#like i see so many people apply the same logic that makes sense with mac to dennis and it's like whoa. wait a minute. huh??

[dennisboobs]

most annoying thing about being me is that i cannot engage with like. any fanon shit about dennis because i'm constantly on some advanced derangement and the stuff i thought two years ago when i was first getting comfy in the fandom is still the way everyone else looks at dennis but i'm like. yes but its Worse than this. you're like a quarter of the way there. this isn't the interesting bit, this is a symptom of it, keep going.

[solitvdcs]

* sofia carson, cis female + she/her | you know raquel morales, right? they’re twenty-five, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, most of her life? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to go your own way by fleetwood mac like, a million times this year, which makes sense ‘cause they’ve got that whole leather jacket and stiletto boots, red painted lips, alphabetized record collection thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is september 20, so they’re a virgo, which is unsurprising, all things considered.

trigger warning: death, drugs, alcohol

basic info

full name: raquel morales giraldo

birth date: september 20, 1995

pronouns: she/her

hometown: irving, north carolina

sexuality: bisexual

height: 5′5″

eye color: hazel

hair color: dark brown

build: slim

tattoos: the letters “crel” along the inside of her middle finger (the initials of each morales sister, including herself), an eighth note behind her ear, blooming flowers going up her left thigh

piercings: many, many ear piercings, formerly pierced nose but the hole has closed up

style: if you see her around and she’s not wearing a leather jacket, that’s not her

favorite color: black

favorite food: torta negra

zodiac: virgo sun, leo moon, scorpio rising

mbti: istj

hogwarts house: slytherin

enneagram: type 3 wing 4

temperament: choleric-melancholy

alignment: true neutral

rocky was born the second oldest out of four sisters, though her younger sisters weren’t that much younger. one of a set of identical triplets, rocky always felt herself taking on the “big sister” role when it came to ellie and lisa, even if they were only a couple hours younger than her. their oldest sister, cassidy, was already ten when the triplets were born, so by the time they were able to remember, cassidy was already off living her own life. there was a distinct separation between the triplets and cassidy, but the triplets were so close knit that none of them really minded.

each triplet seemed to be a prodigy in their own way. ellie moved her way through the ranks of her ballet company faster than any other kid in the studio’s history, lisa could charm just about anyone and was a natural actress, and rocky gravitated towards music. she could pick up just about any instrument and play it, and music became her escape. she shared a face and so much else with two other girls, but music was the thing that was solely hers. but, being the most logical out of the three, she saw music as more of a hobby than a career. when the time came for university, she planned on majoring in business. but - as a nod to her true passion - her concentration was on the music industry.

during undergrad, she met her boys. the four were music majors with different concentrations who’d decided to form a band, but unfortunately were short a guitarist. they held auditions, rocky showed up on a whim, and was promptly welcomed into the band. it was odd, at first, being the only girl when she’d grown up in a household of mainly girls, but she acclimated quickly. it was the first time she’d felt at home since she’d left her sisters back in irving. they became popular on and around campus, and eventually a few other local universities started booking them. after graduation, they got a record deal - rocky led the negotiations, of course - and after that, syndicate took off.

syndicate’s fanbase consisted of people mostly interested in her bandmates, and it didn’t bother her until the fans started targeting her on social media. there were rumors going around that she and the lead singer were “more than friends” (which at the time was not true), and his most extreme fangirls bullied her until she had no choice but to delete her social media accounts. after that she focused on the music and nothing else, until one night at an afterparty, the lead singer made a move. sure, they’d had a weird, jealous flirtationship for most of the time they’d known each other, but nothing had ever happened. they started dating in secret, nobody knowing except the other guys in the band. after a while, rocky reactivated her social media accounts, and hoped the lead singer would have her back now that they were actually together.

long story short, he didn’t.

DRUGS, ALCOHOL, DEATH TW. they started fighting. a lot. and the more they fought, the harder rocky partied. she fell deep into the underground music party scene and started mixing progressively harder drugs with alcohol, until one day she overdosed. she wasn’t supposed to survive, but someone was looking out for her that night. she found out too late that her youngest sister, lisa, had died that same night. she flew home just for the funeral before discreetly checking herself into rehab, though nothing could fix the fact that one whole third of herself was now missing.

after rehab, she made the decision to leave not only syndicate, but the music industry altogether. music had become a gateway drug instead of an escape, and she couldn’t let all of her hard work in rehab go to waste, not to mention it felt like a slap to the face to her dead sister. instead she enrolled in grad school back home, and ultimately syndicate broke up without her. nobody outside of the band and her family know about her rehab stint, nor do they realize that she was the instigator behind the band’s breakup. she carries the guilt around with her still, though.

added bc i c/ped the intro from when i played her before: rocky dated isaac hensely in high school for a couple years, and she started thinking that maybe he was it for her. she’d planned on going to the same school as him instead of her dream school, and when she told him, he broke up with her (right before prom, too). she wasn’t going to go after that, but ellie and lisa convinced her to. she stayed until she saw isaac there with another girl, and promptly left. she didn’t even stay for long enough to see him and his date crowned prom king and queen.

wanted connections (yes these are also c/ped from when i played her before lol)

anybody wanna apply to be one of the band members????

someone who went to rehab with her and knows

a confidant for when she doesn’t have her sisters to talk to

friends i guess??

flirty frenemies?????? that’s clearly her type lol

a fwb thing that’s not serious but just when they both need to blow off some steam

someone who tempts her back into music (slowburn lol)

i am so bad at wanted connections i’m so sorry

[wolfpawn]

I Hate You, I Love you, Chapter 75

Chapter Summary - Danielle gets ready to leave for the reshoots, meaning that since their moving in together, it is the first time Tom is left behind, an odd sensation for him.

Previous Chapter

Rating - Mature (some chapters contain smut)

Triggers - references to Tom Hiddleston’s work with the #MeToo Movement. That chapter will be tagged accordingly.

authors Note - I have been working on this for the last 3 years, it is currently 180+ chapters long.  This will be updated daily, so long as I can get time to do so, obviously

tags: @sweetkingdomstarlight-blog @jessibelle-nerdy-mum @nonsensicalobsessions @damalseer @hiddlesbitch1 @winterisakiller @fairlightswiftly @salempoe​ @wolfsmom1​

If you wish to be tagged, please let me know.

The break was everything Tom needed to get himself back in a good frame of mind, his body needed the massage to get out the knots he seemed to have given himself after the stress of everything, the break away got him out of the eye of the public, and finally being able to be intimate with Danielle again made him feel as though he was not falling apart completely. If her masseuse was to be believed, she too was carrying a large burden on her shoulders, but she had not shown it in his presence. After more than a little prodding, he had gotten her to admit that study was getting on top of her as well as trying to get back to work, with at least another fortnight before her brace could come off, she was worried she would miss the opportunity to interview for the US job she had been eyeing for the summer. He sensed she was also worried about him but did not say anything on the subject.

Their return to the city was fairly quiet, getting immediately back into a routine, though with less studying from Danielle's perspective. Instead, she readied to go back on location for Game of Thrones for the reshoots, packing large hoodies and jackets to take attention off her injured arm, which she was hoping to keep hidden. Tom worried that it was not a good idea to go if she was injured, but part of him knew it was not a concern, but selfishness that was causing him to think that way. He knew she would be fine, she was more level-headed than most, bar the incident that led to said injury; she would make sure to be careful so that it would be off sooner rather than later.

"I am after clearing the downstairs area of all things 'me' related," Danielle informed him as she entered the bedroom. Tom turned to look at her, conveying his confusion as he did so. "You said you were inviting the writer here for the interview?" "Yes." "Well, we don't want to go parading it all, so I have all my stuff tidied away."

"You erased all trace of yourself?"

"No, simply tidied my things downstairs until I come back." She corrected. "Our room is the same, as you can see," She pointed around. "About Mac, do you want me to put him in somewhere or will he be okay with you?" "Are you saying you think I cannot mind our dog?" Tom asked putting his arms around her.

"I am saying you might not have the time or the wish to mind him if you are busy." "I am not too busy for him, he will stay here with me." "Okay, and what are you planning to cook for…what is her name again?" "Taffy." Tom smiled. "I was thinking of cooking something simple." "Make it something reheatable, do it earlier in the day to allow you to no seem ignorant and ignore her while cooking," Danielle suggested.

"You are so considerate." Tom kissed her. "You don't mind her coming here?" Danielle frowned, "Why would I even care?"

"Well, another woman…" "Tom, she is a magazine writer, this is not some seedy rendezvous behind my back, if I was not working I would be here or close by, you are making it sound as though you plan on the two of you having some heated saucy affair." Danielle scoffed.

Tom looked at her for a moment. "Thank you." Danielle cocked her head slightly. "So many partners get jealous." "Tom if I get jealous at you meeting women you need to work with, this is not going to last particularly long." She laughed. "I mean, safety control means I work with the set crew, which to date, has had zero women on the construction side of things, zero, nada, zilch. If the same logic was to be applied to me, you would be bald, grey and going crazy."

Tom's brow furrowed. "Not one other woman in the whole area?" "Well there are set designers and other such women, but the construction guys, the ones that put the sets together, that's pretty male-orientated; not to mention I am the first woman a lot of them have worked within my role." She shrugged.

"Really?" "Yep." Tom pulled her into him. "That's my girl, breaking down barriers."

"Just wait til I am finished my study and get back my paperwork," She smiled. "Now, since I mentioned saucy already, there is Bolognese in the freezer, your one, you should just defrost some and give it to her."

"Why the Bolognese?" "Because you make a damn good one." Danielle smiled, leaning up on her tiptoes to kiss him.

"What am I going to do without you?" Tom stated, looking at his smiling girlfriend. "Get on with it, it's about three days, a week at most." "Hey, there's a big difference between three and seven days," Tom pointed out.

"There is, but they won't say until we get there what is being reshot, so we can only hamper guesses and that's the best I can give. When I get there, I will be told what it is and can give you are a better idea of when I am back," she stated with a smile. "Sure, you are meeting Taffy and have the Graham Norton show so that's half the week gone alone," she explained.

"Then a small recess until hectic schedules again."

"Yes, being proper adults with responsibilities isn't always fun." Danielle agreed, "But I mean, the Kong premiere run is what, two weeks? We can handle that, right?" "Three, but yes, phone calls, texts, skype." "I am not skype sexing, I am saying that right here and now, people can hack that and the last thing I want is my hoo-hoo on the internet!"

Tom chuckled. "Agreed, that would not be advisable. So phone calls and texts then?" "Phone calls, texting while trying to have a bit of fun is not easy I would imagine." "No, it's not." Tom agreed, leading to a raised brow from Danielle, "I was far younger, and it was back before predictive text." Danielle erupted in laughter. "God I was tragic." Tom groaned as he joined in. "'Was'?" she jested. "Was that far younger, curly-haired Hiddles?"

"With obligatory oversized jeans and thinking I was cool." Danielle erupted in fresh peels of laughter. "God I have come so far."

"Thank fuck." She forced out between laughter. Insulted, Tom grabbed her and began to tickle her leading to Danielle falling onto the bed in laughter. "Stop!" "Are you saying you would not have had time for younger me?" Tom asked.

"God no, younger Danielle would probably have been in this same position, though probably with a bit more drinking and going out." Danielle smiled.

"Wait you used to drink more, what happened?" "Myself and a friend, we drank a whole bottle of vodka between us one night," Tom winced. "It was the last time I did that." She nodded.

"How old were you?" "Nineteen, maybe twenty. Before that, I went out to nightclubs, drank my weight in alcohol and eating dodgy takeaway like every other youth." "Young, irresponsible Danielle, I would love to have seen that."

"And you?" "I don't think people realise how much alcohol a bunch of lads on a rugby team can drink." "Weren't you on the rugby team when you were in Eton, underage?" Tom shrugged. "Bold boy." "Then the Drama society in college, it wasn't a day if we weren't drinking it was a day wasted in some of their opinions." "But you ran the London Marathon back then, didn't you?" "Jesus, that was the hardest day of my life." Tom groaned. "Wait, didn't you say before you were going to do an IronMan?"

"Was." "What happened?"

"Work, I can't dedicate as much time to it now." "So you have given it up?" "What, no. I just have to wait for this to heal so I can cycle and swim, not to mention the weather is crappy, but I have found a pool to train in. The cycling is harder, there are a few places, but the city is far harder to navigate with all the traffic." She stated, holding up her hand.

Tom smiled in relief. "I thought you had given up something you love."

"Nah, not going to happen. I mean, I won't get to an IronMan for a while, but I am not after giving up. I am just a bit busier now, but it is short term, I want to get this all under my belt first." turning slightly, she gave the bed sheet a small smell. "I may need to give these a wash before I go, it stinks of my deodorant." "Don't, leave them as they are," she looked at Tom. "This is odd for me, being the one left at home." "It's only for a few days, you'll be abandoning me for longer." She smiled, toying with his hair.

Tom moved around so he was over her, smiling down at her. "I know, I am sorry, I wish I had a regular job." "I don't, you are incredible at what you do and you love it. I am so happy you get to do what you love so much, and if it means that for a few weeks here and there, I have to wait at home, or even skype or call you from wherever I am, I am okay with that." Tom leant down and kissed her. "My flight is in a few hours." she reminded him.

"Are you packed?" "Mmhmm." "Well then, I am going to ensure you go well satisfied," Tom swore as he leant to kiss her again.

*

Tom - Well, that went well.

Danielle - Done and dusted?

Tom - Yes, I went to speak to her at the hotel today, clear up some of the points that may not have been as clear as I wanted them to be.

Danielle - Good stuff.

Tom - How is work?

Danielle - Fine, cold, wet, dirty, but hey, that's why I signed up for, right?

Tom - Sadly there is good and bad. BTW good call on the Bolognese.

Danielle - Called it! No, seriously, it is lovely.

Tom - Minus the celery? :)

Danielle - what can I say, I'm not a fan.

Tom - duly noted.

Danielle - where did you eat the first night?

Tom - Can't say, you'll be mad.

Danielle - …..you went…..without me…..That's it, we're over, goodbye! Tom - Darling...

Danielle - You think you can grovel at my feet? Don't darling me!

Tom - We can go when you come back.

Danielle - I cannot believe you brought another woman there, I am heartbroken!

Tom - I'm sorry.

Danielle - Bite me!

Tom - If you keep acting like this, I might have to!

Danielle - …..really? You kinky fecker!

Tom - And I'm off the hook!

Danielle - so what else did you do?

Tom - Well, after she left last night, I watched Moonlight, as good as expected, but we did the interview yesterday, partly in Regents park, partly at the house.

Danielle - I haven't been there since New Years.

Tom - God it was gorgeous that day, the fog was so thick.

Danielle - We lost Mac about fourteen times in it! Tom - that only made it more fun.

Danielle - I suppose :)

Tom - So, now that you know what they are filming, do you know how long before you are home?

Danielle - My flight is booked for Friday, should be in about half seven to Gatwick.

Tom - Three more days? :(

Danielle - I know, it is almost done putting it together, I have to sign off on it in the morning, then film all tomorrow and Thursday, back Friday.

Tom - I'm collecting you from the airport.

Danielle - Well you have then time :) I'll make a deal with you, we will spend all of Saturday doing what you want?

Tom - So not leaving bed then?

Danielle - If that's what you want.

Tom - Bed is horrible without you.

Danielle - only three more nights. Xx

Tom - Mac misses you too, by the way, he is barking at the stairs every morning for you.

Danielle - Please stop, I can't know that! Tom - It's just him and me, all alone, without you here, all alone.

Danielle - Feck you anyway!

Tom - You want to come home?

Danielle - I wasn't overly happy to leave in the first place.

Tom - you'll just have to rush back so.

Danielle - Aren't you supposed to be at the BBC?

Tom - I am there now.

Danielle - Good.

Danielle - I am being called to set now, enjoy and talk to you this evening, tell me everything then. Bye xxx

Tom - Let me know what time to ring you, have a lovely day. Xxx

Tom put his phone in his pocket and smiled at Danielle's pretend anger at him going out for food without her as well as her enthusiasm to return home soon before getting to his feet and readying to go on stage for the Graham Norton show again.

[castlehead]

makeshift feels from the opinion lab

kafka wrote in a journal urhmherm of being limited to prague, then his room, then his bed, then nothing at all. to be limited at last to nothing at all. well. turns out i guess the most kafkaesque sentiment came from franz kafka.

enjoi ya rickety gethsemane while it is still to be dreamed, young writers, young writers of youth.

after a job on a hot day back in april or may or something i started listening to this while walking out of the truck towards the gas station convenience store and abruptly pivoted away from the sliding doors to sneak around the side and weep near the green fencing around some boilers. it occurred to me how little i could ever forgive myself for doing.

the shit ive done, all of it, i havent forgiven myself. if i did it and it was bad, or even meagre, dumb, really no big deal, bet yr ass it still keeps me from thinking i deserve happiness. i do not forgive myself for anything ive ever done. no deed is too temporal to etch itself cleanly into my head as something unforgivable, if only it makes a small point.

i know this is true because no joy i ever feel is felt fully, because i do not think it is deserved; and because i allow myself to be joyous only when i think of the truth of my unforgiven, unforgivable state. never to be. Never will.

and that is what is depression.

There must be something here, in me. Here where the jackals caterwAul Like streetcats Mewing their gizzard After this night’s heat, What’ll it be Jackals, Buzz off, shit man

i feel like the key to life is knowing that 90 percent of anxiety & depression, either in degree or in its truth, and at least somewhere not wracked by war, is unsubstantiated (the ten percent being actual crises, like fear of violence, a death in the family, etc). The problem is how persuasive these feelings can be that lead to the fulfillment of the very fear or solidifying the reason for being depressed. But with positive feelings, the least thing, whether true or no, can always be rewarding. A bit of happiness must be allowed to be felt, indiscriminately, because it is more useful to us than a bit of sadness. Take the fierce dialectic u use to establish a depressing ‘truth’ and persuade yourself of something good. If one is far fetched, let it be the something bad. Until it happens, after all, all of it remains in your head, to do with what u will.

You don’t get to lower taxes on the rich and gut social services at the same time. The reason social services are in place is to provide a fair shake for john q public. Mostly investors are feeling the benefits of the corporate tax cut. They’re not giving the money towards a better product that would help the people. but one day there will be no sesame seeds on the bun of yr Big Mac and you’ll wonder how that’s possible with an entire sesame seed dept that just got a pay raise.

tax reform should be done to help a free market, so that the rich can be poor and the poor rich. Taxation helps the people so that social services become less necessary. Social services were developed because the percentage of taxation was unequal between higher and lower class. Poor folks felt the pain while rich folks shrugged it off.

Thats why I say you can’t do both: social services are a protection against the world being entirely controlled, if it’s not already, by those from the very swamp this president wants to drain. T**** hasn’t drained shit.

i feel like writing takes over for your thought process. You can’t think and write at the same time, or something. something turns off or it switches where it’s doing the shit it’s doing to a different place, like yr hands. I don’t think you can write down one linear thought with another thought being thought in your head. This is why people say their mind goes blank in extended periods of inspiration. The functioning has gone from being untethered and temporal, ie wandering thoughts, notions, speculating, to being possessed in a focused place, ie yr hands, which usually leads to a more focused expression of perhaps a thought of particular value, enough in the first place to require writing down. But tho this can be easy for some talented people, who might, as Joyce said, polish their nails while writing some genius thing, what does not come easy for anybody, because it is imposssible, is thinking two disparate things, of the everyday and of some behemoth philosophic concept, for example, without either one taken place after or before; or, one of them being intermittently disturbed, tho linearly, by the other, like a notification on yr phone- until at last one of the two breaks down, and the foxus superseded by the one left. This is especially novel. One thinks; one does not think and also think. That would make it two people in one head. Therefore we can presume that ones identity is found in the unity, or internal focus, of their story in thoughts down one narrow wire: thought can cross many paths and examine everything under and beyond th sun, but per person it is still in the singular. It cannot divide into two simultaneous paths of equal focus. there can be multilayered thoughts with a similar core concept behind them, and these can be thought simultaneously as much as one can ante up and dole out shades of emotion and shades of thought, and so on. But I cannot think of a teleological explanation for all creation and with the same focus Apply myself to letters in the mail. There is a dominant voice, and the rest, the mundane voice, is seen thru that lens.

ya cant say yr colorblind then gripe about people hatin ya cuz u r white. contradiction of terms no? if you really didnt see color, ud say people hated yr ass because yr a damnfool entrylevel, grunt-ass lowbrow. not because of the color of ya skin, which ya recognized and put to the forefront in making that very statement.

feel like uh, a priori is not intuition alone. Intuition is a function of the mind, while a priori is, if I understand Kant correctly, a representation synthesized before there is an object of focus available for the senses to interpret, ie an essentially true conclusion drawn, that has no need for a combined manifold, as, Kant tells us, is offered by merely living in space and time: time to extend and progress from cause to effect to cause, and space to do it in. In other words, intuition is cognitive- psychological, and a priori, theoretical- logical.

Pathos is the one thing most divine about people, for i see that in my worst state I can still grieve for the savaging of life’s last hope, and be uplifted, feel tears, at least for a little blessed while. There is no state so low that does not inspire one to at least pity themselves, and feel the comfort of passions, however mistaken or wretched the person.

i feel that / Some subjects do not even allow to be proved through the scientific method, yet they are still issues of a scientific nature and not just mysticism. the line is very thin however, since usually these subjects devolve into mysticism. In fact, if science only worked with that which could be proven, from the outset or otherwise, we’d have a pretty limited roster of discoveries. Sometimes discoveries can be made along the way towards proving; sometimes, discoveries can be made, scientifically, thru means that for lack of anything better, are entirely theoretical. And sometimes the search is not to prove something true but to clarify something. Science is not out to be incontrovertible.

The man in mismatched sox inhaled not as deeply as he would have liked at such a crescendo, even if on the third listen in a row, then, looked up at the massive pure blue upwards, cloudless, felt likely to cry for joy, but in the end simply mouthed the words:

“I’m gonna die of loneliness, fo sho.”

So often doth trespass our intuition upon realms and pathways of a more intimate enumeration of cause and effect than could be available to any witness, and that is available only to the actioning of objects involved in the event seen and analyzed by what and who were no player.

The crisis paid goodbyes in the form of telling your ass off, is what he said. But we all knew he thought he was merely a parable often enough already. We didn’t listen to the crisis, deliberately shut our ears like boxing them very slowly ourselves before anyone else could. Later in the year many terrible events would occur that were the direct result of ignoring his words. But nobody came around to believing he did it. The crisis was way off teaching prophecies someplace probably foreign. But if I refuse to be confined to learning from my own folly I should at least give the follies of others a chance. Fatass karma, and more hell than handbasket.

What the crisis he said was

HEY YOU DONT WANT TO FACE JACK, FACE? TELL ME ABOUT HOW CRUELTY CAN BE ELEGANT AGAIN. YOU ARE FACING NO SUCH BURDEN OF SIMPLY LIVING. TELL ME WHAT HALLUCINATIONS ARE, YOU SWOLLEN, DYSPEPTIC SHIT.

And to this day All I remember is him Looking slain already Like he’d be on the slab In days Or even hundreds of years from then And it’d be how, uh, how He looked then Slamming the door While my sister and things Was gatherin they buckets for weeping later In that queer disease of spite where You grieve for the vanquished enemy.

all triumph is in some sense humorous, for in itself triumph is the opposite of tragedy. that is why the soldier laughs as he shoots at a retreating enemy. there is an element of rowdiness that is somewhat comedic, taken in itself.

Numbers are the only symbols that stand for what they are. In this way they are more like hieroglyphs

is bed porn a thing? it should definitely be a thing.

THIS LIFE IS FILLED WITH DARKNESS THIS DARKNESS IS SO LIGHT GOD IN HEAVEN QUA SKY MUST BEAT WINGS TO KEEP ON GROUND NOTHING MUCH IS EVER FOUND NOTHING MUCH IS EVER FOUND. No symbols where none intended etc etc

No art is permanent, in that its aims in being created do not last, do not translate between epochs. I will never experience Homer as one living in Ancient Greece. Have not closely read Homer, but when I do it will be as myself in my time, with all the sullying context of those years from then to now only left to unguide me.

Kierkegaard tricks you into thinking he knows his insanity is illogical, the side effect of writing his labyrinths. The frightening moment comes when you realize how fiercely logical his insanity seems to him, and how insane the World actually is, and you wonder if it is that you do not understand it or just do not accept it.

[scrawnydutchman]

Why Craig McCracken is a Genius

Anybody who follows my work as well as my most frequent postings and discussions knows that I LOVE animation. I sincerely and confidently say it is the greatest art form in the world, simply because in one way or another it’s every art form combined. It’s drawing, painting, acting, film making, special effects, literature and music all at the same time, and while cartoons get the unfortunate shove as being nothing more then non-intellectual “kid’s stuff”, the field has produced some of the finest achievements in art of the 20th century as well as the 21st so far. But much like any art form, the field is only as great as it’s artists and what they bring to the table. There are many great animators and animation directors that any enthusiast can point to for inspiration like Rebecca Sugar, Lauren Faust, Genndy Tartakovsky, Don Bluth, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, Sitoshi Kun, and of course the most obvious answer Walt Disney. While I have great admiration and nothing but respect for the artists above, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the genius of the man behind the shows I bring with me throughout my childhood and even adult life. The creator of such shows as Powerpuff Girls (which incidentally he collaborated with Faust and Tartakovsky on), Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Wander Over Yonder, Craig McCracken.

Make no mistake; there is a reason this man is so heavily respected and regarded in the current landscape of western animation, and you know a McCracken cartoon when you see them. But what exactly makes his work stand out? What is it about the cartoons McCracken has produced and directed that makes it so accessible to such a wide audience of kids and to an extent adults? How is it that whenever I put on an episode of Fosters or Wander Over Yonder I’m immediately put in a good mood and am enthusiastic about life? Well, after watching and studying his work I think I can boil it down to a few elements which, incidentally I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts before.

1. Beautifully Simple Character Design

Aesthetically speaking, what do the Powerpuff Girls, Bloo from Fosters Home and Wander all have in common? The answer of course is that they are deceptively simple designs that all take a very minimalist approach. So many household names from cartoons are memorable but their designs can often be so complex that if one were to try and draw them from memory, even as a skilled cartoonist, they’d have just enough trouble that they may forget a few key aspects of the design. With McCracken’s designs you can draw them likely in less then 2 minutes, especially ol’ Bloo from Fosters Home. You just draw a little pac man ghost with little flipper arms, circular eyes, a grin and a straight line at the bottom and you’re done. One might think these designs are very limited because of how minimalist they are with how you can express them, and if you’re feeling particularly like a snobby Jackass you might call it lazy. But in truth these design choices are the most practical you can get as they give you all the essentials of the character with nothing superfluous. First, because of how quickly you can draw them by that very nature they are also SEVERAL times easier to animate, and with the added aid of glorious modern day technology (when it’s not crashing that is) producing high quality entertainment quickly has never been easier. Second, all the essential parts of the character are there. Each character in a show is a distinctive shape not replicated by any other character, meaning that if you were to put them in a silhouette you could easily recognize who is who. Also, the whole art of animation is expressing character and personality through motion, which is where the acting part of the field comes in. Just by mannerisms, typical distinctive poses and even the very nature of their walk cycles we know exactly what kind of person each character from these shows is. We know the Powerpuff Girls are only innocent on the surface level and in truth are actually quite violent and gruesome (unless you’re watching the new horrendous show that completely misses the point of what makes the original so great), we know Bloo from Foster’s Home is a mischievous egotistical little trickster who is always causing trouble and we know Wander is a happy go lucky optimist who only seeks to bring happiness to all. Sometimes the best way to go is to not think too hard about it and let the main points of the character come through with no additions holding them down or distracting from the point.

2. Creative Yet Broad Show Premises

*This is my new favorite Gif*

I have to imagine each one of these shows had beautifully smooth pitches to get them funded (except maybe Powerpuff Girls because of the violence) because they have such imaginative and original premises that can be summed up so quickly to anyone who wants to watch and they leave themselves open to so many different types of stories.

*A boy visits his Imaginary Friend at a Foster Home where he and many other Imaginary Friends go on all sorts of hijinx or adventures, along the way saying goodbye to imaginary friends who find a new home*

or

*a superhero parody where a bunch of seemingly innocent and adorable little girls are actually quite violent and aggressive, and the show plays off of superhero stereotypes while also challenging typical gender roles*

Done. Great simple premise with unique concept not explored before. Take my money.

I’ve said before that it’s important for a show to have an easy to grasp premise, especially for children, because the easier it is to understand the more accessible it is to a larger audience. Plus because of the broad nature of the summary you can tell any kind of story you want between episodes. Premises like these  have story ideas that just write themselves; it’s why the family sitcom of middle class family with idiot father and hot overcompensating wife exist, because everyone can relate to having a family and the dichotomy of a couple where one is the straight man putting up with the ceaseless antics of the other. Wander Over Yonder is a  particularly good example of this because quite honestly all you need to know is “A couple of do-gooders wander the galaxy making new friends and incidentally run into an incompetent arch enemy a lot”. It’s basically just Road Runner but it takes place on a new planet every episode. 

3. Color!!!!

Craig McCracken KNOWS how to use color. It gives all of his shows such a warm inviting feeling because it’s all so bright and either blends nicely or makes decent contrast. This may seem like a minor point, but You’d be amazed how quickly a bad color palette can ruin a show for an audience. the color choices of these shows immediately attract the attention of the viewer with it’s positive vibes and satisfying placement. Plus each character has a color scheme appropriate to their personality (or more accurately they contrast, appropriating a common theme in McCracken’s work; polar opposites hanging out with each other). The goodhearted reasonable and well behaved Mac is red, but his mischievous trouble making fun loving imaginary friend Bloo is, well . . . . blue. The happy-go-lucky Wander is orange, but his logical and pragmatic best friend and steed Sylvia is blue. The leader Blossom is pink, the innocent Bubbles is baby blue and the tough tomboy Buttercup is green. They remain consistent with these choices and much like the contrast of these characters physical appearance it makes it all the more apparent that the characters themselves contrast too.I don’t know what else to say about it, but just TELL me you don’t watch the intro to Fosters Home and get all hyped up in the process!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZiB_S9VpiU

4. Surrealist Humor

One thing you’ll notice about these shows is that they aren’t afraid to be weird, Fosters especially. They take every chance they can get to have something surreal happen only to play it off moments later like it never happened. I think that’s always been a great strength of McCracken’s shows. A huge part of comedy is playing with expectations: nobody ever gets a laugh out of something predictable. But another great and common aspect of comedy is stark, jarring contrast. I once read a WONDERFUL book called The Humor Code by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, that was all about studying what makes people laugh, and they brought up a theory in the book that comedy is all about violation + benign. Something is jarring to our senses but we quickly find out it’s actually nothing to be afraid of. Hence why being tickled by someone we love makes us laugh: it’s a violation of our personal space, but we know our loved one wouldn’t actually hurt us. But it wouldn’t be funny if we tickled ourselves because it’s not a violation, and it isn’t funny with someone you don’t trust tickles you because the violation isn’t benign. This can also happen in reverse: something that initially lowers our defences turns out to actually be harmful or annoying or bother us in some way. I’m not necessarily saying this is the be all and end all of comedy as it’s only a theory, but I think you could apply it to McCracken’s work. His cartoons are littered with moments where a character does something strange or random or out of the ordinary and nobody bats an eye, or maybe it’ll shift in perspective about how large the situation at hand is. An immediate example that comes to my mind is the episode of Wander where a planet is attacked on a huge scale by a destroyer of planets called “Buster” . . .which actually when you zoom out it turns out it’s an adorable little puppy just playing with a ball. Humor is largely subjective, but if you ask me . . that shit is funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5QRrAosQo

Conclusion

McCracken

 has been making numerous contributions to the field of animation throughout his career and has gained notoriety for the shows under his belt . . and rightfully so. He understands pure and simple what cartoons are all about: simple, down to earth, easy to access entertainment that’s fun and leaves you in a good mood. Some television can be considered junk food like reality tv shows (cheap to produce, quick to make, advertised well but loaded with garbage), and others can be considered fruits and veggies like Breaking Bad or The Simpsons (they make you a better person and challenge your sensibilities), but sometimes all you really need is a light simple snack. One that’s colorful, sweet, and maybe even a little nutritious. McCracken delivers in his work with original premises, accessible characters, bright inviting colors and a delightfully weird sense of humor. God bless ya, Mr. McCracken!

[lancecarr]

My Thoughts On Appleҳ Brand New Mac Pro & Why The Hefty Price Tag Is Justified

We’ve all been waiting a long time for the new Mac Pro to be announced, and this week Apple finally delivered one. And while it certainly impressed many of us (myself included), there was also the inevitable pushback from those who felt the new machine was just too rich for their blood.

The new system features an entirely new design that pays homage to the original PowerMac G5. At the same time, it somehow also feels like it’s from the future. It’s significantly larger than the previous MacPro model (which I’m currently running), allowing for incredible amounts of power, speed, and expandability. 

Maxed out, the system can utilize a 28 core processor, 1.5TB of memory, 4 AMD GPUs, and an Afterburner ProRes card that will play back 12 streams of 4K raw simultaneously. It’s an absolute beast.

The tower is designed to be paired with Apple’s new Pro Display XDR – A 32” Retina display with 6K resolution, and up to 1600 nits of brightness, which is almost unheard of.

The Mac Pro starts at $6000 for a base model and the display will run you another $6000 – at least once you include the $1000 stand that it’s sold with. 

There’s no denying that both products are priced high, as you might imagine given their quality and Apple’s pricing structure overall.

For some, the cost is entirely justified – I would very much fall into that category. But many others criticize the system for being overpriced, and ultimately reject it entirely on that basis.

I’ve heard more praise than criticism overall, but have encountered at least a few people who seem almost furious about the pricing.

Their argument is centered around an assessment of price vs. specs, in particular on the base model Mac Pro.

On paper, the $6000 entry level Mac Pro doesn’t make sense to them. They don’t like that it (only) has an 8 core processor or an AMD 580x graphics card. They feel they could build a “better computer” for $2000… And maybe they could, for their purposes at least.

But for others, the $6000 price is completely reasonable. After all, if raw specs were the only considerations when purchasing a product, many companies in the tech space would be out of business.

Who would buy a $10,000 Leica camera when they could buy a $500 camera from Best Buy with more megapixels? Many would, apparently.

Particularly those who find value in the build quality of the camera, the color reproduction, the customer care, and the experience that it gives them in the field. That’s why companies like Leica or Apple can thrive. They don’t have to appeal to everyone, just to those people who share their values.

Personally, I am someone who values my time tremendously. Apple products have proven to save me time both by operating incredibly reliably, and by requiring virtually no service for many years. That alone often justifies the cost premium for me when purchasing their products.

They also enhance my ability to make a living. My (now 5 year old) Mac Pro continues to power through project after project with no signs of slowing down. It has singularity processed thousands of hours of content for my clients, and in turn generated a constant revenue stream for myself and my production company.

Could I have done all of this on a Hackintosh or a PC? Maybe… But for me, it wouldn’t be worth risking reliability to save a few bucks up front.

But with respect to the new Mac Pro, it’s not just reliability that warrants the $6000 starting price. The physical build of the machine, its modularity, expandability, design, and real world performance all play a big part too.

Each of these variables will have a huge impact on the user experience while running the machine, not to mention raw performance. 

I would wager that even a base model Mac Pro (with 8 cores) will easily outperform its PC equivalent. Its thermal system alone would likely push it over the edge – it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

That said, in the real world I don’t think we’ll find a ton of new 8 core Mac pros. They will exist as an entry level option, but most professionals who can afford to spend $6K on the tower will likely be happy to spend more for additional processing and graphics power.

Post-houses, large facilities, and freelancers working on higher end projects will likely pony up the extra $$$ for a 16-core, or maybe even a 28-core machine. To working professionals who actually need that power, the extra cost will be a non-issue. It will allow them to blaze through projects and potentially take on more volume and scale.

Prosumers on the other hand will likely find any variation of the Mac Pro too expensive, and will probably be better served with an iMac Pro or similar. Corporate production companies, wedding videographers, or independent filmmakers don’t necessarily need the power the new Mac Pro offers. It would certainly help their workflows in some way, but perhaps not enough to justify making such a big spend.

The same logic applies to Apple’s Pro Display XDR. Consumers and (some) prosumers will find it overpriced, while professionals who can truly benefit from the technology will be happy to pay for it. That’s kind of how it’s always been with Apple.

From where I stand, I think the new Mac Pro is not only an incredible technical achievement in and of itself, but also represents a positive step for Apple as a whole.

Over the years Apple has been criticized for forgetting the professionals – a market that they served so effectively for so many years. But in light of what we’re seeing with the new Mac Pro, I’d say that argument is dead in the water.

The same people who were upset at Apple for not releasing a new pro-level computer, are now just as upset that it has arrived… They wanted a pro-level machine but didn’t want to pay professional prices. Some people will never be satisfied.

But meanwhile, the rest of us are happy to see Apple moving in such a great direction. Not all of us will need the new Mac Pro or even be able to afford one, but at least we have the option. And who knows, maybe we’ll see a more affordable version down the line – a Mac Pro Mini perhaps.

In the future, I’ll be sure to share some follow up thoughts once I’ve had time to test out the machine in the real world. For now, let me know what you think of the new Mac Pro in the comments below.

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The post My Thoughts On Apple’s Brand New Mac Pro & Why The Hefty Price Tag Is Justified appeared first on Noam Kroll.

http://noamkroll.com/my-thoughts-on-apples-brand-new-mac-pro-why-the-hefty-price-tag-is-justified/

[summylise]

Erasing the Stigma: Fanfiction as Legitimate Form of Literature

Remember this post from a few weeks ago that got a ton of notes (which I am STOKED about)? Well...I just submitted the final draft!! I figured you guys would want to see what your responses amounted to so here it is!! If you’d like to share it with others (especially those who look down at fanfiction) go ahead!! I’d love to spread the word more~~

(Oh! and here is where you can access the original formatted with the works cited essay)

      Erasing the Stigma: Fanfiction as Legitimate Form of Literature

Two writers type on a desktop computer. One sits cross-legged in a dark room lit only by a single, smooth Mac surrounded by sheets of character references, thesauruses, dictionaries, and the occasional motivational quote. The other in a similar position but at their local Panera with nothing but their school laptop open to a few wikis, Thesaurus.com, and maybe some calming music. Both bite their lip as the words fail to transfer to screen. Both stress about the possible response to their pieces. A few hours later and they are ready to submit. The first contacts their agent who then contacts a few others. Days, weeks, months pass and the first writer still hasn’t heard back from their agent. The second author uploads their file as soon as they finish typing the last word, sometimes in an email to their beta (or their editor from the same fan-base), other times directly to the site. Days, weeks, months pass and the second author has already cranked out more chapters, received a handful of reviews, and has gained many followers. The difference? The second person uploaded theirs to Fanfiction.net and is looked down upon by most of society. There has often been a stigma associated with the term “fanfiction”, as if it was a disease or something others look down upon. Yet many see it as a creative outlet and something that allows them to fully express themselves in a way that formal writing or writing a physical book cannot. Some oppose the fact that fanfiction, stories written about video games, movies, television shows, etc., are forms of literature and say that reading and writing is not “real” reading or writing. They even may go as far to say that fanfics serve no outside purpose and has no content. While some stories may be lacking in the grammatical or logical correctness, fanfiction as a whole is in fact a valid form of literature, especially when compared to formal reading and writing.

In order to discuss fanfiction, it needs to be defined. Fanfics are stories that are written by fans of a certain form of entertainment (whether that be musicals, books, animes, television shows, movies, etc.)(Lammers and Marsh). Fanfic authors are not paid, do not expect anything in return (except for the occasional review or two), and write just because they like the show and have an appreciation for writing. The fanfic author, formerly known as epeolatryx on Tumblr, writes, “People don’t pay for fanfiction. Reviews are our currency. Thank yous pay for the effort we spend on the next one,” (Xambedo). Another difference comes in the form of creativity, or rather, starting with nothing versus starting with a pre-existing base. Instead of creating entirely new universes with brand new characters, fanfic authors use existing characters, settings, and plots from existing medias to generate their own stories. Some of these stories even become so popular that they end up published due to a uniqueness they had despite being based on something else. The After series by Anna Todd, a One Direction fanfic, began on Wattpad, a free, digital publishing service, and became a published novel that is going to be made into a movie (Contrera). Granted, Todd had to change the names of the band mates in order to avoid copyright infringement but this successful story still began as fanfiction. Other fanfictions include The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Ella Enchanted, and many more that do not seem obvious to the naked eye. The only difference between stories on sites like Fanfiction.net and the ones listed above are that the second are considered “actual books” or “real reading” whereas the first are not. It all comes down to what makes up real literature.

Literature is defined as “any piece of writing that can claim that it has—in some way—artistic beauty” according to Richard Jewell, author of Experiencing the Humanities. However, he later states that items such as bullet points and grocery lists would not count as they are not artistic and are only meant to serve as lists rather than actual pieces. In his textbook, he states all of the qualities that make literature and claims that if a piece were to include those attributes, that it would be considered literature. Those three attributes are creative description, characters, and plot (Jewell). All of those are included in fanfiction which are just stories created using non-original characters. Based on these requirements, fanfiction would factually be regarded as literature. Not only does fanfiction count technically as literature, but the process is the same.

Fanfiction should also be viewed through a newer learning term known as the multiliteracy framework. Multiliteracies are forms of reading or writing that incorporate more than just a pen and an idea; they explain how different cultural mediums, forms of communication, and compositional variety come together to create a piece (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 559). Three main branches of this framework can specifically be applied to fanfiction: multimodality, intertextuality, and hybridity.

Multimodality involves the “integration of various Designs such as visual, linguistic, and audio in one text…” (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 561). In regards to fanfiction, authors often employ these three attributes in order to entertain their readers and make their story more enjoyable. In my experience as a fanfic writer and reader, we authors show pictures or fanarts that we have created or have had created for us, find music or sound effects to serve as the background to our stories, and alter their fonts to evoke a stronger meaning (such as italicizing thoughts). By doing so, we are incorporating many different elements into one to create a diverse and interesting final product.

The second concept is that of intertextuality. Intertextuality are the “relationships and references between and among texts. Fanfiction is the crossing of original ideas with those of pre-existing characters and features which, in a sense, is exactly what intertextuality is. The connection between two sources doesn’t have to be strictly between two written pieces; Chandler-Olcott and Mahar explain that it can also occur between fanfiction and reality. The authors describe a fanfic the girls they studied wrote that involved deep, psychological questions such as a woman’s place in the world and heterosexual relationships despite the girls still being in middle school. The authors say, “Viewing rhetorical moves like these from the perspective of the Multiliteracies framework helped us to appreciate how complicated, and even sophisticated, the girls’ fanfics often were,” (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 563). The two fanfic authors were able to pull from different forms of “text” in order to create a unique and thought provoking piece by using the concept of intertextuality.

Finally, hybridity is the creation of new ideas by picking and choosing specific parts of different mediums and combining them in a unique and sometimes never before seen way. Fanfics tend to grab from many different areas such as different genres and different story structures. When I go to publish a work of mine on Fanfiction.net, it prompts me to select two different genres before I can continue. Much like published books, fanfictions mix many genres together such as adventure, romance, comedy, etc. in order to create a successful and unique piece. However, fanfictions differ from books immensely when it comes to story structure. In fanfics, there tends to be a lack of an exposition or any explanation, description, or background of the story; the author jumps right in (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 564). Fanfic authors choose to not add an exposition because they know that their audience knows almost everything about their characters: their physical attributes, their history, their personalities, their hopes and fears (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 564). By neglecting to include an intro and picking multiple genres with which to base their stories on, fanfic authors rely very heavily on the concept of hybridity. Creating a hybrid of literature tends to have consequences, though not the ones that society may expect.

Fanfictions are a new branch of reading and writing that not only counts structurally, subjectively, and scholarly as a form of literature but also, much like its published counterparts, leaves an impression. In my survey of over two-hundred people, I found that around 53.59% of respondents had connected with new people they otherwise would not have met through fanfiction, whether it was reading or writing. This is due to the collaboration and connection with authors and readers via the follow, favorite, review or comment ability on Fanfiction.net that allows people to say how a certain chapter made them feel, make assumptions on future chapters, and offer suggestions for future chapters. Social media also plays a role in connecting readers and writers. On the popular social media site, Tumblr, many fanfic authors publish their stories in order to further spread their work across their fandoms (or domains in which fans from the same genre congregate). This allows the fan-base to actually contact the author on a more personal level rather than just via the comment section.

In addition, fanfiction affect the connection between each other but it also changes one’s reading and writing habits. Motoko Rich’s claim that student standardized reading scores have steadily declined due to online reading (Rich 1). However, measuring one’s aptitude for test taking does not translate to their inclination towards reading. A psychology professor at Michigan State, Linda A. Jackson, agrees when talking about the results of giving low income students internet access: “[The students] were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time… Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading,” (qtd. in Rich). I have also found that fanfiction actually increases a reader's want to read by means of the survey I conducted. 75.95% of respondents say that they are more motivated to read fanfiction than actual books, which in turn makes it easier for them to read more.“Books are a big time commitment for something I might not like. With fanfiction, I get something I’m already familiar with and will know I’ll enjoy, and they’re much shorter,” said a respondent to my survey. This is because in published works, the author has to include an exposition where they describe the characters and setting. In fanfiction, since it’s based on a world that already exists, the readers already know what the characters and setting look like so the author can jump right into writing their story. Reading online not only increases one’s wish to read, but also improves their writing as well. According to the study done by Jayne C. Lammers and Valerie L. Marsh titled “Going Public”, the young author they had longitudinally studied said that fanfiction had allowed her to stay anonymous and therefore felt more willing to share her works with others than if they had known who she was (Lammers and Marsh 281). By being anonymous, fanfic authors are able to express themselves and produce pieces that they otherwise may not have shared which allows them to further grow as a writer. A fanfiction writer who took my survey said the following:

Real writing, to me, is writing that makes us grow both as readers and writers. When I first started writing, it was through fanfiction. I was horrid at first. But fanfiction gave me a supportive, eager community to be able to continue producing work and subsequently grow into the writer that I am today. Therefore, I can confidently say that fanfiction is a valid alternative to reading and writing.

With the practice of writing fanfiction and support of the community, this author was able to make a name for themselves and eventually grow into the writer as seen above. A writer that may either turn into a published author or a fanfiction author.

[eldritchsurveys]

954.

5k Survey LII

2651. Do you think that most people have the qualities you look for in friends/intimate relationships or do you feel alienated? >> I don’t know. I always feel alienated, but it’s difficult to pinpoint exact reasons for that. Most of the time I default to assuming that it’s me that doesn’t have the qualities required for friendships. 2652. Are you very critical: of others? of yourself? >> I can be exceedingly critical of myself; less so of others, but I can be critical of them too. I’d prefer not to be critical of anyone, but the nature of my inner monologue isn’t exactly under my control all the time. 2653. Is there such a thing as expecting too much? >> I’d imagine so. 2654. Would you rather take an hour lunch break or skip lunch and get out of work early? >> --- 2655. Do you believe that happiness is equal to fakeness? shallowness?joy? something good that happens? an attitude you have inside no matter what happens? >> It’s weird to me that happiness is the only emotion that people seem to have all these varying ideas about. I don’t think it’s any more remarkable or interesting than any other emotion, but this is the one that gets all the attention. I think it’s also because happiness got conflated with all these other lofty ideas like “inner peace” and “equanimity”, which doesn’t really make any sense to me.

2656. Can you control your emotions? have you ever tried? >> Of course I can’t control my emotions; my nervous system is responsible for my emotional response to things. My actions in response to and my thoughts about my emotions are much more conscious functions, so that’s what I focus on learning to control. 2657. Imagine you are 34 weeks pregnant. You are healthy and you didn't have any major problems in your pregnancy. Would you consider flying from the UK to Germany, which takes one hour, whithout a bad feeling that something could go wrong or the baby decides to come out earlier? >> You lost me at “imagine you are pregnant”. 2658. How long do you think it would take you to jog a mile? >> A long time, because I’d actually spend most of it walking. Fuck jogging. 2659. Word assciation: twilight: Vampires. >:3 garden: of Eden. warm: Sun. stars: Moon. crash: 1996 movie directed by David Cronenberg that I’m lowkey obsessed with. mold: Cheese. gold: Favourite colour. green: Meadow. lush: That soap store that smells way too strongly even from 10 feet away from the entrance. 2660. Picture a triangle: Quick! What color is it? Picture a square. Quick! What color is it? Picture a circle. Quick! What color is it? Why do you think you saw these shapes as these colors? >> *stares blankly* 2661. What things are endless? >> I don’t know what things are endless. I don’t think we can truly measure that, although we can come up with some fairly logical theories. 2662. Are you ever subtle? >> I mean, I guess. 2663. Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood...some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't conceive of your life without it? How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? How can you fully appreciate these moments, every moment, when it all seems limitless? ~Paul Bowles, except from The Sheltering Sky >> I imagine that’s not a question I’m supposed to have a ready answer to. It’s just something to think about, I guess. 2664. Do you never have an ordinary day? >> Most of my days are ordinary. For me, that is. 2665. Do you embrace every single thing you've never known? >> I don’t know what this means. 2666. Has anyone ever mistaken you for a satanist? >> Probably. It’s easy for people to see someone in all black and a metal band t-shirt and automatically assume a great number of things about them. 2667. Can stress sometimes be good? >> Yep. 2668. Write something random, just whatever flows out of your head without thinking. Forget punctuation just try to type as fast as you think: >> No. 2669. Are you a musical snob? How about a film snob? >> I’m not a snob, period. 2670. When you were in school did you learn to think or repeat? >> Meh. 2671. Do you have everything you need to be happy? If not, what is missing? >> All I need to be happy is a nervous system and brain that can create and process an emotional response that I can then interpret as “happiness”. 2672. Would you take a very casualy dropped 'maybe I should just kill myself' as a warning ssign? >> You know, it’s pretty hard to say, these days. Casual suicide jokes have become a bit more commonplace than they were in previous generations. I’ve said “I’m going to jump off the balcony” in response to just... being slightly overwhelmed by noise. Although I should probably stop saying shit like that, to be fair. There’s got to be less dramatic and potentially disturbing ways to express myself. 2673. What does the word 'ironic' mean? Can you give an exaple of an ironic situation? >> May I introduce you to a website called dictionary.com-- 2674. What did you see today that was beautiful in an ordinary way? >> I don’t know. 2675. Have you ever been on the edge of the night? >> I don’t know what that means, so I can’t say. 2676. Do you feel oppressed in some way? >> Not, like, at this moment. 2677. Who do you think shot JFK? Who do you think shot Martin Luthar King? Why do you think they got shot? >> I assume the people that were named as the killers are the killers, because I have no real reason to assume otherwise. I think they got shot because they stood for something that the shooters didn’t, and the shooters decided to take drastic measures to prevent the social change they felt threatened by. 2679. Are you aware that although only about 14 percent of the american total population is black, that about 70 percent of the people in jail in america are black? Why do you think that is? What conclusion can you draw based on this? >> Yes, I’m aware of that. As a Black person, it’s hard to avoid learning that fact at some point. As far as why I think that is, I know why it is. The conclusion that I draw is that racial profiling is a thing and our communities have always been targets for systemic oppression by some form or another. 2678. Do you think that the culture you live in is completely open to all ideas and forms of expression? >> The country I live in is definitely not completely open to all ideas and forms of expression, and that manifests itself in a variety of ways. 2680. What do you think of the character (muppet) on sesame street that has aids and should this kind of a theme be explored in children's television? >> Of course that theme should be explored in children’s television. 2681. Are you dyslexic? >> No. 2682, Can you construct a bong out of: household objects? an apple? your cat? >> I’ve participated in some stoner engineering in my time, lol. Don’t know about the cat, though. 2683. Starwars, star trek or star gate? >> Stargate! <3 2684. Windows or mac? >> Windows is what I use, for better or worse. 2685. Do you start conversations or wait for other people to start them? >> Either? 2686. How many phallac symbols can you think of? >> I’m sure I could think of a lot of phallic symbols if I put my mind to it, but I’d rather not at this moment. 2687. Would you but tickets to see the top ten american idols sing live? >> No. 2688. A bird may love a fish...but where would they live? >> I don’t see why they have to live together at all. 2689. Are you a hologram or a misfit? >> What? 2690. How are you oriented sexually? Do you agree with the people who say that everyone is bi-sexual even if they don't want to admit it? >> I’m oriented against outworld sex. I don’t agree with the people who say that everyone is bisexual, because that’s one hell of a way to invalidate the experiences of millions of people. 2691. If you are the only human on the planet of the apes do you have sex with an ape? >> --- 2692. If you aare making out with a sex someone and you reach down and find they have a fish tail instead of legs do you still fool around with them? >> *sigh* 2693. Does superman wear kryptonite condoms? >> --- 2694. Do you know exactly where you are? Do you know the meaning of it all? Do you know the distance to the sun? Do you know the echo that is love? >> The longer this survey goes, the more esoteric the questions get... 2694. Do you believe you are: extraordinary? Blessed? Cursed? Won? >> Wait, that last one makes no sense... 2695. What are you doing this weekend? >> I assume the same thing I do most weekends -- go grocery shopping on Saturday, maybe go to the park meetup Saturday afternoon if it’s happening, and do laundry on Sunday. I’m not sure what we’re doing Monday, which is part of the weekend this time because of Labor Day. 2696. Do you believe that black people should get money to make up for their previous enslavement? Do you believe that all oppressed people should get money to make up for their oppression? >> I think reparations are probably a drop-in-the-bucket type of solution; I’d rather see actual change being made in the way this country is run and the way we are treated in society rather than just be given a lump sum of money as some kind of “apology”. That’s such a capitalistic kind of apology, too, lmao. Here’s some money, take it and don’t complain. Meanwhile, we’re still gonna literally gun you all down in the streets with impunity :) 2697. What's a quagmire? >> I’m not Google. 2698. Is philosophy a science or can everyone have their own philosophy? >> Er, philosophy isn’t a science, period. Go ahead and try to apply the scientific method to a work of philosophy. 2699. Are you a big fish in a small pond? >> I’m not a fish. 2700. Would you like to read an entire novel written in stream of consiousness form? >> Probably not.

[the-firebird69]

Expirement

And the prison set up that we told you about we and the prisoners and questioned them regarding me hostage situation and they will find out for wanting to hold me hostage and the chamber very aggressive you trying to harm someone who looks exactly like me when questioned after was the only Saturday demanding to be set free my question is what kind of nut job should I say that after finding out that it wasn't really me there and they have nothing the answer is you nut jobs do it every day even though its me

Zues

after that I say nothing now you're messing with his computer phone all the time as well even though you have no idea what the answer is to an important question to answer that we have it's so confusing there we have to come in there and grab you as we did today anyways my grandson's name is stuff and explains a lot of it but not your Maniac attitude you have a weird Maniac attitude I sure don't care about anything you just want to bother me I mean bother him and bothering and bother. want to find out today was your unwilling to listen to any lesson that applies to you regardless of what it is or what the outcome is and you're sitting here ways to do nothing until led to do it it's very weird you have no set path no sent goals only try to grab them and it never succeed in any way.

Why you mess with what I'm saying I don't understand change change the words and you try and modify them while I'm gone dictating like angry little retarded morons it's retarded or not you want to do you want to blame retarded people not Chinese people I don't care about you retarded idiot Max or non retarded retarded Max you're getting jumped out by the trillions every day so you'll be gone I guess that's what you want that's what I want and I'm getting it for free does it cost me a dime. What you trying to do is to get down to a group which would kidnap me and that's what mcdowney wants to do and that was his plan to have one group do it is Mac Daddy's failure and is continuing to fail and he understands his failing and your stance cork why and he's not doing anything logically to respond to his failure

Zues

And see this after they get the answer they looking for in captivity now you know what it is and we know you know how it works but we don't care I'm going to keep trying over and over and over how many times you say why don't you stop making sense because it's on our way what we say is you're offended by the Chinese and you're such assholes that you do it all day long if you mentions it because you're suicidal pieces of crap and we don't want you near him at all in the Chinese can try and get here but we filled in the canals because they're so goddamn annoying and blame our Chinese just like you want so we cut you both off you were cutting the ruskies off because they're making it happen and the Africans were making it happen South America and Stewart as well but not as badly and Europeans everybody not badly at all but you people Max macdaddy's are the worst the biggest offenders I'm going to cut you off because you're coming with these other girls you just replace the ones here and say nothing change a million times a day so many times that where you're saying doesn't make any sense or ring true at all are Tums words to most of your won't do anything about because they're too many words you tomorrow reading the answers here you're so annoying that were forced to defeat you and you're so annoying because you're stupid have you told people your plans so the people out there killing you to take over your friend one of your retarded or not they come from all over the world to do this glorious kidnapping and doomsday thing here don't believe anything about pyramids I don't believe anything about Giants or aliens none of it at all they don't believe that anybody of there is over there Mac or forgs. are bombing at all in any way whatsoever. they all think it's the people here as you never change you're always the same characters The shield that you're powerful the coming here now by the trillions no overwhelm you and then will overwhelm our system and not allowing them here in any way we cannot stop them from getting here because you're such assholes you come up and demands we stop them after you do all this dumbass crap to them and we have absolutely no reason to do that and we hate you so much we only have a few more things to say it's lights out for all of you we can't stand you this gay boy BGA enough time swather practically everybody on Earth and we don't understand why you can't figure out we're killing you because of him and this other idiot Justin and you don't seem to care so I'm going to call all of you in and ask you why you don't care about getting yourself killed all day long every day over and over and over you see people die every single time that they do what you're doing and in captivity you all stop immediately when you noticed something different you start doing to him she sent him and some of that looks like him this kind of like this we're not there so him bothering one of us like maniacs whenever his value

And you're so annoying we know who you are we're coming to get you now what is it about that you don't understand same to you because we're doing it to you it doesn't matter if you have an attitude about it you're going to die because you're doing it and then you say we can't do it at all as if you were a complete absolute idiot I know my value stupid m*********** yours is non- such that I can kill you with just mentioning you do you ever understand English loser is it too much for you to ask you to be quiet to try a little to save your life so you don't get your brains blown out all over your wall is it really too much these people here gets shot almost every day some of them know like Justin continue to do it all the time it'll go somewhere else and he'll let some dead and survived they stay here and die almost several times a day because they're dumb it's not what smart people do

Thor

Zues

I want to DJ a completely crushed tonight gone

Zues

We shall

Thor

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Warning: These 12 Psychological Triggers Will Instantly Skyrocket Your Affiliate Sales

I have a confession to make. I just cannot resist buying that extra chocolate bar while paying for my grocery at the cash counter of my local superstore. Or taking the offer to upgrade my Big Mac meal even though I can rarely eat the regular sized one. Or going for the large Latte at the coffee shop even when I struggle to drink to the regular size. Even if I don’t need it, even if I don’t plan to buy it, even if I try not to buy it. I still buy them. Every single time. And the store owner knows it. In fact, he knows I’m not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of people like me all over the world. Which is why retail stores everywhere make extra sales by taking advantage of impulse buying and upselling. That right there is a practical example of how understanding human psychology and emotions can help you drive more action and boost sales. Sales, in fact, is all about psychology. Research shows that 8 out of 10 buying decisions are based on emotions, not logic.   Source: Salesforce   Buying that extra chocolate bar doesn’t make sense. Upgrading to an even bigger coffee isn’t logical. Taking a slightly larger burger meal that is even more unhealthy even when I’m not that hungry is just dumb. But I still do it. Thousands of people do it. Because sales are driven by emotions. As an affiliate marketer, the more you understand human psychology the better you’ll get at driving more conversions, closing more sales and banking higher commissions. That’s the difference between you and super-successful affiliate marketers. They understand human psychology and know how to use emotions to their advantage. But I’m not here to turn you into a psychologist or a hypnotist. Can’t do it with just one article. But I can share a few psychological triggers that you can apply to your affiliate and online marketing strategy and immediately see results. Don’t believe me? Keep reading (with the intention to take action).   What You’ll Learn In This Post How to convince people to buy from you even if they don’t need your product The simple technique that triggers lazy people into action How to help your prospects overcome purchase anxiety How smart marketers increase repeat sales   1. Scare Your Prospects Into Take Action (…That Benefits Them) Fear is a powerful emotion that drives many of the decisions we make in our daily lives. When fear takes over, we look for safety. This has a very real impact on businesses and buyer purchase decisions. For example, The FBI reported that gun sales went up by 12.3% in Florida and 3.4% all over USA immediately after the deadly Parkland school shooting incident. Advertisers and marketers routinely use fear in their campaigns to drive more sales, like this advertisement for example.     Like it or not, but these campaigns usually work because people don’t act rationally when they’re afraid. Here’s another example of a public service campaign using fear to convince motorcyclists to wear helmets.   Source: AIP Foundation   But there are other, not so dark, ways to use fear in your marketing campaigns. As an affiliate marketer, you can play on your audience’s fear of missing out (FOMO) to drive more sales. Studies suggest that around 69% of millennials experience FOMO while using the internet and 60% of them make reactive purchases mainly driven by fear of missing out on a good deal. Booking.com uses this technique in a very subtle but effective way.     Using one-time offers (OTO) in a sales funnel is another example of how affiliate marketers use fear. OTO’s are heavily discounted deals that affiliate marketers offer if someone buys their main product. Marketers also frequently use limited time offers and discounts to scare their audience into taking action. I get these kinds of emails all the time.     Here’s another one     Marketers keep doing this and it works. However, use fear with caution. Because using it excessively, and not actually living up to your promise, hurts your credibility and makes your message ineffective. Fake Fear with bullsh*t scarcity and deadlines that don’t really exist aren’t cool. They just make you look scammy and your audience lose faith in you, so use fear in a respectable and honest way.   2. Demonstrate Contrast To Shake Your Buyer I often say this in my posts that people don’t buy products. They buy better versions of themselves. They buy a product because they believe it’ll take them from their existing state to a better and more desirable state. It’ll solve a problem or make them happier or richer or healthier.   Source: DigitalMarketer   Your job as a marketer is to show how your product can improve the life of your buyer. Using contrasts is a great way to do that. Adding contrast to your marketing message simply means that you show the “before” and “after” state of your buyer in the same picture. You make them dream and show them how your product will drastically improve their current state or protect them from an undesirable situation. For example, look at this pop-up that Chelsea (former staff writer at NicheHacks) uses on her copywriting website     In just a couple of sentences (from meeehhh to Holy Sh*t) she gets her point across and makes her prospects dream. Here’s an even better example of using visuals to demonstrate the “before” and “after” effect of your offer.     The core benefit of this traffic alert app is that it saves time and gets you home faster. But instead of focusing on its features this ad makes the buyer dream. It shows them how their lives would improve by using this app. That’s the power of contrast.   3. Use Their Greed To Your Advantage “You never get enough of what you don’t really want!” I recently read this somewhere and it really hit me hard. Think about it. People who’re already rich, want to become richer. Those with power, want more power. It’s a never-ending desire that’s mainly driven by greed. And we all have it to different extents. We’re all greedy by instinct, just admit it. That’s why we’re still drawn to “Buy One Get One Free!” offers despite every brand on the planet using them. In fact, almost all marketing is driven by greed to a large extent. But how can you use this emotion to your advantage as an affiliate marketer? Just look around, most marketers are already doing it. For example, almost every affiliate marketer I know offers bonuses and extras while promoting digital products. Here’s an old email I got from Stuart during one of his product promotions.     You can find the same technique in action on most digital product sales pages     Even Amazon uses it     But you don’t always have to offer bonuses or free products to take advantage of greed in your prospects. If you can prove that the value of your product is significantly higher than the price you’re asking for, you can still trigger the same emotion and make users take action. For example, this $1 sign up offer from Digital Marketer is unbelievably attractive and clearly offers MUCH more value than its price.     There are numerous other ways you can use this particular emotion in your marketing strategy.   4. Accelerate Sales by Using Scarcity & Urgency Using scarcity is a great way to create a sense of urgency in your visitors. And urgency is the catalyst that speeds up the buying process and forces your prospects to take action. All successful physical and digital product sellers do it. Like Amazon, for example     The subject line of this email by Jeff Walker is another good example     Very intelligently, Jeff has created a subject line that creates a sense of urgency in the readers. You can apply the same to your “calls to action” buttons and blog post headlines as well Use words like “Now”, “Hurry”, “Quick” to make your calls to action more urgent. For example, instead of using “Join Us” use “Join Us Now!”   Source: TechWyse   Product creators and affiliate marketers use scarcity in almost every campaign. For example, why do you think people have limited time product launches?     Can’t they just leave registration open forever? Of course, they can. But people are lazy and smart marketers know it. If left to our own devices with no urgency or deadlines most of us will never make a decision and instead put it off till “later” or a “better time” which never comes. And that isn’t good for your prospect in getting their problems solved (the quicker the better) or for you as a business who needs to make sales to pay your bills. Which is why a fundamental rule of marketing is that there must always be urgency and there must always be a deadline.   5. Use Novelty To Attract Repeat Buyers All of us like new things. A new iPhone every year, a new laptop, a new car every few years. The list goes on and on. Do we really need a new iPhone every year? No Is there really something drastically different in every new iPhone from the previous version? No Does it make our lives significantly better than the previous version? No Then why do we buy it? The answer lies in a research by Dr. Emrah Duzel. He concluded that we like things that are new and novel because they trigger a dopamine release (a chemical in the brain that makes us happy and motivated). In marketing terms, this means that you constantly need to renew and refresh your message. Why else do you think Pepsi keeps coming up with new slogans every year? This is exactly the reason why marketers keep releasing new versions and upgrades of their products every few months. They sell the same old products with minor upgrades But people buy them again and again because they perceive them to be valuable. Stuart’s product “Find Your Niche in 7 Easy Steps” is a very good example of this phenomenon Every year Stuart makes this product available for download for a few days after making minor updates to its content. Yet, the same people who already have this product ask him whether they should buy it again or not. In fact, many of them do. This makes no sense. Stuart even tells them NOT to buy it again because if they had actually followed the instructions in that eBook they would’ve unearthed a million niches in 1 year. But they didn’t take action. Yet, when the product becomes available again with minor updates, they’re ready to buy it again thinking that somehow buying it a second time will help them when all they have to do is take action on the first version they have. Insane, right? But that’s human psychology for you. People perceive new things as better. Take advantage of this behaviour in an ethical way. Don’t trick people into buying the same product over and over again if there’s no changes in it. Though at the same time if you’ve updated the product and there’s fresh information in there then there’s no harm in someone purchasing to get the updated info. Here’s another example. Over the last couple of years, you might’ve noticed many bloggers replace blog post date with “Last Updated”     What does this do to your brain? Even if there’s no change in the content, you immediately think this information is more up to date and valuable. If the same post had its original publish date of 2016, it might’ve appeared outdated. So here’s the marketing takeaway for you. Keep renewing and updating your products and affiliate offers. Even if you’re promoting the same products, promote them in different ways and make them look new.   6. Hack Your Prospects’ Minds With the Halo Effect In simple words, Halo Effect refers to our tendency of judging a person’s unknown qualities based on our knowledge of a known quality. For example, if someone’s physically attractive, we assume they’re intelligent as well.   Source: VeryWellMind   Just because a marketer is successful at big product launches and promotions, we assume he’s also more intelligent, credible, and happier than us. It’s not always true, of course. But that’s how the human brain works. And you need to take advantage of it. It’s a well-known human behavior that advertisers and marketers have been using for years. Celebrity endorsements are the most common example of this. Brands associate themselves with celebrities because it makes them likable and more credible. So how does this practically impact you as an affiliate marketer? In several ways actually. The appearance of your product, its branding, presentation everything has an impact on how people perceive it. Even if your product is great and offers lots of value, people might perceive it as unreliable if your landing page isn’t professionally designed or if the product doesn’t have endorsements. On the contrary, if a well-known marketer launches a new product, people perceive it to be valuable even before exploring it. This is why a product that’s endorsed by the marketers usually has MUCH higher sales than a product with no endorsements. The same effect is in play when marketers borrow credibility from other reliable brands     The Halo Effect has a direct impact on your affiliate sales. For example, if a customer purchases a product you’re promoting and likes it, he’s much likelier to buy from you again even if your new product has nothing to do with his previous purchase. Based on his previous experience, the customer assumes that every product you promote is worth buying. So be careful about choosing your product promotions.   7. Use Reciprocity To Drive More Action No matter what news channels tell you, humans are still compassionate and kind beings at heart. This is evident from our universal behavior of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that when someone gives us something for free, we’re compelled to return the favor. You might’ve seen perfume sellers give free samples to everyone even before they buy anything. That’s reciprocity in action. When you get free perfume samples, you feel compelled to buy from the same shop. How does this translate into online marketing? Lead magnets! Lead magnets are free content resources that marketers give away to turn visitors into subscribers.     If you simply ask your website visitors to sign up to your email list, they won’t. But when you offer them a free content resource, they feel compelled to sign up. This is the same principle content marketing uses to generate sales. The article you’re reading right now took hours of research and cost Stuart several hundred dollars. Yet he’s given it away for free. His blog is full of actionable content and marketing advice that many people charge hundreds of dollars for. But he’s giving away for free. Is he stupid? No! When people keep consuming high-quality marketing content for free, guess who they’ll be buying from when Stuart launches a paid product. It’s a proven model that’s been working like a charm. Studies suggest that content marketing results in 88% and 67% more leads for B2B and B2C businesses respectively. Apply it to your affiliate marketing model as well. Give away free value and build trust. People will return the favor by opening their wallets to you.   8. Apply Reverse Psychology To Open Your Visitors’ Eyes You must’ve seen these pop-ups on different blogs     They’re everywhere. And they’re very effective. Partly because they’re so huge and in your face but mainly because of the reverse psychology used in their call to action. Here’s another one. This time it’s a slide-in box instead of a pop-up but the call to action is based on the same technique.     Why does this work so well? Because instead of the usual positive calls to action that mention desirable actions like “Join Now”, “Yes I’m in!”, “Please send me the eBook” etc. negative calls to action highlight undesirable outcomes. They highlight what the user is missing out on. Using reverse psychology opens the eyes of your visitors because it makes them realize what they’re missing out on. Using this technique increases the effectiveness of the positive call to action because the negative statement pushes people away. For example, in the two screenshots I’ve shared, how would feel clicking on  “No I’ve never had writer’s block” You’ll be reluctant, like most people. You can apply this technique to not only your email popups but also to your sales page copy and calls to action. I particularly liked a sales page that had the “Why This Is Not For You” section before “Why You Should Buy” Under that heading, the page had provocative copy that hits the readers hard. For example here’s one of the points I remember “This course is NOT for you if you’re and want everything to be spoon fed to you” “This is NOT for you if you’re short-sighted and greedy and just looking to make a quick buck instead of building a long-term and evergreen business” This copy is provocative And it’s designed to do exactly that. Because it pushes people towards the positive action and increases conversions.   9. Disrupt Then Reframe (DTR) To Change Perceptions DTR is a really interesting technique that you might already be using unconsciously in your daily life. But advertisers and marketers use it intentionally because it breaks down any mental barriers that stop people from taking action. The core idea behind this technique is that you rephrase the action that you want people to take in such a way that it appears unusual and easier. You disrupt their regular thought process and then reframe the same information in a way that the customer finds easy to accept. Sounds complex? Here’s popular experiment that’ll help you understand DTR. To test the effectiveness of DTR, a group of researchers tasked two teams of undergrads with door to door selling Christmas cards to benefit a charity. One team simply stated the price of the cards to their prospects which was $3. The other one, however, used the DTR technique. They disrupted the prospects’ perception by stating the price as 300 pennies instead of $3 and reframed by adding a small pitch “it’s a bargain” The results? The second team closed a whopping 70% sales as compared to the first team which sold to only 30%. How do you apply this to your affiliate marketing strategy? There are numerous ways. But here’s a really easy to understand example that I’ve seen many marketers do. Simple reframe your total product price into per day price, like this.   Source: Nickkolenda   Culligan used the same strategy to make its $29/month service look more affordable by pitching it as “less than a dollar per day”   Source: KissMetrics   This doesn’t change the price of your product, but it makes your prospects view the price differently. And research shows that they’re likelier to respond positively to it.   10. Use Social Proof To Relax Your Prospects This one’s pretty easy to understand and almost every marketer uses it. But I need to mention it because it’s so important. Using social proof is another way of borrowing credibility from others. You show your prospects that there are examples of people who’ve used your product and they love it. It comes in various forms. Most marketers use testimonials for social proof.     Others use case studies to demonstrate how people are benefiting from their products.     Even the number of subscribers or customers mentioned on a landing page is a form of social proof.     Using social proof not only gives credibility to your product but also eases the nerves of your prospects. It has a reassuring effect on most people which reduces their resistance to buying.   11. Apply Secrecy To Earn Big Bucks from Your Customers “My secret list building strategy revealed!” “The little-known strategy that brings millions of visitors every month to these websites” “5 secret money making methods millionaire marketers never share with their followers” I don’t know about you but I’m sick of these “secret” tactics. Yet, whenever I see a headline like this I click on it. As humans, we love to know secrets. Research shows that people feel closer to someone who shares secrets with them. It also gives them a sense of being important This is why private membership groups and exclusive gated content works so well. Take the example of our own Facebook Mastermind which almost 50,000 active members now. We promote it as an exclusive closed community of the best niche marketers in the world where newbies can interact with seasoned niche marketing experts, learn from their experiences and seek their guidance that is otherwise unavailable on other public forums. But you can’t join it unless you’re approved by the group admin. This instantly makes it desirable to new NicheHacks visitors because it gives them the impression of an exclusive value-driven closed community available to members only. This also fuels the subscriptions to our premium NicheHacks Insider Community, which is a paid membership program. To take advantage of this human behavior, promote secrecy in your sales content and try to make it look exclusive.     Or use it in your email subjects and headlines to increase CTR When your audience perceives something to be exclusive, they’re often prepared to pay a higher price for it. This is the reason why membership sites and subscription-based services have seen explosive growth over the last few years.   12. Have a Higher Purpose To Gain Unconditional Support Most people buy products because they benefit them in some way. They spend money on services or products that make them look good, solve a problem or generally make them happier. But most of us have certain causes, goals, or issues very close to our hearts. For example poverty eradication, or fight against mental illnesses, or gender equality, or animal rights etc. When brands or marketers tie their marketing strategy with a higher goal, people support them even if they don’t actually need the product. For example, veganism is a rising trend among millennials and many of them feel strongly about it. This shoe brand naturally appeals to them.     This perfectly ties in with the idea of starting a niche site or a niche business about something that people are passionate about. A topic that attracts people because they care about it, not just because they can make money from it. Like this niche site about vegan recipes (a topic that people are passionate about for a number of reasons – health, animal rights etc.)     Feed, an eCommerce retailer is another good example     Every Feed product you buy helps reduce hunger around the world.   This provides additional incentive to buyers who care about fighting global hunger and gives them satisfaction for contributing to a noble cause.   Are You Ready To Hypnotize Your Visitors? As I said at the start, selling is all about understanding human behavior and psychology. The more you apply it to your marketing strategy, the better you’ll get at making people take action. But for that to happen, you need to take action first. So take a good look at your existing marketing strategy, promotional emails, landing pages, and calls to action and apply the tricks that I’ve shared in this post. I’ll be waiting to hear your results in the comments. The post Warning: These 12 Psychological Triggers Will Instantly Skyrocket Your Affiliate Sales appeared first on NicheHacks. Read more: nichehacks.com http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/06/warning-these-12-psychological-triggers-will-instantly-skyrocket-your-affiliate-sales/

[the-connection]

It wasn't his knowledge of programme, his appeal, or anything remotely leadership-like that led to the vogue of Donald Trump. If anything, it was the serenity and willingness with which he returned himself into a walking meme, ended with a fandom busy composing fanfiction, supporter beliefs( i.e. stupid conspiracy ideologies ), and, of course, tons of bad fan skill. Now are some of the weirdest and wildest cases under the current Trumpian prowes motion for "youve got to" assimilate before they find their way into the National Portrait Gallery.

5

Deep Dream Trump Is Pure Nightmare Fuel

While computers are getting better at everything that sees humen so special( like opening doors ), there is one region where we'll ever using them to lick: logical thinking. After all, it's hard to have a sense of whimsy when a lost semicolon can return you into scrap. In detail, a very close we've get to causing computers a macrocosm of pure imagery is through "deep learning" -- software that simulated how our neutrons fire and is perhaps the future of neural networks. And like any good humans, we uttered computers the endow of invention, merely to spend it on monstrosities like this :P TAGEND

Chris Rodley That's why you don't share a teleporter with Muppets.

div >

This is a deep learning interpretation of one of Donald Trump's clas photos. And if you're wondering why Melania looks like Miss Piggy on her space to her third divorce, that's on purpose. This art is submitted in accordance with creator Chris Rodley plugging pictures of Donald Trump into a penetrating teach algorithm which was also "looking for portraits from Sesame Street . " The ensue is this hellscape of vacant speeches, googly gazes, and straying hands -- plus aspects from Sesame Street .

Chris Rodley Courtesy of Industrial Light and Horror.

It could be a lot worse, though. You could be looking at a video of Trump be converted into an awakened eldritch cruelty contending against the confines of our universe :P TAGEND

Though on the plus side, Trump's hair has never searched more in its element.

Eric Cheng/ YouTube Oh, like you've never had a wookiee sexuality dream.

This nightmare fuel was brought into our world by Eric Cheng, who said he established it by plugging a video of a Trump speech into a penetrating discover algorithm that was simultaneously thinking about Cthulhu. The elevation of Cthulhu influence was governed by the volume at which Trump was speaking. We're lucky that it was one of his quieter rantings. If it had been about minorities or women, that video might have accidentally opened a wormhole into the domain of the Elder Ones.

4

All Hail God-Emperor Trump ! div>

To a lot of internet manbabies, Trump is the ultimate badass. He's an ass-kicker and a risk-taker, a street fighter and shot-caller, the person who throws the Big Mac into Mack Daddy. Of track, in order to maintain that panorama of Trump, you have to constantly dismiss all of actuality . Fortunately, the internet boys help find a method to easily block out the pesky truth by replacing it with hardcore sci-fi fan story!

div >

Meet God-Emperor Trump, may his choked routes predominate for immortality. Located on the lore of the favourite tabletop gaming universe Warhammer 40,000 , which is set in a ludicrously dystopian future, the cruddy line-up of the internet is fitted with likeness of Trump as the iconic Emperor of Mankind, immortal sovereign of the human dominion wreaking his never-ending fighting to the undesirables. Feelings like parody, right? It isn't.

via The Flama

via The Flama His armor appears to be made from the Ark of the Covenant, which is suitable, since it performs us want to melt our faces off.

div >

Sure, it's pretty weird to pick an formidable divinity of fight as the avatar for a buster who applied alleged bone prodding as an excuse to get out of armed obedience, but that's where the full amounts of the disenchantment comes in.

via r/ Warhammer4 0k

Robokoboto/ Art Abyss Carrying the skulls of his own followers doesn't seem foreboding at all.

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Read Next

Kanye West Liking Trump Is The Most Kanye West Thing Ever

But the comparing isn't flattering for either line-up. Evidencing again that they have the cultural penetration of someone who's been in a lethargy since the '6 0s, Trump fanboys seem to not realize that this Emperor of Mankind is nothing more than a freakish ogre whose "shattered, crumbling form can no longer support life, " or that his ruler gave rise to "technological and cultural rights stagnation, and a regression into cruelty, superstition and religious obfuscation and intolerance." So God-Emperor Trump is based on some slither who conventions over a dystopia in which mindless, alien-hating militants sacrifice thousands daily to keep the bloated corpse of their despot governor departing. Maybe they did do their research after all.

And to introduce the cherry on the stupid neo-Nazi patty, the God-Emperor isn't, uhm ... white-hot. He was born in primary Anatolia( Turkey) in 8,000 BC. Meaning the web dictators have changed their white-hot supremacy superstar into a space-age Middle Eastern king.

Warhammer 40 k Oh yeah, this guy is totes going to preserve the white-hot race, you dolts.

3

The New "Alt-Right" Cartoon Mascot Adoration Dressing Up As Trump

You once know about Pepe, the amiable comic book frog who became a hate emblem. But since Pepe has gone very mainstream, hardcore "alt-right" dudes have created a excellent mascot for the brand-new Trump age: a inadequately gleaned copyright infringement.

via Will Sommer/ Medium "Racist Frog, Reclining Nude"

This corpulent little shit-grinner is Groyper. No, that's not a Trump-inspired brand-new Pokemon( although we understand the fluster ). We're speak about Groyper the Frog, the MS Paint cartoon mascot for hardcore politicos . He even comes in countless cute clothings for love to frisk dress-up with( dog whistle sold separately ). There's Papa John Groyper :P TAGEND

via Slate "These boxes actually contain Thirsty Howie's."

div >

Hulk Hogan Groyper :P TAGEND

via Will Sommer/ Medium

Even a special edition "Are you upset more? " Burka Groyper :P TAGEND

via Slate Don't try to make sense of it. That action madness lies.

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But among the favorite spices of Groyper stands Trump Groyper, somehow glancing less slimy as a lumpy frog :P TAGEND

via Will Sommer/ Medium And the fake fuzz on the fake Trump-toad searches less nonsensical than the real whisker on the real Trump-golem.

So if you're wants to know why all the worst accounts on Twitter swopped up their avatars to this, that's why. It's obviously not because Matt Furie, the developer of Pepe, has started litigating the white-hot fastens off of any favourite enough site for copyright infraction. No, it's because Pepe isn't hot fairly anymore. Not like Groyper, who's too cool for clas -- art school, specifically.

Donald Trump/ Twitter

2

The Anti-Obama Oil Painter Now Envisions Trump Is The New Messiah

Jon McNaughton is perhaps one of history's greatest craftsmen. Not because he formed anything impressive or profound or thought-provoking, spirit, but because his manipulates are some of the goddamn funniest examples of religious right-wing bathos.

Jon McNaughton First and foremost, why would you plant a tree three feet in front a situate where people will be sitting?

This lovely painting, named You Are Not Forgotten , boasts Herr Conditioner and demonstrates that you can't form Trump look warm and attractiveness even if you proceed him yourself. But the real beauty of McNaughton's art lies in the fact that he's time a really, actually hacky government cartoonist with a better touch stroke recreation. He often boasts about the number of members of "symbols" he manages to stuff into a single canvas. Now, the topic is unity. That's why a not-that-keen eye can will distinguish that Everyman Trump is looming over a working-class clas( whom he's shafted) as they plant a flower( which he's fucking kill) in front of a gather of veterans and soldiers( whom he dishonors ), disabled population( whom he doesn't care about ), black people( whom he doesn't like ), many cabinet members( whom he's burnt ), police officers( whom he's reviled ), and laborers( whom he doesn't wage ).

div >

But McNaughton didn't establish his honour by paring half a dozen inches off of Trump's waist. He became a republican beloved by making drops on President Obama for a solid eight years. Here's his interpretation of Obama's domestic policy :P TAGEND

Jon McNaughton Did you acknowledge the 9/11 symbolism? The stuff that happened seven years before Obama was president, when a Republican was in office?

His foreign policy :P TAGEND

Jon McNaughton To be fair, Los Alamos does have a really nice golf course.

div >

His stance on Obamacare :P TAGEND

Jon McNaughton There vanishes the story for National Treasure 3.

And here again is that classic, peculiarity Obama trampling over the interests of the very same working man who Trump will afterwards save while all the good Republican presidents are yelling at him :P TAGEND

Jon McNaughton "But I wanted to flower a tree there ... "

div >

Man, Obama really seems like a cock in these likeness. We're astounded that the nuclear shell didn't change his golf waver, or that he escaped unharmed after dipping the Charter in napalm and rectifying it alight in his hands, although that's to be expected when you're Literally Satan. Their capabilities are absolutely interminable, as is his cruelty ... as demonstrated by that time he magnetism a soldier to feed a slice of a lesbian marriage cake.

Jon McNaughton "It's not even ice cream cake. Thanks, Obama."

Save us, President Trump! Save us from that deceitful pitch-black sn- oh, you already have.

Jon McNaughton There is an extremely prominent pennant advising against this very thing!

1

Barron Trump, Manga Star

While Trump himself has a awfully divisive kind of notoriety, the same can't be said about the Trump juveniles -- Ivanka, Donnie Jr ., and the one who looks like a hardboiled egg with a appearance gather on it. His spawn are nigh-universally taunted, incessantly putting their feet in those openings they can't ever seem to fully close. But one Trump kid is exempt from this sneer: Barron, the unassuming, sweet-looking 12 -year-old who actually has to live in the White House with his mom and dad. Becoming entertaining of a kid is not the most wonderful act to do, so two confidential masters have gone the other direction, trying to delve into the mind of this placid son and figuring out the ferment he was required to find from having the most powerful dreadful parent in the whole world -- in fabulous manga structure, natch.

Yuusuke Hori "At least it's not a prejudiced amphibian."

div >

This very melodramatic patch was affixed by master Yuusuke Hori right after Trump's inauguration. It pictures Barron in sparkly bishonen use with a name that speaks "My loud, riling dad is director, so the gentle unassuming life I demanded is fully over." It was only wanted as a goofy mockup handle, but because it came insanely favourite, we eventually got the for-realsies The Adventures Of Barron And His Loud-Mouthed President Father , i> and it's everything we've ever wanted.

Joy Ling Well, except for Trump not to be president, but still.

To all the non-otaku out there, TAOBAHLMPF ( created by Brooklyn-based artist Joy Ling) ensure Barron, who really exactly wants to "watch Netflix and play Pokemon, " teaming with Sasha and Malia Obama to solve the puzzle circumventing a "mysterious anomaly" that appeared after "his fathers" took office -- which is not a gracious nature alluding to Kellyanne Conway. We don't want to give away too many spoilers, but one of the center conflicts revolves around Barron trying to persuade his father to help gave happens right. Oh, that's right, Donald Jerwillickers Trump makes an appearance, or at least the DJT from the universe where he doesn't is argued that exert is a radical plan to sap his cherished bodily fluids.

Joy Ling "Please don't tell me which flui-" "Semen."

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing biography that you should definitely subscribe to . i>

Art is great for making some of the tension out, in case that's a concept you will be required to do in this day and age, so perhaps pick up some Bob Ross oil depicts ? b > i>

Support Cracked's journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you . b > i>

For more, check out 8 Hilariously Offensive Artworks Featuring Famous Presidents and 5 Unsettling Sub-Genres Of Fan Art Lurking On The Internet . b > i>

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere . b > i>

Read more: http :// www.cracked.com /~ ATAGEND

[softcarecs]

CPU Security Flaws 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' affect nearly Every Computer, Device

The Meltdown and Spectre are the bugs at a fundamental level which allow a critical information stored deep inside computer systems to be exposed.

Security researchers released official documentation; complete with nicknames and logos; of two major flaws found in nearly all modern central processing units, or CPUs. It is not a physical problem with the CPUs themselves, or a plain software bug you might find in an application like Word or Chrome. It is in between, at the level of the processors’ 'architectures', the way all the millions of transistors and logic units work together to carry out instructions. In modern architectures, there are inviolable spaces where data passes through in raw, unencrypted form, such as inside the kernel, the most central software unit in the architecture, or in system memory carefully set aside from other applications. This data has powerful protections to prevent it from being interfered with or even observed by other processes and applications. Meltdown and Spectre are two techniques researchers have discovered that circumvent those protections, exposing nearly any data the computer processes, such as passwords, proprietary information, or encrypted communications. Meltdown affects Intel processors, and works by breaking through the barrier that prevents applications from accessing arbitrary locations in kernel memory. Segregating and protecting memory spaces prevents applications from accidentally interfering with one another’s data, or malicious software from being able to see and modify it at will. Meltdown makes this fundamental process fundamentally unreliable. Spectre affects Intel, AMD, and ARM processors, broadening its reach to include mobile phones, embedded devices, and pretty much anything with a chip in it. Which, of course, is everything from thermostats to baby monitors now. It works differently from Meltdown; Spectre essentially tricks applications into accidentally disclosing information that would normally be inaccessible, safe inside their protected memory area. This is a trickier one to pull off, but because it’s based on an established practice in multiple chip architectures, it’s going to be even trickier to fix. Pretty much everybody is affected by these 2 flaws. Chips going back to 2011 were tested and found vulnerable, and theoretically it could affect processors as far back as those released in 1995. One would hope there aren’t too many of those in use, but we may be unpleasantly surprised on that count. Because Meltdown and Spectre are flaws at the architecture level, it doesn’t matter whether a computer or device is running Windows, OS X, Android, or something else — all software platforms are equally vulnerable. A huge variety of devices, from laptops to smartphones to servers, are therefore theoretically affected. The assumption going forward should be that any untested device should be considered vulnerable. Not only that, but Meltdown in particular could conceivably be applied to and across cloud platforms, where huge numbers of networked computers routinely share and transfer data among thousands or millions of users and instances. The good news is that the attack is easiest to perform by code being run by the machine itself; it’s not easy to pull this off remotely. So there’s that, at least. It can be fixed Only partially for now and it is going to take a while. Many, many devices are “affected” or “vulnerable” to these flaws, but that’s not the same thing as saying they’re totally open to attack. Intel, AMD, ARM and others have had months to create workarounds and “mitigations,” which is a polite way of saying “band-aids.” Meltdown can be fixed essentially by building a ber wall around the kernel; the technical term is “kernel page table isolation.” This solves the issue, but there’s a cost. Modern CPU architectures assume certain things about the way the kernel works and is accessed, and changing those things means that they won’t be able to operate at full capacity. The Meltdown fix may reduce the performance of Intel chips by as little as 5 percent or as much as 30 — but there will be some hit. Whatever it is, it’s better than the alternative. Spectre, on the other hand, is not likely to be fully fixed any time soon. The fact is that the practice that leads to this attack being possible is so hard-wired into processors that the researchers couldn’t find any way to totally avoid it. They list a few suggestions, but conclude: "While the stop-gap countermeasures described in the previous section may help limit practical exploits in the short term, there is currently no way to know whether a particular code construction is, or is not, safe across today’s processors – much less future designs." What will actually happen is hard to say, but there will likely be a flurry of updates that carry out various software hacks to protect against the most obvious and damaging attacks. Microsoft has already issued one for Windows; ARM has a set of mitigations for its affected chips; Amazon is updating its many servers. These updates may not be pretty, perhaps requiring changes that will break other software, drivers, and components. And all will likely involve degrading performance. A more permanent fix will require significant changes across the board — the circuit board, that is. Basic architecture choices that have been baked into our devices for years, even decades, will have to be rethought. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be fun. In the meantime companies are working at full capacity to minimize the apparent threat: “mitigations” that may or may not prevent some or all of the variant attacks. As usual, these patches will likely reach only a small subset of new, fast-updating users and devices, or those the company can update directly on its own. We will only know the efficacy of these measures by their performance in the real world. It’s worth noting that there won’t be a “recall.” If this flaw affected a single device, like the battery problems in Samsung’s phones a while back, a recall would make sense. But this is an issue that affects millions, perhaps billions of devices. A recall isn’t an option. It’s always a bit odd to hear that companies were informed of a major security flaw like this one months ago, as was the case with Meltdown and Spectre. This particular exploit has been under investigation for some time by researchers, and word of it trickled out in the form of small updates to various operating systems addressing a hitherto-undocumented security flaw. If the researchers just tweeted out the details when they discovered them, it would essentially be giving attackers access to that information at the same time as the companies that can fix the problem. Generally security investigators do what’s called responsible disclosure, contacting affected companies secretly, either as a simple courtesy or in order to collaborate on a solution. In this case Google contacted Intel several months ago, and no doubt others knew to some degree as well, since Microsoft issued patches to insiders well ahead of the public announcement, and Linux distributions were likewise addressing the issue even though the papers describing the flaw were not out yet. The plan would normally be that the affected company or companies would come up with a solution, quietly apply it, then announce both the flaw and the solution at the same time. And in fact that seems to be what was planned in this case. But smart reporting by The Register, which among others put together the disparate pieces, seems to have forced the hands of several billion-dollar companies. The companies scrambled to finalize their statements, addressing “inaccurate” media reports and hastily issuing patches and explanations that likely weren’t due until next week. While some may suggest that El Reg should have let things take their course, there’s a great deal to be said for not allowing the billion-dollar companies in question to completely control the narrative around a major issue like this. If the only version of the story we ever heard was one approved by their joint committee, things would likely have been painted in a different light. As the researchers put it at the end of the the Spectre paper: "The vulnerabilities in this paper, as well as many others, arise from a longstanding focus in the technology industry on maximizing performance. As a result, processors, compilers, device drivers, operating systems, and numerous other critical components have evolved compounding layers of complex optimizations that introduce security risks. As the costs of insecurity rise, these design choices need to be revisited, and in many cases alternate implementations optimized for security will be required." How do I protect myself? Fixes are in the works for Meltdown but probably aren’t available yet on all your devices: Firefox 57 (the latest) includes a fix, as do the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Edge for Windows 10. Google says it will roll out a fix with Chrome 64 which is due to be released on January 23rd. For Windows itself, this is where things get messy. Microsoft has issued an emergency security patch through Windows Update, but if you’re running third-party anti-virus software then it’s possible you won’t see that patch yet. Apple said that it released software updates to mitigate the Meltdown exploit for iOS, Macs, and the Apple TV in December and that further updates are forthcoming. Fixes for Spectre may require hardware changes, which could take years to roll out as people buy new devices. While you wait for fixes, the best thing you can do is to enable two-factor authentication, which uses login codes from your phone or email. Enable this on as many sensitive accounts as possible, create long passwords, and don’t reuse them. Also consider a password manager, which can create passwords for you (but make sure the manager itself is secure). These are just sound advice in general. Whether or not these specific flaws are taken advantage of by hackers, future ones certainly will be. Software fixes for Meltdown, when they come, may not be perfect: Patches for Meltdown could slow down computers in some cases by up to 30 percent. Andres Freund, a software developer, told the New York Times he had confirmed slowdown in testing on Linux machines. But some other experts say that that alarming figure will most likely only apply to servers and cloud services. That’s potentially bad news for many small- and medium-size businesses that rely on complex networks, but the big tech companies have had time to grapple with the problem and have the money to mitigate any effects on consumers. Don’t put off updating your devices because of fears of slowing them down. You are probably resigned by now to the malicious code panic cycle: A flaw is discovered or exploited, millions of sensitive personal data is/is not compromised, and we all push a few buttons to get the fix — and pray hackers ignore our helplessness. While the threat of these newly discovered flaws is still hypothetical, little technical knowhow may be needed to exploit Meltdown, in particular. All it could take is an annoying banner ad to compromise your device. You absolutely need to push those buttons. But the specter of hardware-level security flaws may not be lifted anytime soon. Credits: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/03/kernel-panic-what-are-meltdown-and-spectre-the-bugs-affecting-nearly-every-computer-and-device/ Read the full article

[loislaneinvestigatesauthors]

Jim Feast’s Long Day, Counting Tomorrow

1))) Why did you chose to write with a nonlinear structure? What does the novel gain as your characters move within time and space?

In looking over all my answers, I find I expressed much of what I have to say in answering this first question. So, bear with me, if the opening reply gets a bit long-winded. 

I believe that Freud’s theory of over-determination, which holds that a dream image will only appear if it has multiple causes pressing it to come to life, also applies to novels. In the present case, my choice to work with a non-linear narrative was over-determined by precursors I esteem, the book’s structure and my philosophy. 

Novelists (or at least those with pretensions) always give credit in their development to one of the greats of Modernism, whether Joyce, Kafka, Woolf  or others. My allegiance is to Proust.

Those who remember the details of Remembrance of Things Past will recall that as the hero, Marcel, moves forward in time, he keeps thinking back to reinterpret or almost re-see the past. At his first visit to Balbec, he meets a crowd of young women, who pal around the seaside resort, members of the group becoming (to him) almost indistinguishable. Later, he singles out Albertine, and later yet the two become lovers and she moves in with him in Paris. However, by putting it this way, I misrepresent the book. Each of these forward movements is not only temporarily halted by the first person narrator as he thinks back to how new moments compare to those in the the past, but because, learning years later of things of which he was unaware going on at Balbec, he is forced, as it were, to remake the present in light of this new knowledge. One might say that in this book, no matter how long ago something happened, it is always in play. 

This was the formative novel of my young manhood and it became something of a guiding star in all I wrote. This and one other book, a book that (given its literary merit or rather lack of same) is a bit embarrassing to name: Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. 

Compare this line from Long Day, Chapter 4, v.:

Time was Mac entered Billy’s Topless like a moody conqueror 

To this line (in translation) from Book VI of Mysteries:

 [As he entered Madame de Lucenay’s house] Never had the viscount been more glorious; never had he felt happier, more sure of himself, more the conqueror.

 Sue’s ties the past to present in a way conventional to the times. Seemingly complete strangers feel themselves drawn to or repelled by each other via near occult sympathies, which, as it turns out, are really based on the fact that these strangers are long-lost daughters, fathers, brothers, and so on.

 I fancy Long Day presents a materialist version of this theme. My characters are drawn together by similar mystical propensities, not due to family heritage but because they eventually find they belong to contiguous progressive and avant-garde groups, all of which have some relation to the now disbanded, shadowy Neo Phobes.

In any case, both these book influenced my thinking as did Long Day’s structure. There are two untoward elements here. 1)) Each chapter has one more section than the last. So Chapter 1 has 1 section; Chapter 2, two sections and so on. 2)) After the book gets underway on November 12, there begin to be two, forward, chronological thrusts: one going ahead from November 12, the other, starting in the past and moving toward it. So, eventually, the penultimate chapter, the first movement ends with the solving of the crime. The last chapter, following the second movement, ends on November 12 and shows how the hero’s life was saved so that he could then solve the crime.

(By the way, November 12 is my wife Nhi’s birthday.)

Perhaps the reason for the first innovation is obvious.  The book opens with Rask writing in his diary, the solitary act of an isolated character. What takes place, chapter by chapter, as more sections are added, is that we find out to how many other people  he is connected, each with its own dramas and projects. This indicates how tightly he is bound to a greater community, which is (I believe) best shown in all its reality by the nonlinear element. Through this, we find that not only is Rask tied vertically to community (in the sense that he meets will meet a new link that end up knowing others links he already knows), but he is tied horizontally to it – and this is very much taken from Proust – in that this new link has as-yet-unrecognized ties to his past, which can only be fully represented by  returning to this past in flashback chapters. 

Still, having read all this, someone may ask: Why fixate on how the character is shown to be horizontally and vertically embedded in a group context? What’s the point? What kind of non-starter theme is this?

To answer this, let me talk about my life, but not my life as an individual but as a group member. In the early 1990s, Carol Wierzbicki, Ron Kolm, Yuko Otomo, Bonny Finberg, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Michael Randall, Sparrow, Eve Packer, Tsaurah Litzky, bart plantenga, Deborah Pintonelli, Steve Dalachinsky, Samuel Delany, myself and others formed a literary group called the Unbearables. The idea was not to form another writers circle but a collective that would imitate the audacious exploits of the Situationists. 

What did we do? We invaded the New Yorker’s offices and, until escorted out, demanded they print more poems about earthworms. We put on a Jack Kerouac imitators contest to offset the NYU Beat Conference. At our event, the aspirants not only had to read Mexico City Blues style poems but sit on the lap of Mamere (Ron Kolm in drag) to drink a shot of Jim Bean as well as panhandle the audience for spare change. Our point was not to protest the Beats but their commodification. And along with these spectacles, we put on nearly weekly readings, including such events as a séance at the Fusion Arts Gallery, complete with smoke machines and ghostly echoes, at which writers channeled departed writers. Michael Carter even came in a winding sheet, covered in dirt, as if he’d just pushed his way out of the grave. Add to that nearly 15 years of monthly get-togethers at the now gentrified-out-of-existence, dive bar, the Shandon Star, and you have a sense of the existence of this group. 

Anyone who has read the newspaper in the past 15 years will have heard that community is on the way out. Now it’s every dog-eat-dog for her/himself. This is the corporate script, which supposedly even applies to the literary world, where the real author tramples all others on the way to the top of the heap. My experience runs counter to all this. What I’ve seen is that the deeper the artist is involved in a community, not only as a member but as a participant in scandalous behavior and inventive projects, the truer that creator’s art.

So, I got to thinking, maybe I could write a novel in which a character, at first seeming to be isolated and anomic, is shown, page by page, to be, both by time and situation, enclosed in a community of plots and counterplots, all of which coalesce in the end to save his life. Such a book would give the reader a deeper sense of what reality is or could be.

Indeed, as I saw it, this would translate Proust’s vision into postmodern embodiment terms. In Jameson’s famous formulation (in Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), Modernist novels often center on revealing a character’s hidden inner depths. So, Proust shows Marcel’s insight on the nature of time gradually taking shape through years of his life. Jameson continues that Postmodernist writing, by contrast, is all surface, with characters who are basically shallow, engaging in a non-directional fluctuations from fugue states of manic behavior to passivity. Take Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow as a marker here. But what if, I was thinking, the Postmodern person could be given depth in exteriority? Instead of a book gradually revealing the complexity of the person’s interior, it revealed the complexity of her or his exterior? It was worth a try, although it would only work, I thought,  with a very disturbed chronology.

2)) Was this novel always conceived as a murder mystery? Why did you choose to tell a story about the AIDS epidemic with a mystery backdrop?

Good question. Now that I’ve said almost everything I have to say, let me simply outline a few points in relation to each very wisely posed question. As to the mystery form, I can identify two things that pushed me in the direction of making this a detective story,

First, let me ask: What is American detective fiction? Am I the only one that sees it falling into left and right wings? It’s epitomized by the iconic difference between Hammett and Chandler. Hammett, the disillusioned Pinkerton, thrown in jail for refusing to name names during an anti-Communist trial, versus Chandler, the laid off oil company executive who, for instance, in his racist depiction of L.A.’s Central Avenue in the opening of Farewell, My Lovely, earned him (from Chester Himes) the epithet, “a joker.” 

In Zizek’s appreciation of Hammett, he says each of his five novels was totally distinct, each taking a different tack, driving in a different direction that Hammett would never subsequently repeated. I thought of that as an ideal way to write, a way taken up by Hammett’s only true disciple, the aforementioned Himes.

Imagine a mystery in which the plot is not centered on solving a crime but on showing why the crime cannot conceivably be solved. This is Himes’ Blind Man With a Pistol, in which the white captain sends out his only two black detectives to find out who started a Harlem riot. The book describes the neighborhood’s competing social movements, eccentric religious sects, impoverishment and the segregation blocking people’s opportunities. The book ends having revealed a crime (the riot) that has many extenuating circumstances but no culprit

How could it have one when it was caused, not by individual rabble rousers, but social conditions?

Or take the equally unusual production, The Big Gold Dream. Himes opens by depicting a street-corner preacher holding a revival. A congregant gets on the makeshift stage and tells the audience that last night as she slept she had a vision of money and gold. Then she collapses, seemingly dead. Five hustlers, listening in the crowd, then begin acts of violence-prone dream interpretation as they (rightly) surmise that the woman’s dream alludes to hidden real wealth. 

Himes’ novels, which I read in college, alongside Proust, mined a deep vein of political protest while offering a bleak but powerful view of a community, showing me a form of radically experimental and committed literature operating inside a genre.

But let me turn to the circumstantial. As the Unbearables formed and began giving readings, and  since we already had great writers to read (some of them coming along a little later), from Yuko Otomo to Carl Watson, Meg Kaizu, Thad Rutkowski, Bonny Finberg, Ron Kolm, Gabriel Don, and Jason Gallagher, I became the master of ceremonies, introducing the readers. Since the audience was made up of us and our friends, I felt it would be useless, in making an introduction, to list a reader’s (generally spurious) accomplishments, so I, instead, just made up stories about them or the reading. 

Here’s an example opening from 1992:

As Steve Dalachinsky once said, “Ron, you can’t give your poetry book away free. No one will respect your book. Don’t you know that the more a person pays for a book, the more that person will feel committed to it.” In fact, Steve went on, “The more you pay, the more you read so as to get your money’s worth. So, if you pay $10, you will read a few pages. Pay $20 and you will read the whole book. Pay $30 and you’ll read it twice.”

Today, following this philosophy we are going to auction off our poems. The winner will get a private, one-to-one reading in our VIP room. And in order to whet your appetites, tonight each poet will read you, as a teaser, part of their poem, leaving out the juiciest passages. In my introductions, after naming the poet, I will simply slip you, free of charge, some of those forbidden lines which he or she will only fully unload on you if you win the bidding. 

To jump ahead, when it came the time, years later in 1995, to put out our first anthology, Peter L. Wilson, of all people, suggested I do as I did in the introductions, that is, put in the margins of the book an introduction to the each writer combined with some narrative. I wasn’t sure how exactly to do this but I believe it was Steve Cannon, who suggested I make it a mystery story.    

To quote myself again, here is the premise of the mystery that was used in the margins of our first anthology:

Carol Wierzbicki ran a profit-strapped detective agency situated in the South Loop. When the four of them … arrived in her office that morning …. She lounged back in her chair and polished off a tumbler of rock and rye. “Can I help you?” Carol is one of the editors of the National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side … “What kind of case is this?” Carol asked. 

”Missing person,” said Deborah Pintonelli, taking out a damaged photo [taken from the stage] of the auditorium. “We want you to locate these 100 people.”

The intros to the authors in the book were made part of a mystery. These over-determining experiences, my background, my Unbearable practice, predisposed me to put my hopes in the mystery form as the best conveyor of all the themes which (as I see it) are proscribed from serious fiction.  

3)) What do you think the role of literature and culture was in raising awareness of AIDS and bringing about research into the disease and compassionate care for those affected? Do you think that books made a difference in slowing the epidemic and saving lives?

The novel Eighty-Sixed by David Feinberg presents an informed account of an AIDS sufferer, who, as the disease progresses, sees how politicized and homophobic the medical establishmentis which drives him into activism. As you can guess, this book was an inspiration to me, but there’s another issue here. Eighty-Sixed  was hardly a favorite of the public compared to, say, Irvine Welsh’s  best-selling Trainspotting. I see these two novels as part of a war, turning on the difference between activist Feinberg, writing with the truth in view (in relation to AIDS) and Welsh (despite the other considerable merits of his book) spreading ignorant lies.

In the book I co-authored on AIDS  -- forgive me for constantly quoting myself -- I said this about Trainspotting:

I label the author’s Welsh’s ideas about AIDS cockeyed in light of such incidents as those presented in the chapter “Bad Blood.” There a woman becomes infected with HIV after one night, one “shag” they call it, with an infected man who rapes her. Next the narrator becomes infected after on night with her. If, as we discussed earlier, the likelihood of the first infection is one in a million, [one generally gets HIV only after multiple contacts with the infected] the likelihood of the second – one-shot, female to male transmission [female to male is very atypical, it is generally male to female] – is more like one in 2 million.

The point I’m making, one documented at length in the mentioned book, AIDS: A Second Opinion, is that the arts community, not the one producing best-sellers, but the one in the margins, was fighting not only to raise awareness of the disease and call for compassionate care, but battling the negative, panic-inducing misconceptions promulgated in the mainstream. 

Moreover, in the 1980s, as literary activists were fighting the combined complacency or indifference of the public, the government, and the corporate medical industry, it is important to recognize that the marginal arts community became integrated as part of a broader community in struggle. I give a thumbnail of this as it was visible in San Francisco: 

If we look at the case of San Francisco in the early days of the crisis, we see that the gay community developed a mesh of dispersed organization. … Some of the major components of this distribution were the Shanti Project, which acted as a counseling agency; the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which arranged medical treatments; the group behind the AIDS Candlelight March, which raised public awareness while memorializing those that had passed; Project Inform, which studied and disseminated knowledge about drug treatments; Open Hand, a food service for PWAs, and SANE (Stop AIDS Now or Else), an ACT UP style group that engaged in public protest, such as blocking the Golden Gate Bridge [as well as having an affiliated arts group that worked to raise consciousness].

To summarize, as I see it, writers and cultural workers not only joined in the good fight of alerting, informing and arousing; but went further by creating their own groups and then linking up with other organizations who had joined the battle to increase knowledge and care for those hit by the AIDS plague.

 4)) What do you think makes the book readable and enjoyable, although it’s about corruption and evil and people dying of a terrible disease?

To answer this question let me begin with what will seem a rather out-of-left-field way by saying something about the Dadaists. As I understand them, gathered in Switzerland while an insanely destructive world war was going on in Europe, they felt the times demanded a different kind of art, one more rule-breaking and impolite, as an adequate response to the horrors all around. 

On a lower plane, the Unbearables felt, as we stated and re-stated in our get-togethers, that – although there were outstanding exceptions, such as Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Lethem, Carolyn Chute and Paul Beatty – as a whole the literature of our time was compromised. Perhaps, it was due to the ever-growing stranglehold of corporate publishing, but overall literature was not facing up to the social problems of our time. (Compare Proust’s confrontation of anti-Semitism and open discussion of homosexuality or Sue’s look at poverty.)  

This doesn’t mean that in response the Unbearables wanted to produce political pamphlets, thought there were a few of those too, but they sought to create a literature of enjoyable texts, but ones that refused to shy away from America’s monumental failings.

Let me mention a few strategies other group members adopted to talk about harsh situations while using “gimmicks” to produce an exciting reading experience, taking up some books published by the renegade, saintly Jim Fleming of Autonomedia. Black writer John Farris talks about his bleak time in prison, but in a transmuted way. In The Ass’s Tale he did so by describing his hero as magically transformed into a dog, placed in a penitentiary run by a passel of talking monkeys, mastiffs and other animal low-lifes. Bonny Finberg in Kali’s Day describes a woman who goes to Nepal to seek enlightenment, but this is no New Age yuppie, rather a fleeing pot dealer, escaping both the law and her kinky ex-boyfriend. Finberg’s sensitivity to the Eastern country, the character’s comic, absurdist misadventures, and loopy spiritual wisdom embodied in the book make it a tremendous reading experience, despite its low down milieu. Finally, Ron Kolm, in The Plastic Factory, takes the most unpromising of experiences, a guy’s first day on the job making plastic, and uses matter-of-fact deadpan humor and sly observations to make this a book to look at once and then read again. 

My own effort in Long Day to describe a hero coming apart under the double diagnosis of AIDS and cancer, who finds (and, hopefully, the reader finds also) a healing leaven of gallows humor along with a waxing sense of the loving support that can arise in a marginalized community forced to take care of each other when they ignored by most of society’s helping institutions.      

5))  A reviewer has commented that hero Rasken Hasp is realistic in that he has all sorts of random human things on his mind even though he knows he doesn’t have long to live, that big existential thoughts aren’t all he thinks about. Would you agree with that? Have you known someone who was near death? What do you think people really think about in their last months?

I heartily agree with the reviewer’s observation that Rask seems to be too busy worrying about other things to contemplate his approaching demise.

This novel is dedicated to long-time friend John Penn, boyfriend of my editor, Carol Wierzbicki; Unbearable member and dying man. A lot of Rask’s character and history is drawn from John, who had AIDS and cancer, probably brought on  by a crack and cocaine addiction, that he broke through attendance at AA. He was a guy who thought each day’s hat selection was crucial to his well-being. 

Now, to seemingly digress, I feel it’s hard to truly know someone unless that person is an artist, because an artist you can understand by triangulation. When I got to know a writer, say, Carol, I began to see and talk to her, that’s one part; but then I heard her read her writings, and that gave me the other side. In most cases, there’s no easy fit between the two revealed selves and lining them up allows you to see into the puzzle that is each person.

Now John Penn had an outsized, brash, in-your-face personality, but this character was humbled down (in a good way) in his writing.  His prose was deeply observant, unobtrusive, with a linguist��s feeling for words and a scat singer’s ability to play with them. So, taking the two sides, it was as if I saw him raw and cooked.

In his last days on earth, I felt that his writing was taking (in a good way) more from his brash side. I don’t mean he lost something, as if death were releasing some of his “uncouthness” into his writing, but rather that he was becoming more integrated. As his writing changed, he changed and some of the modesty of his writing also became part of his humanity.

You know I knew him before he cleaned up when he was not one for following the rules. But he made a change, had to change, when he entered AA. It was a heroic struggle, giving up drinking and drugging was a struggle, which he won. I hope this book reflects some of his courage, some of his hardihood.  

Jim Feast’s Long Day, Counting Tomorrow is available here. 

[techscopic]

Patch Super Dram World

My recent dive into retro gaming has opened my eyes to how much time and effort still goes into playing console games that are as old as I am.  The basic challenge has gone out of these games, understandably, so players have improvised new goals like speed runs, 100% completion challenges, and even playing through games blindfolded…

…but then some people take things to the next level:  creating patches to a game to make the game more difficult or take the game in a completely new direction.  The most popular game to reimagine is Super Mario World, thanks to utilities like Lunar Magic and Super Mario Maker, tools that let you use Super Mario World’s assets and logic to create worlds of your own, both simple and complex.

The most hyped Super Mario World patch I’ve seen (and there are many) is Super Dram World.  Super Dram World is an insanely difficult game, requiring even the best players to dig deep to solve problems while crossing their fingers along the way when it comes to timing.  In this post, I’m going to introduce you to the concept behind creating these reimagined games and how to patch original ROMS to play them!

Why Patching?

Finding a download of a Super Dram World game is really difficult, but finding a Super Dram World patch is incredibly easy.  Why?  Because distributing a patched game is illegal — you’re effectively redistributing Nintendo’s property.  You can, however, easily find the patch itself, which is not illegal.

It’s a bit like a keygen or crack:  that bit of software isn’t illegal but serving the patched software is.  Patching games is a bit of a hardship on the player but absolves the creator of legal jeopardy.

Patching Super Mario World to Create Super Dram World

We’re about to create Super Dram World by patching Super Mario World but keep in mind this process is mostly the same for patching any older game.

Ensure Your Super Mario World ROM is Clean

Patching a game ROM is no different than applying a patch to any other software:  your patch needs to be applied to the right state of the repository to be successful.  You can use JSRomClean to ensure your ROM file (in this case a smc file) is clean Super Mario World ROM.

There are hundreds of Super Mario World mods so this is an important check.  JSRomClean employs a few edge JavaScript APIs to make this check so browser the source code if you’re interested in seen these JavaScript APIs employed.

Note:  I can’t provide you the clean Super Mario World file but a Google search should help you.  Be aware, however, that it took several downloads to find a suitable version due to the enthusiasm for modifying this game.

Download the Super Dram World Patch File

Download Super Dram World 2 here.  Patch files generally come in .ips or .bps file formats and should be relatively small files.  If you are looking to patch Super Mario World with a different game variant patch, download that patch file instead.

Applying the Patch

The .ips/.bps file must be patched onto the clean .smc ROM file.  I tried a number of utilities to patch Super Mario World with the Super Dram World patch on my Mac, including MultiPatch, but all efforts failed.  I shifted to a Windows computer and the Floating IPS application and the patch applied cleanly!

Play Super Dram World!

When the patch applies cleanly you have a new .smc file that can be imported into any Super Nintendo emulator; I prefer OpenEmu on my Mac but Snes9x for Windows is also a popular choice.

The hassle you went through to patch Super Mario World will seem like a cake walk compared to actually playing Super Dram World.  The initial stage of Super Dram World sees you almost immediately killed if you don’t jump immediately — an appropriate warning to the punch in the mouth that comes by playing this game.

Don’t take my word for it; watch the SDW world record holder struggle too:

;

Part of me thinks retro gamers are crazy but, looking back at the games I loved when I was a kid, I totally get the desire to find every exploit, execute every trick, and even patch games to feel that joy again.  I really wanted to write this post because my readers, mostly web designers and developers, think of patches in the sense of small code fixes;  stepping back a moment, patches to other software can completely change your perspective on how others patch code.

Have fun patching and playing Super Dram World.  Never let that kid inside of you go away!

The post Patch Super Dram World appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

Patch Super Dram World published first on http://ift.tt/2fXj93U

[jansegers]

Simple English Word List

SIMPLE1540 : a simple English wikipedia word list based on the XML export of all articles related to the nine major groups: Everyday life, Geography, History, Knowledge, Language, Literature, People, Religion, and Science and retaining all word forms appearing 7 times or more in this corpus. The total number of words in this corpus is well over the 100.000 words. a A.D. ability able about above absence abstinence abstract academic academy accent accept access accord account across act action active activity actual actually ad add addition adherent adjective adult advance advice affect after again against age agnostic agnosticism ago agree agreement agriculture air alcohol all allow ally almost alone along alphabet also although always amateur amendment among amount an analysis ancient and angel animal annals anonymous another answer anthropomorphism any anyone anything aphasia appear apple apply approach archaeology architecture area argue argument around arrange art article artificial artist ask aspect associate association astronomy at atheism atheist atomic attack attempt attribute audience author authority available average avoid award away B.C. baby back background backpack bad bah balance band baptism base basic basis battle BCE be bear beautiful beauty because become bed bee before begin behavior behind being belief believe believing belong below best better between beyond bias biblical bibliography big billion biological biology birth bit black blind blood blue body book born both bottom boundary box boy brain branch bring brown buffalo build building bull burn business but by c. ca. calendar call can cancer canon capital caption car carbon card carry case cassette cat category cathedral catholic cause cell center central century cerebral certain change chapel chapter character chemical chemistry child china China choice choir choose chronicle church circumcise circumcision cite citizen city civil civilian civilization claim clan class classical cleanup clear clergy click climate close closer clothes clothing coast coauthor code codex cognitive col cold collection college colonization colony color column com come commentary commission common commonly communicate communication communion communist community companion company compare 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distance distinct distinction distinguish distribution divide divine do doctor doctrine document dog don't door down Dr. dream drink drown druid due during dynasty each earlier early earth easier easily easy eat economic economics economy ed edge edit edition editor education effect eight either electric electricity electronic element elevation else emperor empire encyclopedia end energy engine engineering enlightenment enough enter entertainment environment environmental epic episode equal era error especially establish etc. etymology even event eventually ever every everyday everyone everything evidence evil evolution evolve exact exactly example except exchange exist existence expansion experience experiment expert explain explanation express expression external extinct face fact failure fair faith fall false family famous far fast father feature feel feeling female feudal few fiction field fight figure file find finding fire first fish fit five fix flow folk follow food for force 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inquiry inside instead institute institution instrument instrumentation intellectual intelligence interlinear internal international internet interpretation into introduce introduction invent invention involve iron island issue it IT itself job join journal journalism judge just keep key kill kind king kingdom know knowledge la LA label lack lake lamp land landlocked landscape language large last late later law lead leader leap learn learned least leave legacy legal legend let letter level lexeme library life light lightning like likely limited line linguistic linguistics link liquid list literacy literary literature little liturgy live local location logic logical long longer look lord lore lose lot love low lower mac machine magazine magic magnetic magnum mail main mainly major make male mammal man mankind manuscript many map march March mark market mass material mathematical mathematics matter may May me mean meaning meant measure measurement meat median medical medicine medieval mediterranean medium meet member memory men mental mention mercury message metal method mid middle might migrate migration military millennium million mind minister minute misconception miss model modern modernism modernist moment money monologue monophthong month monument moon moral morality more morning most mostly mother mount mountain mouth move movement much museum music musical musicians must my myth mythology name narrative nation national nationality native natural naturalism naturally nature near nearly necessarily necessary need negative neither neologism network neurogenesis neuron neuroscience never new news newspaper next night nine no non none nor normal normally not note nothing noun novel now nuclear number object objective objectivity observation observe occupation occur ocean octane of off offer office official officially often oil old older on once one online only open opera opposite or oral orbit order org organization organize origin original originally orthography orthology other others our out outer outside over own oxygen p. pack pagan page paint palace paper paradigm parent parish park part participant particular particularly party pas pass past pasta pattern pay peace peer penguin penis people per percent percentage perception performance perhaps period peroxide persecution person personal personality perspective persuasion pet phenomenon philosopher philosophical philosophy phoneme phonetic phonetics photo phrase physic physical picture piece pilgrimage place plan planet plant plat plate play please poem poems poet poetry point pole police policy political politics polytheism polytheistic popular population position positive possession possible possibly post power powerful pp. practical practice praise pray prayer precise predict prediction prehistory present preserve press prevent priest primary principle print printing private probably problem process produce product production professional program project pronounce pronunciation proof property prophet propose prose proselytism protection protein provide province psychological psychology public publication publish publisher publishing punishment pure purpose put pyramid quantum question quickly quite quote race racial rack radiation radio rain range rate rather read reader real realism reality really reason receive recent recently reclamation recognize record recreation red ref refer reference referred reform reformation regard region reign rejection relate relation relationship relatively relativity reliable relic religion religious remain remember remove renaissance replace report republic request require research researcher resource respect response result resurrection retrieve return revelation revert review revision revival revolution rhetoric rich right rise ritual river rock role room royal rule ruled ruler run rural sacred sacrifice safe saga sage saint salad same sample satellite saw say schizophrenia scholar school science scientific scientist scope sea search second secondary section secular see seek seem selection self sense sent sentence separate sequence series service set seven several sexual shall shaman shape share she short should show shrine side sign significant silence similar simple simply since single situation six size skill skin slavery sleep slightly slow small smell smith snake so social society sociology soft soil solar soldier solid soliloquy some someone something sometimes song soon sortable sound source space speak speaker special specie specific speech speed spell spirit spiritual spirituality split sport spread square st. stage stain standard star start state statement station statistic statistical statue status stick still stone stop story strange strap strong structure struggle stub student study stutter style subject successful such sugar suggest sun sung sunlight superior superiority supernatural support suppose supreme sure surface survey surveyor sushi sustainability sustainable sweat symbol symbolic system table take talk tam tan task teach teacher teaching technique technology tectonics teeth tell temperature template temple ten term terminology territory tertiary test testament text textual than thank that the their theism them themselves then theology theoretical theory therapy there therefore thesaurus these they thick thing think third this those though thought thousand three through throughout thumb thus ticket tight time title to today together toilet tolerance toleration tongue too tool top topic total towards tower trade tradition traditional train translation transport travel treat treatment tree trench trial tribe tried trig true truth try turn twentieth twenty two type typical typically ultimate ultraviolet under understand understood union unit united universal universe university unknown unsortable until up upon upper urban urbanization usage use useful usually valley value van vandalism various vassal vegetable verb verbal verse version very video view violence virgin visit vitamin vocabulary voice vol. volume vowel vs. wale wall want war warm warmer wash waste water wave way we weak wealth wear weather web website weight well what when where whether which while white who whole whom whose why wide widely wild wilderness will window wisdom wise witch witchcraft with within without witness woman word work worker world worship would write writer writing wrong yam year yellow you young your

China, March and May made this list because china, march and may are on it and I didn't want to decide in favor of the common noun or the proper noun; all other proper nouns have been omitted (even the ten other months that met the criterium of appearing more then 6 times). #SimpleWikipedia #SimpleEnglish #wordlist #English #words #level1540 #Inli #nimi #selo1540

[hypertagmaster]

How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience

Art Silverman had a vendetta against popcorn.

Silverman wanted to educate the public about the fact that a typical bag of movie popcorn has 37 grams of saturated fat, while the USDA recommends you have no more than 20 grams in an entire day.

That’s important information. But instead of simply citing that surprising statistic, Silverman made the message a little more striking:

“A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”

Yes, what you say is crucial. But how you say it can make all the difference.

How you say it is determined by your “who”

“Marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively.” – Seth Godin

When you create a well-rounded representation of your ideal customer, what you’re really tuning in to is the way your people view the world.

And when you understand the worldview your prospects share — the things they believe — you can frame your story in a way that resonates so strongly with them that you enjoy an “unfair” advantage over your competition.

Consider these competing worldviews, framed differently by simple word choices:

Crossfitter vs. Gym Rat

Progressive vs. Snowflake

Businessman vs. The Man

These are extreme examples, and you can certainly cater to audience beliefs and worldviews without resorting to name-calling. For example, the simple word “green” can provoke visceral reactions at the far sides of the environmental worldview spectrum, while also prompting less-intense emotions in the vast middle.

Framing your story against a polar opposite, by definition, will make some love you and others ignore or even despise you. That’s not only okay, it’s necessary.

You’ll likely never convert those at the other end of the spectrum, but your core base will share your content and help you penetrate the vast group in the middle — and that’s where growth comes from.

Based on who you’re talking to, you have to choose the way to tell the story so that you get the conclusion you desire.

It’s the delivery of the framed message that keeps your heroic prospect on the journey so that their (and therefore your) goals are achieved.

The “how” is essentially the difference between success and failure (or good and great) when it comes to content marketing. You must tell a compelling story with the right central element for the people you’re trying to reach.

It’s all about the premise

When you think about how a story is told, you’ll hear people talk in terms of hooks and angles. Another way of thinking about it is the premise of the case you’re making.

As a term in formal logic, the premise is a proposition supporting a certain conclusion. Applied to content and storytelling, I use the word premise to mean the emotional concept that not only attracts attention but also maintains engagement throughout every element of your content.

In other words:

The premise is the embodiment of a concept that weaves itself from headline to conclusion, tying everything together into a compelling, cohesive, and persuasive narrative with one simple and inevitable conclusion — your desired action.

And yes, you’re telling smaller stories along the buyer’s journey that forms an overall empowering narrative. You’ll have a “big idea” that’s told one step at a time along the path.

The premise connects you to the emotional center of your prospect’s brain, stimulates desire, maintains credibility, and eventually results in the action you want.

This happens when you understand how to frame your message and overall offer to mesh so tightly with your prospect’s worldview that the “this is right for me” trigger is pulled subconsciously.

Of course, each piece of content reflects your core values and overall positioning in the marketplace. Here’s a famous example from the world of advertising.

Nike has one of the most powerful positioning statements on the planet, expressed in three little words — just do it. Beyond selling shoes, this is a way of viewing the world boiled down to its essence, which is why it’s so powerful.

Now, think back to Nike’s commercial featuring John Lennon’s song Instant Karma:

What’s the premise?

First, notice how you don’t see a logo or company name until the very end. In fact, the camera barely shows the shoes of the athletes. It’s all about the lyrics married to the visuals.

The first lyrical tie-in hits with “Join the human race.” Then things really kick in with “Who on Earth do you think you are, a superstar? Well right you are!”

And then the unifying chorus paired with images of athletic adversity punctuated with triumph, as John Lennon repeats, “We all shine on ….”

This individual promotion supports Nike’s overall brand positioning of just do it in a powerful, unique way. Did it resonate with everyone? Not at all … and I’m guessing that very same commercial today would be absolutely despised by a certain segment of the U.S. population.

But the Instant Karma clip did highly engage the people it was aimed at. Repeat this to yourself over and over:

The content you create is for a particular “who,” and no one else.

Let’s now look at a process for finding your how, both with your overall positioning and at each step in the prospect’s journey.

4 steps to creating your winning story concept

Great ideas are unique. There’s no formula for innovative ideas, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling the slickest of snake oil.

That said, great premises always have certain elements in common. It took me many years to understand that, beyond all the tactics, it’s the premise of the message that matters first and foremost.

The work you’ve done so far on who and what was the heavy lifting of the how. But to refine your content marketing strategy even further, here are four essential elements of a winning story concept.

1. Be unpredictable

The first thing you absolutely must have is attention. Without initial attention, nothing else you’ve done matters.

And nothing kills attention faster than if your prospective reader, listener, or viewer thinks they already know where you’re going. Beyond curiosity, a great premise delivers an unpredictable and unexpected element that makes it irresistible.

It all comes back to knowing who you’re talking to at an intimate level and what they are used to seeing in the market.

What messages are they getting from your competition? This is what you must use as the benchmark to create your own unique and unexpected angle that forms the foundation of your premise.

In this day and age, you might have to dig deeper for a new and unexpected message that startles or downright fascinates people. A creative imagination combined with solid research skills help you see the nugget of gold no one else sees.

Part of why people tune things out is a lack of novelty, which makes even a previously desirable subject matter mundane.

Taking an approach that differs from the crowd can help you stand out, and that’s why unpredictability is crucial for a strong premise.

Just remember that things change. What was once unpredictable can become not only predictable, but trite. This is why being able to come up with a fresh premise is a valuable skill for anyone who creates content or markets anything.

2. Be simple

One of the fundamental rules of effective content marketing is to be clear and simple. Because a premise by definition is an unprecedented and grand idea, sometimes boiling it down to its essence is difficult, or worse, neglected.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying to water down your big idea to the point of stupidity.

That defeats the purpose.

What I’m saying is you’ve got to make it so simple and clear that it travels directly into the mind of your prospect, so he begins to tell himself the story. Your copy must guide him and inspire him, not beat him over the head.

So, you’ve got a grand premise that’s unpredictable and destined to shake up your market. Reduce it to a paragraph.

Now, take it down to two sentences.

Get it even shorter.

Just do it.

At this point, you may find yourself with a great tagline. At a minimum, you’ve now got the substance for the bold promise contained in your primary headline.

3. Be real

You’ve heard that in this day of social media, you’ve got to keep it real. Speak with a human voice. Be authentic.

Be you.

You also hopefully know that social media hasn’t changed the fact that it’s about them, not you. In fact, it’s more about them than ever.

How do you make that work? What makes a premise real to the right people?

First of all, your premise must be highly relevant to your intended audience, while also being directly in line with your core values. Without relevance, you can’t inspire meaning. And it’s meaningful messages that inspire action.

Meaning is a function of what people believe before you find them. As we discussed earlier, what your ideal customers believe reflects how they view the world, and your content has to frame that view appropriately to be effective.

As a function of belief, meaning is derived from the context in which your desired audience perceives your message. That context is the heroic journey of the prospect, with your brand serving as a guide.

There’s another aspect of being “real” with your content. Your messages must communicate meaningful benefits that are also tangible. This is the second important aspect of an authentic premise, and it’s critical to help your prospects understand and connect with your message.

In this sense, tangible means real or actual, rather than imaginary or visionary. This is the aspect of your premise that is express, meaning the part where you tell the story in a way that concretely injects certain information into the prospect’s mind in a specific way.

Remember the Total cereal ad from the late 1980s?

“How many bowls of YOUR cereal equal one bowl of Total?”

You then saw stacks of cereal bowls filled with various competing brands, with one case reaching 12 bowls high.

Powerful, right?

Instead of saying something pedestrian like, “Total has 12 times the nutrition of the leading brand,” they showed you a tangible expression of the benefit. But it doesn’t need to be done with visuals to work.

Words alone are plenty powerful to paint a picture in the mind. Look at the opening of this article and the way Art Silverman explained the saturated fat content in a bag of popcorn. He took a dry statistic and brought it to life.

You’ll note that both examples contain the element of unpredictability and simplicity. But it’s the relevant and tangible expression of the premise that creates instant understanding.

Make your messages as real to people as possible, and you’ll create the kind of instant understanding that all truly great premises contain. But there’s one more critical element to a premise that works.

4. Be credible

If you’re writing to persuade, you have to hit the gut before you get anywhere near the brain. The part that decides “I want that” is emotional and often subconscious. If your premise doesn’t work emotionally, logic will never get a chance to weigh in.

If you flip that emotional switch, the sale (or other action) is yours to lose. And I mean that literally. Because our logical minds do eventually step in (usually in a way that makes us think we’re actually driven by logic in the first place). If your premise is not credible (as in it’s too good to be true), you fail.

That doesn’t mean hyperbole never works, as long as the prospect wants to believe you badly enough. That’s how some desperate people in certain markets are taken advantage of.

But belief is critical in any market and with any promotion, so credibility is the final key to a winning premise — people must believe you just as your premise must match their beliefs.

Remember, the more innovative your idea or exceptional your offer, the more you’re going to have to prove it. This brings us right back to an unexpected, simple, and tangible expression of the benefit in a way that’s credible.

Every box of Total cereal contains the cold, hard data about the nutritional content. Art Silverman’s popcorn claims were backed up by solid scientific facts about saturated fat.

The kind of proof any particular premise requires will vary, but the more credibility that can be baked into the premise itself, the better.

Now … put it out there

“I’m looking California, and feeling Minnesota …”

That metaphor is from the 1991 Soundgarden song Outshined, written by frontman Chris Cornell. He shared an interesting anecdote about writing those very personal words in a magazine interview:

“I came up with that line — ‘I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’ — and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. That was a shock.”

Instead of the “dumbest thing,” those are the most famous six words Cornell has ever written. In addition to being a fan favorite, the line inspired both a movie title and an ESPN catch phrase whenever Minnesota Timberwolves player Kevin Garnett was in the news.

Why did it work? Because with those six words, Soundgarden’s audience understood instantly what Cornell was trying to convey. He spoke to them.

And yet, what if Cornell had cut the line because “it was the dumbest thing?” I suppose that would have been unfortunate, because he would have missed out on a level of engagement with his audience that the rest of us would kill for.

The content marketing strategy we’ve been working through is putting you in the position to get things right the first time. You smartly spent a ton of time on your who, and then you outlined the critical points of your story by mapping the buyer’s journey and the customer experience.

The who and the what inform the how.

You might even be surprised at how easily the fresh ideas are coming to you now.

But ultimately, we as content marketers don’t know for sure what will resonate. Only the audience can determine that, so you’ve got to put it out there.

When the audience magic happens, you’ll know it.

For the rest of February, we’re going to be sharing our favorite tips and tactics for the how. You’ll be telling better stories, creating better analogies, and connecting with your audience at a deeper level than ever before.

The post How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience appeared first on Copyblogger.

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