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ailuronymy · 3 years

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Thoughts on the new discourse? Warrior cats naming conventions and rank names being straight up stolen from native American people? So many people seem to be... Straight up leaving the Fandom or changing all of their fan content and it feels very performative and, people not actually thinking critically and just being scared of getting "cancelled"? I feel like your opinions on these matters are very informed and well written so I wanted to ask given that this blog main theme is, well, warrior cat naming system and that seems to be the main issue of the new discourse.

This is probably going to get long, since there's sort of a lot to say about it in order to talk about this whole thing fairly and constructively, because from what I’ve seen there’s a lot of hyperbole happening, and panicking, and disavowing this series and fandom, and so on, like you say, and also some people genuinely trying to have complex meaningful conversations about racism in xenofiction, and also probably some bad faith actors in the mix--as well as some just... stupid actors. Kind of inevitably what happens when two equally bad platforms for having nuanced discussions--i.e., twitter and tumblr--run headlong into each other, in a fandom space with a majority demographic of basically kids and highly anxious, pretty online teens. I don’t mean that as a criticism of fans or their desire to be liked by peers and “correct” about opinions, it’s just the social landscape of Warriors and I think it’s worth pointing out from the start.

If I’m totally honest with you, if not for this ask, I wouldn’t actually be commenting on it at all, because none of this is going to impact this blog or change how I run it in any way. But since you’ve asked and frankly I do feel some responsibility to try to disentangle things a little for everyone stressed and confused at the moment, because I know a lot of people look to this blog for guidance of all sorts, I’m going to talk about what I think has happened here, and how to navigate the situation in a reasonable way.

Quick recap for anyone blissfully unaware: from what I understand, this post (migrated over from a presumably bigger twitter thread) has got a lot of people very worried about Warriors being a racist and appropriative series, and now are trying to figure out what ethically to do about this revelation. The thing I found most interesting about this screenshotted conversation is that it makes a lot of bold claims, but misses some pretty surprising details (in my opinion). If you do look critically at what is being said, here’s a few things to notice--crucially, there are two people talking.

Person 1 says that a lot of animal fantasy fiction + xenofiction (fiction about non-human/”other” beings, such as animals) is frequently built upon stereotypes of First Nations and Indigenous people, and/or appropriates elements of Indigenous culture and tradition as basically set dressing for “strange” and “alien” races/species etc., and this is a racist, deeply othering, and inappropriate practice. This person is right.

I’ve spent years researching in this field specifically, so I feel pretty confident in vouching (for whatever that’s worth) that this person is absolutely right in making this point. Not only is it frequently in animal fiction/xenofiction, but it’s insidious, which means often it’s hard to notice when it’s happening--unless you know what you’re looking for, or you are personally familiar with the details or tropes that are being appropriated. Because of the nature of racism, white and other non-First Nations people don’t always recognise this trend within texts--even texts they’re creating--but it’s important for us all, and especially white people, to be more aware, because it’s not actually First Nations’ people’s responsibility to be the sole critics of this tradition of theft and misuse. Appropriation by non-Indigenous people is in fact the problem, which means non-Indigenous people learning and changing is the solution.

Person 1 offers Warriors as a popular example of a work that has this problem. Notably, this person hasn’t given an example of how Warriors is culpable (at least in this screenshot and I haven’t found the thread itself, because the screenshot is what’s causing this conversation), only that it’s an example of a work that has these problems. And once again, this person is correct. We’ll look at that more in a moment.

Person 2 (three tweets below the first) offers, by comparison, several more specious insights. Firstly, it’s really, really not the only time anyone’s ever talked about this, academically + creatively or in the Warriors fandom specifically, and so that reveals somewhat this person’s previous engagement in the space they’re talking into re: this topic. In other words, this person doesn’t know what has already been said or what is being talked about. Secondly, this person explicitly states that they “[don’t know] much about warrior cats specifically but from what I see it just screams appropriation,” which as a statement I think says something crucial re: the critical lens this person has applied + the amount of forethought and depth of analysis of their criticism of this particular series.

I’m not saying that using twitter to talk about your personal feelings requires you to research everything you talk about before you shoot your mouth off. However, I personally don’t go into a conversation about a topic I don’t know anything about except a cursory glance to offer bold and scathing criticisms based on what it “just screams” to me. By their own admission, this person isn’t really offering good faith, thoughtful criticism of the series, in line with Person 1′s tweet. Instead, Person 2 is talking pretty condescendingly and emphatically about--as the kids say--the vibes they get from the series, and I’m afraid that just doesn’t hold up well in this court.

So now that there’s Person 1 (i.e., very reasonable, important, interesting criticism) and Person 2 (i.e., impassioned but completely vibes-based opinion from someone who hasn’t read the books) separated, we can see there’s actually several things happening in this brief snapshot, and some of them aren’t super congruent with each other.

Person 1 didn’t say “don’t read bad books,” or that you’re a bad person for being a fan of stories that are guilty of this. They suggested people should recognise the ways xenofiction uses Indigenous people and their culture inappropriately and often for profit. My understanding of this tweet is someone offering an insight that might not have occurred to many people, but that is valuable and important to consider going forward in how they view, engage with, and create xenofiction media.

Person 2 uses high modality, evocative language that appeals to the emotions. That’s not a criticism of this person: they’re allowed to talk in whatever tone they want, and to express their personal feelings and opinions. However, rhetorically, this person is using this specific language--consciously or subconsciously--to incense their audience--i.e., you. Are you feeling called to action? What action do you feel called to when you rea their words, despite the fact their claims are not based in their own actual analysis of or engagement with the text? It’s, by their own admission, not analysis at all. Everything they evoke is purely in the name of “not good” vibes.

Earlier I mentioned that Person 1 is correct that Warriors is absolutely guilty of appropriation of First Nations and Indigenous people and culture. I also mentioned that they didn’t specify how. That’s because I think the most egregious example is in fact the tribe, which in many ways plays into the exact kind of stereotyping and appropriation of First Nations Americans that Person 1 mentions, and not the clans, contrary to Person 2′s suggestion. For instance, in addition to the very loaded name of “tribe”, there’s a lot of racist tropes present in how that group of cats is introduced and how the clan cats interact with them, as well as the more North American-inspired scenery of their home. It’s very blatant as far as racism in this series.

When it comes to the clans themselves, though, I think it’s muddier and harder to draw clear distinctions of what is directly appropriative, what is coincidentally and superficially reminiscent, and what is not related at all. Part of this difficulty in drawing hard lines comes from the fact that, on a personal level, it actually doesn’t matter: if a First Nations person reads a story and feel it is appropriative or inappropriate, it’s not actually anyone’s place to “correct” them on their reading of the text. Our experiences are unique and informed by our perspectives and values, and no group of people are a monolith, which means within community, there will always be disagreement and differenting points of view. There is no one single truth or opinion, which means that First Nations people even in the same family might have very different feelings about the same text and very different perspectives on how respectful, or not, it might be.

I’m saying this because something that gets said very often when conversations of racism and similar oppressive systems present/perpetuated in texts comes up, people frequently say: “listen to x voices.” It is excellent advice. However, the less pithy but equally valuable follow-up advice is: “listen to the voices of many people of x group, gather information and perspective, and then ultimately use your own judgement to make an informed opinion for yourself.” It means that you are responsible for you. The insight you can gain by listening to people who know topics and experiences far better than you do is truly invaluable, but if your approach to the world is simply to parrot the first voice, or loudest voice, or angriest voice you come across, you will not really learn anything or be able to develop your own understanding and you certainly won’t be making well-informed judgements.

In other words, one incomplete tweet thread from two people who are each bringing quite different topics and modes of conversation (or perhaps gripes, in Person 2′s case) to the table is not really enough to go off re: making a decision to leave a fandom, in my opinion. In fact, I think in responding to anything difficult, complex, or problematic (which doesn’t mean what popular adage bandies it about to mean) by trying to distance yourself, or cleanse of it, will ultimately harm you and will not do you any good as a person. It is better, in my opinion, to enter into complex relationships with the world and media and other people in an informed, aware way and with a willingness to learn and sometimes to make mistakes and be wrong, rather than shy away from potential conflict or fear that interacting with a text will somehow taint you or define your morality in absolutes.

So. Does Warriors have racist and appropriative elements, tropes, and issues in the series? Yes, of course it does, it’s a book-packaged series produced by corporation HarperCollins and written by a handful of white British women and their myriad ghostwriters. Racism is just one part of the picture. The books are frequently also ableist, sexist, and homophobic (or heteronormative, depending how you want to slice it, I guess), just to name some of the most evident problems.

But does the presence of these issues mean it’s contaminated and shouldn’t be touched? Personally, I don’t think so. Given the nature of existing the world, it’s not possible to find perfect media that is free of any kind of bias, prejudice, or even just ideas or topics or concepts that are challenging or uncomfortable. I think it’s more meaningful to choose to engage with these elements, discuss them, criticise them, learn from them, and acknowledge also that imperfection is the ultimate destiny of all of us, especially creators.

I’m not saying that as a pass, like, “oh enjoy your media willy-nilly, nothing matters, do what you want, think about no-one else ever because we’re all flawed beings,” but rather that it’s important not to look away from the problems in the things we enjoy, rather than cut off all contact and enjoyment when we realise the problems. That doesn’t mean you have to only criticise and always be talking about how bad a thing you like is either, publicly admonishing yourself or the text, because that’s also not a constructive way to engage with media.

As I said, there’s a lot to say here, and believe it or not, this is honestly the shortest version I could manage. There’s always more to say and plenty I haven’t talked about, but pretty much tl;dr:

I don’t find Person 2′s commentary particularly compelling, personally, because I think it’s a little broad and a little specious in its conclusions and evidence, and I also suspect that this person is speaking more from their feelings than from a genuine desire to educate or meaningfully criticise, unlike Person 1. That’s not to say Warriors isn’t frequently racist and guilty of the issues Person 1 is discussing, because it is, but I don’t think this tweet thread is a great source of insight into the ongoing history of this problem in xenofiction, or Warriors specifically, on its own. I would recommend exploring further afield to learn more from a variety of sources and form your own opinions. I hope this helps.

#just in case anyone sees this post and gets the wrong idea: i'm not inviting debate on this.#i am saying that first nations people are allowed to have ANY relationship with texts because that's how subjectivity works.#they are allowed to have negative neutral or positive experiences of texts--even 'bad' ones that have a lot of problems.#the people in this tweet are just talking about their thoughts and it's their bad luck the world's a public forum and it's spiralled.#the other thing i am saying is that if your approach to media is exclusively to cut out any problematic text like it's a cancer #that's not a great strategy. just straight up. you're better off developing critical insight and your own opinions and confidence.#by most parameters i can think of warriors as a series pretty much sucks really bad and i've been saying that for nearly ten years.#despite being so phenomenally flawed it can still have value--and much of its value in my opinion is IN these conversations about it.#so yeah tl;dr 2: i'm not here to slap-fight with teens which is what much discourse devolves to after 5 mins on tumblr so don't try it.

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chibinoyume · 5 years

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Feb 15th - International fanworks day

So today I found out via this post that today is international fanworks day. As such, I thought I’d reminisce about how fandom & fanworks have changed my life, little by little. While I’ve been a fan of many things, to me, a level of love/obsession (and most likely, a ship) must be present in order for me to engage more in a fandom, read fic, make fanart, try to write, etc. Still, I’ll only mention the 4 most significant here, with drawings to match.

The oldest - Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X)

My first fandom, Rurouni Kenshin, made me interested in trying to draw (by copying what I saw), especially as it was an anime/manga, I had (and still have) the comics and so the source material was right there. Here is my favorite character from that series, and possibly one of the oldest scans I have from any fanart. Fandom was hard to navigate because I was limited by the glitchy websites that were the norm back then and I was barely starting to learn really basic english at age 12 (my first language is spanish).

The one that kept me sane - InuYasha

As I fell more and more in love with a different show, InuYasha, I still felt most comfortable copying what I saw (above is one of my favorites from that time, copied from a page of the manga), and sometimes, with a ton of detail. It was a hard time in my life because personal things, family problems, depression, school problems... focusing on something I loved deeply at 13 -and weirdly for a fantasy story, identified with- was really helpful. I felt limited because the difference in results when I copied an image vs when I made it up was staggering, but I still tried.

I joined a forum, made friends online (some of which I’m still very close to today -some of them I’d definitely credit with helping me not... take drastic measures back then), ventured to write fic in spanish and, something I’ll always thank my obsessive brain for, I forced myself to learn english so I could keep up with the new releases (it was either english or japanese, easy choice which one was easier).

It was literally trying to figure out via context what the english subtitles meant, sometimes pausing every 5-10 seconds in a 20 minute episode because sometimes I didn’t understand a single word and had to look it up on the dictionary (google translate was kinda trash back then). My english wasn’t great but I tried. I couldn’t read fic in english yet, though.

This era lasted for a long while, I don’t know how many years. While I never stopped being more comfortable copying stuff, I did venture into doing my own little drawings and comics from my own head, based mostly on things I liked, stuff that happened in real life and my love for chibis has never stopped.

The “taking a leap of faith” fandom - The Mentalist

There were quite a few years where I went fandom-less (at least to a significant degree), I don’t know why. I found The Mentalist relatively early on, but since it clearly involves real people and actors, I couldn’t quite copy anything since realistic portraits have never been a huge interest or my strong suit. I started using pictures as references instead. I joined a forum once again, they had a lot of activities and I got to interact with people I admired, especially fic writers (by this point, I could read if in english, which was great because the ratio between spanish fics and english fics is... like 1:100. Also the source material in this case is in english, so...).

I didn’t know if my very anime-y style would be well received in the fandom, especially as I was probably one of the youngest people there and one of the only ones that came from the anime world. I tried regardless, I felt accepted, and eventually ventured into making my mostly pencil-only drawings snazzier with some digital editing.

I dipped my toe in writing fic, in spanish and (gasp) in english, even if I was slightly terrified even with a beta reader. I also became very active in my deviantart profile (an art sharing website) since I hada lot of material to show and the fandom was also active there and probably joined Tumblr around this time.

I stayed in that fandom for years, through universities, made a lot of fandom friends over the years (from my late teens to my early twenties), mostly from the forum and ffnet, and because of tl;dr reasons, I had the opportunity to travel eventually and I had the good fortune of meeting a bunch of them in person. A couple of them we’ve met irl more than once even if we’re from different countries, and we talk online very often ♥

Also I started experimenting with watercolor, just a little bit, encouraged also by university. I did a ton of fanart comics, mostly humor. All the constant interactions with my fellow fangirls helped me improve my english a great deal, especially when it came to slang, and ever since then, most of my online life is in english now.

There was this blog that did episode recaps of the show, I was somewhat popular in this fandom by then because I did a lot of fanart, and the person in charge of the blog commissioned me to make a drawing or comic per episode. I had deadlines and this was the first time I considered making drawings to supplement income, the opportunity meant a lot to me because I had free reign to let my fanart ideas run wild. I mostly used colored pencils. I think it was the most creative period of my life, I had so many ideas I never did, some because I didn’t feel good enough, lack of time/energy, etc. Still, some of them I’m still pretty fond of.

The current one - Blindspot

Again, it was a few years between fandom/a show I deeply connected with/a ship I fell in love with. But I stumbled into Blindspot (and Jeller) around July 2019, and you all know I love it here ♥ I wish I had found it earlier on, but eh, I’ll take what I can get!

I now run my own tiny business where I make stationery and apparel goods with my own original illustrations (and making commissions sometimes), mostly working in watercolor, and while it’s not yet at the point where I can fully support myself with just my income, it’s been a very long ride to get here. Of course it took a lot more than just fandom love, but I can’t say it wasn’t a big part of it.

Blindspot will end in 2020 but I still hope I can keep it and the friendships I’ve already made from it close to my heart, and that the fandom lives on. I certainly have lots of ideas pending, and as opposed to my previous fandom, I don’t want to leave any just as a scribbled down idea on a notebook.

#international fanworks day #fandom #get to know me #fangirl life #personal #fanart #about me #long post

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the-hinata-project · 6 years

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How do you set up a week like this? I mean, the part where you actually manage to get people involved with it?

That’s an interesting question! I assume you mean getting people to participate when the event actually runs?

The main things you need, regardless of how many followers you have: posts that advertise and explain your event, and tagging those posts appropriately!

Some bonus things: something eye-catching about those posts (fanart/sprites and banners for the event), probably multiple posts about the event to keep people thinking about it, and getting help from friends or outside sources willing to plug in and promo your event! Your own followers may help, so never disregard your own blog!

The success of the event depends on: The subject of the event (How popular is the ship/character/series?) and how much effort you put in (Does it look like you actually care about the event? Does it look like you will respect the participants and their fanworks? Do you seem reliable enough to handle the event? Are you approachable? How do you handle criticism and hecklers? Did you organize it well?)

If you want details, I can only give you my own experience with events. (It’s under the cut because, well, I can’t be concise...)

I’ve only ever run one ship week before, and that was completely on my own at the time. I say “on my own,” but I actually did have support, namely my friends and mutual followers on my main account, spreading the word whether they were actually interested in participating in the event, or not! I am very thankful to them for putting up with it XD

There’s also tagging posts appropriately by the characters/ships involved in the event (in this case, Hajime and Izuru). And I really have to hope that the post shows up in the tags. I keep making sure after the post is created that the post shows up where it is supposed to (in other words, don’t put external links in your posts whatsoever! Not even links to polls). Also, you want to make sure to post it at a time you know people are active. To me, it seemed like around 10AM or 3PM PST will work.

People like me actually do surf Tumblr through the tags, so when they are interested in the event (as I’m sure they must be at least somewhat if they are surfing through the main character tags), they would hopefully reblog the post and their followers may be interested and reblog from them, and the cycle will hopefully continue. Reblogs are so important. Likes... don’t tell me much except that you are interested? And that’s a maybe as well.

A lot of it has to do with whether people are interested in what the event is about. Hajime/Izuru is a rather popular character who people love, so not to sound like as if I’m bragging or anything, but I do expect this event to gain traction based on that.

However, even less liked character/pairings can get some traction! I know for my ship week, I put a lot of effort into making sure people knew about the event. I actually went over what is expected, lol. I made polls to get as may people involved as possible and check how many would be interested in participating. I made quite a lot of pixel art leading up to the event, as well, and with each post, it’s another chance someone new will see it and be interested in the event.

And Kamu//Koma Week, for example, would occasionally get fanart made by their friends (mostly pixel art) and answer asks and tag these in the main tags (their ship tag mostly, and the character tags too maybe). They also had some polls made to get people involved- I mean it is both more advertising and it helps get people engaged and hyped about the event.

Both me and that mod relied on the tag system and our own followers. If you do own a blog that has a lot of followers, definitely use it! And if not,it’s very much possible to get attention. Like for me, I don’t have an insane amount of followers, and I have seen people who don’t have many followers have very successful events. Still, whatever followers you have, make sure to reblog your posts on your own blog!

Another thing you can do is respectfully ask for people who do have a lot of followers (like ask blogs, for example) to help you make your event known. If they don’t get to your ask, don’t be pushy with it, please ^^;

For this event, I could rely a lot on the tag system, my mutuals were helping spread the word, and I was able to get @/ask-hinapape to help! (Let’s say we had connections XD) I’ve seen people ask ask blogs and confession blogs for promos before, as well!

Mod Kusamochi, Mod Ahoge, and I each made something to promote the event! I drew the icon, Mod Kusamochi made the header (Also was put on our submission guidelines post) and Mod Ahoge made the “Uncle Hinata” poster on our Mods Intro post! To attract people to your event, having an attractive post is going to help you. Make sure it is something that centers on what your event is about, of course, but also try to make it pretty! Using a lot of colors might help, or maybe it is a moving gif.

It is not that fanart is necessary, either! You can use sprites or official art and just edit it. I mean, for the ship week I ran, I took already-made transparents or transparented stuff on my own and added a background that was actually just the background of other official art, but zoomed in or replicated into a pattern. You can also ask friends to help you out if you’re not that great with making fanart/sprite edits! And if you claim to have no friends, you can always request/commission someone else to help!

Having organization in an event is going to help as well! Make sure you give people time to think about the event you’re planning so that they can organize themselves. A week is very short notice, a month is better, but might not be ideal enough for people to time themselves. When the event occurs is also going to affect how many people can participate. Make sure when you plan it, people have the time to submit something.

You want to have some rules, as well. First, you have to figure out just how is it that people are submitting their entries. For example, most events have you use specific tags. As a mod, you go to those tags and reblog them to the event’s blog. You can also have people submit their entries to the blog, and you tag or mention who created the submission.

It’s also great to have backups! Make yourself available and approachable in case something goes wrong. Do they need more time? Did you miss their entry? Did they accidentally break a rule?

If you need help creating rules, then try looking up other ship weeks for guidance on how they had set up their guidelines!

You also do not want too many restrictions, especially not something controversial, like “none of these ships are allowed”, or “none of that character”, or “these headcanons are not allowed”. Give people more freedom, and you’ll find you run into less problems. It may even be that no one was planning to draw/write something about the things you restricted them on, but because you restricted it, now they demand you let them. Or, if you had perceived there would be a problem, it might just be that there never would have been one to begin with. Don’t create drama, you’re only going to hurt the event and yourself.

And on the rare occasion, you may come across hecklers. The first time, you might respond. Try to not confront them even if they are rude- remain calm. It may just be that what you think is an insult to the event is just curiosity worded a bit strongly. They don’t like the ship? Explain that all participants are going to use a specific tag or tags they can block, or that they will all be tagged with the ship name, so they may as well block that. Same goes to specific characters. They don’t like how you run the event? Ask them what they wanted changed, or tell them that if they want to create their own event, they can. If they or others keep filling up your inbox- ignore it. It hurts, but don’t give in to the bait. There’s an event you are running with people that actually care for the subject- you focus on that. Don’t bring all the negativity hecklers want to pollute the event with. They want people to feel bad about participating in the event. You stay strong, and the participants will too.

Be open, be willing to make changes, be willing to stand up for yourself when needed, and most importantly, show that you actually care. Make sure that it is known that you find the event important enough to have created it and will treat it with the care and effort necessary.

You can feel the difference between someone that gave their event a lot of thought, and someone that didn’t plan ahead as much as they could have. And I’m not pointing fingers at any particular event- I’ve seen a few events that were not planned that well. But for the most part, I’ve seen a lot of mods who created events they genuinely cared for.

To me, a successful event is not measured how many people participated. A successful event is one where those that participated and the mod(s) feel genuine pride at what has been created for the event. If the goal was to expand a ship, then even one fanwork is more than what it had once been. If the goal is to show more appreciation for something, then even if only a few people actually participated, you now know who it is that shared your love for the subject. For me, I found that the most valuable knowledge- knowing you are not alone in your love for that subject.

All-in-all, if you want to create an event, whether it is a ship week, a secret exchange, or an appreciation week for a character/series/etc, just make sure that you and the participants are able to have fun and that you are able to be heard by the people who’d like to participate.

This turned out to be... quite the lecture, lol. Sorry XD I hope this was informative though!

-Mod WORLD DESTROYER

#long post #sorry this turned out to be an essay orz #Mod post #mod WORLD DESTROYER #Anonymous

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ivyandink · 6 years

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Do you have any advice for people who want to start writing a sims story on tumblr? I’ve always wanted to but I’ve never really known how to start one. Also using poses/custom content stuff is kind of new to me and I don’t want to look like a huge noob lol

Hey anon! I’m briefly coming out of hiatus, just to answer this for you, lovebug.

First off- thank you in your patience for my reply. :) I know, I’m a little slow sometimes!

Second off- THANK YOU for asking me this :D Such an honor to have someone ask me how to start writing a simblr story! lol. I’m such a dork- okay, moving on.

Third off- I actually have a little project in mind that will cover this topic WAY MORE in depth.. ;) (queue me being extra af as always) but, I didn’t wanna leave you hanging, so I’ll put some tips here :)

Below the cut bc it long lol #extraAF

So for CC, literally just so go sssvitlans.tumblr.com and scour her ts4 tags! :D Lana’s blog is like the only place I use for cc, outside of others’ cc finds blogs (which typically are just reblogging Lana too lmao). Don’t worry about Alpha vs Maxis Match. Just download what YOU like :)

Scour her pose tag as well! I’d recommend getting a few basic ones, like talking, a few general romantic ones, etc. to start, and adding more to fit any scenes you want to create :)

But ALSO- decide how much you want to use poses! They add a tricky element to storytelling, it’s true. Poses can be a bitch sometimes. So think about what ratio you wanna use. When I first started my simblr story, I used 75% in game stuff. That percentage changed as I grew more invested in my story however. Because posing CAN be so frustrating though, I do recommend starting off with mostly gameplay anims, until you know for certain you’re really digging your story and want to invest more time into it! That way you don’t get discouraged.

As for the actual story part.. I recommend developing characters you love first. Don’t try and come up with a super dramatic plot, or something you think will be “popular”. The best plots fall short when you have flat characters. Come up with characters that YOU love, and everything else will fall into place a lot easier!

As for how to get started… literally, just do it! If you need some ….. inspiration?? for lack of a better word, lol. Go to the VERY beginning of my Ivy Legacy (the prologue, called ‘Diaspora’) and see how gd awful my story was back then lmao. It takes a while to get into the groove of things, that’s just how it is. Unless you’re already used to how the whole sims/simblr story thing works for you, there WILL be a learning curve. But that’s ok :) As long as you keep trying to learn!

The longer you wait, and put off starting, though, the longer you’re delaying your success!!! And by success I DON’T mean “followers”- please, DO NOT pay attention to the numbers. It’s hard not to- I know, I sometimes even still do sometimes. But it’ll only do you a disservice. When I say success, I mean writing a story you love and being able to share it with others who will love it too :)

As far as the “aesthetic” side, i.e. how you edit your pictures, to use reshade or not to use reshade, captions or no captions, short or long posts, etc. Just experiment! Follow people who’s work you admire, and take inspiration (don’t copy, tho!). Try out different styles until you find something you like. My editing/writing style has changed dramatically over the whole time I’ve had my simblr. Change is good. Change = growth. :)

I also recommend actively engaging with and reading others stories. Not only with that help you grow in your editing/writing by consuming their content, it’ll also help you make friends! And having friends in this community makes it a lot more enjoyable! It could also potentially give you people to bounce ideas off of, come up with plots, run things by if you’re unsure, etc. Feedback is good, when it comes from a place of care and appreciation!

Okay.. one last lil note for this long af ask… DM me when you start your story! I’d love to read it.

And like I said at the beginning, I do plan to make a more comprehensive guide to this kinda thing, since it’s a question I see asked a lot :) So, keep ya eyes peeled for that! ;) ofc, i’m also a v busy gay so who knows when itll happen lol.

Anyways, I hope this helped somewhat!! Send me another ask if you need more clarity with anything :)

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appcalgary321 · 3 years

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Okcupid Slow

What Is OkCupid Boost?

Ok Cupid Show

Okcupid Login Home

Okcupid Slow Motion

OKC is EXTREMELY slow at times. Sometimes loading a new page on OKC takes minutes. During this long load time, the rest of my browser is frozen almost solid; I can sometimes switch to a new tab, but it always takes at least 30 seconds. I'm running Firefox, and I do have lots of tabs in a few different windows open, but only OKC seems to be.

OkCupid is very inclusive of lots of different people; their site includes 12 different genders and 20 sexual orientations, and it provides a great platform for gay and lesbian dating. Members: There are around 1.4 million users in the UK and 10 million worldwide.

Slow Dating - 84% of people on OkCupid think it's important to have an emotional connection before a physical one. Wilder-dating - After being in lockdown for most of the year, daters will be looking to experience the great outdoors as a way to get to know their match. See full article at OkCupid blog. See the top news on OkCupid.

If Okcupid is slow or you have problems loading Okcupid web pages, try to press CTRL+F5 in your web browser to refresh the webpage. If this doesn't work, try to close and re-open the web browser. Alternatively, try to clear your web browser's cache, or to disable a browser plug-in addon that you have recently installed.

An OkCupid Boost shows your profile at the top of special blend searches, on quick match, and in activity feeds. So, in essence, your profile is seen by a lot of users in a short amount of time.

Boosts usually last for 15 minutes but OkCupid extends them if you don’t reach a certain number of impressions in that time (currently 1,000).

You can buy a Boost individually or buy in bulk for a discount.

Unlike the daily Boosts that come with an OkCupid A-List subscription, you can choose the timing of a separately-purchased Boost. The clock starts right after you purchase.

Can Anyone See I’m Using OkCupid Boost?

Nope. OkCupid doesn’t label profiles using Boost.

How Much Does a Boost Cost?

For now the set price of a single OkCupid Boost is .99 cents via the mobile app or $2.00 via the website.

How Can I Get the Most Out of an OkCupid Boost?

To make your Boost impressions go farther, optionally consider doing the following during your Boost. (This is best done on a computer rather than a phone.)

• Turn anonymous browsing off and visitors on.

• As profile thumbnails pop up, open the attractive ones in new tabs.

• Also search for Last Online and open the attractive ones in new tabs.

The idea here is: if you show up as having viewed their profile, they’ll view yours back — further increasing the amount of attention you’re getting in that short time.

When your Boost ends, read through the profiles and message/like the users you’re into to get the ball rolling.

When Is the Best Time to Use an OkCupid Boost?

Short answer: Sundays at 9pm

According to a study of mobile app behavior by Nielson, OkCupid is busiest on Sunday. Between 9pm and 10pm is OkCupid’s most popular hour.

Activity is lowest between 2am and 5am. Users start engaging around 5pm. Activity goes up and up through the evening until 10pm, when activity falls off again.

Long answer: When your profile is good enough that you won’t be wasting the opportunity

When you use a Boost, a lot of users are seeing your profile. But it still really depends on the quality of your profile as to how many messages or dates you’ll get from it.

With a bad profile, there’s the sad possibility that you’ll just get rejected more and faster.

Look: Being considered highly attractive on dating sites/apps isn’t just for Brad Pitt or jacked guys named “Chad.” You just have to know what kind of pics sell you well. And the vast majority of your competition is failing at this. Turns out, most people use pics that don’t do them justice at all, and they lose attention immediately.

Tinder is not for hook ups, that's a myth. The studies vary, but the distribution is about: 10% hookups 50% people looking to see what the fuss is all about (lot of couples do this too) 20% people looking to make friends or meet people 20% people looking for romantic dates and serious relationships. Reddit dating apps. My girlfriend and I both met on Plenty of Fish. Compared to the other dating apps I've found that that was the best one at least for a guy. It has the capability for a more comprehensive profile so people can get to know you better (if they read profiles and you actually write your information.) and it allows for two way messaging instead of this wait for the girl to respond BS.

Answer? Test your pics on Photofeeler. Choosing a profile pic this way has been known to increase matches on Tinder by 200-400%.

Go to Photofeeler.com now and give it a try!

So, typical scenario on OkCupid. I find a profile I at least rather, and perhaps quite like. Maybe even one where I think / “feel” we’re highly probable to make for a good – even excellent match. I message them, and … nothing. Statistically, that’s to be expected. For M messaging F on OkCuid, something roughly around 2/3 to 90% of those messages get zero response.

But alas, I “favorited” them, or gave them a (1-3) “star” rating.

I almost never give 4 of 5 stars – mostly because, at least as I recall, if one does that on OkCupid, it notifies them … and that’s likely counter productive – at least I’d think … whether I’d messaged them or not. Maybe if I’d already met ’em and know ’em fairly well, perhaps that would work fine – but otherwise I think it mostly would make any chance of mine with them only slightly less probable – so I almost never give 4 or 5 start ratings on OkCupid. International cupid sites. But I digress.

Ok Cupid Show

Alas, having favorited them, I also generally see their activity … various updates they make, they show in my searches, “matches” and activity, even often shows me when the logon. And, … that’s mostly just a slow bit of torture – as I’d already messaged them, hadn’t heard back – and in most cases/probabilities, never will. Likewise, they look at my profile – I see that … but again, most probably they’ll never message me back, and it’s mostly just more slow torture. Could message them again? Sure, … but that’s highly unlikely to get a response. If they didn’t respond to a first message, pretty darn improbable they’d respond to a second one – particularly if they’ve been on the site some hours or days or more since I sent them that message, and they’ve had more than ample time to read it and respond. So, a second message would, where they’d not replied at all to the first, at least most probably, would be a counter productive waste (and a bit more slow torture).

Many many times – just as part of emotional “survival” strategy – and the harsh realities … I message someone, and I then, more-or-less, as much as feasible, try to – much as I hope and wish they’ll respond – I try to start letting go and forgetting about them the instant I’ve sent the message – because most of the time I’ll hear exactly nothing back – ever – and nothing will ever come of it – and more messages won’t make it better. But there’s still that slow torture aspect to it.

Okcupid Login Home

But alas … a somewhat better way of dealing with that. :-) On OkCupid, one can “hide” a user. When one does that, they can still message you, and you them, but … they won’t show up in your searches, matches, activity, that they’ve viewed your profile (or you theirs), etc. So, … I’ve changed my strategy. I send a first message, then “hide” them and remove them from my favorites. If I get a message from them great – or at least potentially so. And, if not, … I, for the most part, never at all see or are reminded of or about them again at all – at least not by OkCupid in any way. Well, … except there’s still the “sent messages” – they show up in there, unless/until I delete them. Maybe too, I’ll also start doing that at some point? But that’s not as critical – as once I “hide” the user, and remove them from favorites, “sent messages” is the only place on OkCupid I’ll ever see them again.

Okcupid Slow Motion

Reality sucks … but sometimes there are ways to make it feel at least a slight bit less sucky.

0 notes

shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon

This story was originally published on mssv.net by Adrian Hon (@adrianhon)

The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. Last week, it was 5G cell towers, this week it’s Wayfair; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”

I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, A.I., had just begun. YouTube wouldn’t launch for another four years, so you had to be eagle-eyed to spot the unusual credit next to Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, and Frances O’Connor: Jeanine Salla, the movie’s “Sentient Machine Therapist.”

Close-up of the A.I. movie poster

Soon after, Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) posted a tip from a reader:

“Type her name in the Google.com search engine, and see what sites pop up…pretty cool stuff! Keep up the good work, Harry!! –ClaviusBase”

(Yes, in 2001 Google was so new you had to spell out its web address.)

The Google results began with Jeanine Salla’s homepage but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites or lifestyle magazines; others were inscrutable online stores and hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, over twenty sites and phone numbers were listed.

By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from a single AICN article suggesting readers ‘do their research’. It later emerged they were part of one of the first-ever alternate reality games (ARG), The Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg’s movie.

The way I’ve described it here, The Beast sounds like enormous fun. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a doorway into 2142 filled with websites and phone numbers and puzzles, with runaway robots who need your help and even live events around the world? But consider how much work it required to understand the story and it begins to sound less like “watching TV” fun and more like “painstaking research” fun. Along with tracking dozens of websites that updated in real time, you had to solve lute tablature puzzles, decode base 64 messages, reconstruct 3D models of island chains that spelt out messages, and gather clues from newspaper and TV adverts across the US.

This purposeful yet bewildering complexity is the complete opposite of what many associate with conventional popular entertainment, where every bump in your road to enjoyment has been smoothed away in the pursuit of instant engagement and maximal profit. But there’s always been another kind of entertainment that appeals to different people at different times, one that rewards active discovery, the drawing of connections between clues, the delicious sensation of a hunch that pays off after hours or days of work. Puzzle books, murder mysteries, adventure games, escape rooms, even scientific research—they all aim for the same spot.

What was new in The Beast and the ARGs that followed it was less the specific puzzles and stories they incorporated, but the sheer scale of the worlds they realised—so vast and fast-moving that no individual could hope to comprehend them. Instead, players were forced to cooperate, sharing discoveries and solutions, exchanging ideas, and creating resources for others to follow. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.

QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.

In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?

ARGs never made it big. They came too early and It’s hard to charge for a game that you stumble into through a Google search. But maybe their purposely-fragmented, internet-native, community-based form of storytelling and puzzle-solving was just biding its time…

This blog post expands on the ideas in my Twitter thread about QAnon and ARGs, and incorporates many of the valuable replies. Please note, however, that I’m not a QAnon expert and I’m not a scholar of conspiracy theories. I’m not even the first to compare QAnon to LARPs and ARGs.

But my experience as lead designer of Perplex City, one of the world’s most popular and longest-running ARGs, gives me a special perspective on QAnon’s game-like nature. My background as a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist also gives me insight into what motivates people.

Today, I run Six to Start, best known for Zombies, Run!, an audio-based augmented reality game with half a million active players, and I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification.

It’s Like We Did It On Purpose

Perplex City “Ascendancy Point” Story Arc

When I was designing Perplex City, I loved sketching out new story arcs. I’d create intricate chains of information and clues for players to uncover, colour-coding for different websites and characters. There was a knack to having enough parallel strands of investigation going on so that players didn’t feel railroaded, but not so many that they were overwhelmed. It was a particular pleasure to have seemingly unconnected arcs intersect after weeks or months.

Merely half of the “Q-web“

No-one would mistake the clean lines of my flowcharts for the snarl of links that makes up a QAnon theory, but the principles are similar: one discovery leading to the next. Of course, these two flowcharts are very different beasts. The QAnon one is an imaginary, retrospective description of supposedly-connected data, while mine is a prescriptive network of events I would design.

Except that’s not quite true. In reality, Perplex City players didn’t always solve our puzzles as quickly as we intended them to, or they became convinced their incorrect solution was correct, or embarrassingly, our puzzles were broken and had no solution at all. In those cases we had to rewrite the story on the fly.

When this happens in most media, you just hold up your hands and say you made a mistake. In video games, you can issue an online update and hope no-one’s the wiser. But in ARGs, a public correction would shatter the uniquely-prolonged collective suspension of disbelief in the story. This was thought to be so integral to the appeal of ARGs, it was termed TINAG, or “This is Not a Game.”

So when we messed up in Perplex City, we tried mightily to avoid editing websites, a sure sign this was, in fact, a game. Instead, we’d fix it by adding new storylines and writing through the problem (it helped to have a crack team of writers and designers, including Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Dan Hon, Jey Biddulph, Fi Silk, Eric Harshbarger, and many many others).

We had a saying when these diversions worked out especially well: “It’s like we did it on purpose.”

Every ARG designer can tell a similar war story. Here’s Josh Fialkov, writer for the Lonelygirl15 ARG/show:

“Our fans/viewers would build elaborate (and pretty neat) theories and stories around the stories we’d already put together and then we’d merge them into our narrative, which would then engage them more. The one I think about the most is we were shooting something on location and we’re run and gunning. We fucked up and our local set PA ended up in the background of a long selfie shot. We had no idea. It was 100% a screw up. The fans became convinced the character was in danger. And then later when that character revealed herself as part of the evil conspiracy — that footage was part of the audiences proof that she was working with the bad guys all along — “THATS why he was in the background!” They literally found a mistake – made it a story point. And used it as evidence of their own foresight into the ending — despite it being, again, us totally being exhausted and sloppy. And at the time hundreds of thousands of people were participating and contributing to a fictional universe and creating strands upon strands.”

Conspiracy theories and cults evince the same insouciance when confronted with inconsistencies or falsified predictions; they can always explain away errors with new stories and theories. What’s special about QAnon and ARGs is that these errors can be fixed almost instantly, before doubt or ridicule can set in. And what’s really special about QAnon is how it’s absorbed all other conspiracy theories to become a kind of ur-conspiracy theory such that seems pointless to call out inconsistencies. In any case, who would you even be calling out when so many QAnon theories come from followers rather than “Q”?

Yet the line between creator and player in ARGs has also long been blurry. That tip from “ClaviusBase” to AICN that catapulted The Beast to massive mainstream coverage? The designers more or less admitted it came from them. Indeed, there’s a grand tradition of ARG “puppetmasters” (an actual term used by devotees) sneaking out from “behind the curtain” (ditto) to create “sockpuppet accounts” in community forums to seed clues, provide solutions, and generally chivvy players along the paths they so carefully designed.

As an ARG designer, I used to take a hard line against this kind of cheating but in the years since, I’ve mellowed somewhat, mostly because it can make the game more fun, and ultimately, because everyone expects it these days. That’s not the case with QAnon.

Yes, anyone who uses 4chan and 8chan understands that anonymity is baked into the system such that posters frequently create entire threads where they argue against themselves in the guise of anonymous users who are impossible to distinguish or trace back to a single individual – but do the more casual QAnon followers know that?

Local Fame

A Beautiful Mind

Pop culture’s conspiracy theorist sits in a dark basement stringing together photos and newspaper clippings on their "crazy wall." On the few occasions this leads to useful results, it’s an unenviable pursuit. Anyone choosing such an existence tends to be shunned by society.

But this ignores one gaping fact: piecing together theories is really satisfying. Writing my walkthrough for The Beast was rewarding and meaningful, appreciated by an enthusiastic community in a way that my molecular biology essays most certainly were not. Online communities have long been dismissed as inferior in every way to “real” friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing, but not something that anyone should choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more potent and rewarding than a neighbourhood bake sale. This won’t be news to most of you, but I think it’s still news to decision-makers in traditional media and politics.

Good ARGs are deliberately designed with puzzles and challenges that require unusual talents—I designed one puzzle that required a good understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—with problems so large that they require crowdsourcing to solve, such that all players feel like welcome and valued contributors.

Needless to say, that feeling is missing from many people’s lives:

“ARGs are generally a showcase for special talent that often goes unrecognized elsewhere. I have met so many wildly talented people with weird knowledge through them.”

If you’re first to solve a puzzle or make a connection, you can attain local fame in ARG communities, as Dan Hon, COO at Mind Candy (makers of the Perplex City ARG), notes. The vast online communities for TV shows like Lost and Westworld, with their purposefully convoluted mystery box plots, also reward those who guess twists early, or produce helpful explainer videos. Yes, the reward is “just” internet points in the form of Reddit upvotes, but the feeling of being appreciated is very real. It’s no coincidence that Lost and Westworld both used ARGs to promote their shows.

Wherever you have depth in storytelling or content or mechanics, you’ll find the same kind of online communities. Games like Bloodborne, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Animal Crossing, Eve Online, and Elite Dangerous, they all share the same race for discovery. These discoveries eventually become processed into explainer videos and Reddit posts that are more accessible for wider audiences.

The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike Twitch). Michael Andersen, owner of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network news site, is a fan of this trend, but wonders about its downside—with reference to conspiracy theorists:

“[W]hen you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together. Living it, though? Sheer chaos. Wild conjectures and theories flying left and right, with circumstantial evidence and speculation ruling the day. Things exist in a fugue state of being simultaneously true-and-not-true, and it’s only the accumulation of evidence that resolves it. And acquiring a “knack” for sifting through theories to surface what’s believable is an extremely valuable skill—both for actively playing ARGs, and for life in general.And sometimes, I worry that when people consume these neatly packaged theories that show all the pieces coming together, they miss out on all those false starts and coincidences that help develop critical thinking skills. …because yes, conspiracy theories try and offer up those same neat packages that attempt to explain the seemingly unexplained. And it’s pretty damn important to learn how groups can be led astray in search of those neatly wrapped packages.”

“SPEC”

I’m a big fan of the SCP Foundation, a creative writing website set within a shared universe not unlike The X-Files. Its top-rated stories rank among the best science fiction and horror I’ve read. A few years ago, I wrote my own (very silly) story, SCP-3993, where New York’s ubiquitous LinkNYC internet kiosks are cover for a mysterious reality-altering invasion.

CITYBRIDGE/NYC

Like the rest of SCP, this was all in good fun, but I recently discovered LinkNYC is tangled up in QAnon conspiracy theories. To be fair, you can say the same thing about pretty much every modern technology, but it’s not surprising their monolith-like presence caught conspiracy theorists’ attention as it did mine.

It’s not unreasonable to be creeped out by LinkNYC. In 2016, the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote to the mayor about “the vast amount of private information retained by the LinkNYC system and the lack of robust language in the privacy policy protecting users against unwarranted government surveillance.” Two years later, kiosks along Third Avenue in Midtown mysteriously blasted out a slowed-down version of the Mister Softee theme song. So there’s at least some cause for speculation. The problem is when speculation hardens into reality.

Not long after the AICN post, The Beast’s players set up a Yahoo Group mailing list called Cloudmakers, named after a boat in the story. As the number of posts rose to dozens and then hundreds per day, it became obvious to list moderators (including me) that some form of organisation was in order. One rule we established was that posts should include a prefix in their subject so members could easily distinguish website updates from puzzle solutions.

My favourite prefix was “SPEC,” a catch-all for any kind of unfounded speculation, most of which was fun nonsense but some of which ended up being true. There were no limits on what or how much you could post, but you always had to use the prefix so people could ignore it. Other moderated communities have similar guidelines, with rationalists using their typically long-winded “epistemic status” metadata.

Absent this kind of moderation, speculation ends up overwhelming communities since it’s far easier and more fun to bullshit than do actual research. And if speculation is repeated enough times, if it’s finessed enough, it can harden into accepted fact, leading to devastating and even fatal consequences.

I’ve personally been the subject of this process thanks to my work in ARGs—not just once, but twice.

The first occasion was fairly innocent. One of our more famous Perplex City puzzles, Billion to One, was a photo of a man. That’s it. The challenge was to find him. Obviously, we were riffing on the whole “six degrees of separation” concept. Some thought it’d be easy, but I was less convinced. Sure enough, fourteen years on, the puzzle is still unsolved, but not for lack of trying. Every so often, the internet rediscovers the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I can tell whenever this happens because people start DMing me on Twitter and Instagram.

This literally came a few days ago

A clue in the puzzle is the man’s name, Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be same as the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. So of course people think Perplex City’s Satoshi created bitcoin. Not a lot of people, to be fair, but enough that I get DMs about it every week. But it’s all pretty innocent, like I said.

More concerning is my presumed connection to Cicada 3301, a mysterious group that recruited codebreakers through very difficult online puzzles. Back in 2011, my company developed a pseudo-ARG for the BBC Two factual series, The Code, all about mathematics. This involved planting clues into the show itself, along with online educational games and a treasure hunt.

To illustrate the concept of prime numbers, The Code explored the gestation period of cicadas. We had no hand in the writing of the show; we got the script and developed our ARG around it. But this was enough to create a brand new conspiracy theory, featuring yours truly:

My bit starts around 20 minutes in:

Interviewer: Why [did you make a puzzle about] cicadas?

Me: Cicadas are known for having a gestation period which is linked to prime numbers. Prime numbers are at the heart of nature and the heart of mathematics.

Interviewer: That puzzle comes out in June 2011.

Me: Yeah.

Interviewer: Six months later, Cicada 3301 makes its international debut.

Me: It's a big coincidence.

Interviewer: There are some people who have brought up the fact that whoever's behind Cicada 3301 would have to be a very accomplished game maker.

Me: Sure.

Interviewer: You would be a candidate to be that person.

Me: That's true, I mean, Cicada 3301 has a lot in common with the games we've made. I think that one big difference (chuckles) is that normally when we make alternate reality games, we do it for money. And it's not so clear to understand where the funding for Cicada 3301 is coming from.

Clearly this was all just in fun – I knew it and the interviewer knew it. That’s why I agreed to take part. But does everyone watching this understand that? There’s no “SPEC” tag on the video. At least a few commenters are taking it seriously:

I am the “ARG guy” in question

I’m not worried, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a touch concerned that Cicada 3301 now lies squarely in the QAnon vortex and in the “Q-web“:

Here’s a good interview with the creator of the “Q-web”

My defence that the cicada puzzle in The Code was “a big coincidence” (albeit delivered with an unfortunate shit-eating grin) didn’t hold water. In the conspiracy theorest mindset, no such thing exists:

“According to Michael Barkun, emeritus professor of political science at Syracuse University, three core principles characterize most conspiracy theories. Firstly, the belief that nothing happens by accident or coincidence. Secondly, that nothing is as it seems: The “appearance of innocence” is to be suspected. Finally, the belief that everything is connected through a hidden pattern.”

These are helpful beliefs when playing an ARG or watching a TV show designed with twists and turns. It’s fun to speculate and to join seemingly disparate ideas, especially when the creators encourage and reward this behaviour. It’s less helpful when conspiracy theorists “yes, and…” each other into shooting up a pizza parlour or burning down 5G cell towers.

Because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of “SPEC” tags. In their absence, YouTube has added annotated QAnon videos with links to its Wikipedia article, and Twitter has banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, among other actions. Supposedly, Facebook is planning to do the same.

These are useful steps but will not stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums. It’s not something we can reasonably hope for, and I don’t think there’s any technological solution (e.g. browser extensions) either. The only way to stop people from mistaking speculation from fact is for them to want to stop.

Cryptic

It’s always nice to have a few mysteries for players to speculate on in an ARG, if only because it helps them pass the time while the poor puppetmasters scramble to sate their insatiable demand for more website updates and puzzles. A good mystery can keep a community guessing for, as Lost did with its numbers or Game of Thrones with Jon Snow’s parentage. But these mysteries always have to be balanced against specifics, lest the whole story dissolve into a puddle of mush; for as much we derided Lost for the underwhelming conclusion to its mysteries, no-one would’ve watched in the first place if the episode-to-episode storytelling wasn’t so strong.

The downside of being too mysterious in Perplex City is that cryptic messages often led players on wild goose chases such that they completely ignored entire story arcs in favour of pursuing their own theories. This was bad for us because we had a pretty strict timetable that we needed our story to play out on, pinned against the release of our physical puzzle cards that funded the entire enterprise. If players took too long to find the $200,000 treasure at the conclusion of the story, we might run out of money.

QAnon can favour cryptic messages because, as far as I know, they don’t have a specific timeline or goal in mind, let alone a production budget or paid staff. Not only is there no harm in followers misinterpreting messages, but it’s a strength: followers can occupy themselves with their own spin-off theories far better than “Q” can. Dan Hon notes:

“For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game. This content generation/consumption/playing asymmetry is, I think, just a fact. But QAnon “solved” it by being able to co-opt all content that already exists and … encourages and allows you to create new content that counts and is fair play in-the-game.”

But even QAnon needs some specificity, hence their frequent references to actual people, places, events, and so on.

A brief aside on designing very hard puzzles

It was useful to be cryptic when I needed to control the speed at which players solved especially consequential puzzles, like the one revealing where our $200,000 treasure was buried. For story and marketing purposes, we wanted players to be able to find it as soon as they had access to all 256 puzzle cards, which we released in three waves. We also wanted players to feel like they were making progress before they had all the cards and we didn’t want them to find the location the minute they had the last card.

My answer was to represent the location as the solution to multiple cryptic puzzles. One puzzle referred to the Jurassic strata in the UK, which I split across the background of 14 cards. Another began with a microdot revealing which order to arrange triple letters I’d hidden on a bunch of cards. By performing mod arithmetic on the letter/number values, you would arrive at 1, 2, 3 or 4, corresponding to the four DNA nucleotides. If you understood the triplets as codons for amino acids, they became letters. These letters led you to the phrase “Duke of Burgundy”, the name of a butterfly whose location, when combined with the Jurassic strata, would help you narrow down the location of the treasure.

The nice thing about this convoluted sequence is that we could provide additional online clues to help the players community when they got stuck. The point being, you can’t make an easy puzzle harder, but you can make a hard puzzle easier.

Beyond ARGs

It can feel crass to compare ARGs to a conspiracy theory that’s caused so much harm. But this reveals the crucial difference between them: in QAnon, the stakes so high, any action is justified. If you truly believe an online store or a pizza parlour is engaging in child trafficking and the authorities are complicit, extreme behaviour is justified.

Gabriel Roth, editorial director for audio at Slate, extends this idea:

“What QAnon has that ARGs didn’t have is the claim of factual truth; in that sense it reminds me of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoir wave of the 90s and early 00s. If you have a story based on real life, but you want to make it more interesting, the correct thing to do is change the names of the people and make it as interesting as you like and call it fiction. The insight of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoirists (I’m thinking of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris) was that you could call it nonfiction and readers would like it much better because it would have the claim of actual factual truth, wowee!! And it worked! How much more engaging and addictive is an immersive, participatory ARG when it adds that unique frisson you can only get with the claim of factual truth? And bear in mind that ARG-scale stories aren’t about mere personal experiences—they operate on a world-historical scale.”

ARGs’ playfulness with the truth and their sometimes-imperceptible winking of This Is Not A Game (accusations Lonelygirl15 was a hoax) is only the most modern incarnation of epistolary storytelling. In that context, immersive and realistic stories have long elicited extreme reactions, like the panic incited by Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds (often exaggerated, to be fair).

We don’t have to wonder what happens when an ARG community meets a matter of life and death. Not long after The Beast concluded, the 9/11 attacks happened. A small number of posters in the Cloudmakers mailing list suggested the community use its skills to “solve” the question of who was behind the attack.

The brief but intense discussion that ensued has become a cautionary tale of ARG communities getting carried away and being unable to distinguish fiction from reality. In reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers subreddit. There’s a parallel between the essentially unmoderated, anonymous theorists of r/findbostonbombers and those in QAnon: neither feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes:

“There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on. The feeling that all information is available online, that reality and truth must be captured/in evidence somewhere”

There’s truth in that feeling. There is a vast amount of information online, and sometimes it is possible to solve “mysteries”, which makes it hard to criticise people for trying, especially when it comes to stopping perceived injustices. But it’s the sheer volume of information online that makes it so easy and so tempting and so fun to draw spurious connections.

That joy of solving and connecting and sharing and communication can do great things, and it can do awful things. As Josh Fialkov, writer for Lonelygirl15, says:

That brain power negatively focused on what [conspiracy theorists] perceive as life and death (but is actually crassly manipulated paranoia) scares the living shit out of me.

What ARGs Can Teach Us

Can we make “good ARGs”? Could ARGs inoculate people against conspiracy theories like QAnon?

The short answer is: No. When it comes to games that are educational and fun, you usually have to pick one, not both—and I say that as someone who thinks he’s done a decent job at making “serious games” over the years. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it’s really hard, and I doubt any such ARG would get played by the right audience anyway.

The long answer: I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification. Come back in a year or two.

For now, here’s a medium-sized answer. No ARG can heal the deep mistrust and fear and economic and spiritual malaise that underlies QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories, any more than a book or a movie can solve racism. There are hints at ARG-like things that could work, though—not in directly combatting QAnon’s appeal, but in channeling people’s energy and zeal of community-based problem-solving toward better causes.

Take The COVID Tracking Project, an attempt to compile the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the U.S. Every day, volunteers collect the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every state and territory. In the absence of reliable governmental figures, it’s become one of the best sources not just in the U.S., but in the world.

It’s also incredibly transparent. You can drill down into the raw data volunteers have collected on Google Sheets, view every line of code written on Github, and ask them questions on Slack. Errors and ambiguities in the data are quickly disclosed and explained rather than hidden or ignored. There’s something game-like in the daily quest to collect the best-quality data and to continually expand and improve the metrics being tracked. And like in the best ARGs, volunteers of all backgrounds and skills are welcomed. It’s one of the most impressive and well-organising reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale.

If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like Bellingcat, an an open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly-available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade in Kursk, Russia. The Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.

Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of trust. Today, people don’t trust authorities because authorities have repeatedly shown themselves to be unworthy of trust – misreporting or manipulating COVID-19 testing figures, delaying the publication of government investigations, burning records of past atrocities, and deploying unmarked federal forces. Perhaps authorities were just as untrustworthy twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, but today we rightly expect more.

Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, believes it’s that lack of trust that leads people to QAnon:

“Q’s [followers] … are starving for information. Their willingness to chase bread crumbs is a symptom of ignorance and powerlessness. There may be something to their belief that the machinery of the state is inaccessible to the people. It’s hard to blame them for resorting to fantasy and esotericism, after all, when accurate information about the government’s current activities is so easily concealed and so woefully incomplete.”

So the goal cannot be to simply restore trust in existing authorities. Rather, I think it’s to restore faith in truth and knowledge itself. The COVID Tracking Project and Bellingcat help reveal truth by crowdsourcing information. They show their work via hypertext and open data, creating a structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism can be built. And if they can’t find the truth, they’re willing to say so.

QAnon seems just as open. Everything is online. Every discussion, every idea, every theory is all joined together in a warped edifice where speculation becomes fact and fact leads to action. It’s thrilling to discover, and as you find new terms to Google and new threads to pull upon, you can feel just like a real researcher. And you can never get bored. There’s always new information to make sense of, always a new puzzle to solve, always a new enemy to take down.

QAnon fills the void of information that states have created—not with facts, but with fantasy. If we don’t want QAnon to fill that void, someone else has to. Government institutions can’t be relied upon to do this sustainably, given how underfunded and politicised they’ve become in recent years. Traditional journalism has also struggled against its own challenges of opacity and lack of resources. So maybe that someone is… us.

ARGs teach us that the search for knowledge and truth can be immensely rewarding, not in spite of their deliberately-fractured stories and near-impossible puzzles, but because of them. They teach us that communities can self-organise and self-moderate to take on immense challenges in a responsible way. And they teach us that people are ready and willing to volunteer to work if they’re welcomed, no matter their talent.

It’s hard to create these communities. They rely on software and tools that aren’t always free or easy to use. They need volunteers who have spare time to give and moderators who can be supported, financially and emotionally, through the struggles that always come. These communities already exist. They just need more help.

Despite the growing shadow of QAnon, I’m hopeful for the future. The beauty of ARGs and ARG-like communities isn’t their power to discover truth. It’s how they make the process of discovery so deeply rewarding.

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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mydigisalon · 4 years

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A Guide to Use Promotional SMS for Salon Owners

Are you planning an SMS marketing campaign? Do you find it difficult to create new templates? Do not fret, friends! We’ll help you master it and make your experience a success. My Digi Salon is the best app for salon owners to help build a loyal customer base with the help of SMS, social media, salon app and so much more. Our UI and UX experience is simple and our app is easy to set up and use.

Let’s dig into the intricacies of how things work for beauty salons while running an SMS campaign:

How SMS Marketing WorksKeywords

Keywords are the most important things when it comes to the content in SMS. You have a limited word count that you need to keep in mind while sending a text. Make sure you think carefully while selecting a unique keyword to represent your salon.

You can choose your salon name, service type and location etc. just keep in mind that it should be easy to remember so that users can relate it to your salon without too much thinking.

E.g. For a salon in Gurugram DLF Phase 3 called Femina, you can reserve the keyword “FEMINA”. It is unique and will work as an identifier for all intents and purposes. You can send Promotional SMS for salon to your targeted audience to join your marketing list by asking them to send FEMINA on XXXXX number. Rather easy, right?

The Auto-Reply

After the clients sign up or opt-in for the SMS campaign, they should get an automated response. This SMS auto-reply should include confirmation of subscription, offer details and approval statement. Taking the above example, your Promotional SMS for salon should look somewhat like “Thanks for opting in to receive SMS promotions from Femina! To get 10% off any service, show this text on your next salon visit. T&C.

The Offer

Getting people to opt-in is easier but retaining them is a whole different struggle. You need to encourage people to use and redeem promotions. The easiest way to do so is by offering them exactly what they want. Segregate your users in segments based on their demographic and psychographic properties and then text out hand-picked offers. E.g. discounts on your popular services like waxing, pedicure etc. for women and haircuts for men and women. You can even offer discounts on hair colors after one transaction or next appointment. Just make sure that you offer them something that they can not refuse. This will not only improve your ROI but also your brand image.

How Will SMS Grow Your Salon?

Why do you think salons work? During the COVID lockdown period, beauty salons and parlours were one of the most missed things. This is due to the below-mentioned facts

People of all age groups want to look their best at all times.

Clients expect to be rewarded for their loyal patronage.

SMS is the most read communication medium.

If you take all these points into consideration then you will get the opportunity to reward your loyal clientele, organise your appointments and schedule with the help of beauty salon text messages. The main benefits that you will get after following the text guidelines will be

Increased foot traffic in your salon

Better offer redemption by your potential and recurring clients

Strengthened brand awareness within your vicinity

Heightened client engagement at all times.

All these benefits have one thing in common, they help in increasing revenue. And that my friend is the most important factor when you start any business

Also Check: How to Enhance Re-Booking Services for Your Salon?

Why should you Choose salon text message marketing?

There must be a number of marketing techniques out there then why out of all other marketing solutions SMS are perfect for salons?

Everyone receives and reads texts: It is such a common mode of communication that everyone sends, receives and reads texts.

Fast response: Over 90% of all texts are read within the first five minutes of being delivered. Everyone has their phone in hand. You do not need a login password, net connection or recharge to receive a text. It’s just a simple, short and crisp message that you can read anytime.

Extremely cost-effective: while running any other campaign like email or social media you need creatives, ad copy, platform to run your ads and a lot more. However, when it comes to Promotional SMS for salon you just need a short message that you can send free of cost or at the price of less than 10paise per message.

My Digi salon offers unparalleled customer support, cost-effective and user friendly features, and tools that you can use to empower your brand image and increase your clientele.

How to Get Started with SMS salon promotions that work?1. Identify a Unique Keyword

Your SMS keyword will be your salon identity for clients, choose a unique keyword for your business. Do not opt for genetic keywords like HAIR or SALON. Try to incorporate your salon/ business name or exclusive services associated with your salon.

2. Make sure you have a capturing Auto Reply

After the sin up, users/ subscribers will get an auto-generated text. It will contain confirmation and offer. People love freebies and gratification. You’ll be able to retain more customers if you give a lucrative offer.

3. Advertise Your List on different platforms.

In order to maximize your list length, provide a valuable opt-in incentive. It should be lucrative and then you should promote it rigorously. Some ways to promote it are:

A Post on your social media business profiles.

Send out an email with instructions to join.

In-store flyers.

Try to add a sign-up form on your website or salon marketing app.

Try to talk to your customers face to face during/after their appointment. Ask them to sign up.

4. Text Out Valuable Promos

The salon industry is all about personal relationships. We generally have an idea about the type of thing our customers expect. All this knowledge is important and you should put it to good use. Try to deliver valuable promotions.

Because the salon and spa industry encourages personalized relationships, you probably have a good idea of what your clients want. By all means, use this knowledge to deliver valuable promotions. If you give bland and boring offers, people will unsubscribe. It will defeat the whole purpose. You need to use this campaign as a medium to grow upwards and ahead of your competitors.

Type of salon promotion messages you can send to the customers:

You can run small campaigns as well as decide user journeys when it comes to SMSs. The options are endless but you need to make sure that these SMSes are reliable, valuable and appropriate for the users. E.g. The moment a new user signs up you can start a user journey till he completes a successful transaction then you can shift to another segment and the user journey will change for him. For your recurring customers, you can automate the following Promotional SMS for salon:

Appointment Reminders

Keeping a track of scheduled appointments is easier with My Digi salon. You can send out text alerts to remind clients of their next appointment. It will decrease no shows and help streamline your schedule.

E.g. Hey Marie, You have an appointment tomorrow at 5 PM with Salim at Femina. See you then!

Anniversary/Birthday Rewards for your loyal customers

The best way to keep clients happy and make them come back for more is by going the extra mile. On special occasions like anniversaries and birthdays, send them a special treat.

E.g. Happy birthday Rohan! Here’s your free haircut. Use code: HBR on our salon scheduling app to claim it today

Contests and Makeovers

Running a contest that gives free makeovers is quite popular. You can either do it in festive seasons or when you feel you need that extra footfall in your salon.

E.g. Need a free New year’s makeover? Text NEW ME to xxxxx and enter for a chance to win. T&C.

Exclusive Coupons

Exclusive coupons are a great way to convert potential customers to recurring ones. When people feel the special treatment they avail services more readily.

E.g. Happy weekend! Exclusive 25% off on all haircare products. Don’t miss out! Just show this text. No code required!

Fill cancelled Appointments

Clients cancel appointments on some occasions, there’s nothing new. But you can make up for that empty slot.

E.g. Unexpected appointment slots open between 5 pm to 6 pm. Call now to book and get 15% off. Hurry!

Introductory Product or Service Alerts

You can send introductory offers to alert customers about new products or services you’re offering. This is a great way to kick start any service.

E.g. Fresh batch of matrix hair care products now available. Check out our salon marketing app to know more.

Conclusion:

No matter your business goals, a simple Promotional SMS for salon can help you move forward and reach the goal. We hope that after reading this you are ready to give text marketing a try.

Originally published here: https://www.mydigisalon.com/blog/guide-promotional-sms-salon-owners/

#salon booking software #salon scheduling software #salon app #salon software #book hair appointment online #book online hair salon #beauty salon marketing

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danyelle756games · 4 years

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What do i need to know to build a gaming pc

What Are The Most Common And Ifluential Gaming Blogs Of Uk?

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earlywrites · 7 years

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there’s no place like 127.0.0.1 commentary part II: ‘keeping up’

Welcome to part two of the commentary for my fic there's no place like 127.0.0.1! Let's dive right into Sunday morning. As before, here there be spoilers for the majority of Season 3.

“[...] And, for your information, the internet exists. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but you can find anything on there. Literally anything. Including a Keeping Up With The Kardashians fact-checker resource.”

Keeping up with the Kontinuity Errors is a blog, currently run on the Cut, that breaks down episodes of KUWTK scene by scene, using social media and paparazzi photos to determine when each scene was actually filmed versus the date/timeframe that is claimed on the show. Here is the post on the first episode Robot and Angela watched, wherein the Kardashian-West clan et al travel to Armenia and also may or may not be in Jerusalem at any given time. I didn’t choose particular episodes for rounds two and three, but I do have a fondness for the one where Kim loses her diamond earrings in the ocean, and Kourtney goes:

“How about, the loser gets to do the dishes from last night. And this morning.”

I actually wrote this section before 3x09 came out, so this ended up being a sad piece of foreshadowing.

“That’s the cholesterol,” she retorts, as she marks out new columns into her notebook. “Your diet is terrible.”

“No, Elliot’s diet is terrible,” he says, licking maple syrup off of his fingers and setting his score sheet up on his knee. It still gets a little sticky, but whatever. “I don’t get much choice in that matter. Occasionally, when I get the chance, I eat a vegetable.”

Literally how is Elliot a functioning human being. Robot brings this up in Part I, but that post was getting full, so I'm putting the discussion here, and, look. Everything about his lifestyle, his love for junk food and the fact that he probably gets 0 sleep now given Robot’s nocturnal cycle points to him being deeply, incredibly unhealthy. Having Robot making some effort to take care of their body, even as a semi-joke, is my way of somewhat justifying how Elliot is still alive, lol.

“[...] vaguely considers beating one out – because it’s been a while, and Tyrell’s snarl under the press of his hand at his throat is still tucked away in his spank bank, awaiting withdrawal [...]”

I feel like 3x09 proved unequivocally that Robot is absolutely into playing rough.

[source: @knownoshamc, x]

“[...] I bought a few titles that looked interesting. And a few things just to mess with him - did you know there’s a game where you can date pigeons? Like, actual birds. It’s apparently very popular.”

Yes, of course I’m referring to the masterpiece of visual media and storytelling that is Hatoful Boyfriend.

He stares at her, breathing heavily, and thinks about picking up his laptop and smashing it against the smooth surface of the coffee table, watching it splinter and crack, then taking her MacBook and sending it flying across the room, shattering the glass of a window, compromising the integrity of the perfect little box she’s living in, the one she’s caged him inside. He visualizes it, until he can feel the weight of the laptop in his hands, sees in the reflection of her eyes – big, blue, steady and unwavering – how the arc of destruction plays out, walls crumbling around them, fragments spinning out in slow motion, catching the light.

Elliot and Robot are highly creative, and are shown to manipulate the world around them to fit their perspective - in that vein, from Robot’s point of view, that scene would play out similarly to Cobb and Ariadne’s first dreamsharing experience in Inception.

Then he sits down next to her.

I separated this line from the preceding paragraph because this, for me, was the biggest character moment for Robot in the fic -- rather than doing what he wants, and releasing his rage, being his usual rash and destructive self, he chooses not to, and essentially releases his anger like air slowly leaving a balloon (minus the squeaking, lol). He tried to bait Angela, to get under her skin, after she made an astute judgement about him and exposed a major vulnerability of his, but she was unwavering, meeting him eye to eye. I think this point was when he gave into trusting her, knowing that she knows his weakness -- his deeply complicated, protective, antagonistic relationship with Elliot, the fact that he doesn’t want to face that he misses him -- and allowing her to keep that secret for him.

Completing Portal 2 in co-op mode ends up taking the rest of the afternoon, only pausing for snacks – and Angela takes his blithe comment on Elliot’s nutrition seriously, because of course she fucking does, and prepares shit like carrot sticks and celery with hummus which are both incredibly bland and deeply unsatisfying, so in retaliation he spends an inordinate amount of time dicking around with the portal mechanics so her character keeps falling to its untimely end. But he quickly gets bored of that, and of Angela making empty threats to beat him over the head with her MacBook (yeah, like her noodle arms could ever manage it), and does end up working with her to beat the game. The entire concept is problem-solving and teamwork, which is genuinely engaging, even though it’s obvious Angela picked this as some kind of teambuilding exercise for the two of them — which, on paper, is annoying as hell, he’s not some fucking suit in an intern program. Still, she’s not a bad partner – they bounce off each other well, sometimes literally, and she’s the one to actually figure out the shoot-while-jumping sequence needed to get through the penultimate level. For some reason, though, her favorite characters, if you can even count them as characters, are the cubes. The cubes. She fucking loves those dumb, inanimate objects. GLaDOS would definitely take her ass in to test for whatever malfunctioning part of her cortex causes her to express affection for a cube.

Hey, look, it's a game where two characters work together to aid the agenda of an evil megalomanic who's actually manipulating them and ultimately wants them to die to serve her true purpose, while ignoring warning signs saying not to trust her. Sound familiar? ;) But yes, for those unfamiliar with the Portal series, here's a little article about the essence of the co-op game; the purpose was to directly parallel it with Robot and Angela's doomed plan under Whiterose's thumb. Totally check out the games, if you haven't already! The co-op is a lot of fun, and the penultimate level took my friend and I like an hour to figure out how to complete (whereas the last level? Total cakewalk, even if The Cake Is A Lie :P)

“And we will have to manage Darlene,” she continues, bringing several onions on a chopping board over to him. “I don’t know what her motives are in coming here to look for Elliot, but either way, we have to play it safe. I’m going to give you your phone back tomorrow and if she calls, you can answer it, but… tell her you wanted to go off the grid this weekend, or something, clear your head. You can use the fact that you’ll be at work to keep it short, just enough to keep her from looking in any further.” “That excuse won’t stretch too far – isn’t Elliot getting fired tomorrow?” he asks, peeling the skin off the first onion and starting to slice it up.

“Yes,” Angela says. “Mid-morning at the latest, but she wouldn’t know about that, so even if she wants to meet she’ll have to wait until the end of the day – if she presses for the lunch break, you can say you’ve made prior plans with me. [...] Okay, so, you’re just going to sit tight until security escorts you out, as we discussed, and don’t make a scene [...] Once you’re out, keep your distance from the data recovery center but stay in the area in case Irving and Tyrell need assistance with the execution, in which case I will contact you directly and escort you through any E-Corp facilities, since your card access will be revoked. Otherwise, go somewhere public, so that you have an alibi that can be corroborated by at least several witnesses concerning your whereabouts at the time the building comes down – but keep a low profile, get a Starbucks, or something. Make sure not to take your laptop out of your bag unless there’s an emergency, you don’t want anyone making assumptions about what you were doing during Stage Two once the dust clears and the feds look for someone to pin it on. And, if you need to call me, ring and let it dial once, hang up, and then immediately ring again. That way I’ll know it’s you calling, and not Elliot.”

We never got to really find out what Robot & Angela’s original plan was for that day, if Elliot hadn’t taken over for the events of 3x05-06. I assumed that, after Tyrell and Robot’s altercation in 3x04, the reins had been handed over to Tyrell and the Dark Army to execute, and Robot’s job was essentially support-if-needed, Angela still acting as his handler and liaising with Irving. This is my interpretation of what the OG plan might have been like -- at the beginning of 3x05, Angela encourages Elliot to pick up his phone as it rings, and then seemingly clicks that it’s no longer Robot, but still calls out to Elliot to grab lunch later. Later, she didn’t pick up her phone when Elliot called her, which I wondered about at the time since we weren’t given an indication as to whether she knew who was actually calling, and so this is my justification for that too.

“We’ll toss those in olive oil with the carrots and set them to roast in the oven for about twenty, and in a couple of minutes I’ll get started on the steaks [...]”

I made a few fun Matrix shoutouts in this fic, and this is another one -- Cypher eats a virtual steak dinner as he trades the crew on his ship to the Agents in exchange for insertion back into the matrix, rejecting his harsh reality for the comfort of an artificial world. The recipe I had in mind is something along the lines of this one.

His memories are a muddled patchwork, haphazard at best – the clearest ones he has are also the darkest, ones Elliot didn’t want to deal with, shoved into a box and couriered to his doorstep with DO NOT RETURN TO SENDER in big red lettering, his burden now to bear. It’s no sweat, he’s stronger than Elliot, anyhow, which is probably is the point – the nightmares of yesteryear don’t faze him much, especially now their bitch of a mother is slowly rotting away upstate.

3x07 heavily implied Robot had already emerged before Edward Alderson died, and was the alter in control when Edward collapsed at the cinema -- but, in Season One, Robot begged Elliot not to let people ‘try to get rid of [him]’ again, implying there were stretches of time in Elliot’s life when he wasn’t present. Mr. Robot’s timeline is muddled to hell thanks to Elliot’s unreliable narration anyway, but I figured that Robot’s memories would be somewhat similar to Elliot’s with more gaps in them, and more strongly feature the abuse exacted by their mother, per Robot’s role as a (deeply flawed) ‘protector’ to Elliot. Also, I’m not sure whether Magda Alderson is actually alive or dead, but ‘slowly rotting away’ can mean both physically rotting in a grave and just generally living a stagnant existence (in a nursing home, presumably), so that’s up to interpretation!

He’s not much one for wine, but this one’s pretty good – it’s apparently a 2008 Penfolds Grange, whatever the fuck that means, and they’ve made quick work of it as the evening has wound down.

The Penfolds Grange vintage 2008 Shiraz (South Australia) scored a rare 100 points in both The Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator, two of the world’s most influential wine journals, when it was released in 2013, and I believe was initially priced at around $600-700. Price probably gave her this bottle, so it’s a good one to crack open when intending to destroy his company.

“I guess… I’m nervous, about seeing her again,” she murmurs. “It’s been so long, and so much has changed… it’s weird, because all I’ve felt up until this point is excitement, like, this is the whole reason I’m going through with all of this, to finally destroy E-Corp and create our new world, to share it with her – and yet, now we’re here, I’m not sure if I’m ready.”

Her whole deal with Whiterose is bordering on obsession, at this point. It’s somewhat disconcerting, but then again, he supposes that’s Angela – she’s just intense like that. “Look, Angela, don’t set your expectations too high on that one,” he cautions. “I don’t think either of us are going to see Whiterose again, at least, not in the immediate future. She’s not the type to just swing by to pop off some champagne for a job well done.”

Angela looks at him, frowning slightly, and then her expression clears. “Of course,” she says, finishing up her glass. “You’re right, Whiterose has more important things to do. Maybe we’ll just have to have our own celebration.”

“Maybe,” he replies, looking at her narrowly. He has an odd feeling that she wasn’t talking about Whiterose. But then, who else would it be? Darlene? No, that doesn’t quite add up.

I mean, look, at this point, it’s very obvious to we the audience that Angela is talking about seeing her mother again, and she then makes reference to Elliot believing in the #cause once he gets to see his father just before the brownout comes in. These scenes always made me feel sad to write.

The inset on the face says 29, and the hands glint at a little after six. Early, but not quite early enough to justify a little more shuteye.

In 3x05, Elliot says the Dark Army tried to execute Stage Two at 6am. Robot waking up with a start around the time the Dark Army try to attack but being completely unaware of it happening is the beginning of the end for his usurped revolution.

So that's it, for now. If you’re still here -- thanks for reading, friend! Hope you enjoyed this self indulgent spiel -- catch you on the flipside :P

#earlyfic #dvdcommentary #TNPLH #mr robot fic

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sigge88posts · 5 years

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What is Affiliate Marketing in 2019: A Beginner's Guide

To affiliate something is to officially attach or connect it to an organization. An affiliate is a person or organization officially linked to a larger entity. When I hear the word “affiliation,” my mind instantly thinks of all the different announcements I’ve seen brands send out when they choose to either partner with or discontinue a partnership with a certain individual or organization.

We’re known by the company we keep, and this is true for brands as well. More and more, brands want ambassadors with good characters whose values align with their overall message. Brands are paying attention to their ambassadors’ public perceptions and reputations.

What is affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing is, in some way, a strategy that helps reduce a brand’s pressure to find the perfect spokesperson. It also increases the likelihood of success, as affiliates are often vetted by networks or agencies.

Unlike celebrity endorsements or influencer marketing — strategies that typically have a few people or one person acting as the face of a brand — affiliate marketing is a strategy without limits. A brand can have its product affiliated with one major website, or be running a plethora of strategies at the same time. Affiliate marketing allows its marketers, or “affiliates,” to take their income into their own hands. This strategy is, in some instances, referred to as a form of “passive income” for those who endorse products. By this, we mean affiliates aren’t always actively selling to make money. They put their strategies in motion and any sales that come through their site drive income.

I know what you’re thinking: “Well, of course sales drive income. How is this different from any other retail exchange?” The answer is easy. Affiliates aren’t selling their own products. They’re selling products for a merchant and get to keep a percentage of the profits. Whether you’re a merchant looking to form an affiliate marketing strategy or you're an affiliate hoping to generate some of this passive income, look no further.

Affiliate marketing definition Affiliate marketing is a strategy consisting of three-to-four components, depending on who you ask. Most sources agree that the popular grouping of components consists of a merchant, customer, and affiliate marketer. Others argue that a network should also be included in this make-up. There is no right or wrong answer here, just a difference in opinion. Let’s talk about the role each component plays. The affiliate is the marketer, representative, publisher, etc. It can be one person or an entire organization. Affiliates don’t always have to sell a tangible product, either. Some affiliates are selling software or trying to encourage sign-ups to an e-course.

Compare affiliate marketing to something like the Mary Kay Cosmetics company. Mary Kay is a makeup brand that has helped serve as surplus income to families for years. Individuals choose to sell the makeup produced by this company, and they profiting in accordance with their sales. This is a form of network marketing. Affiliate marketers also take a product or service, put it on their website (or other page), and profit through any direct purchases. The only difference is Mary Kay consultants have to do a lot of leg-work, whereas affiliates can profit passively. A merchant is whoever is making the product or service. It is the retailer, or the brand name, for which the affiliate sells. Again, the merchant can be an enterprise size company or a single person. The merchant pays the affiliate to be a vessel in which its product or service is sold.

The customer is whoever is buying the product. Customers and consumers are not limited to one particular channel through affiliate marketing. Customers can be found on social media profiles, blogs, forums, or product websites. In affiliate marketing, the affiliate has an obligation to know how to attract the consumer. Affiliates are somewhat in control of their income, and, as such, should have a passion for market research and knowing how to engage the merchant’s target consumer. The network is, again, contested by some as to whether it’s truly a part of the affiliate marketing conglomerate. But for good measure, we’ll discuss it. The network is essentially the middle man used to manage this exchange. The network helps accomplish such tasks as payment processing, tracking technology, reporting solutions, and can serve as a repository of available affiliates.

Benefits of affiliate marketing As you can see from the many moving parts labeled above, affiliate marketing has a multitude of sides. In this section, we’ll discuss the benefits of affiliate marketing for every different angle. Benefits for the affiliate The biggest benefit of affiliate marketing for the affiliate is that they’re getting paid. While the specific percentages vary, affiliate marketers profit a certain portion of every sale that goes through their channel or website. As an affiliate, you work out with the merchant exactly how you will determine profits. Whether you’re paid per sale, per click, per lead, or per call, you profit as the merchant does. For the affiliate, this strategy is all profit with virtually no money down. You aren’t investing in the success of the product, nor are you paying for the upkeep or production of goods. There’s no storefront necessary, which means there’s no rent to pay or light bulbs to replace.

Affiliates are responsible for the maintenance of their platforms, be that a website or social media pages. They have to pay for web hosting and a domain name, which can be procured for free or relatively low monthly fees. Additionally, being an affiliate marketer helps build a brand. Consider it like networking with vendors. The more efficiently you’re able to sell a brand’s product, the more likely it will keep you on or other brands will reach out to you for sales. To individuals who are oblivious to affiliate marketing, it also looks reputable that big name brands are having you sell their products. While you’re aware that it’s as easy as signing up, to others you look like a big-name influencer!

Another benefit to being an affiliate is the relative autonomy in what you’re selling. You get to choose which brands you work with and what products you push. You can sell products you’ve used, products you believe in, or products that simply seem interesting to you! Benefits for the merchant One of the main benefits for the merchant is having someone else do the grunt work on selling its product. Although affiliate marketing is not as taxing as, say, door-to-door sales, it’s still a form of labor the merchant does not have to perform. In addition to sales, affiliate marketing is, well, marketing. Merchants are not limited to one affiliate. Say a larger company has 100 affiliates selling its lamps. This means 100 people, in 100 different locations across the world, are pushing this one merchant’s product and name. While the bottom line is imperative, affiliate marketing should also be considered for its ability to create impressions. It gets your name out there at a larger scale than you can do alone.

Plus, consumers are more likely to rely on a trusted source for brand information than they are an advertisement. In the current state of influencers and rampant review sites, we’re looking to real people’s opinions more than we are static advertisements or TV commercials. With your affiliates comes the trust of networks they’ve previously established. Another benefit for the merchant is the opportunity to join affiliate networks, which, again, do much of the grunt work for you. From finding affiliates, to tracking pay, to reporting on key metrics, these affiliate networks have a number of business-boosting features.

Affiliate networks, among other things, can even post advertisements for you that help locate affiliates who would make effective and professional brand ambassadors. So, not only are your products being advertised, but they’re being advertised by someone you can trust. Benefits for the consumer If we’re being honest, it’s possible that, oftentimes, consumers don’t even know they’re partaking in an affiliate marketing strategy. Even if the webpage is labeled as such, consumers can easily miss that kind of information.

What customers do know is they are purchasing a product potentially through the website of someone they trust. After that, the particular dispersal of funds is unknown to the consumer. Not all affiliates are influencers. However, as professionals whose incomes are self-driven, all affiliates would do well to build trusting relationships with their readers and consumers. In this way, consumers benefit from affiliates because they are passionately working for their income. This leads affiliates to be choosy about the products for which they advocate. Customer satisfaction will lead to increased loyalty, as well as increased sales. Whether the customers can tell or not, the buyer experience is different with affiliate marketing. There’s a middle-man between them and the brand or vendor that is sticking its neck out for this product, so to speak.

Benefits for the network The affiliate marketing network is sort of like LinkedIn for affiliate marketers and brands. These networks help both sides of the equation — those hunting for money-making opportunities and those hunting for quality candidates — find each other. The benefit of affiliate marketing for affiliate marketing networks is that this strategy keeps the networks alive. Without brands trusting that this type of marketing works, there is no reason to pay for network services. Subsidiary advertising programs Partner projects are an expansion of the subsidiary promoting system in general, with a couple of key contrasts.

As per HowStuffWorks, "Member programs, additionally called partner programs, are game plans in which an online shipper site pays subsidiary sites a commission to send it traffic. These member sites post connects to the shipper site and are paid by a specific understanding. This understanding is typically founded on the quantity of individuals the member sends to the shipper's site or the quantity of individuals they send who purchase something or play out some other activity. A few courses of action pay as indicated by the number of individuals who visit the page containing their shipper site's standard ad. Essentially, if a connection on a member site brings the trader site traffic or cash, the vendor site pays the partner site as indicated by their understanding." Once more, the points of interest of these organizations are resolved by the individual organizations. In any case, one thing is the equivalent all through: the commonly gainful relationship of shipper and member that carries positive outcomes to the two gatherings.

Like offshoot promoting, member programs likewise advantage from utilizing an associate system, now and then alluded to as a partner program arrange. These systems are helpful in following snaps, changes, deals, and pennant commitment on offshoot destinations. In promoting, each impression or commitment tallies. It's significant for associations to comprehend which of their endeavors are seeing noteworthy quantifiable profits. Monitoring these through a system or other kind of revealing instrument enables the two gatherings to decide the result of this association. Tips for offshoot showcasing learners I know you're not a sham. You know you're not a sham. Be that as it may, in case you're a few seconds ago getting some answers concerning partner advertising and the advantages it procures, it's conceivable you feel somewhat innocent or marvel how on the planet you passed up the promotion of this system. In case you're simply getting into member advertising and the majority of its brilliance, investigate these early on tips:

Discover your associates and member programs in quite a few spots - As people, a large number of us want to characteristically confide in each other. We'd like to accept that somebody's pledge is great. That a check will money. That we'll again observe the man who said he'd pay us tomorrow. On the off chance that you've invested even a smidgeon of energy filling in as a consultant, you realize this isn't generally the situation. Individuals pay late, if by any stretch of the imagination. You turn in work, and the source challenges it. So as to evade disillusionment and extortion, ensure you are utilizing a real system to discover the two dealers and associates.

One tremendous warning is any organization that guarantees you a "make easy money" advertising system. In spite of the fact that offshoot advertising can be great cash, it's in no way, shape or form momentary. Avoid whatever sounds unrealistic. Additionally, avoid any trader that needs to charge you startup costs. Also, utilize set up associate projects to discover your vendors. Understand surveys and make a few inquiries. You're not by any means the only individual attempting to enhance salary with this advertising technique, so there are a lot of different experts with whom to publicly support.

Try not to go excessively wide — Earlier, we referenced that an advantage of offshoot advertising is that associates get the chance to pick the items they sell. Since subsidiaries are working out their brands, they shouldn't cast their nets excessively wide. There are offshoot open doors for all that you can consider: innovation, style, wellbeing, wellness, and even canine preparing. In case you're attempting to get into member promoting, attempt and stay generally inside a specific specialty. This doesn't mean you just sell one item. This implies you work out a brand by selling changing yet adjoining items. After some time, your buyer system should think about you a go-to for which kind of vacuum they should purchase. Moreover, a few ventures pay more than others. Particularly if the item is a harder sell, members may get a higher cut than they would for an item more popular.

Have an arrangement — As an offshoot, you aren't altogether liable for the offers of this organization, yet you are answerable for the achievement of your association with that organization. On the off chance that you need to progress nicely, get ready. Have an expert evaluation site. One shoppers trust with their contact data. Have a methodology for the substance you produce and how you advance posts or items. Consider an internet based life advertising system related to your site. On the off chance that you have the assets, use a site design improvement apparatus to enable your site to come up in web search tools when clients are looking for that specific item.

You don't really need to have a whole substance advertising plan, however you additionally shouldn't "wing" your way through a member showcasing procedure. Like we stated, fruitful associates keep on banding together with organizations, and proceeded with associations mean an unfaltering pay! The most effective method to begin offshoot showcasing As we've referenced, member promoting has numerous sides, each similarly as significant as the other. In case you're hoping to start an associate promoting procedure, look no further. Here, we'll talk about fledgling strategies for both the associate and dealer that will ideally bring about durable, commonly helpful business connections. Member promoting for novices For the dealer — If you're a vendor and you're hoping to get associated with some quality member advertisers, the most prominent and, seemingly, best strategy is join an offshoot system or program. (Later on, we will talk about explicit instances of systems you could pursue in your pursuit.) Subsidiary projects and systems take a ton of the weight off the seller's back. It's basically a one-stop look for everything member showcasing related. On the off chance that you need to engage in this technique, however don't have the opportunity or information to do it without anyone's help, think about going along with one of these networks.

Associate systems have a ton to offer vendors. Take, for instance, the idea of an arrangement commercial center. This is a kind of stage that exists for the two traders and offshoots, helping them locate one another. A subsidiary program can robotize procedures, for example, posting openings, discovering offshoots, following their deals, and paying for snaps and leads. This guarantees occupied traders and merchants don't solid associates or commit errors on their checks.

These arrangements can likewise deal with the announcing part of associate showcasing. In case you're a seller or, odds are you have huge amounts of records going immediately. It's an enormous time-suck to filter through and deal with these once a day. With a member system or program, the hard stuff is dealt with. On the off chance that you need your image depicted in a specific light, you can transfer inventive security for partners to use inside their very own foundation. This guarantees brand consistency and disentangles correspondence between the subsidiary and vendor. In the event that you would prefer not to join a member arrange, you'll need to do a great deal of this all alone. That implies scanning for offshoots, following their deals and pay, giving an account of month to month income, and the sky is the limit from there. While this may make you feel progressively free, you wind up investing a great deal of energy in manual assignments that the systems basically deal with. In spite of the fact that I've never had individual experience being a brand hoping to get into partner showcasing, the system course still appears the best approach, as I would see it. It's dependable, mechanizes a great deal of the generally manual and tedious procedures, and accompanies the information, for sure.

For the offshoot -There is a great deal to be picked up from turning into a subsidiary advertiser. From additional pay, to mark mindfulness, to a system of similarly invested customers and experts, the advantages demonstrate it to be more than an easy money scam. To turn into a member advertiser, you should place in what you would like to receive in return. On the off chance that you are a self-starter who doesn't stop for a second to do your own examination, accomplishment in member promoting should work out easily for you.

Specialty — Unless you're Amazon, individuals don't go to your site hoping to purchase both weed-wackers and saturating cream. Most sites have their items limited to a particular kind, for example, style, wellbeing, petcare, and so forth. In case you're needing to go into member promoting, your first game plan is to figure out what you're selling. This progression starts things out on the grounds that such huge numbers of resulting choices rely upon this answer. The sort of site you make, the kind of group of spectators with which you connect with, these are vigorously affected by your specialty. In case you're experiencing difficulty choosing where to center, do some thoughtful speculation to figure out what you're energetic about.

What do you figure you could sincerely sell clients in the expectations that it would improve their everyday? For instance, perhaps you revamp homes and are continually searching for the best paints or most eco-accommodating cleaning answers for washrooms and kitchens. In case you're as of now educated about a market and have enthusiasm for it, that is an incredible spot to begin. I place accentuation on the "intrigued" viewpoint, as you may wind up staying with this subject for an all-inclusive timeframe. As we've said already, effective member advertisers are bound to get chances to sell different items later on. Similarly you would prefer not to develop a resume brimming with employments you loathe, don't sell items for an industry that makes no difference to you.

Likewise, do some examination on the open doors in this market. What is the current scene? Who is the challenge? What information is accessible to disclose to you how rewarding this market is? The simplicity of selling will change from market to advertise, Some companies may offer you a higher cut of the profit because their products are more difficult to sell. Determine what kind of selling experience you’d like to have, as well as the type of profits you’d like to see. Use those factors to inspire niche.

Find a program — As we discussed earlier, many affiliate marketers find their merchants, vendors, or brands through affiliate programs. It’s important you determine your niche prior to finding a program, as some programs are geared toward certain types of products. If you’re interested in a particular affiliate program, look into what kinds of products it offers and whether it has any data on the success of its affiliates. Finding an affiliate program does not have to be as difficult as it sounds. In just a little bit, we’re going to discuss a few of the best affiliate marketing programs as deemed by popular use. A few general ideas to remember, however, are to look at a multitude of options and read testimonials on other individuals’ experiences.

Thirsty Affiliates wants to help you discover both your program and your niche in their article Find Affiliate Programs For Your Niche, wherein the above image was originally published. As affiliate marketers, you’re all similarly motivated, and listening to what other affiliates have to say about a program or network can help deter you from an unsuccessful or even fraudulent situation. Because you’re doing this to get paid (very few people create a cleaning solutions blog for the passion in it), you’ll also want to know what commissions the programs or networks offer their affiliates. Some programs and products do pay better than others, and that is something to take into consideration.

Before choosing an affiliate program, see if there is a clear breakdown of how money is dispersed after a sale. Because the network tracks and pays affiliates, you want to ensure it has good rates and pays affiliates fairly. Earlier, we talked about liking and/or being interested in the subject of your marketing. Equally as important is trusting the integrity of your products. It’s fair that not every tool you sell will be something you know forward and backward. However, you should be familiar enough with the solution that you know what you’re selling, can answer questions about it, and can defend its integrity if it comes into question.

If you’re not an actual user of the products on your site, you can familiarize yourself with products by reading reviews or blogs about them. This keeps you from being ignorant to questions regarding the product and helps ensure you don’t support any item with major defects or malfunctions. Online presence — A major step in becoming an affiliate marketer is having your online presence up and running.This includes learning how to start a blog and any social media profiles you deem necessary to the promotion of these products.

If you’re unsure or need direction on how to build a professional website, check out our pillar page on how to make a website from scratch. You can create a website through a website builder, which will host your site and allow you to purchase a unique domain name. With website builders, you get what you pay for. While they have plenty of free templates, more professional-looking websites will always cost more money. However, this investment could be worth it, especially as a website is one of the few startup costs for affiliate marketers. The social media profiles you develop are dependent on your niche and target market.

However, social media profiles are free to create, so it couldn’t hurt your marketing efforts to integrate these strategies. Consider making a Facebook busines page, or utilizing some Twitter marketing techniques to grow your networks. In addition to a website, you’ll also need to create content. Content such as blogs, forums, FAQs, videos, and images all help your website rank better on the internet. For example, say you’re selling reusable water bottles. No one is going to go to Google and search, “reusable water bottle blog.” Rather, they’re going to search terms such as, “best reusable water bottle,” or “reusable water bottle for best price.”

Creating content that utilizes these phrases in the titles or bodies of blogs will help your website appear more often in searches. This means an increase in traffic, which is especially helpful if you’re a pay-per-click kind of affiliate. Market research/networking — When you become an affiliate marketer, you are hoping to establish yourself as a voice of authority in that specific industry or niche. In order to do so, you need to have a good grasp on who you’re talking to. Who are you trying to sell these products to? What kinds of copy or advertisements do they respond to? Do they prefer email marketing over social media marketing, or vice versa? Market research is a part of any advertising strategy. Sure, you’re not the brand itself, but you are employed by various brands, and I’m sure you want to see success in this industry. For that reason, it’s important you take control and learn about your audience while trying to form connections. Take cues from your competitors or other affiliates. What kind of advertisements are they utilizing, and do they seem to be working?

Additionally, feel free to seek out conversations with both consumers and other professionals. Send out LinkedIn invitations to those you think might be a good professional contact. Join Twitter conversations that are relevant to your industry or product. Physically attend networking events or conferences you think could result in a stronger network or more informed strategy. You’re a part of a community now, but other people don’t know that unless you show up. Push your own content — As an affiliate marketer, you have already proven yourself as a self-starter. You don’t necessarily need the guidance of a micromanager breathing down your neck to ensure you’re doing things correctly. You probably enjoy working alone and proving to others that you can figure out new tasks. That’s great, because you’re going to need this type of attitude to promote your own content.

We spoke a little earlier about writing for your website to improve search engine optimization and SERP, or your ranking on search engine results pages. After you’ve created and published this content, it’s time to promote it! Promoting content can look a number of ways. It can mean sharing it on your social media profiles. It can mean including a few articles or video in your weekly newsletter that relate to your products. It can mean going on internet forums and replying to individuals whose questions you know how to answer. It can mean writing a guest post that gets your name and website name onto another person’s site, expanding your reach to their network as well. If you’re super serious, you could even pay for promoted tweets or Instagram posts that increase the visibility of your posts. Any number of these strategies is good for content promotion. Again, it all depends on what works best for you depending on the research you’ve conducted.

Product promotion — Lastly, we come to what you’re really here for: the opportunity to partner with organizations in selling their products for a portion of the profits. A lot of what we’ve mentioned previously will come into play when deciding exactly how to promote products. You should continue to consider your niche, audience, and goals when choosing how to promote products. You could take the route of being a real product user who reviews items on your site. People tend to trust individuals more than they do brands, and using your site as a sort of product review resource could appeal to the masses. We’ve talked about building up your network and developing an email list. Another way to promote products is by contacting that email list directly with the products you’re selling. Perhaps that email contains a code that results in a discount or maybe it’s just a link to your latest product review. Either way, it lands your website and product straight into consumer inboxes. You could consider writing a how-to article that gives users an idea of how they can make use of your product. If you sell to more than one target market, consider finding a solution that helps you target ads based on factors such as where the consumer lives. This way, the ads on your site always have their best chance at finding an interested consumer.

Report and try again — One important aspect of being an affiliate marketer is looking back at your successes and failures to determine where to go in the future. If a certain product didn’t do as well as you’d expected, make note on that so you can properly analyze what went wrong. Was it the way you advertised? The product itself? The times you posted? Current events, such as the recall of a similar product? Any number of these could play a role in the success of your sales, but you won’t know which unless you analyze the data you’ve collected over time. Keeping tabs on what worked and what didn’t will help you decide not only how to strategize in the future, but which brands or vendors to continue doing business with. In the same way freelancers keep books and records of which publishers or editors they enjoyed working with, affiliates have the independence to reroute later on if they don’t end up enjoying certain brands or products. Best affiliate marketing programs Which affiliate marketing program or network you sign up for, whether as a merchant or an affiliate, will have a huge impact on the success of your sales. Some programs are niche and cater largely to a certain industry, such as technology/software or retail sales. A ton goes into picking a subsidiary advertising program, and the choice ought not be messed with. In this segment, we'll examine probably the most conspicuous subsidiary advertising systems with expectations of furnishing you with a good beginning stage for your very own endeavors. This rundown is by no mean comprehensive. Particularly in case you're hoping to get into a more specialty advertise, you ought to extend your pursuit past this article. These are only a couple of instances of associate systems to help acquaint you with the market.

ShareASale — ShareASale has various trader sorts accessible. Regardless of whether you're searching for home and nursery, design, green, business, workmanship and music, family and children, instruction, or wellbeing, these specialties are accessible to you. This system offers in excess of 3,900 member projects spreading over 40 different classes. ShareASale offers constant following that advises vendors when an activity, for example, a tick or buy, has occurred. It enables vendors to fragment and gathering subsidiaries. It likewise has detailing highlights that keep dealers refreshed on progress and issue zones.

CJ Affiliate — CJ Affiliate is another catchall partner program. Its rundown of promoter verticals goes on, yet a couple of models include: carrier, books/media, network, work, non-benefit, endowments and blooms, online administrations, and transportation. CJ Affiliate offers various distributer orders too, which are distributers' or members' essential limited time strategies. "Think about this as the manner in which you advance sponsors on your site, or your general plan of action. Sponsors may view, sort, and download distributers by their arrangement," peruses its site. "In the realm of member showcasing, a sponsor can be an organization selling an item like hardware, aircraft tickets, attire or vehicle parts, or a publicist could likewise be an insurance agency selling arrangements. The most significant thing to recollect is that you are a publicist in the event that you are prepared to pay other individuals to assist you with selling and advance your business." Different highlights for the ... incorporate value correlation, social shopping, email advertising programming/innovation, content/specialty, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Highlights for the sponsor incorporate compensation per call, promoter tool kit, pay for execution, lead age, and the sky is the limit from there. It has a substance arrangement that steers publicists who worth extraordinary substance to advertisers who can make it. For the distributer, there is a distributer tool kit, a profound connection generator, constant exchange checking, and then some.

— FlexOffers is another member showcasing program that offers various potential classes, instead of taking into account one specialty. Models are home and nursery, way of life and entertainment, travel, regular advancements, sports and wellness, media communications, garments and adornments, vitality, and then some. For the distributer, FlexOffers gives advantages, for example, a point by point dashboard that imagines the achievement of different crusades. The stage produces reports that update inside the hour and offers news reports on what's going on in the stage. It professes to include almost 50 new publicist programs for each day, which means partners are failing to run stale on alternatives to create salary. For the promoters, there is a generally low system charge, just as no base agreement prerequisite. Clients pay for execution just, which means they don't pay except if battles start profiting. Promoters can grow their subsidiary conveyance inside the stage and approach propelled publicizing arrangements. FlexOffers has a substance the executives include that solitary needs a site preceding execution. Promoters are additionally given reports produced by the stage, to decide their crusade's adequacy.

Rakuten — Rakuten LinkShare associate accomplice system has been around for a long time. It has been casted a ballot the no. 1 partner promoting system for as long as seven years, and, only two years prior, it had a record 100 million requests around the world. "Through our worldwide member arrange, we enable advertisers to connect with customers over the whole purchaser venture. Offshoot achievement comes down to associations — we interface publicists with distributers to contact new crowds and impact rehash buys. Our answers make an all encompassing procedure that conveys demonstrated gradual income and is consistently enhanced for execution," its site peruses. Rakuten encourages you handle everything. It offers influencer crusade the executives that guides in influencer enlistment with point by point revealing and battle bits of knowledge that can prod clients without hesitation. It offers blogger and customer systems administration to assist experts with furthering develop their systems. Rakuten is trusted by brands, for example, Best Buy, Macy's, Walmart, ecco, Dialogtech, and then some. For promoters, Rakuten focuses on helping structure enduring connections among them and distributers. It offers versatile application following, cross gadget following, attribution, subsidiary customer diagrams, and then some. A 2017 Consumer Ad Sentiments Survey of 2,500 worldwide purchasers announced, "71 percent of buyers every now and again purchase things a blogger or influencer prescribes." For distributers, Rakuten is focused on preparing people and engaging them to be the most ideal members. A portion of this preparation incorporates month to month bulletins, instructive online courses, and email support.

Tradedoubler — Tradedoubler markets various answers for the two promoters and distributers. For promoters, it has TD Convert, TD Connect, and TD Engage. TD Convert is its foundation for associate advertising. It says publicists possibly pay when they get results, which are normally estimated as deals or leads. It likewise claims to have 2,000 sponsors nearby standing by to cooperate with excited partners. A portion of its publicist highlights are as per the following: A global system of 180,000 site distributers An assortment of distributer plans of action to drive traffic and convey required outcomes showcase driving innovation stage that conveys precise and solid following of online clients' adventures paving the way to an ideal exchange An imaginative suite of use program obstruction (APIs) to encourage effective correspondence among publicists and distributers Nineteen years of subsidiary showcasing ability Its business knowledge stage, TD ADAPT, gives significant, information driven bits of knowledge into the presentation of your partner crusades TD Convert has a distributer center explicitly for this side of the condition. For distributers, it offers value examination, a substance entrance, voucher destinations, compensate stages, and it takes a shot at portable also. It can likewise follow exchanges to build straightforwardness. "Distributers can see a scope of measurements including what was purchased from singular retailers, giving an unparalleled degree of straightforwardness. Magnificent Assets — Regal Assets is an associate system intended for customer base wishing to put resources into gold or different valuable metals. It gives members a level rate to their leads, in addition to a bit of the venture. Great Assets is another case of a specialty subsidiary chance. You can't sell style things or planting apparatuses inside this system. You are constrained to upholding for its item, which is valuable metals, just as cryptographic forms of money.

SellHealth — SellHealth is a wellbeing subsidiary system. It's free for offshoots to join, should their applications be acknowledged. The majority of SellHealth's deals are made through organization possessed sites, which means subsidiaries don't have to encourage deals individually destinations. This takes out the plausibility of blunder and expands buyer trust, as they are sent to an authentic brand site to finish their buys. SellHealth has a fluctuating commission contingent upon the deal, however it guarantees somewhere close to 30-to-50 percent commission on all passing deals. SellHealth deals with following the deals so partners don't need to. It likewise offers alluding measurements to subsidiaries who are keen on knowing where their traffic originates from. Offshoots have the open door for expanded commission as they go. On the off chance that they show a steady pace of offer, SellHealth may build their bonus by 10, or even 20, percent.

Moreniche— MoreNiche is a wellbeing, delight, and wellness offshoot arrange that gives partners information with respect to winning, change measurements, statistic data, and regularity patterns. MoreNiche guarantees offshoots higher commissions, ensured every other week installments, territorial subsidiary help, and then some. It tracks impressions, for example, snaps and changes, and even has an advantages club for representatives. With this system, partners have the chance to win as a lot of cash as they are happy to work for. MoreNiche likewise gives preparing assets. "Our far reaching partner instructional class, broad digital book and video guides, and inside and out articles have been made by our group of specialists in light of all degrees of advertising background. Along these lines, regardless of whether you're a complete beginner or an associate showcasing veteran, you'll have all that you have to succeed." Whatever your fantasy — leaving your place of employment, purchasing your first home, taking that occasion you've constantly needed, or even complete monetary opportunity — our broad preparing assets matched with one-on-one, master direction and tutelage from our advertising authorities can assist you with making it occur," peruses their site.

eHarmony— The eHarmony associate system pays offshoots to advance the dating site and obtain new individuals, and I don't think you need to know every one of the verses to "This Will Be," by Natalie Cole. To apply to be an offshoot, you need to mean what sort of program you'd like to support. It enables subsidiaries to pick between dating guidance, way of life dating, and nearby dating in urban communities everywhere throughout the world. Since dating is such an individual encounter, associates can be separated by characteristics, for example, religion, race, age, regardless of whether they have children, or in the event that they are working. This is eHarmony's way of life classification, which ensures people discover accomplices with the characteristics that issue most to them. eHarmony furnishes associates with all fundamental inventive materials, for example, pictures and email formats. This guarantees messages are, well, amicable, in all cases. Offshoots can acquire commissions on recruits. Since this is a specialty offshoot system related with one brand, there is no cutting-edge system of sellers like there are when all is said in done member programs. eHarmony is the main brand name subsidiaries work with, should they pursue this seller.

Shopify — Shopify helps transform sites into eCommerce stages by giving an installment passage and helping storekeepers report on deals, to give some examples highlights. As a member arrange, Shopify has advertisers advancing this eCommerce system and acquiring commission. It publicizes that this program is helpful if your group of spectators is, "hoping to dispatch a business, move a current store from another stage, or adapt side interests with trade." Clients need to apply and get affirmed so as to turn into an associate with the Shopify arrange. When endorsed, they are given assistance training, support, following, revealing, installments, and given an extraordinary partner connect so as to precisely follow referrals. Like a portion of the previously mentioned systems, Shopify gives substance to associates. Instances of the substance gave include: sites, online courses, video instructional exercises, and mechanized channels. Rather than investing their energy making these apparatuses themselves, partners can simply utilize the devices gave.

Amazon Associates — The Amazon Associates program is, as you can presumably envision, a wide-going chance. There are not many breaking points to what subsidiaries can sell, regardless of whether that be innovation, open air gear, style, shoes, gems, furniture, computerized music and recordings, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Members need one endorsement to join, and Amazon doesn't require an outsider sponsor endorsement. Amazon professes to have more than 1 million items for members to browse. To put it plainly, you have alternatives. It likewise has simple to-utilize connecting devices that help your associate site effectively produce salary. Amazon offers up to 10 percent in publicizing charges, just as salary from qualifying buys. It has detailing devices that give members all that they have to quantify and characterize achievement in their subsidiary procedure. The models talked about here are just a couple of the numerous open doors associates need to band together with systems or projects. There are still more sorts, specialties, and markets to find. Confident offshoots shouldn't be reluctant to be selective when investigating subsidiary systems. With such a large number of alternatives accessible, it's critical to take as much time as necessary and read the fine print, particularly in regards to commission. The system picked will hugy affect pay accumulated. It's critical to be fussy with regards to your own primary concern. The most effective method to profit with partner promoting At this point, you, ideally, comprehend the coordinations of how partner promoting gets cash. Partners publicize the items or administrations their related brands or merchants are selling. Contingent upon the particular terms of understanding, associates are paid for snaps, leads, as well as buys. Brands and sellers discover partner showcasing important on account of the additional publicizing and, thus, income got from the training. By extending their spectators through offshoots, brands grow their chances for impressions and deals. In case you're a yearning associate, you'll must be set up to accomplish something other than put connects on your site and trust that the cash will come in. This industry has a great deal of potential, however will just reward the measure of work you put in. So as to truly take off, you ought to be set up to act like a genuine advertiser. This implies advancing your very own substance, working out a system, and connecting with individuals. The accompanying arrangements will help you become an offshoot advertiser, however become an associate advertiser with a reputation of achievement. Turning into a subsidiary advertiser Build up an email list: There's a great deal you can do with a well-created email list. Many partner advertising bloggers use them to send week by week or ordinary bulletins that furnish perusers with refreshes on what they're selling, what arrangements are open, and what purchasers can hope to be accessible later on.

Your email rundown is in excess of a gathering of names. It's your system, the individuals who are requesting to get notification from you. Messages go directly to their inboxes, and you get the opportunity to state anything you desire. I'd suggest exploring some email or bulletin best practices that will assist you with drafting drawing in duplicate. Messages are nothing without perusers to open them!

You ought to likewise think about an email arrangement, for example, MailChimp. This apparatus is free for up to 2,000 endorsers, which means it's an extraordinary device for fledglings. It sorts out records, make engaging pamphlets, and monitor snaps and open rates. Addition endorsers through visitor blogging: Guest blogging is a compelling method to widen your span. Most importantly, you're making an association with the host blog that can ideally remain mutualistic. Also, you're getting your name out there on another stage. One incredible component of visitor blogging is that you can utilize this auxiliary stage to plug your own bulletin. You can do this by including a source of inspiration toward the finish of your post urging perusers to buy in on the off chance that they are keen on finding out additional. You could even boost recruits by promising free preparing material to the individuals who do pursue your email list. This offers perusers something important while developing your rundown of names and, possibly, customer base. Supporter your own substance on visitor posts: Your visitor post ought not simply be one major notice for your item or site, however it ought to be where you put your best foot forward to potential new endorsers. A few hosts will have standards or breaking points on how often you can connection back to your own substance inside that visitor post. Observe their guidelines, yet ensure you accept the open door to connection to your own substance. This guides individuals to your site (where the enchantment occurs). In addition, on the off chance that you can connection to content perusers of that specific blog or site will discover significant, you might have the option to score yourself some new faithful perusers! Pick an open system with a lot of choices: If you're simply beginning as an offshoot and have no specific type at the top of the priority list, a few sources prescribe not going too specialty. While specialty offshoot programs here and there have a higher pace of commission, their items or administrations are likewise progressively hard to sell. For those tenderfoots out there, consider picking a progressively broad system that enables you to sell an assortment of items. This will give you a chance to play around with substance and notices until you are certain and OK with a specific specialty. State, for instance, you start selling outdoor supplies, however aren't having extraordinary karma. In the long run, you understand that is on the grounds that it's winter and few individuals are out hitting the fairway when there's snow on the ground. With a progressively broad partner arrange, you could without much of a stretch change to winter coats or scarves through a style merchant and have more karma. At the point when the snow clears, you can take a stab at selling golf gear again! With this technique, you're less secured to one item and can try different things with what works best for you.

Utilize your system to develop or connect with different subsidiaries: As an offshoot advertiser, you ought to grow a multi-faceted network. Some significant players in your system are individual members with whom you can swap visitor posts, perusers and customer base, and merchants or brand partners. So as to keep boosting your system, take part in discussions. Remark on other visitor websites. Hop into Twitter strings, in the event that they appear to be important to you. Consider transferring an initial video on your site clarifying what your identity is and what you do. This will expand trust inside your system, just as help other people for all intents and purposes become acquainted with you. Regardless of your procedure, recollect that you can't make due in this industry without those imperative network individuals. Different subsidiaries may have answers to your inquiries that nobody else can offer. Brands and merchants may in the end start coming to you, on the off chance that they see you doing great on your blogging endeavors. Member promoting preparing On the off chance that you have an inclination that you need some additional readiness as you jump into the universe of partner promoting, a preparation program may be directly for you.

A great deal of subsidiary advertising systems or projects offer instructional classes as a major aspect of their information exchanges. They need partners to feel arranged to utilize their items and take advantage of the salary winning chance. For those hoping to get increasingly conventional member advertising preparing, consider an offshoot promoting instructional class. These are accessible everywhere throughout the web, and the one you pick will rely upon what sort of help you're searching for. There are some free instruments on YouTube from experienced offshoot advertisers hoping to share their aptitude. Affluent Affiliate is another extraordinary asset for those hoping to get familiar with associate showcasing and get ready for the street ahead. Rich Affiliate has a week by week live online course that you can use to improve your own practices. It likewise has open-source preparing devices made by genuine offshoots to assist you with learning from exercises and errors. These instructional exercises and learnings make certain to assist you with the particular challenges experienced in this classification of advertising. Rich offshoot has preparing apparatuses, yet additionally causes you construct the ideal site and offers facilitating and areas! Since this arrangement is associate situated, its site choices may work superior to anything the nonexclusive formats offered by a web designer.

Affilorama is another solid asset for those simply beginning. It offers subsidiaries a subsidiary showcasing brisk beginning aide, a downloadable guide to progress, and 120 video exercises. These preparation devices make you through the procedure stride by-venture to create the best result. It has trainings on statistical surveying, content creation, site building, SEO, advertising thoughts, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. It not just tries to assist you with understanding member advertising, yet additionally the encompassing methodologies that could help make you effective. Tributes from clients state Affilorama is an amazing hotspot for confident subsidiaries who, starting at yet, know nothing. A considerable lot of the basic apparatuses are free, which means partners have no commitment to pay before they're profiting of their own.

Udemy is an internet preparing site that offers courses for nearly everything from a web designer bootcamp to moral hacking preparing. Notwithstanding that, it additionally has a couple of seminars on associate advertising. Its most noteworthy evaluated seminar on associate advertising is Affiliate Marketing Domination: Become a Super Affiliate. This course has 42 talks and 35 supplemental assets. Udemy claims this course can assist clients with starting their partner advertising business, just as change their current business to create additional income. This course can likewise assist increment with trafficking to your subsidiary site to drive more income. While this course is somewhat pricier than others, Udemy occasionally offers streak deals on courses that could arrive you a huge markdown. For the merchant: How to discover member showcasing accomplices Probably the most ideal ways for you, as a brand or merchant, to discover subsidiary advertisers is to progress toward becoming related with a partner organize. Systems do a great deal of the snort work with regards to offshoot advertising. They acknowledge associate applications and survey their data for endorsement. They fill in as a connection between the two and track deals so the two sides have an exact portrayal of their adequacy. Member systems are additionally useful for helping construct trust. Rarely do offshoots will contact unsubstantiated associations to attempt to sell their stuff. There are such a large number of fake organizations out there for this alternative to have a sense of security. On the off chance that your business is on a member arrange, the offshoot in any event realizes you're authentic enough to be gathered with those other name brands. Offshoot promoting sites and subsidiary advertising organizations The systems organizations and sellers ought to take a gander at are similar ones offshoots ought to take a gander at. This industry is a two-way road and similar systems that are useful for associates will be useful for brands. In case you're keen on ending up some portion of an offshoot organize so as to be matched with fruitful and reliable accomplices, attempt any of the member systems referenced previously. Amazon offshoot showcasing In spite of the fact that we've referenced it previously, the Amazon offshoot showcasing system is so enormous, it merits referencing once more. In case you're keen on the Amazon offshoot organize, investigate this upsides and downsides rundown aggregated by The Balance SMB: Masters of turning into an Amazon Affiliate: There are a few incredible motivations to join Amazon Associates program, including: Amazon is a profoundly visited, understood name that individuals use and trust each day.It's allowed to join. There are no traffic limits or different measurements you should be acknowledged into the program. There are tons and huge amounts of items you can advance. Amazon has numerous apparatuses to assist you with selling explicit things, or a class of things. There is a decent detailing framework so you comprehend what's getting clicks and what's selling. You can get immediate store installments into your ledger. Amazon offers great client care to it's purchasers, so you lessen the danger of having your guests get frantic at you on the off chance that they have an issue with the item. Regardless of whether your guest doesn't purchase the item your alluded, in the event that they purchase something on that visit, you win a commission. Cons of the Amazon Associates Program: Nothing is ever flawless, including the Amazon offshoot program. Here are a couple of drawbacks: The commission rate is generally low contrasted with other associate projects. In the event that you sell 6 or less things a month, your rate is 4%. You can win up to 8.5%, however that is accomplished by selling in excess of 3,131 items. Their treats just most recent 24-hours. That implies if your referral doesn't purchase inside 24 hours, you won't get credit. (Be that as it may, if the item is added to their truck, the treat endures 90 days.) You're not permitted to send Amazon subsidiary connections in messages. That incorporates blog entries that get sent as an email. Since email is an exceeded expectations approach to send incredible ideas to your perusers, this standard is especially baffling. On the off chance that you have a U.S. site and are advancing items in the Amazon U.S. store, you won't get acknowledgment for alluding somebody who winds up purchasing the item from outside the nation (for example Amazon UK). Installment choices are just through direct store, check, or Amazon gift voucher. There's no PayPal choice. Least payout is $100, which isn't that much on the off chance that you make heaps of offers, however a great deal of you're just winning a couple of dollars a month.

Reddit subsidiary showcasing In case you're searching for a system to assist you with discovering more advantages and disadvantages to partner advertising, just as reveal answers to your inquiries, the Reddit people group is the spot for you. This advanced discussion covers everything identified with associate advertising. The latest posts alone fluctuate from "What was your most noteworthy active visitor clicking percentage?" to "Searching for contacts in Tokyo for one week from now's pre-dispatch." This Reddit gathering is actually what we mean when we state develop your system. Responding to these inquiries or hopping into the discussion now and then could assist you with meeting partner advertisers or merchants over the globe. Pushing ahead with member promoting Member promoting is your chance to "join" yourself to something remarkable, something you believe you can advocate for. For some, it turns out to be in excess of a type of easy revenue. It's an intrigue, an interest, and an enthusiasm. It's an opportunity to become familiar with different items and have a constructive outcome on the lives of others. Partner advertising is an opportunity for people to utilize their aptitude to assist purchasers with making more intelligent shopping choices, such as busying mothers make less rushes to the store, returning flawed things, or birthday presents. An opportunity to assist customers with purchasing the correct item the first run through. Whatever member promoting progresses toward becoming for you, may it generally be about the connections — the ones you structure with merchants and brands, the partner companions you make who are additionally attempting to explore this framework just because, and the purchasers who put their trust in you and your developing skill. If you have any comments on the article or just want to send us your info for future updates, please fill in the form below. /Simon

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