil was in charge of the social media sector. He was in charge of all their social media accounts and uploaded frequent videos of their interviews with celebrities on their YouTube channel.

They were in charge of two sectors which usually worked well together. Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter increased the magazine's popularity. It was also worth mentioning that Phil's videos never failed to enrich their magazine.

Not that Dan would ever admit it out loud.

It was common knowledge among the company employees that Dan and Phil hated each other.

They both joined the company around the same time and quickly began to one-up each other. The trend carried on throughout all the promotions they received during their time of working with the company.

Today was no different.

The two sectors were having a joint meeting on the direction they wanted to take the magazine. Both sides were supposed to pitch in different ideas and suggestions until they reached a mutual agreement.

The meeting got off to a bad start when Phil suggested publishing the magazine on a monthly basis rather than once a week. This would allow for more focus on the social media aspect by having more time and resources to film and edit videos for YouTube.

Dan was not in favour of the idea.

Phil's intentions were crystal clear to him. He wanted more focus on his sector so that Dan's sector would lose value.

They were not suffering from poor sales and Dan liked to think his sector kept the magazine's content fresh and interesting every week. Reducing them to a monthly basis was unnecessary and Dan would not stand for it.

Much to his horror, their higher ups seemed to like Phil's idea.

"I think Mr. Lester is on the right track. Switching the magazine to once a month rather than once a week will ensure Mr. Howell's sector has more time to put together an adequate edition of the magazine. The money we'll save on that can go into investing on better equipment for the YouTube videos as we all know they've been doing well lately," Mr. Parker said.

Dan was dumbfounded. Mr. Parker agreeing with Phil did not bode well for him. As the owner of the magazine, Mr. Parker had the last say on what was implemented. Few were the employees brave enough to go against his suggestions.

"Excuse me sir," Dan spoke up, trying not to feel too terrified over the prospect of going against his boss' wishes. "Don't you think it will be counterproductive? The magazine has been published on a weekly basis ever since it started. Implementing such a drastic change could backfire."

"We won't know unless we try though, will we Howell?" he said with a cheeky grin.

Dan gritted his teeth together to keep himself from saying something he would later regret when he saw the satisfied look on Phil's face. Everyone in the room could tell things would not be going Dan's way.

"All in favour of publishing the magazine on a monthly basis and invest on the YouTube channel?"

Dan almost groaned out loud when he saw everyone raising their hand. Even the workers on his team meekly raised their hands while giving him guilty looks. Everyone could tell what Mr. Parker's preference was, and no one was brave enough to go against it. Dan was on his own.

He winced when he saw everyone looking at him expectantly. Dan was the only one not raising his hand and Mr. Parker did not look impressed. Knowing he did not afford to end up in his boss' bad books, he also raised his hand.

It hurt to against his beliefs in such a blatant way but he was left with no choice. Dan had to concede and admit Phil won the round.

"Excellent!" Mr. Parker said, clapping his hands. "This new procedure will be implemented from next month. Mr. Lester, make sure our readers are notified of this change as soon as possible through Twitter and Facebook."

Everyone filed out of the meeting room after that but Dan stayed behind. He wanted to get the chance to speak to Lester in private.

Once everyone was out of the meeting room, Dan closed the door and turned to glare at Phil. "You could have warned me about what you had planned. It would have kept me from looking like a complete moron in front of my team."

"I could have, but where would have been the fun in that?" Phil asked, a cheeky smile on his face.

"You'll pay for this Lester," Dan snapped. "How dare you mess with me like this? Changing from a weekly magazine to a monthly will take so much work on my team's part. And for what? More YouTube videos. As if videos keep our audience growing."

Phil's smile dropped and instead he glared at Dan. "You can say whatever you want but it doesn't matter. Mr. Parker agrees with me and his word far outweighs yours. Maybe it's time to face the fact that buying a magazine from the store is no longer the trend."

Dan scoffed. "Oh, please. Mr. Parker will regret agreeing with you once he realises your silly videos are not as popular as you seem to think they are. He'll be begging me to change the magazine back to a weekly schedule."

"You're a jealous moron. Maybe it's time I remind you your place," Phil snapped, tiring of Dan's attitude.

Dan was about to retaliate with something just as offensive, ignoring the shiver of pleasure that went down his spine at Phil's words but the other interrupted him. He was pulled forward and, before he could complain, Phil was kissing him.

He eagerly kissed back until he remembered where they were. "Stop it Phil. Not here, someone will see us," he said, pushing Phil away from him.

Phil didn't listen. "Maybe you should have thought of that before you talked rubbish. You know what they say; don't start what you can't finish." He left kisses down Dan's neck, torturously slow.

As much as Dan was enjoying his ministrations, he couldn't relax. He kept glancing behind him, expecting someone to walk in and see them in such a compromising position.

Phil pulled back and rolled his eyes at seeing Dan's attention elsewhere. "Will you relax?"

He walked to the door and locked it before returning to Dan's side. "Better?"

Dan sighed in relief, feeling a lot more comfortable continuing where they left off now that he didn't have to worry over someone walking in. "Where were we?" he asked, pulling Phil back in for a hungry kiss that left them both breathless.

They kept walking back until Dan's back hit the large table in the middle of the room. He laid back on it and allowed Phil to crawl over him.

"What was it you said about reminding me of my place?" he smirked. He knew from experience that the best way to get Phil to give him what he wanted was through riling him up.

This time was no different. Phil growled and wasted no time to unbutton Dan's shirt, dragging his teasing kisses all over Dan's naked chest.

In front of their colleagues at work, Dan and Phil hated each other. Behind closed doors, they knew exactly what the other needed to reach that delicious release. It was what kept them going to each other regardless of their dislike of each other.

They made quick work of their remaining clothing until they were both naked and the surrounding floor was covered with stray clothes. Neither of them could hold back a moan at the feeling of their naked bodies finally rubbing against each other.

"What would Mr. Parker say if he were to see you right now?" Phil said, tweaking Dan's nipple and basking in the whimper the other let out at his actions. "One of his best CEO's, spread out on his meeting room table and waiting to be fucked."

Dan whimpered and thrust his hips up, desperately searching for more friction. Hearing Phil use such foul language always got to him in the best of ways.

"Are you going to keep playing around or are you going to do something? We don't have all day," Dan reminded. It would only be a matter of time before their coworkers realised they were both missing and came looking for them.

If they were really going to do this at their workplace, then it needed to be quick.

"Don't rush me," Phil snapped but did as asked. He wrapped a hand around Dan's cock and moved it up and down, giving his hand a little twist occasionally, just as he knew Dan loved.

Dan didn't disappoint. Soon, he was writhing underneath him, biting his lip to hold in his loudest moans. The last thing they wanted was for people to hear them going at it.

"S-Stop, I'm close," Dan said, attempting to push him back. As much as Phil wanted to keep on stroking him and watch Dan fall apart underneath him, he much preferred getting to come inside him.

He pulled back and leaned down to grab his trousers from the floor. "I should have a packet of lube here somewhere."

Dan could only watch him with raised eyebrows. "Came prepared?"

Phil crawled back onto the table, brandishing a small packet of lube in his hands. "I wouldn't complain if I were you," he said, opening the packet and spreading the lube on his fingers.

He carefully pushed one finger inside Dan, smirking at the strangled moan the other let out.

Dan quickly got used to the intrusion and thrust his hips, ready for more. "Come on Phil, we don't have all day. It won't be long until som-"

Whatever else Dan was about to say was forgotten as Dan moaned at the finger of two more fingers being pushed inside him. "I'm ready, I'm ready," he gasped, wanting Phil to give him what he wanted.

He whined at the loss when Phil pulled his fingers out but quieted when his muddled brain caught up to what it meant.

Dan saw Phil stroking his cock to get it covered in lube so he spread his legs to give him enough space to move. “Hurry up Phil,” he said, nervously looking towards the door.

Phil took a hold of Dan’s legs and lifted them up. “Are you ready?”

Dan almost snapped and told him he’d been ready for the past ten minutes but nodded instead. The last thing he wanted was for Phil to get offended and leave before they got to the best part.

They both moaned when Phil pushed his cock inside him, burying himself to the hilt in one go.

Dan threw his head back, mouth open in a silent scream. “M-Move.”

Phil listened to him for once and thrust in and out.

It wasn’t sweet and loving; it was rough and hard. Dan kept scratching his nails down Phil’s back to hold on to something and Phil was pushing in so hard Dan knew his back would be bruised the next day.

Neither of them cared.

Dan moved his hand to his cock and tugged at it but Phil slapped it away. “You’ll come just from the feeling of my cock inside you.”

It was the hottest thing he ever heard Phil say while they were having sex. “If I’d known sex at work would get you talking like this, I would have suggested it ages ago.”

Phil looked like he wanted to reply but couldn’t. “I’m close,” he said instead, sounding out of breath.

“Go faster.”

“You’re insatiable,” Phil said but fastened his pace.

All you could hear in the room were the sounds of skin slapping together and moaning. Dan really hoped no one was passing by the meeting room.

“If only Mr. Parker could see you right now. Getting fucked on his table and begging for more. I don’t think he would think of you so highly then," Phil whispered in his ear.

Even though he knew the door was locked, thinking of someone walking in on them in their current position was all it took for Dan to reach his orgasm.

Dan whined when Phil kept thrusting inside him, feeling over sensitive but he was determined to get him to cum.

He lifted his hips higher and gasped when the new angle allowed Phil to go much deeper. Judging by Phil’s moan, he felt the difference. “Fuck Dan, you feel so good.”

Dan kept moving in time with Phil’s thrusts, ignoring how sensitive his body was feeling for the time being. When he noticed Phil getting close to his release, he used his free hand to rub his nipple and was rewarded with a pleasured hiss.

Phil couldn’t hold back any more. He threw his head back and came with a loud moan. He tried to cover it by biting into Dan’s shoulder and he hissed in pain.

“What the fuck Phil?” he snapped, hitting him in the shoulder.

“Sorry,” he said, although he didn’t sound apologetic. “I can’t believe you’re in the mood to complain after all that.”

Phil slipped out and lied down next to him on the table. “That was fun Howell. We should do it again soon.”

Dan rolled his eyes, but he didn’t disagree. The risk of being caught having sex with his rival at work had given him a rush that made their sex even better than usual.

Hearing a knock on the door made them both sit up straight in alarm.

“Mr. Howell? Mr. Lester? Is everything all right in there? Mr. Parker is looking for you.”

The mention of Mr. Parker was enough to get them off the table and scrambling around to find all their clothes. They hurriedly got dressed and took a quick look at each other to make sure they looked presentable.

“I’ll see you tonight at your place?” Phil asked, fixing his tie.

Dan ran a hand through his hair, hoping it didn’t look as if he had spent the past half an hour having sex. “Sounds good. Try not to forget the lube like last time.”

Phil rolled his eyes and ignored him. He unlocked the door and came face to face with Lynette, a member of his team. “Tell Mr. Parker we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He waited to see Lynette leave then turned to Dan with a smirk on his face. “I bet he wants to talk to us about my great idea and congratulate me on a job well done.”

“And what do I get when you’ll lose?” Dan asked, intrigued.

“I’ll let you top tonight,” Phil offered. “Not that I’m going lose.”

“You’re on.”

A/N: If you guys need me, I’ll be hiding in my bed after posting smut. Hopefully, it’s not bad and you enjoyed it. Today, more than ever, I ask of you to please let me know what you think. It would really be helpful for me to know whether the smut was decent or not.

For any Harry Potter fans out there, Day 6 will be a favourite...

#phanfiction #phanfic #phan au #phan smut #25 days of christmas #25 days of Christmas 2017 #smut #day 5

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mint-kook · 7 years ago

Text

I tagged along (wherever you are)

Hey! So I am a very new writer who decided to create a sideblog (elsearwrites) for writing. I really enjoy your fics so I would appreciate it and be honored if you took the time to read something I’ve been writing for Hoseok x Reader! It’s called I tagged along (wherever you are), and is a social media and college au where Hoseok is an instagram famous dancer and the reader is a famous youtuber. The first part is a prologue of how the reader actually became to be a youtuber, and features best friend! and frat boy!Jungkook who broke her heart. It does mention sex and alcohol, but just once and is not explicit. Word count for pt.1 is 2.4k, at least for now because it is unedited and very rough. I just wanted to show a person before I upload it to my own blog. Sorry if it’s long, you don’t have to read it all lol.

So here’s part 1/prologue: A Role Model

You ran.

All you could think about doing is running.

You didn’t really know where you were going, because your visions were blurred by your tears and your brain blurred by shattered pieces of your heart. But whatever your legs remember, took you back to your room.

And you enclosed your whole world in the bleak dark room you returned to.

Just 25 minutes ago you walked into your best friend Jungkook and a girl he was chasing after for some time having sex.

You have been hopelessly in love with him for a good decade, ever since you met each other on a playground, but knew he didn’t feel the same way about you when you watched him fall for someone else all those years. Because you were too scared to break what you already had, the strong friendship that protected you from bullies and protected him from giving up on his dreams. That tight bond you had made you hope. Hope that somewhere along those years, maybe he felt at least a possibility that something more could develop between you two. So you tried hard to be the ideal person Jungkook dreamed about. You were even a model because Jungkook half-heartedly stated that he wanted to date a model once. But when you saw his eyes soften at someone that wasn’t you, your heart betrayed you.

“Y/N! Look, you know Somin right? She’s the one in your Chem class. I think she’s cute and I used the time I waited for you to talk to her.”

“Y/N, Y/N…She’s different from all the other girls I dated. Something about her…is special. I feel like she may be the one…Pfft I sound so cheesy, this isn’t me.”

And so, you got desperate. Before he made things official, maybe you can change something. And even if chances were bleak, you couldn’t take the bottled up feelings inside you anymore. Or, that was what you thought.

“Y-Y/N!”

He panicked to cover both him and the girl, both confused and shocked at your presence, clearly someone that did not belong in the almost perfect picture.

“Uh…I-I’m so sorry.”

Ah. So they did make it official. Was in the middle of making it official.

And so you ran.

You only convinced yourself you would be okay if you were rejected.

But when you were rejected without you even saying anything, every resolve and every cell you managed to convinced screamed otherwise.

You weren’t okay.

For a couple of days, you were holed up in your room. You had no midterms, and you were that honor student that passed all her classes, and no class you had this semester were attendance mandatory. You managed to avoid the hell out of Jungkook somehow thanks to your roommate’s extremely kind cooperation (Raeun was now your new best friend, screw ex-best friend). You turned off notifications from Jungkook, effectively ignoring every message and call from him. But honestly, you couldn’t turn off your phone. It was the one thing you couldn’t do, because while you were holed up in your room, Raeun and your phone were the only things that connected you to the outside world.

And before you were to head bang on the wall regretting to even think about trying to confess to him, you decide that you need time to yourself. Time to think about you. Distract yourself from whatever may happen to something you tried hopelessly to protect.

And you find yourself in more deeper than ever in the world of social media.

Unhealthy? A little, yes. Successful in distracting you? Also, a little, yes.

That “little” comes from the frequent posts Jungkook updates on his Instagram and Snapchat and sometimes on Twitter, where he seemingly has a blast at parties his frat hosts. You had to admit, even if you told yourself you didn’t care, you were a little, well maybe a lot angry that nothing seemed to change in his carefree alcohol induced world. Were all the messages and missed calls a lie? Even if they stopped all together after a long while, you still had hoped he cared. It wasn’t until Raeun told you that he posts a severely lessened amount ever since that day, and that it’s most likely people of his fraternity controlling what he posts, that your anger subsided.

Even if you told her and yourself that you didn’t care.

“Y/N? There is some food in the fridge for you. Just in case, I’m leaving the door locked. Don’t open the door for anyone just in case, unless it’s the RA, kay?” Raeun said before leaving to take her Calculus exam.

God, why was your roommate and now-best friend such an angel? The mom friend? She even cared for you while she had a very important exam the next day. She was the guard that made sure Jungkook wasn’t going to be near you, hiding you in the closet or threatening to call the RA back when he knocked on your door and called for you for what seemed like an endless period of time.

You didn’t know how you were going to thank her for her hospitality, her generosity, and her existence. But knowing how vulnerable you feel, she just smiles and pats your back.

“Girl, I know how you feel. One thing you shouldn’t do is apologize. Thank me later but there’s absolutely nothing you should apologize for.” She gives you a wink.

Now alone, you felt your nerves kick in as you try to register that Raeun cannot protect you when she’s gone for classes. You hated feeling dependent on her and you hated feeling weak, but you know what?

You felt like you deserved a break. You studied so hard, you tried so hard to grab Jungkook’s attention, and you tried so hard dealing with emotions strong enough to break you down and you were just done. You were tired. So what if you rest for a couple of days? No one will be mad. Raeun was right. You can thank her later, but surely you don’t have to apologize for feeling this way.

So you kicked yourself onto your bed, and dived straight to watch some funny videos. And as you scrolled through your Instagram feed, something happened.

Yes, something magical happened.

It wasn’t Jungkook acting all stupid at a party again, hell no.

It was something entirely different.

You saw the swift arm movements, the smooth lines and fluid form, the music created using the human body. Was that even possible?

You saw sunshine.

“J…J-Hope?”

That was his name. J-Hope. The boy who shone his sunny yet fierce facial expression dancing a routine to 24K Magic.

And that was your entrance to something new. You became a fan of him in a split second. One moment you are replaying the video for about 25 times and the next moment you are exploring his page. The next moment you are following him. And the next moment and for the next few following moments you were drowning yourself in this newfound excitement.

Raeun came back to you giggling and sighing happily.

She frowned for a few seconds, wondering if she should take you to the school psychiatrist, but she later understood when you told her that you recently found out about J-Hope.

“Oh, Yeah. He’s like…super popular lately. It’s said that he’s one of the best young dancers and he’s getting a lot of media attention lately. Well, he is hot after all, he has sooo many followers.”

“…He’s…he’s soooo talented. Like, really talented. Not just because he is hot though. His dancing is just so passionate.”

Raeun smiled a little, glad at least something simple like this (to her) was able to get you to laugh a little.

But to you, it wasn’t something simple. For the next few days, all you did was stalk his Instagram, liked all of his oh-so-aesthetic pictures, watch literally all of his videos, and as if that wasn’t enough, rewatched them all over again. You learned a lot about him. About how his real name was Jung Hoseok. How he is currently a street dancer who slowly gained exponential fame through social media and went viral. How even if he danced so passionately he always found time to appreciate his other hobbies such as photography and singing. How he dreamed of becoming a professional dancer and opening his own dance school one day. How for now, he loved to meet new dancers, collaborate with them, and show them off to the world like the world doesn’t have enough sunshine. How even if he seemed all badass, there were cute things about him too, like being afraid of snakes and rollercoasters. Your world shined through this man who didn’t even know you.

And Raeun may not understand you. I mean, all you have been doing was either catching up on notes you missed or watch J-Hope. But soon, she started to leave you be, and started to even watch him with you. It was crazy to think that something like this served as distraction away from Jungkook, but you surprised Raeun by entertaining a crazier idea.

“Hey. Y’know what? How bout, I try this?”

Raeun turned away from the phone screen a little belatedly.

“Try what.”

You pointed to the screen.

“This.”

“What, dancing?”

“Well, not exactly. But you know how I modelled a little before? And how I sing sometimes?”

Raeun rolled her eyes and chuckled.

“You make it sound like you just touched both hobbies. Your mom and I both know how prolific you are, with both singing and modelling.”

It was true. Even if you became a model for the sake of catching Jungkook’s attention, you were naturally talented at it. And singing was something you were so often praised for, even by Jungkook. But you had no confidence in both, and that was ultimately something that made you quit modelling or drop out of your high school honors choir. Perhaps your confidence was dropped to an infinitesimal level due to failing to be with Jungkook, but during the past few days, that confidence level surged to the northern skies. And who made that confidence soar? J-Hope. Someone who doesn’t even know you. And because of this certain Jung Hoseok, you were willing to do something that always lingered your mind. Jung Hoseok inspired you.

And so you made up your mind. You didn’t care if no one will notice you at first. You were finally breaking out of your shell into becoming someone you should have become so long ago.

But you were never too late.

You weren’t going to let one guy ruin your life like that.

You were going to be someone like J-Hope.

——————

After a little while, you picked yourself up your feet. You weren’t holed up in your room, and you learned to be a little bit more independent. More confident. More you. Yes, you still made efforts to avoid Jungkook, but still. An improvement.

And now, you were about to make more.

“Kay, Y/N, let’s try this one more time.” Raeun called out to you behind the camera amidst your trance.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry. It’s just…I haven’t done this in a long time, y’know?”

“Of course I know. Take your time, okay? Remember. Just be you. Don’t worry about what other people have to say. You are freakishly talented enough.”

You and Raeun smiled at each other and as you shut your eyes you took another deep breath. Your hands were sweaty, both your feet and voice were shaking, but after a while, you envisioned the sun. You had the same anxiety during the first modelling job where your parents, Jungkook, and Jungkook’s parents were watching, but now, you had that same adrenaline-fused feeling of excitement that you discovered with J-Hope. You. You were going to do this.

And you open your eyes, and sing.

And as you thought, it was difficult.

Your first video was a self introduction.

“Hi, I’m Y/N. And I have a story to tell. But y’know, it’d be a little boring to suddenly open myself up like a book, so I wanna take my time. So please, listen to me.”

You utilize whatever you learned in modelling to keep a straight face, strict but fluid posture, and beauty tips. You recalled the times where you enjoyed singing, back when your parents would attend your childhood talent shows and you personified a loud, clear voice.

Since when was all of that convoluted? When did you start being so shy with your own voice? Was it when little boy Jungkook bragged to his friends on the playground that you were the best singer he knew? Was it the pressure? But at that moment, you didn’t blame anyone. No, not Jeon Jungkook. When you sang, you just remembered how happy you were, singing. You lost that joy but you found it back. That’s all that it mattered.

You try a number of different songs, from Boa’s Every Heart to Audrey Hepburn’s Moon River, and though Raeun praised you with hugs and tears you were never sure enough that you were good.

But, it happened.

At first, responses toward your uploads were slow. You thought you were fine with that, because even letting out what you wanted to let out was cathartic to you. But during the first few months, you became more and more dejected over low views and lack of response. However, Raeun’s networking connections and incredible signal boosting as well as your busking and frequent gigs at school events or small coffee shops, your name spread like wildfire through the entire school. And although it was a little towards the future, you went viral on YouTube.

Somewhere in between though, you think you see Jungkook across campus. He was with the girl he was with that one time-Somin, you think her name was. You would be lying if you said you were completely over him. But with Raeun’s now utter determination to get you “out there” and your busy schedules balancing school work, recording, and finding times to at least breathe, you become more invested in yourself than thinking about him. And so, you smile. You don’t say “Hi” or anything awkward. Maybe one day you’ll have the courage to talk to him, or, well, stop avoiding him first. After all, you completely shut him out without his say in anything. But for now, you think that him being out of your life was not something that was losing light. If Jeon Jungkook was someone you wanted to please, then J-Hope, Jung Hoseok was your role model. You don’t have to please someone in order to admire them. That was it.

#bts #bts imagine #bts imagines #jungkook #j-hope #submission

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nancydsmithus · 5 years ago

Text

Programmatically Discovering Sharing Code With oEmbed

Drew McLellan

2019-11-26T11:00:00+00:002019-11-26T12:06:06+00:00

The web is full of services that host rich content such as videos, images, music and podcasts, maps and graphs, and all manner of different delights. Chances are, when you add your content to a site, it will offer you a way to embed that content in a web page somewhere else.

Sites like YouTube have their own embeddable player that is popular to use in blog posts and even product pages. Soundcloud has code for embedding their music player in your band’s website. Charity fundraisers might upload the route of their big race to a site like Strava, and want to share it on their fundraising site to show their sponsors.

All this is done by finding that Share option on the hosting site and copying out some code that is normally a mix of HTML and JavaScript. That code can then usually be pasted into the destination page, and the hosting site will present a rich representation of the content for all your friends, customers and contacts to see.

So far, so good, and this covers the option for the manual embedding of content pretty well. There is a distinct second use-case however, where the outcome is the same but the route to it is very different.

Sharing Programmatically

Let’s imagine you’re building an app or site that accepts content from a user. That could be something as simple as a basic intranet page for staff to share news with coworkers, or something massive like a whole social network where people can sign up and start posting.

In both cases, you need to work out what to do if the user adds a URL as part of that content. You can imagine the scenario:

Check out this video! https://youtu.be/jw7bRnFbwAI

At this point, as a publishing system, you need to figure out what to do. The first option is to do nothing, and just leave the URL as plain text. That’s not a brilliant idea, as users will generally want to click on the URL and plain text won’t help them get to the page at the other end.

The second option is to turn it into a link. That’s a good solid next step, as users can follow the link and get to the content. But in doing so, they leave your site and might not come back in a hurry.

The best user experience might be to be able to fetch the player for that content and embed it right there instead of just the URL. That would enable users to experience the content right within your site, much like they would on Facebook, for example.

This poses the problem. Given a URL, how can I turn that into the HTML/JavaScript embed code needed to show a rich player on the page?

If it’s a known site like YouTube, I could write some code that uses the YouTube API to fetch the video information and get or build the embed code that way. I could do the same for other video services like Vimeo and VIVO. I can write code to recognize Flickr and Instagram URLs and use their APIs to fetch nice embeddable versions of photographs. And the same for Twitter and tweets. But this is sounding like a lot of work!

What would be ideal is if there was a standardized way of getting from a URL of a piece of content to a block of embed code to show that content on a page. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that the answer to that is oEmbed.

The Origin Of oEmbed

This was exactly the problem Leah Culver had while working on Pownce (a truly innovative social networking site that was the Betamax to Twitter’s VHS). Pownce wanted to embed rich representations of content into a user’s update stream, but didn’t want to limit support to only the services they’d specifically written code to integrate with. At dinner with colleague Mike Malone, as well as Cal Henderson (who led engineering at Flickr — one of the major providers of such content at the time) and Richard Crowley, they together hashed out an idea for an open standard for getting embed code from a URL. Henderson went away and drafted something up based on the discussion, and oEmbed was born.

Using oEmbed

Here’s how it works.

It starts with the URL that points to a single item of content. That might be a YouTube video, an image, or whatever. Typically this will have been provided by a user of your site or app as part of some content they wish to publish. The first step is to fetch the content of the page at that URL, which should be an HTML page.

If the site hosting the content supports oEmbed, in the <head> section of that page there should be a link element with an oembed content type:

A note about XML: oEmbed supports responses in both XML and JSON format. For this article, I’m only considering JSON, because we’re not savages. If you’re in the unfortunate position to need to work with XML, be aware that it is a supported format with the oEmbed spec, although you may find that some providers only offer JSON responses.

This link tag as the rel attribute set to alternate and a type set to either application/json+oembed or text/xml+oembed. It’s this attribute that clues us into the fact that the URL given in the href is actually an oEmbed API endpoint for retrieving the details of the content.

That URL will have usually two parameters: url and format.

Parameter Value url (required) The URL-encoded web address of the content item format The format you’d like the response in. One of either json or xml

Common URL parameters for the initial consumer request

The full specification goes into much more detail here (and you should reference that if creating your own implementation) but these are the two parameters you’ll likely see the most.

So, we’ve got a URL, fetched the page, found an oEmbed link tag with another URL for an API endpoint. Next, we request that new URL, and that returns all the information the service has to provide about that piece of content.

{ "author_name": "Smashing Magazine", "width": 480, "title": "Smashing TV: Inclusive Components with Heydon Pickering (Nov 7th 2019)", "provider_name": "YouTube", "height": 270, "html": "<iframe width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/jw7bRnFbwAI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen></iframe>", "provider_url": "https://www.youtube.com/", "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jw7bRnFbwAI/hqdefault.jpg", "type": "video", "thumbnail_height": 360, "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSDtqcJ8ZXviPrEcj1vuLiQ", "version": "1.0", "thumbnail_width": 480 }

Now we’re talking! The response gives us lots of information about the content. The version should for the foreseeable future be 1.0, which is the current version of the oEmbed spec. The other information returned depends largely on the value of type.

Response Types

The value of the type key in the response tells you what sort of media you’re going to be embedding.

Value of type What to expect photo A static photo that offers a url, width and height that can be used for a basic img tag video A video player, with html specifying the code required to embed a player on a page, although with a width and height link The best way to deal with this content is just to provide a link after all. The response might have other useful information like a title, but it should just be linked up. rich Some sort of rich content player, which just like the video type returns html, width and height

Aside from dedicated video content, the more common type you’re likely to see in the wild is rich. Even Flickr itself, while still sending a photo response, also supplies html for a rich embeddable ‘player’ for the image, too.

Most of the time, embedding the content in your site is just a case of using the code provided as the html value.

A Note On Security

One thing you might be rightly cautious of is taking an HTML response and embedding it programmatically into a page you host. Without the human step to double-check the code you’re pasting in, there is always potential for that code to be malicious. As such you should take appropriate steps to mitigate the risk.

That might include filtering the URLs to make sure the schemes and domains match those expected, and sandboxing code into an iframe on a different, cookieless domain. You should access the situation in which you’re using the code and make sure that you’re not exposing your self to undue risk.

Getting Started

As important as it is to understand the process when using oEmbed, the reality is that most common languages have libraries available that abstract away the process and make it relatively simple.

For example, the npm packaged oembed provides a very simple interface for making a request based on the content URL and getting the oEmbed response back in return.

First install the package into your project:

npm i oembed

And then request the URL. Here I’m using the URL of a presentation on Notist that I gave about oEmbed. How very meta.

const oembed = require('oembed'); const url = 'https://noti.st/drewm/ZOFFfI'; oembed.fetch(url, { maxwidth: 1920 }, function(error, result) { if (error) console.error(error); else console.log("oEmbed result", result); });

And the response:

{ type: 'rich', version: '1.0', title: 'Understanding oEmbed', author_name: 'Drew McLellan', author_url: 'https://noti.st/drewm', provider_name: 'Notist', provider_url: 'https://noti.st', cache_age: 604800, thumbnail_url: 'https://on.notist.cloud/slides/deck4179/large-0.png', thumbnail_width: 1600, thumbnail_height: 900, html: '<p data-notist="drewm/ZOFFfI">View <a href="https://noti.st/drewm/ZOFFfI">Understanding oEmbed</a> on Notist.</p><script async src="https://on.notist.cloud/embed/002.js"></script>', width: 960, height: 540 }

If you wanted to do the same in PHP, a handy package called embed/embed is available to install via Composer.

composer require embed/embed

And then in your PHP project:

use Embed\Embed; $info = Embed::create('https://noti.st/drewm/ZOFFfI'); $info->title; // "Understanding oEmbed" $info->authorName; // "Drew McLellan $info->code; // "<p data-notist="drewm/ZOFFfI"> ... </script>"

As you can see, with the use of a library the process becomes very simple and you can quickly get from a URL to the embed code, ready to show a rich representation of the user’s content.

Conclusion

oEmbed is a very elegant solution to a very specific problem. You’d be forgiven for thinking that only a few engineers working on big social networks would benefit from this, but in reality, publishing systems where a user might enter a URL are surprisingly common. Find me one back-end engineer who at some point hasn’t needed to build some kind of CMS. We may not think of it in the same terms, but if you accept user input, you should be thinking about what to do if that input contains URLs.

Now that you know about oEmbed (sorry) you’ve got no excuse not to give some serious consideration to how you handle URLs in your future projects.

oEmbed specification

oembed for NodeJS

embed/embed for PHP

“Announcing OEmbed: An Open Standard for Embedded Content,” Leah Culver

(ra, il)

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castawxayaway · 7 years ago

Text

in the middle

why is it that since I got requests I have just gone a bit AWOL? i’m sorry, it has been a few days since I posted and it’s been me and my headspace right now- i’m spacey. i hope you like this though, and of course it had to be the artist that it is, if you know anything about me this is who I personally am in love with right now (music and person wise).

if you requested something from me it is coming! i promise I haven’t forgotten about it (entirely) and they will all be done before wednesday as that is when i’m at reading festival for almost a week.

also I wanna do a q+a for my youtube, so if you have any questions about anything (literally anything) send them in! if you want to be anon be anon I don’t mind. just something I want to do and tumblr is a good platform to ask for mixed questions :)

love you guys 🖤

prompt list / collection of my writing / requests open *nudge nudge*

Unable to get the lyrics out of my head I find myself tapping on the keyboard, my foot bouncing to the rhythm and soon enough I am singing the words under my breath. I can’t stop myself from going online and straight to Twitter where many of my bizarre thoughts lie filled with numbers from others in agreement or sheer curiosity.

cannot get the song ‘In the Middle’ by dodie out of my head! the lyrics to ‘intertwined’ are something else #obsessed

Immediately I see lots of responses in agreement, some from pages dedicated to the singer and others recommending me other songs. The known smile forms on my face as my screen goes dark, giving me the chance to see my reflection before it turns itself back on and becomes flooded with life. Twitter is one of those platforms where you can just talk to anyone, I’ve been lucky enough to connect with various artists through Twitter, have them praise my lyrics and even ask for my help with producing a song or two for their albums or EPs.

My job isn’t the easiest, it can be challenging at times, but it pays off when you can hear it on the radio, or talked about online; just like dodie’s is. I sit for a while and scroll through the tweets change in my mentions and focus around someone besides dodie, instead they focus around Bastille.

Leaning in closer to my laptop I analyse their comments; ‘omg dan loves her work!’ ‘shit you know her too? dan was tweeting about her the other day’ ‘@bastilledan another reason why you two could be super cute together’ they all differed in opinions, but they all kept mentioning him and me along with dodie. Seems like I am the one in the middle this time.

Part of me wanted to see if he’d respond too, if he even knew who I was. I’ve worked with bands like his, but none of them have ever been as unique as Bastille is. Their lyrics hit you somewhere unknown inside, they delve through all the hidden and buried emotions, bringing them to the surface for four minutes at a time. They are a reminder at times of what we should value, what can easily be lost when we least expect it. Eventually I give up on waiting, I leave my phone at my desk and go to my music room and work on some lyrics knowing that I have a meeting with a new musician in a few days.

A few hours had passed and I had barely been able to get anything done, the jitters over Dan were settling as curiosity was consuming me and ruining my creative abilities. I kept telling myself to just test these lyrics with these notes, but it was no use. Sitting I stare at the blank notebook, nothing achieved due to my phone calling my name, whispering possibilities in the other room. “Oh fuck it.” I mumble to myself as I rush to my phone as if my life depends on it.

Scrolling through the masses of notifications to do with the three of us I see one that catches my eye and makes me smile. ‘EeeeeEkkkk it’s you! you like my music??? I listened to your work for YEARS l o l <3′ dodie, a true sweetheart. Shifting my focus from dodie I can feel my heart pause until I see it, until my eyes can find it fast enough for everything to resume.

‘I wasn’t sure if anyone else really knew of her for the music she does? good to know you love her too!’ ‘as much as I admire her talent, instrumental is a great piece of music, don’t you agree?’

I glanced over his words, the words he had aimed at me to read and respond to. Fans immediately got on board, responding, freaking out and fanning their hearts out; which is exactly what I wanted to do, but no I am going to keep my cool. It’s only Dan Smith, an incredibly talented musician and lyricist. Only.

We talked back and forth via tweets, dodie along with others unable to keep up with the excitement of fellow people within the music realm discussing her work, but it was getting to that point where fans were suffocating. Suffocating is that point where the meaning of the conversation is lost in the feed of fans losing their shit, those who love bastille favouring or protecting them/Dan from wanting to speak to me.

Rolling my eyes I just went to DM him instead, knowing it would be easier in some aspects, but more difficult to not mess it up. After a few messages were exchanged I eased into it more, we both did. Our conversation slowly moved away from dodies music, towards the direction of my own- specifically my writing process and how it is to write for others and not so much myself.

‘Writing for myself is always a personal thing, some songs I write and I know I can’t share it or give it to someone else to release. Most things I write I tailor for them specifically, I work with them to get the best result rather than put myself in them, I put them in me- not literally obviously!’

Why did I send that, it sounded so rare and professional, but like always I cocked it up.

‘No no, I see where you’re coming from. There are so many songs I wrote and published, but I never perform them, really talk about them. Sometimes I wonder what if I did? What if I were willing to perform them again? But it was before Bastille, that was when I was just ‘Dan Smith’ and it doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.’

‘As if it is outdated?’

‘I think it is and isn’t. Some music can be timeless.’

‘Like The Beatles?’

‘Yes, but also the likes of Kendrick Lamar.’

‘So you’re an in between then? Somewhere along the scale of being too caught up recent affairs and stuck in the past?’

‘Unfortunately so. But how come you’ve never published under you, as in become an artist and not just lyricist?’

I lean back in my chair as I read over the message. It’s not something I’ve been asked for years, my parents enquired why I wouldn’t do it myself, but I felt too vulnerable in my young adulthood. Now it is a different story, but I just don’t think I could do it.

‘Conformity, pressure, the stress. When I write a band or an artist a song that is my role done, I get the contract, I write the songs and I get paid. I hear it and my name is written legally as the lyricist, but I have no other ties that are so severe. It prevents me from getting overly exposed, risk of being watched 24/7. I’m just afraid to try really.’

He doesn’t respond for a while unlike before. Maybe that was too much, a bit too honest for someone he doesn’t really know besides the work I produce for others. I resume my work as I listen to the rain beating down against my window, trying its hardest to fight through the glass with little success. Now I find myself humming his songs, not dodies. I tap my pen and play a few notes that I can remember off of the top of my head. Interrupting my moment of distraction my phone goes off, he’s back.

‘Would you like to meet up with me sometime? It may seem a little forward, but I would love to discuss music, possibly working on something together. Only if you’re comfortable doing so. I’ve heard your work, as in your work when you did a few videos prior to writing for others. I didn’t know how to tell you that without sounding like a creep, but I would love to see that person, only if you’ll let me?’

My mind wanders back to those years when I would set up my brothers camera on a stack of books as I played on my piano with a small microphone by me to hear my voice above the piano. I forgot I had those uploaded, now no one really knows about it as it remains hidden in the depths of the internet, yet somehow he found it. He actually watched my 19 year old self nervously introduced myself and the song before that part of me melted away into the song. It was an offer to get back into that, to reopen that side of my music that has not been truly revisited for years.

Glancing over to my notebook, to the second one that is filled messily with tea stains, small doodles and hundreds upon hundreds of lyrics I compare it to the neat, carefully colour coded organised one that I use for other artists and not myself. I used to have fun writing songs, but of late I’ve lost the heart to it.

Licking my lips I sit behind my piano and envision myself again, that part of me I loved. I close my eyes and my fingers naturally find the keys that I memorised, my mouth opens and the lyrics are still there, despite being shrouded in multiple songs since. It was the first song I truly wrote, the one that I was actually proud to call my own that only few have seen online; Dan being one of those few.

I reach over for my phone, wanting to thank him for a reminder of why I write music. That sometimes you need to just re-evaluate what is happening around you, to go back to what you know in order to keep creating music.

‘That sounds like a plan, thank you Dan. It may seem odd, but having a small conversation with you I feel as if I have rediscovered my music. It’s something that is easier to explain in person. How is next week?’

As I send the message I can’t wipe the smile, it differs from the smile for the fans on Twitter. It is one of giddiness, of excitement for what is to come with my music, with meeting the musician and lyricist who has lived in the same boat I have for possibly longer. Fans still conspire amongst themselves about our absences, so I leave them wondering with a tweet to an old song of mine.

‘For the person who made me realise why I do what I do’

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fentonizer · 8 years ago

Text

Zero Value

“You should do some more writing” my girlfriend said to me in what may just be a narrative framing device.

I have always dabbled in writing, and people have always been polite enough to tell me the things that they’ve read that I wrote have been good.

Truth is, of late I have been in a funk. “Funk” being an offhand and slang way of distancing the problem that is no doubt a depressive disorder. Low mood is the symptom, as as far as symptoms go, it sounds benign. Everything is grey a lot of the time, and I do not know where the colour has gone.

I can’t seem to remember the last thing I looked forward to. Nothing grand anyway, nothing more important than a pizza, or a lie in. The days, like much of my writing are a run-on sentence.

I did write a 2000 word, mostly auto-biographical story about the year of my life twenty-fourteen, a year where a lot of “mad shit” happened to me and which I have never fully internally processed to closure. I probably never will.

Here are a few paragraphs from it I feel comfortable sharing with you:

There’s a documented condition called Paris Syndrome; a form of culture shock, the romanticised view of France and Paris specifically, a city of green grass, culture, love and that European free spirit is at odds with the reality of an overpopulated, dirty city, full of normal French people sick to death of tourists.

Depression itself is like Paris Syndrome, but instead of culture shock, it’s existence shock. You’ve been thrown into a world you don’t understand and are trying to cope. It’s not like how you thought it would be, is it? It’s not like how you were told it would be. Everyone else seems to have it together, right? Why aren’t I like that? Why do I go home and want to do nothing but rest in bed? Where do these people find the energy to do all this stuff? See places. Go to things. What am I missing that doesn’t make me feel capable of doing all that too?

The quintessential existential problem is feeling like you don’t belong and having no memory of the place where you do, if it even ever existed in the first place. How can one hope to fit in and find purpose when we have no template with which to work from? This is the void depressives speak of, like being perpetually hungry for a meal that doesn’t exist, the hole is indescribable precisely because nothing will fill it. It is formless, and we try to sleep, eat, drink, love, talk and fuck our way to a fulfilment that doesn’t exist for us.

We cannot ever get a plane out of Paris.

My intuition tells me only one thing here, and that is that because I am actually quite proud of the literary clarity of my mental state in the above, it is likely trite, probably plagiarised, and essentially of zero value.

Maybe you know or even remember that I wrote the allgamesshouldbedarksouls blog. This was a few years ago, before even Dark Souls 2 came out and society hit what we now refer to as “Peak Dark Souls.”

I don’t really want to go on about it, but it’s easily summarised. Remember liking “the cake is a lie” references? Then remember hating them as overdone and shallow, popularised not because of any real love for the art or end result, but because it was coded “in-language” that separated you from “them?” Like drawing a fish in the sand, we understand, and we’re safe here, away from those neophytes. And when they kneel at my feet, saying “Why!? Why didn’t we listen to you about how Dark Souls was an instant classic?” I will shove them aside. They had their chance, and no, I will not lend you my copy of it now.

The writing was good (people were polite enough to tell me) but as far as “video” “game” “writing” goes, it was shallow and I could see that. It was overly concerned with mechanics and more than implied some measure of objectivity in game-design. Plus, I was really tired of the “angry young dude hates every video game for petty reasons” shtick, knowing full well that if you gave me money and a team to design a videogame I would inevitably shit out something milquetoast.

But nevertheless, it was well received and proved that if I had the inclination I could string words together to create something vaguely compelling, although possibly I’m not accounting for the low bar of the subject matter, in this, the medium where you can wax idiotic about your constitutional right to kill a virtual prostitute.

I bring this up not because it’s the one good thing I’ve ever produced and reminisce about it daily, but because it’s yet another unfortunate example of something in my life that I tried, started to get somewhere with, then got bitter about not being handed fame on a plate and gave up.

I noticed this of myself today; (now, look, this is going to get pretty pathetic, but my girlfriend said I should write more (she didn’t), and I’m being open and honest with you, even if that reveals some... truths.) I have very few twitter followers. Not even 150. I use twitter all the time, every day. I say things, I make jokes, I comment on current events. I have tweeted almost 6000 things. I use hashtags, and I use them correctly. I do not, repeat DO NOT, make up random hashtags about my day like #FentonsTeaBreak, which is, like, something everyone who is new to using twitter does in the first week and thinks they are hilarious for doing.

But I am yet to find any more than 150 people who are interested in things I have to say. And 150 is generous as well, I suspect at least half of those are either robots, people who have since died, or people who followed when they signed up because Twitter suggested it might be a good idea and haven’t logged in since.

I actually lose more followers than I gain, and I can assure you that it not because of self-pitying screeds like this (I learnt that lesson about 4000 tweets ago). If you've never felt unsure about your place in the world, imagine the feeling that it is easier to find people who actively regret choosing to listen to you, and you’ve got a good approximation.

Today brought this to the fore as I saw a tweet that was basically the same as a tweet I made, retweeted into the thousands, simply because that person’s audience was bigger than mine. It was weirdly validating, that yes, my thought would have been accepted en mass, but also infuriating like meekly muttering a joke, only to have your confident friend repeat it, louder, to roars of applause (having used better words with a defter sense of comedic timing).

I realise this is incredibly arrogant. People are busy, and the world does not stop when Fenton Makes A Tweet. These days, everyone is a “content producer.” Running the wide gamet of pictures of their cat all the way along to pictures of their latte. There simply isn’t enough internet attention to go around, because mostly, it’s all so fucking boring.

I have come to see twitter more as a diary. A repository of my thoughts so that, like the cold unfeeling robot I am, I can purge the memory banks once this string has been archived, and move on to thinking other things (there is no rider to this joke, I am not going to list two normal things followed by one surreal thing).

For 6 months in 2016, I captured approximately 40 minute chunks of me playing video-game farming simulator Stardew Valley. I uploaded these videos to YouTube and in each I would talk about the game and talk about things going on in the world and it was generally incredibly cathartic. I appreciate there’s not much of a market for what ended up being about 70 hours of unedited video-content of a man, forever teetering on the the brink of an emotional meltdown talk about miking a virtual cow, but goddammit, I produced that content anyway. Fuck the haters (of which there were none).

Someone once said of my brief foray into stand-up comedy, that I was talented but showed an obvious lack of preparedness. That review (3 stars, Milton Keynes SnoZone, 2010) was a more accurate summary of my being than any psychoanalyst has ever achieved. I do not apply myself, and therefore I do not achieve. Even this, these very words that you’re reading right now, I am writing so that I don’t have to practice for a tournament of a game I supposedly enjoy playing and want to be good at.

My entire life feels like a omnibus of half-efforts. Even my job, which I openly loathe, I don’t quit because I do not want to risk trying anything different and have it be worse. I talk myself out of it daily for reasons like “you only know how to do this once specific job anyway” and “other jobs are probably a lot harder.” I give up before I even begin, and then use that same lack of motivation as a self-fulfilling prophecy to convince myself that it was never going to happen anyway, so I’m justified in giving up.

And then, on top of this, the Earth in year 2017 is a shit show to the point that your troubles are pretty small-fry. I’ve drafted tweets, had thoughts, typed internet comments, and then fallacied myself into relative privation by realising “wait, maybe the world doesn’t need THIS JOKE right now, because Muslim’s are being unlawfully detained at airports. Is this really the time for a pun on the word fondant?”

Today is February 2nd. It’s hashtag Time-To-Talk day. And that is as good an excuse as I’m going to get to be this massively self-indulgent and start my commitment to writing more by laying out my neuroses on the shaky pre-tense of lowering the stigma towards mental health.

But please, talk to each other. See your faults, your weaknesses, understand why you feel like you do and then you can start looking at changing patterns and habits that might be bad for you.

Don’t keep this shit locked up. Be brave. Talk. It’s ok. People will understand that you’re a mad-shit. Write a blog post that people will have trouble deciding if it’s too meta or not meta enough.

Society puts so much pressure on us to perform. Be like this. A man should be like THIS, a woman should be like THAT. This is damaging and only serves to alienate.

Mental health is important. My mental health needs constant work. Did you actually read the above paragraphs? That’s my brain all day “Not good enough, stupid weak thoughts, stupid weak job, you’re a failure and it’s no surprise you give up.”

To be Onan just one more time, my mental health is really the only thing I’ve never given up on.

Plus, of course, I have an amazing support network of my partner, family and friends. And if you feel you don’t have this kind of network, then there are plenty of resources which are listed here, the Time To Change website: http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/mental-health-and-stigma/help-and-support or you can drop me a line.

#timetotalk

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jimbicknell-blog · 8 years ago

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Turkle’s interview, Louis C.K.’s video, and my daily social media use log.

I’ll preface this by saying that, as a whole, I despise what is quickly becoming in my opinion a bit of a pandemic. That is, if it isn’t already the modern Spanish Flu only with batteries. The same sort of thing both Louis and Turkle touch on. The death of actual conversation in favor of staring dead eyed at a phone screen. I hate this current shift toward some sort of Facebook generation.

At its inception, Facebook, and the idea behind it, were remarkable. It was a place to keep in touch with your one group of peers, college aged students. No parents, no preteens, no grandparents. There were no games at the start, no “likes” if I remember right. It was simple and served a legitimate purpose.

How far gone a purpose is perhaps debatable, though I’d argue that for the most part, the site as a whole is essentially an internet vampire sucking the life right out of you. I can think of a thousand things in a second that I’d rather do than share something on Facebook. I don’t have the app on my phone, my account/password aren’t saved on it, I check it maybe once a year for all of sixty seconds.

Though as I do this, all around me are the people that get netted in. Especially the young. I can’t even have a proper conversation with some of my youngest family members because even the youngest of my cousins has a smartphone at this point. And they don’t just own one, it may as well be welded onto their hand. Their eyes are downcast to the LED glow, they bob their head as if listening, but their answers are vague and often not on topic.

I remember my first cell. I was fourteen working a job at a gun range and wanted one for the sole purpose of being able to call my parents for a ride back home. Something they could call me on if they were going to be late, that sort of thing. Web wasn’t really a thing on them back then, and while it did do text messaging, it was 10 cents sending or receiving and something I did not use. I bought the device and paid for my plan both. Fast forward a bit over a decade and here we are, where my 8 year old cousins have more modern smartphones than I do.

I absolutely agree with Turkle’s idea of sanctuary zones, where you put the phone away and leave it. Dinner, especially. This doesn’t apply just to family, either. When I’m out for a drink with friends, we often have a rule. Everybody puts their phone away, and anyone caught sneaking a peek is buying everybody else a round.

I will never understand the people filming at a concert. Especially if they are filming a big screen at a concert. Louis is right, you’re never going to actually watch that. People throw it up on facebook or twitter or whatever else and just seek the attention that they were there. The funny thing is, I actually employ my phone with my gopro setup to do a lot of filming. Mostly fishing and underwater videos, mahi on the line, sharks bumping against the lens, that sort of thing. I don’t throw them up on youtube, I don’t put them on facebook, I share them face to face with somebody who couldn’t have been there with me.

Why? Because nothing starts a conversation off like showing somebody a video of a big, toothy critter about six inches away from the camera. Or of hauling in tuna in twelve foot rollers some twenty six miles offshore as lightning cracks overhead and waterspouts kick up around the boat. Maybe the one video I wish I’d posted somewhere because I lost it when I accidentally wiped the flash card.

You don’t get that by posting it on facebook or youtube. Sure, you’d get some likes. Maybe some PETA vegans blowing up the comment section. But not a conversation.

I think that smartphones are every bit as addictive as maybe even heroin. There are people who can’t live without it, as described in both videos. They practically live through the device, more attached to it than the world and people around them. Maybe it is to fill some sort of lonely void as Louis seems to think. I find it at least equally plausible that it is more a vanity issue. People get addicted to the “likes”, to the thumbs ups on youtube, to more tweets in their direction. If tweets in their direction is even a thing, I don’t know, all I’ve ever used it for before this class was when I heard about sports news via some insider. Even then, I wasn’t actually going to twitter, it’s just where the info first broke.

Moving on to the social media log assignment, it didn’t really take me very long to get a baseline reading. I don’t ever use my facebook, which is the one social media thing I even have an account for. I do a tiny bit of texting, if that counts. Today it was to let my one friend know to head out to meet at the gym, and to another that he isn’t going to stop being pre diabetic by sleeping instead of deadlifting. Another to let a different friend know that, while I let his dog out, he did a bit of a roll through mud while chasing a soccer ball and is probably going to need a bath. Sorry, Matt, I did the best I could with the towel by the door.

I’m sure that there are people who would share all of this on facebook or instagram or something else. I see them snapping selfies after two reps, hashtag it with a #swole, and then sit there for another few minutes clicking the pretend cows before leaving and acting like they actually accomplished something. Arnold has a great term for cellphones in a gym. “Mickey mouse stuff.” I’d actually go a bit further and say that applies to just about any situation. If you’re doing something that should require your full attention, or something amazing like jumping out of a plane, documenting it on your cell should be the last thing on your mind. To be honest a lot of fishing trips I don’t even remember to turn my gopro on, if I even remembered to charge it, or even pack it. If you read my first post this week, you’ll note that I don’t even bother uploading these videos anywhere.

I even know a guy who lost his chance at a once in a lifetime trophy deer because he was fiddling trying to do a snapchat, dropped it, and had the buck run off on him. He feels a bit different about trying something like that now.

It’s a real conflict for me to manage all of this. I know that social media is basically required for a modern business to actually thrive. Not because it is really some necessary thing, but because there are billions of phonezombies out there who pay in the same cash everybody else does. Sure, it has a few other uses, making announcements easier to spread and such. For the most part, though, it’s just another form of advertisement spam.

All the while I’m actually perfectly content with not uploading my daily life to the web. If I want to know what somebody else is doing, I’ll usually call or at minimum text. Maybe an email if it is a bit long winded. I only use these as tools in the cases where an actual face to face conversation isn’t possible, usually because of distance or time.

Concerning my social media experiment, I am actually, for a 24 hour period, going to attempt to use my phone as much as my peers. I’ll log in to my facebook, I’ll read whatever inane information people have slathered all over, I’ll maybe even confirm those dozens of people I’ve met who send me a friend request after. I’m writing this little part ahead of time as a way to give my predictions as well.

I have little doubt that I’m going to hate it. Likely for all of the same reasons I stopped using any social media in the first place.

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ramblingsofanobody · 7 years ago

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[{Tech Company}] collects user data

No. Shit.

I am baffled by the outrage that people have towards a lot of the recent items in the news surrounding Facebook & Cambridge Analytica. I’m even more surprised when something else comes out and people get all shocked again. Apparently Google collects data on you too, so I reiterate: No. Shit.

And for all of the other news reports that will come out over the next few months regarding Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Tinder, Grindr and so on, so on, so on. No. Shit. Doubly-so for any website which insists that you must use their shitty app. Facebook functionality is definitely waning on a mobile browser but you can still use m.facebook.com, you can also send messages through it without installing messenger, for reddit you can use i.reddit.com (or m.reddit.com). Treat anything that doesn’t work at all, like Instagram, with a lot of scepticism. If you’re using Google Home or Amazon Alexa, don’t come crying to me when next year you find out that the camera you placed in your bedroom, and the microphone you placed in your living room have actually been recording everything you say and do.

I know that it’s not helpful from the tinfoil-hat-wearing people like me to say that we told you so, but it’s the equivalent of me trying to hang shelves which subsequently fall down, and THEN being told that I should have used a particular kind of anchoring screw. You’ll tell me that you “told me so” with home DIY, I’m telling you that I told you so on this.

I’m on Facebook, I’m on a number of Google services, and an array of other social media and communication tools. Each time some “news” comes out about how you can download your treasure-trove of data one of these companies collects about you I go ahead and do it, and here’s what I’ve found: they’re only showing me the data which I expected to see. I’m not saying that they’re not still collecting additional information in the background, they most likely definitely are, but the outrage that people have found in this user-accessible data is based on data that people have willingly shared:

The Facebook “Contact Info” section is blank for me (i.e. it doesn’t contain records from all of my text messages and phone calls

My Google Activity section is blank, there’s no search history, there is no location history, no Voice & Audio history. There IS Youtube history, because I turned that on

Instagram has never had access to my location, camera, or microphone. I take a picture, and THEN upload it (I know that they do have access to my internal storage this way)

If there is a perfectly functioning website then there is no need to install an app, if the website functions poorly due to poor code then their app isn’t going to be much better, and finally if the website is pushing you to install their app for a better “experience” then be very wary - nobody wants the overhead of maintaining an app just because it cares about your “experience”.

None if this should be considered to be “new” either, I have little experience with iOS but I know that with Google Play you can see the permissions an app wants (click “View Details” under the permissions). You also have the option to retroactively disable some of this access too, but some things will refuse to work without them so you’ll need to weigh up the importance of the trade between your data and functionality, ask yourself: are Snapchat filters important enough to me that Snapchat can have my location?

Ignorance is not a sufficient excuse anymore, particularly somewhere with strong consumer laws like the EU where websites have to tell you if they use cookies, most companies and services will publish terms of service or user agreements, there are EULAs, apps have to tell you what permissions they need. You should assume the worst with any smart device or service and expect anything you share with them to be shared to a third party.

And when you go to install that app, ask yourself why that app needs permission to X. Does a notepad really require camera & microphone access, does Angry Birds really need your location? All social media collects a shit-tonne of information about you regardless of whether you use an app or traditionally access via a computer, but the app has the ability to collect a lot more information about you than a web page would.

I look forward to the next series of outrage, and the subsequent “No shit” from me.

#cambridgeanalytica #facebook #deletefacebook #privacy #tracking

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freelancetofreedom · 7 years ago

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How to Use Twitter Effectively for Your Freelance Business

If you’re curious about how to use Twitter as an effective marketing tool for your online business…you’re in the right place! One of the best ways to learn this is by starting at the beginning. This means making some small adjustments to your account in order to reap the benefits of Twitter more quickly and more effectively.

So, let’s dive deep and take a sledgehammer to your current Twitter profile (or start building a brand-new one!) so that you can truly start to reap the benefits of having an active account.

If you want to know how to use Twitter, here’s where you should start…

6 Things That Every Amazing Twitter Account Needs

#1: A Profile Photo

Okay, obviously, you need to have some sort of photo here. I don’t want to see any of you guys with just one of those egg-head things that Twitter starts you off with.

So, yes, Step #1 of learning how to use Twitter is: do not use the egg.

But the real secret here is not just to upload any ol’ photo — you need the right one!

Your photo is pretty much the one thing any potential new followers are going to notice about your Twitter account. It’s your virtual first impression, and you need to use that opportunity to catch people’s attention.

So the photo you use should be attention-grabbing (but not in a bad way) and somewhat professional.

Depending on your brand, the “professional” aspect of this photo could have a pretty broad spectrum. But, basically, the important thing to remember is that it should be a clear, high-resolution photo of you personally.

Unless you’re a big brand (like Target), a headshot will convert followers way better than a logo. You’re a small business and random people will not know who you are! So using a logo as the profile photo on your social media account does virtually nothing to help you. Global brand recognition doesn’t exist for you (yet). Don’t worry, you’ll get there.

For now, you’ll need to get people interested in your business by using a shot of your beautiful, smiling face instead!

If possible, you will want to use a professional headshot for this.

Here are some good examples of professional-looking profile photos on Twitter:

#2: An Engaging Bio

After someone gets a glimpse of your profile photo, the next thing they’re going to see is probably your username and bio. When learning how to use Twitter for your business, you should keep in mind that small details like this really do matter.

The username is easy, which is why it’s not its own separate section here….it should simply be your personal name or the name of your business!

Your bio is a bit more complex, though.

You need to think about your bio section strategically. The amount of characters you are allowed use here is very limited (duh, it’s Twitter). So you need to get to the point quickly in order to make an immediate impression.

Here are some great Twitter bio examples:

The goal of your Twitter bio is to give a potential follower a brief overview of who you are and what you do.

You may also want to insert an additional fact about yourself or your business (i.e. Jorden Roper’s “fuschia hair” descriptor) that may help someone connect with you on a deeper level.

You also have the option of adding hashtags. This could help Twitter browsers discover your profile more easily.

#3: A Link to Your Site

As part of the little About section Twitter gives you on your profile, you’re allowed to add a URL to your site.

The cool thing is that, unlike some other social media platforms (like Pinterest), you’re allowed to have this link go wherever you want. So feel free to switch it out or rotate it every so often.

The goal of this link is pretty obvious. You’re a business. You want people to convert from Twitter to become followers, members, customers, clients, etc.

The best thing to do is to point them in the direction that you want them to go. For example, are you looking to grow your email list? Have that link go directly to a freebie. Looking to increase Facebook group membership? Send them there.

Be creative with it!

#4: A Custom, Branded Cover Photo

The next thing that all awesome Twitter profiles have is a custom, branded cover photo. If you want to figure out how to use Twitter to your business’ advantage, true me — these are crucial. Cover photos can wow your followers plus do a little bit of subtle marketing for you.

The cover photo is valuable real estate in the world of Twitter, so make the most of it with a graphic that pops.

Here’s a great example of a Twitter cover graphic from Stacey Tuschl:

#5: A Pinned Tweet

I’ll be honest…it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to even realize you could do this on Twitter. But yes, you can totally pin an important tweet to the top of your profile!

This ensures that anyone who visits your profile (hopefully some brand-new followers!) will see it. So it’s a good idea to use that most-prominent tweet to showcase something important.

Here’s a list of ideas on what you could promote there:

A blurb about + link to your latest blog post

A retweet from someone else talking about your services

Information about a Twitter chat you host

Details for an upcoming webinar or live event

A blurb about + link to your lead magnet

Your latest YouTube video

I love this example of a pinned tweet. Someone sure knows what they’re doing!

#6: A Consistent Daily Schedule

You have all the basics set up now, but it’s not time to relax yet! The very next step in learning exactly how to use Twitter to your advantage is to make sure to keep your account consistently active.

This means posting every single day. Ideally, you’re going to want to post multiple times per day.

According to Moz, the lifespan of a tweet is 18 minutes. I’m sure you’ve probably heard this statistic before, as it’s something that’s often repeated by social media pros. But the important thing here is not to just be shocked by how short that is — it’s to actually work to combat it by using that information to your advantage.

How do you do that? Pretty much just by posting on Twitter as frequently as possible.

The key here, though, is to toe the line somewhere between having an accounts that “barely ever posts” and “spams people nonstop.” Personally, I like to post between 12–30 times per day.

The next step is actually creating and posting the content. This is the hard part.

The whole point of content is to engage your audience, so the two main things to keep in mind are (a) post content they want to engage with, and (b) post content when they’re engaging.

A tool like Buffer can help you choose which specific times you want to post throughout the day.

Creating the content itself is more of a trial-and-error type thing. I like to test my audience by posting a variety of different content and then viewing the analytics of my account to see which types of posts they preferred.

Then, all you need to do is reproduce those positive results at the correct time each day. And voilà! Your Twitter account is now a sleek, optimized, social media marketing ninja tool that is working nonstop for you and your business.

You only need these 6 tools to make your Twitter account a marketing ninja for your online biz Click To Tweet

The post How to Use Twitter Effectively for Your Freelance Business appeared first on The Freelance To Freedom Project.

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