#my post production and editing professor let us make a short video using ANY online media

[that1overthere]

"Now is that gratitude?"

Here's the re-edit

[english8muffin]

Vogue morning routine

Y/N Y/N/L’s guide to effortless natural makeup

Summary: you are asked to do the Vogue Beauty Secrets video and your two boys decide to join the party

Word count: around 2000

Warning: none, just pure floof!

I apologize in advance if there are any spelling and/or grammar mistakes, English is not my first language (+ this is my very first fic)

HEADLINE Henry Cavill’s new girlfriend, designer Y/N Y/L/N reveals her everyday morning routine in recent Vogue video: Y/N Y/L/N shows off her secrets to the perfect fusion of European and Asian beauty.

You stood in the spacious bathroom of the hotel room, only wearing a big, fluffy, white robe, that was actually Henry’s. But since the man was in the gym, you took the opportunity to lend it and bathe yourself in his musky smell, that calmed your nerves. Last night you started panicking, thinking you would probably look stupid for the entire world to see, luckily Henry and Kal tried to calm you down with cuddles and kisses.

This was the first ‘interview’ you would do, being such a young, successful entrepreneur really caught the attention of the media. When you first started your small online shop, you never would have thought you would end up here. Five years later, with a steady income, the job you always wished for and the man you had a crush on since the first time you laid eyes on him. Being a creative, it really made your heart soar with happiness, seeing all your products, your babies, in new homes where they would make others happy.

You were really proud of yourself. Henry was as well, and he made sure you and everybody around you knew. You were apprehensive at first, being with such a well known actor, who was also much older than you, it made you nervous of what people would say, what the media would say. You didn’t want to tarnish Henry’s image. You knew there were people with a much bigger age gap, but still, people were ruthless. So you both decided to take it slow, being careful with going out in public and social media posts.

You stand in front of the large mirror, which had a camera attached to it and open up your makeup bag. Right before you went into the bathroom, you made yourself a nice cup of tea, trying to stay calm. “Hi! I’m Y/N and today I am going to show you my everyday makeup routine,” you say with a smile, “I am not a dermatologist so please don’t take what I say too seriously.”

You grab a small white washcloth and hold it up, so it was in the frame, “First, I am going to wash my face and put on a few drops of serum,” You dampen the cloth and wipe it over your face and neck. You put a few drops in the palm of your hand and pat them into your skin. “Now I going to use my jade roller to massage the serum into my skin. It’s quite funny seeing so many people use these nowadays. In ancient China they were mostly used by the elite to keep there skin ageless. They would call jade the Stone of Heaven. It’s really helpful for the people who wake up with a puffy face like me,” you chuckle.

Somethimes you’d wake up with puffy cheeks, which led to Henry calling you his chubby bunny in the morning.

“Just a quick tip, and this is for everybody, make sure you always use SPF. I personally use SPF 30 and this one is shine control, since I tend to get an oily skin, but you can also use a regular one or a foundation with SPF in it. Believe me when I say your skin will be thankful.”

You grab the small tube of sun cream and show the amount you’ll use. You even convinced Henry to wear SPF everyday. At first he said he didn’t think it would make such a big difference, but when he realised you were going to be the one to put it on him, he was convinced about its benefits and adamant to wear it everyday. After working the thick cream into your skin, you put on some lipbalm and rummage through the pouch in front of you. When you find the product you’re looking for, you hold it up. “Now, I am going to put on a bit of concealer, this one is from Maybelline. After this, I will use a lighter shade under my eyes and on my acne scars that I have here,” you point and circle around the small cluster of scars on the sides of your cheeks.

Before blending out the concealer, you smile at the lens and put in two bright yellow hairclips, to keep your dark locks from falling into your face. “I probably should have done this at the start,” you laugh. The nerves creeping up a little. It wasn’t that you where a shy person, but knowing thousands of people will watch this, did something to you. You were always a very easygoing person, who could talk with pretty much everybody. But knowing people were going to watch you do something so intimate in a way, and would probably comment on it, scared you a little. While you would be 100% yourself, doing something as mundane as getting ready. If they didn’t like you now, then they probably won’t like you later. And that was what made you so afraid.

The bathrobe falls a bit down your shoulder, but you ignore it, since your hair fell down your shoulders in big waves. “Okay, brows. I used to block them in really dark when I was younger, but now I try to keep a light hand. I’ll use this Got 2B Glued as a brow gel afterwards. The tails of my eyebrows tend to move if I don’t use a strong enough gel. If you’re Asian you will understand the struggle.”

You quickly finish your brows, put some bronzer on your face and eyelids and take out your liquid eyeliner. “Am I the only one that acts like I’m a beauty guru whenever I do my makeup? Like, I’m just acting as if I’m used to this, right now, but to be honest, I was really nervous to do this video for Vogue,” you admit, “they will probably regret asking me,” you chuckle. You finish your eyemakeup with curling your long lashes, thanks to your mother’s genes, and add a coat of mascara.

You take in a deep breath, excited to show everyone the product you had been waiting for. “The next thing I am really proud to show you guys, because I designed the packaging. This is the new limited edition blush and highlighter palette from Dior, which they created for Lunar New Year!” You beam with pride, holding up the elegant looking palette. It had a darker toned glossy finish and the borders were the traditional Chinese looking frames, which were 3D and were surrounded by a wild variety of peonies. In the middle of the lid was your Chinese calligraphy in big golden brush stokes that said ‘year of the Ox’, the clasp was designed so it resembled an antique Chinese coin and on the side hung a jade charm.

“You can pre-order this palette now, I think they will put a link-thingy in de description. I wish you all a happy and blessed Lunar New Year, 祝农历年新年快乐牛年大吉!”

Just as you’re about to add some blush to your cheeks, the bathroom door creaks open and a curly-headed, sweaty Henry pops his head in. Fresh from the gym, and were you thankful for his new intense workout, because he was truely a sight to behold. A cheeky smile graces his handsome face when he spots you in front of the mirror, only wearing his robe, which made his grin widen.

“what are you doing in here? Are you hiding from me? Playing hide and seek is it?” he teases and rakes his large hand through the tousled curls, but just as he’s done speaking, he sees the camera behind you, and blushes. “Oh, I didn’t know you were filming, I’m sorry darling,” he smiles and gives a small wave in the direction of the camera. You led out a giggle, cheeks turning red already, if he’d keep this up, you wouldn’t need to add blush. You couldn’t focus anymore, he looked so attractive, only wearing his black gym shorts and a tight dark blue tank top. Damn that camera, otherwise you would have jumped him. Henry, thought the exact same thing. Seeing you, only wearing his robe and your hair still a bit wild from this morning’s cardio, made him hold back a moan. Those two cute, yellow clips in your hair could have fooled him, because you were anything but innocent.

Before he’s about to close the door again, he blows you a kiss. But his actions are stopped when a big bear makes his appearance. Bolting past his dad’s legs, Kal comes into the bathroom. Henry tries to catch him but misses. The black and white akita excitedly sniffs his head around the sink, trying to see what you were up to with all the stuff lying on the marble counter.

“Kal!” Henry whisper-yelled, trying to stay hidden behind the door. But you could still see his massive body crouched down behind the wood. It was rather funny, seeing the large man so panicked about getting his dog to listen. It kind of reminded you of that one video from BBC were a professor was being interviewed and his baby and nanny showed up in the background. While Henry tried to get Kal’s attention, the dog just sat next to your legs, and smiled when you pet him behind his ear. He was your good boy.

You both knew there was no other option but to keep Kal here, once he saw you do your makeup, he wanted to watch and get his ‘makeup’ done as well.

Henry also saw the look in Kal’s eyes and let out a sigh. Might as well stay with his two loves. He stood up from his position and walked to you, wrapping his sweaty but oh so save body around your figure, and placed a prolonged kiss on the exposed skin just by your shoulder. So far for taking it slow… He pressed himself thighter against your back, hiding his face in the crook of your neck and intertwined your hands, slowly rocking you two back en forth. “You look beautiful, my love,” he whispered, so only you could hear it, at least you hoped the camera wouldn’t pick that up. You let out a little giggle, like the inner schoolgirl you were whenever he was around you.

“Kal loves when Y/N does his makeup as well, don’t you boy,” Henry explains with a smile and looks down at the bear by your bare feet. Kal gives a small ruff and sweeps his tail eagerly. “Did you show them what you made,” he asked you with a wide smile, and looked straight in to the camera, “she worked really hard on that design, so I hope you all like it,” he declared proudly.

You ended up doing your makeup routine with your two boys in the background. Henry left for a few minutes to shower in the second bathroom your hotelroom had, and came back clad in a pair of light jogging trousers and a sweater. Even though you were inside, it was still a bit too chilly to walk around in short sleeves, being mid-winter and all. He just sat on the small wooden bench by the door, still in frame for everybody to enjoy and behold. His hair now damp. He was reading in a book and patiently waiting for you to get ready, occasionally looking up and laughing when you would wet your hands or Kal’s special makeup brush in the sink and pretend to do his makeup. The dog would bark excitedly and give you kisses. “Wow Kal, you look so pretty,” Henry told the big floof with the chuckle.

“Okay, this was my -somewhat- everyday makeup routine! Thank you guys for watching this chaotic mess, hope you laughed a bit, bye-bye, 再见!” How do those vlogger end their videos? Smash like and subscribe?

Behind you Henry looked up from the pages of his fantasy book and arched his brow, “Hey! No shout-out for your special guests? See you all next time!”

WOOHOO!! This is my very first fanfic, I really hope you enjoyed it. Liking, reposting and commenting would mean a lot to me! If you do repost this, please do not edit or copy my work. I worked really hard on this.

Much love, Nahmi xxx

Masterlist can be found HERE!

Want to be notified whenever I post something?

HERE IS MY TAG LIST!

[simul16]

Low Effort in Their Own Way

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina"

I've been watching a fair amount of D&D content on YouTube of late, for varying reasons, and if I may paraphrase Tolstoy's famous quote above, I've learned that all good D&D channels make high-effort content, while each bad D&D channel makes low-effort content in its own way.

Low-effort content tends to be:

Content that is or can be created quickly; it doesn't require a lot of prep time (and the presentation usually allows this limited prep time to show)

Content that copies current trends; while a certain amount of response to significant events in the gaming world is to be expected, low-effort channels regularly feature content that basically boils down to 'here's my reaction to whatever rumor or scandal is currently being talked about among the community'

Content that does not spark or contribute to a discussion; when such channels go beyond simply recapitulating a recent event, they frequently spend very little time explaining their own reaction and seldom spend any time at all explaining or exploring contrary opinions except to make jokes or elicit emotional reactions from an over-simplified or straw-man version of the contrary opinion

Now let's start off by saying that I'm not knocking low-effort content per se; anybody who knows anything about online marketing can tell you that low-effort content has a role to play in any marketing strategy. Ideally, though, your low-effort content, the stuff that you can get out the door quickly and easily and get in front of your potential customers, exists to guide those customers to your higher-quality content that convinces them to buy your product, order your service, or otherwise become someone who believes that you have something of value to say. Because it's cheap and easy to produce, low-effort content can be cast far and wide to serve as a net to capture many potential viewers and guide them to the gold mine of the really important stuff you have to say. Unfortunately, when your low-effort content is what you have to say, it very much begs the question of what exactly it is people should be coming to your channel for.

Here are a few but by no means an exhaustive list of the YouTube channels that to me seem to feature way too much low-effort content.

The Dungeon Dudes

The Dungeon Dudes are two guys (Kelly McLaughlin and Monty Martin) who mainly do scripted back-and-forth style discussions of D&D-related topics. I've talked about the Dungeon Dudes before, when taking apart one of their recent videos, but they also stream a D&D game they play in on Twitch (and frequently post recordings of those sessions on their channel), do product reviews, and generally do whatever they can to maintain a consistent pace of content output, generally a minimum of twice weekly. They've been around for nearly four years now, and have amassed about 273 thousand subscribers on their channel, with over 44 million views for their content, which seem like decent numbers for a niche content channel. (Contract with CinemaSins, which exists as a viral content manufacturer, and has amassed over 9 million subscribers and over 3.3 billion views. I'm not trying to say the Dungeon Dudes are the CinemaSins of D&D; if they were, their numbers would probably look a lot more like those of CinemaSins.)

The big problem with the Dudes as content creators is that, despite being a niche content channel, they are clearly in it to try to eke out some kind of income or living from the work they put into the channel: they've got a Patreon, they use affiliate links in the descriptions of their product review videos to gain some additional referrer income, and they do sponsored content when they can get a sponsor. They started back in the summer of 2017 with a very 2016-era plan on how to succeed at YouTube: put together a bunch of short (5-10 minutes, occasionally longer, but go over 15 minutes at your peril) videos and release them on an iron-clad schedule to get people used to coming back to your channel and looking over your new content, and to their credit, they've kept up their content production schedule very consistently over the past four years.

They've also learned a few things during that time and have adapted the channel in response: their videos explaining rules and reviewing new products tend to be more popular, so they work those topics in on a more regular basis. They've learned that the YouTube algorithm has subtly changed over the past few years to reward channels that can provide longer 'engagement' (which gives YouTube more opportunities to run ads), and have expanded their video length to an average of about a half-hour, with their re-broadcasts from Twitch being extra-long videos (between two and two-and-a-half hours) which, while drawing fewer total views, probably draw as much or more 'engagement' from the algorithm for the views they have.

But the need to spit out so much content on such a rigid, unforgiving schedule means that they have to aim for quick-creation and easy digestion: putting subclasses into a bog-standard tier ranking, making 'top five' and 'top ten' lists that seem like they're being cribbed from a more thoughtful resource, and generally getting stuff out the door (like their 'Powerful Spell Combos Using Teamwork' video) without spending too much time thinking about how valuable or even accurate their advice happens to be. More to the point, it seems to be taking its toll on the guys who serve as the hosts of the show: Kelly McLaughlin has a fairly dour expression in general, but lately he seems to have the countenance of a man who's about to post a 'very special episode' discussing the dangers of YouTuber burnout.

The Dungeon Dudes feature low-effort content because they have to in order to support the publishing frequency they've chosen; if they were to take the time to put together a truly high-effort piece regarding one of their traditional topics, their Patreon subscribers would likely be asking why their release schedule had slowed down before their work was even half-done.

Dungeon Craft

The Dungeon Craft channel is run by a fellow who refers to himself as 'Professor Dungeon Master'; I have not yet found any reference in his channel or elsewhere that identifies who he actually is, so I'll just refer to him as Prof. Prof has been on YouTube a bit longer than the Dungeon Dudes, having launched his channel in October of 2016, and has put out 185 'episodes' (as of the time of this writing), thus averaging between three and four episodes per month. Prof's own 'trailer' video explicitly states his channel's concept: "Some channels focus on running the game, others on building terrain, others on painting minis. I do it all!" You might think, then, that this would be a place to find quite high-quality content, especially related to terrain and miniatures painting tips, but it seems like the main effect of Prof making his channel be about multiple topics (and there are plenty of topics he discusses that don't fit into any of those three categories above) is that he can't successfully communicate what his channel is actually about, other than about his specific opinions. Maybe that's the reason he's sitting at about 65 thousand subscribers and just under 5 million views.

However, being at a slightly lower 'tier' of content production than the Dungeon Dudes is not itself any kind of crime or even indicative of poor quality -- after all, one of my favorite D&D lore channels on YouTube is RavenloftTravelAgent, and she's got just over a thousand subscribers and only about 50 thousand views on her videos. No, Prof could have a very high-quality, high-content channel with the subscriber numbers and views he has, but he doesn't.

Prof's issue is almost exactly the opposite of that of the Dungeon Dudes: instead of cranking out a rapid-fire, breakneck volume of content to keep up with an arbitrary content production schedule because that's how you make a living producing content for YouTube and you have to keep feeding the hungry algorithm, Prof cranks out content that's very easy for him to write because he's been involved in the game for a long time and already knows that the way he learned to play the game is the best way. Any topic that comes up related to D&D, he's got an opinion and can spit out a script explaining his opinion quickly because it's the same opinion he's held for decades. Classic D&D didn't have skills, so the next edition of D&D shouldn't have them either. Classic D&D had slow advancement, so slow advancement is better than fast advancement. This becomes even more obvious in the videos that have very little or nothing to do with running a D&D game, such as where Prof explains why he thought Avengers: Endgame sucked, or why he thought Season 8 of Game of Thrones was 'nearly perfect'.

Some of the oddest episodes of Dungeon Craft have to do when Prof makes admissions that make him out to be, well, the D&D channel for 'that kind' of old-school gamer: the ones who can make comments to each other that they can't make in front of their wives or significant others because the latter find the comments sexist, the kind of guys you can complain to about not being able to tell a Polack joke at work, the guys who treated D&D in the 1980s and 1990s the way that guys in the 1950s and 1960s treated golf where they could build a wall between the world as it existed and the world as they wanted to believe it was (and, if we're being honest, the way that they believed it should actually be). Nowhere is this more evident than in the video where Prof starts by discussing the hot, rich girlfriend he had once who tried but never got into D&D who he just had to break up with, and which by the 3 minute mark has him "calling bullshit" on the idea that relationships are built on compromise and negotiation. (I mean, you saw this coming, right? Right there at the end of the last paragraph about how the ending of Game of Thrones was so good? You knew that's where this was going, right?)

And, of course, he's not immune to just jumping on the latest bandwagon to contribute his drone to the chorus of voices talking about things just to be talking about things. It shouldn't be surprising that Prof jumped on the bandwagon of the lawsuit brought by Hickman and Weis against Wizards of the Coast over the upcoming Dragonlance trilogy, which turned out to be a nothing-burger. Even weirder is the tag in the description of that video which says "Analysis you can't get anywhere else", even though the video doesn't contain anything that hadn't already been discussed over the three weeks between the lawsuit and Prof's video other than Prof's own opinions about it. My favorite howler that Prof makes in this video is his assertion that, because Hickman and Weis got a lawyer to file a lawsuit, that means there's definitely fire under that smoke, because "big law firms do not accept cases they don't think they can win", which both ignores the existence of SLAPP suits as well as the existence of authors who seem to take perverse glee in suing rival authors just to drive them out of the industry. He's also responded with multiple videos in response to Cody at Taking20s controversial 'illusion of choice' essay, and his response to Ginny Di's essay on making online D&D suck less didn't include any of Ginny's solid advice on making online play more compatible with an in-person mentality (recognizing interruptive behavior, or using text chat to maintain side-conversations that would otherwise not be distracting in person), but instead gave these recommendations to players:

Keep your camera turned on

Mute yourself when not talking

Don't distract yourself with technology during the game

Nothing specific on recognizing how online play differs from tabletop play and suggesting ways to bring those two styles closer together, just commands because he's the DM and he says so. Or, in other words, low-effort, opinion-based content.

Nerd Immersion

Nerd Immersion, a channel by Ted that started in May of 2014 and has amassed over 70 thousand subscribers, starts his "channel trailer" video by leafing through a book, then looking up and saying, "Oh, hello" as if he'd just noticed that there was a camera on pointing at him while he's sitting in his orange-trimmed gaming chair. That, sadly, is roughly the level of thought that goes into the actual content contained on this long-tenured but seemingly still super-niche channel.

The weird thing is that at some point, it was obvious that Ted put some real effort into this channel. There are defined sections of the channel that focus on particular things, avoiding the Dungeon Craft problem of 'what topic is our channel about this week?' On Tuesdays, Ted posts a top-10 list. Ted comes up with an idea for a series, like 'Fixing 5E' or 'Reviewing Unearthed Arcana', posts regular articles until he's said what he means to say, then ends the series. (There hasn't been a new Fixing 5E video in roughly a year, meaning that Ted isn't wasting his own time and that of the viewer continually beating horses he's long since killed.) And he comes up with some great ideas for series, such as his series reviewing products on the DMs Guild; that particular series comes out somewhat irregluarly, but not so irregularly that you think he may have stopped doing the series without telling you.

Nerd Immersion's big problem can be summed up by simply looking at the list of videos on his channel and noticing that when he puts his own face on the thumbnail of the video, the startling frequency with which he's shrugging or has a puzzled face or just seems to be presenting himself as if he's not sure what's happening in his own video. I mean, I get it -- that's his image, the personality he wants to present to his audience. He doesn't have all the answers (a refreshing change from Dungeon Craft, honestly), but has some things to share if you're interested, so go ahead and take a peek. But then you take a look at those different sections we spoke about earlier and see that the 'Fixing' series all have the word Fixing at the top of the screen, the Nerd Immersion logo in the top left, two images underneath the text, one on the right side of the page and one on the left, separated right down the middle, and they all have Fix-It Felix on the far right. The Top 10 videos always have Top 10 at the top of the thumbnail. The Unearthed Arcana reviews all have 'Unearthed Arcana' at the top, then 'Review' in an odd off-set to the right beneath 'Unearthed Arcana'.

In other words, Ted has a formula, and he's damn well going to follow it.

Now it's not a bad thing to have a workflow -- if you're going to be cranking out videos at the volume that Ted does (not to mention the others on this list), you'd better have some kind of process for making the video, getting the thumbnail on it, etc.; otherwise each new video is a horrible nightmare of effort as you re-invent the wheel for every project. Nobody wants to do that, and the results would likely be unwatchable. Having a process is a good thing. But the Dungeon Dudes clearly also have a process -- they've put out at least two videos a week for three and a half years, so they damn well have a process or they wouldn't have been able to get out that much content. Looking at their channel, though, shows you that while they have a brand, and one that's evolving over time to boot, they're not just making the same video over and over again, or at least you wouldn't think that from looking at the thumbnails.

Ted's most interesting videos are where he's interviewing another person or even just having another person in the video, because having another person around clearly takes him at least a bit outside his rigid formulaic comfort zone. The problem is that those videos are few and far between -- the review of the infernal tiefling is about eight months separated from his interview with Celeste Conowitch about her Venture Maidens campaign guide. Also interesting are his unboxing videos, because Ted clearly likes minis and takes some degree of joy in cracking open and looking at new minis. His unboxing videos aren't as irregular as his interview videos, but they are fairly recent, with the first appearing just a few months ago, so it's still not clear if this is going to be a new regular part of the channel, or just another series that goes until he says what he wants to say about minis and then stops.

Most of the stuff on the site, though, is just, well, stuff, cranked out on a formula and thrown out into the digital void with the same soft-spoken volume regardless of whether it's major news or a press release. As an example, while pretty much everybody had an opinion on the Dragonlance lawsuit, Ted covered when the suit was announced, when it was dismissed by Weis and Hickman, when the actual trilogy that was the subject of the novels was announced, and the official release date of the first book in the new trilogy. When it came time to get ready to announce the newest campaign book, Ted was on the job, posting a video preparing for the announcement, another video later the same day when his original prediction of a Feywild adventure book seemed to be contradicted by other rumors that the book would be a Ravenloft book, then posted yet another video when the actual book was leaked on Amazon at 11:24pm later that same day confirming Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, posted the video discussing the official announcement of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft the next day, and then the day after that followed up with more details on Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft revealed in Dragon+. That's five videos in three days, for a grand total of just over 100 thousand views combined. The intention seems like Ted wants to be the CNN of the D&D news scene, but with those kind of distribution numbers, the result is more like your local home town's shopping circular that occasionally also features stories about the latest project to fix the potholes on Main Street. Just like nobody's doing 24/7 news coverage of your local town council, nobody is (or probably should strive to) doing 24/7 coverage of the gaming industry and Wizards of the Coast. At some point it just becomes running a script, pressing a button to upload the next video, because it's news, and while you don't have to think about news to quite the same degree you have to think about more opinion-based topics, once you stop thinking about the process and what it is you're making, all you have left is executing the formula, over and over again, and both the input and the output becomes repetitive.

Repetitive videos, in repetitive formats, with repetitive text, to keep the monster fed for another day. I can admire the effort that goes into it, but the overwhelming presence of the formula involved in cranking out this content keeps me from feeling that it's worth engaging with. It's low-effort, because the effort has been meticulously removed from the process.

I could go on, but I think I'll stop here. There's not really any constructive criticism I could provide to these channels because, as I hope I've pointed out, it seems like low-effort content is pretty much the only thing these channels have to offer or in truth can offer, and anything that might cause their owners to re-consider their channels to improve their content would almost certainly lead to a very different if not wholly different channel. With things being as they are online, there's no guarantee that any new, higher-effort channel would be any more successful than the old low-effort one (remember the RavenloftTravelAgent channel with absolutely miniscule numbers; effort doesn't automatically equate with success). I can't even claim that being low-effort channels necessarily makes these channels bad (despite what I said in the intro); after all, they all have at least some good ideas, especially Nerd Immersion, and they each have subscribers and a following. I guess this is just my way of putting some small amount of effort into explaining why I don't feel like doing more to help these channels succeed, because I'd rather put my support toward channels making higher-quality, higher-effort content, especially because its not the content itself, but people engaging with that content that really drives a channel's success.

[iandeleonwrites]

Ian’s Case: A Personal Statement for Grad School Admission

Personal Statement, Ian Deleón

“He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed.”

It was more than a decade ago when I first read those words. Written by the American author Willa Cather, Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament has always felt to me like an intimate account of my own life penned by a woman one hundred years in the past. 

That is a feeling which makes me proud; that my personal whims, fears, and desires, could find their echo long ago in a story about a young man and his pursuit of a meaningful life. Because of it, I felt a pleasing sense of historicity at a time when I was struggling so much with my own. 

I grew up in Miami Beach. Literally not more than a block away from water for most of my life. My father had emigrated from Cuba with his family in 1980. My mother had come on a work visa from Brazil a few years later. They met on the beach, had an affair, and I came into the world in May of 1987. 

My life was marked with in betweenness from the very beginning. My parents’ relationship did not last long, so I grew up traveling between houses. I had two families. I was American, but I was also Cuban and Brazilian. I even have a Brazilian passport. I spoke three languages fluently, but I couldn’t dance salsa or samba. I felt at home with the working class immigrants and people of color in my neighborhoods, but I often had to work hard to prove I wasn’t just some gringo with a knack for foreign tongues.  

[A quick note on Paul’s Case––If it happens that the reader is not familiar with the short story, let me briefly summarize it here:  A disenchanted youth in turn of the century Pittsburgh feels increasingly alienated from his schoolmates, his teachers and his family. His only comfort is his position as an usher at Carnegie Hall, where he loses himself in the glamour of the art life. Having no drive or desire to become an artist, however, the dandy Paul makes a spur of the moment criminal decision and elopes to New York City. There, he is able to live out his fantasies in a financial masquerade for about a week’s time, until the authorities back home finger him for monetary theft. Learning that his father is en route to the city to collect him, Paul travels to the countryside and flings himself in front of a speeding train, musing about the elegant brevity of winter flowers.]

When I first encountered Cather’s short story I was blown away by the parallels I saw between my own life and Paul’s. In 2005, fresh out of high school, I was living mostly with my father as my mother had relocated to faraway West Palm Beach. I was an usher at the local concert hall, a job I cherished enough to volunteer my time for free. I became entranced by the world of classical music, opera, theater, and spectacle––often showing up for work early and roaming the performance spaces, probing high and low like some kind of millenial phantom. 

In school, however, I had no direction, no plan. I had good enough grades, but no real motivation, and worst of all, I thought, no discernible talent. I probably resented my father for not being cultured enough to teach me about music, theater, and the arts. No one in my family had ever even been to a museum, or sat before a chamber orchestra. And it didn’t seem to matter to them either, they could somehow live blissfully without it. 

Well I couldn’t. I began to mimic the fervor with which Paul immersed himself in that world, while also exhibiting the same panic at the thought of not being able to sustain my treasured experiences without a marketable contribution to them. But here is where Paul and I take divergent paths. 

I was attending the Miami Dade Honors College, breezing my way towards an associate’s degree. I took classes in Oceanography, Sociology, Creative Writing, Acting and African Drumming. I was experimenting and falling in love with everything. 

But it was my Creative Writing professor, Michael Hettich, who really encouraged the development of my nascent writing talent. Up until that point my ideas only found their expression through class assignments, particularly book reports and essays on historical events. My sister had always felt I had a way with words, but I just attributed this to growing up in a multicultural environment amongst a diversity of native languages.  

As a result of that encouragement I began to write poetry, little songs and treatments for film ideas based on the short stories we were talking about in class. Somehow, thanks to those lines of poetry and a few amateur photographic self portraits, I was admitted to the Massachusetts College of Art & Design for my BFA program. 

There, I attended classes in Printmaking, Paper Making, Performance Art, Video Editing, and Glass Blowing. I was immersed in culture, attending lectures and workshops, adding new words to my vocabulary: “New Media” and “gestalt”. I saw my first snowfall. I had the dubious honor of appearing at once not Hispanic and yet different enough. I was overwhelmed. I felt increasingly disenchanted and out of place in New England, yet my work flourished and grew stronger. 

It was during this time that I developed a passion for live performance and engagement with an audience. I also worked with multi-channel video and sculptural installations. Always, I commented on my family history, grappling with it, the emigrations and immigrations. I even returned to those early short stories from Miami Dade, one time doing an interpretive movement piece based on The Yellow Wallpaper. Most often I talked about my father. He was even in a few of my projects. He was a good sport, though we still had the occasional heated political disagreement. We never held any grudges, and made up again rather quickly. It would always be that way, intense periods of warming and cooling. A tropical temperament, I suppose. 

I continued to take film-related classes in Boston, but my interests gradually became highly abstracted, subtle, and decidedly avant-garde. I had no desire to work in a coherently narrative medium. This would eventually change, but for now, I let my ambitions and aspirations take me where they would. 

I returned home to Miami for a spell after graduation. I traveled the world for five months after that. I moved back to Boston for another couple of years, because it was comfortable I suppose, though I was fed up with the weather. 

Finally, I wound up in NYC. Classic story: I followed a charming young woman, another performance artist as luck would have it, a writer too, and a bit of an outsider. We were quickly engaged and on the first anniversary of our meet cute we were married on a gorgeous piece of land in upstate new york, owned by an older performance-loving couple from the city. Piece of land doesn’t quite do it justice, we’re talking massive tracts, hidden acres of forest, sudden lakes, fertile fields, and precocious wildlife. As they say in the movies, it really is all about location, location, location. 

Nearly all of our significant personal and professional achievements in the subsequent years have centered around this bucolic homestead. After meeting, courting, researching and eventually getting married there, we soon decided we would stage our most ambitious project to date in this magical space––we would shoot...a movie.

We hit upon the curious story of an eighteenth century woman in England called Mary Toft. Dear Mary became famous for a months-long ruse that involved her supposed birthing of rabbits, and sometimes cats. The small town hoax ballooned into a national controversy when it was eventually exposed by some of the king’s physicians. My wife and I were completely enthralled by this story and its contemporary implications. Was Mary wholly complicit in the mischievous acts, or was she herself a sort of duped victim...of systematic abuse at the hands of her family, her husband, her country? 

We soon found a way to adapt and give this tale a modern twist that recast Mary as a woman of color alone in the woods navigating a host of creepy men, a miscarriage, and a supernatural rabbit. 

Over the course of nine months, our idea gestated and began taking the form of a short film screenplay. This was something neither of us had done or been adequately trained to do before. But we knew we wanted it to be special, it was our passion project. We knew we didn’t want it to look amateurish––we were too old for that. So we took out a loan, hired an amazing camera crew, and in three consecutive days in the summer of 2017 we filmed our story, Velvet Cry. It was the most difficult thing either of us had undertaken...including planning our nuptial ceremony around our difficult families. 

It was an incredible experience––intoxicating––also quite maddening and stressful. But it was all worth it. Because of our work schedules, it took us another year to finish post production on the film, but throughout that process, I knew I had found my calling. I would be a writer, and I would be a Director. 

Perhaps I had been too afraid to dream the big dream before. Perhaps I had lacked the confidence, or simply, the life experience to tackle the complexity of human emotions, narratives, and interactions––but no longer. This is what I wanted to do and I had to find a way to get better at doing it. 

In the intervening months, I have set myself on a course to develop my writing abilities as quickly as I could in anticipation of this application process. I know I have some latent talent, but it has been a long time since I’ve been in an academic setting, and in any case, I have never really attempted to craft drama on this scale before. 

I’ve read many books, listened to countless interviews, attended online classes, and most importantly, written my heart out since relocating down the coast to the small college town of Gainesville in Central Florida with my wife in June of 2018. It was through a trip to her alma mater of Hollins University that we learned about the co-ed graduate program in screenwriting a few months ago. After all the debt I accrued in New England, I didn’t think I would ever go back to college, though I greatly enjoyed the experience. But what we learned about the program filled me with confidence and a desire to share in the wonderful legacy of this school that my wife is always gushing about. 

Our Skype conversation with Tim Albaugh proved to be the deciding factor. I knew instantly that I wanted to be a part of anything that he was involved with, and I had the feeling that my ideas would truly be nurtured and harnessed into a craft––something tangible I could be proud of and use to propel my career. 

I continue to mine my childhood and adolescence in Miami for critical stories and characters, situations that shed light on my own personal experience of life. I’ve found myself coming back to Paul’s Case. No longer caught up in the character’s stagnant, brooding longings for a grander life, I’m now able to revisit the story, appreciating the young man’s anxieties while evaluating how it all went so fatally wrong for Paul. There was no reason to despair, no cause for lost hope. I would take the necessary steps to become the artist I already know myself to be. The screenplay I am submitting as my writing sample is a new adaptation of this story, making Paul my own, and giving him a little bit of that South Florida flavor. 

I will close by reiterating how I have visited Hollins, and heard many a positive review from the powerful women I know who have attended college there. As a graduate student, I know Hollins can help me to become a screenwriter, to become a filmmaker. This is the only graduate program to which I am applying––I have a very good feeling about all this.

I want to be a Hollins girl. 

[dippedanddripped]

For more than a year, Los Angeles-based streetwear designer Tremaine Emory had been working with Converse on a red, green and black sneaker inspired by Jamaican political activist and Black nationalist Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag and artist David Hammons’ 1990 work “African-American Flag,” an original of which was acquired by the Broad museum in Los Angeles last year.

Emory’s brand, Denim Tears, tells the story of Black people in the United States starting in 1619, when the first documented enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia; according to the designer, the brand’s logo, a cotton plant, is a direct reference to slavery. That’s why the proposed packaging for his Converse sneaker collaboration depicts a coffin covered with Hammons’ flag and a cotton wreath, as a tribute to Black Americans who have died under unjust conditions. The image is based on an art installation, “A Proper Burial, Thanks America,” that Emory debuted in London last year.

However, in late May, as protests spread across the country after George Floyd’s death in police custody, Emory announced on Instagram that he and Denim Tears couldn’t go forward with the partnership until Converse’s parent company, Nike, went beyond its plan to donate $40 million over four years to support the Black community. (Michael Jordan, through his Nike subsidiary Jordan Brand, is donating an additional $100 million over 10 years.)

Emory called the move by Beaverton, Ore.,-based Nike, which reported $37.4 billion in revenue last fiscal year, a very expensive Band-Aid. He said he wanted to use his voice to push Nike to look inward at its own record on diversity and inclusion.

“It’s accountability,” Emory said in a phone interview. “It’s about Fortune 500 companies and how they are run under the guise of white supremacy and patriarchy and how I take accountability, that I need to see the steps — and brands that I work with dispensing that — or guys won’t work with me.”

In recent months, nearly all major industries, including entertainment, journalism and sports, have been forced to confront how closely their statements opposing systemic racism align with their treatment of Black and brown employees. The fashion industry, which has frequently been criticized for cultural appropriation, instances of blackface and a lack of diversity, is no different.

According to a count by trade publication Women’s Wear Daily, Black people make up only 4% — 19 out of 477 members — of the invitation-only Council of Fashion Designers of America, whose new chairman is Tom Ford. In an email to The Times, a CFDA spokesman said, “The CFDA does not record nor require members to state their race upon application, but it is estimated that members of color make up approximately 25% of the total membership.”

June 8, 2020

In anecdotal comments, Black streetwear designers from L.A. to New York told The Times that their subset of the fashion industry is no different.

“You can’t ignore the fact that there aren’t many Black brand owners in the streetwear space,” said Scott Sasso, who founded 10.Deep in 1995 while he was a student at Vassar. “And [at] some of the biggest companies, I don’t know if they’ve even had Black employees.”

Streetwear brands such as Denim Tears and 10.Deep offer casual clothing, primarily for men, that blend the styles of various subcultures, including hip-hop (as popularized in the 1990s by brands such as FUBU, Walker Wear and Phat Farm) as well as surf and skate motifs. It’s an identity that can be found in the clothing from brands such as Supreme and Stüssy. Instead of offering widely available, mass-produced products, streetwear brands tend to offer limited-edition drops for consumers who hear about companies through social media or by word of mouth.

Although Black style — from hip-hop to sneaker culture — has played a major role in shaping the fashion industry while bringing new designers and brands to prominence, Black fashion professionals and streetwear brand owners said in interviews with The Times that the clothing industry has failed to elevate and promote Black creatives in a way that reflects that influence.

Several designers also questioned the sincerity of corporations promising to invest in Black communities. They reflected on their own experiences trying to explain Black art to predominantly white company leaders.

Chicago-based designer Joe Freshgoods started selling T-shirts in high school and has been selling his designs out of Fat Tiger Workshop, the streetwear retail hub he co-owns, since 2013.

“I feel like a lot of these brands are in these boardrooms having these talks about how to fix this or how to just clean up their mistakes real fast, and it’s just like, ‘Hey, let’s just fill in the blanks real quick and see if this will make them happy,’” Freshgoods said.

He said he tried to include the logo of the Black Panther Party on a design for an Oakland-themed collaboration with an apparel brand last year. The company’s legal department rejected his proposal. At the time he went along with it, but now he’d push back, he said.

“A lot of Black collaborators are the reason why a lot of brands are super successful right now, so that’s a lot of power to have,” Freshgoods said.

Emory, who has partnered with New Balance and Levi’s, called on Nike to stop supporting Republicans while President Trump is the party’s leader. He also wants the company to release more information on its record of hiring Black employees and assist in “the defunding and total reform of all the police departments across America.”

Since his initial Instagram post in June, Emory has spoken to Converse Chief Executive G. Scott Uzzell or Uzzell’s team about a half dozen times over the phone or in video-conference meetings. In those discussions, Emory said the company acknowledged it hasn’t done everything it could in terms of creating a diverse corporate structure and laid out its hiring plan, especially in its executive suite. The designer said he discussed current initiatives at Nike to invest in Black communities and to address systemic racism and police brutality. “They want to get involved in all that, and we will see,” he said.

The release date for his red, black and green Converse sneaker has been moved up from February to October, ahead of the November election. Emory said the marketing for the shoe will focus on promoting voting. The shoe will be available in North America, Europe and online for $95 to $100.

“We respect and encourage the efforts of any collaborator or athlete we work with to raise their voice against racial injustice,” a Converse spokesperson said in a statement to The Times. “We have spoken with Tremaine and look forward to working through these issues together.”

At its core, streetwear is about authenticity and the personal connection between consumers and the designers and labels they love.

The push by larger brands and corporations — specifically in the fashion industry — to meet the current moment with statements, donations and new initiatives is in direct contrast to what many Black streetwear designers have been doing since the inception of their brands. Those designers have been hiring diverse staff, speaking up about political issues and infusing their works with references to Black culture.

“Now I feel like everybody’s rushing to make some type of relevant shirt or make some relevant message on their Instagram,” said Zac Clark, a Black designer who started his brand, FTP, while in high school in Los Angeles. “To me, a lot of this stuff right now seems very unnatural and just forced from a lot of these brands, so they won’t get ‘canceled.’”

Olivia Anthony, the designer behind the Livstreetwear brand, said the turning point for her New York-based company was her 2017 My Love Letter to Our Culture collection, which paid tribute to Black trends of the ’90s — think long nails, grills and slicked-down baby hairs — that were largely considered unfashionable until they were adopted by other races.

“It was so beautiful, but it was looked down upon,” said Anthony, adding that she wanted her brand to reflect how those Black trends, now featured in magazines including Vogue, have been “shown in a different light.”

Kacey Lynch said he created his South L.A.-based streetwear company, Bricks & Wood, after years of working at streetwear brands where he felt Black representation was missing.

“They wanted a lot from us, but they didn’t want to do the work, what it took to understand us,” Lynch said of his past employers. “Whether that’s Black culture, South-Central, minorities … wherever the cool came from, they all wanted it but they didn’t really know how to identify with it.”

In May 2019, fashion website Hypebeast and Strategy&, a consulting firm in the PwC network, released its Streetwear Impact Report, based on interviews with more than 40,000 Hypebeast readers and 700 global industry insiders. The survey found that 70% of respondents said they care about social issues, 59% said brand activism is important and 47% said they would stop shopping from a brand because of inappropriate behavior.

“It’s fine as a starting point for corporations to say, ‘This is what we stand for and this is what we believe,’” said Elena Romero, a fashion journalist and author of 2012’s “Free Stylin’: How Hip Hop Changed the Fashion Industry.”“But that’s not going to be enough.”

Romero, an assistant professor at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, said companies likely will face questions over where they invest their profits, the diversity of their staff and how they’ve helped build the communities from which their dollars are coming. She said many companies will realize they’ve fallen short because the answers to those questions weren’t a priority until their profits were at risk.

“Now the consumer is saying, ‘You can’t fool us anymore,’” she said. “If you’re not authentic and truly supporting the very same things that these young people believe, your business will suffer.”

The result has been an industrywide push to make those investments now but also to make amends for past inaction. After Black Adidas employees criticized the company’s response to racism, Adidas announced June 9 that it would add more diverse staff, start a scholarship program for Black employees and invest an additional $20 million over four years in programs that serve the Black community. A day later, Adidas upped its $20 million pledge to $120 million. (In addition to those changes at Adidas, the company’s global head of human resources, Karen Parkin, resigned at the end of June after facing criticism for her handling of racial discrimination.)

Adidas also apologized for its past silence. “For most of you, this message is too little, too late,” a tweet from the Adidas account read. “We’ve celebrated athletes and artists in the Black community and used their image to define ourselves culturally as a brand but missed the message in reflecting such little representation within our walls.”

In the broader fashion community, various organizations and members of the industry have offered different strategies for creating a more inclusive environment. Aurora James, a New York-based creative director, started the Fifteen Percent Pledge, which calls on companies to provide at least 15% of their shelf space or contracts to Black-owned businesses.

After the CFDA announced its plan to promote diversity, a group called the Kelly Initiative called for the CFDA to adopt its proposal to conduct and publish a census of diversity in the industry, audit its recruitment practices and release an annual list of top Black talent, the Kelly List. The initiative is named after the late Patrick Kelly, a Black fashion designer who rose to prominence in the 1980s with work that played with Black cultural symbols and racial stereotypes.

April Walker, whose New York brand Walker Wear was worn by ’90s hip-hop stars including Method Man, Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., stressed that Black designers need to look outside the fashion industry for success by collaborating, mentoring and sharing resources with their counterparts.

“We just need to not look for the fashion industry, as it’s been very oppressive for the last 30 years, to be the end-all, be-all for our opportunities,” she said, “but to create our own.”

Among streetwear companies, the effort to fight systemic racism in the country and the fashion industry has been on an individual basis, with brand owners of all races deciding how much they’re willing to give back and how comfortable they are using their platforms to discuss and condemn racism.

For some, that means speaking up in solidarity with the Black community. Bobby Kim, cofounder of the Hundreds, a Vernon-based clothing brand, teamed with Pharrell Williams’ brand Billionaire Boys Club to raise money for Black Lives Matter and the Black Mental Health Alliance with a shirt that was available for 48 hours. After the Fairfax shopping district where his shop is located was vandalized in late May, Kim, who’s Korean American, defended the right to protest.

In an interview, Kim said, “If you have been given a lot of money, and especially if that money has come by way of participating, contributing, or even stealing or borrowing from Black culture, then you — more than anybody else right now — need to tithe, need to pay up, in a sense, in order to reflect how influential Black culture has been in your career and your profitability as a company.”

Sasso’s 10.Deep stopped selling its regular collection for most of June and instead offered a new line of 10.Deep products to draw attention to activism against racial injustice and police brutality. The profits went to national bail funds for protesters.

“Streetwear, in its truest form, is about shooting yourself in the foot as often as possible but also just doing what you think is right,” Sasso said.

He said he was drawn to streetwear because it was a multiethnic community of different countercultures, a blend of the skate, surf, hip-hop and graffiti scenes, with a dash of punk rock, united by an exclusive knowledge of where to find and buy certain brands.

However, he has noticed a shift among streetwear consumers. For some shoppers, it’s not about the community. It’s just about the clothes.

He said he lost “several thousand” social media followers after he posted about Black Lives Matter and has received comments asking him to just stick to fashion.

“My thought is: If you want just some regular clothes, go buy Banana Republic, go buy Levi’s,” he said. “Those are companies that aren’t gonna take political stances. They’re providing basic stuff. This space is about a culture. If you want to participate in it, this is what it’s about.”

[zanytimetravelenthusiast-blog]

Trenzy Review And Bonus

Trenzy Review - Are you searching for even more expertise regarding Trenzy? Please go through my honest review regarding it before choosing, to evaluate the weak points and strengths of it. Can it deserve your effort and time as well as money?

Introducing Trenzy

Exactly how To Find An Ecommerce Specific Niche You Can Control (Part 4)

Idea 2: Don't go too huge

When selecting a specific niche, you ought to know your broad market group, the sub-industry, and also your target audience. If you choose an audience that's also slim, you'll have a slim chance of transforming your items into a six-figure business. For example, it's also slim if only 50-year-old female professors of Art that are living in Reno experience the issue you want to address.

If you choose an audience that's also wide, you're not targeting any person.

To target your clients right, select a single pain or an expensive issue that lots of people have, as well as build your shop around resolving that pain. With every item you include, contribute to fixing the pain of your clients. From that, you can get your unique offering.

The distinct offering should be easy to describe. Some people fill their talk with so much fluff that after ten mins, you do not obtain what their shop is about. Clarifying your distinct offering should not take that long.

Utilize the fool-proof placing declaration formula: "My store assists TARGET MARKET resolve PAIN. Unlike my rivals, DISTINCT AFFORDABLE ADVANTAGE."- Kurt Elster Up until your positioning is laser focused, you'll battle to market yourself as well as attract an audience. Do this prior to anything else

Until your positioning is laser concentrated, you'll battle to market yourself as well as draw in an audience. CLICK TO TWEET

4. Attempt To Produce An Advantage Over Amazon

If people are searching for an item online, they will inspect Amazon.com and various other industries initially. Create a competitive benefit that sellers on Amazon.com do not have.

Suggestion 1: Consider And Also Craft Your Benefit

Andrew Youderian

You much better recognize that you need to be various from every other organisation and also deal worth enough that customers will move to pay for it. Fantastic customer service and also prominent particular niche products are inadequate.

That is something some brand-new ecommerce entrepreneurs do not think through, and also they obtain irritated as their organisation fall short to get grip.

Jon Cooper

Ask yourself, "in the long run, why should clients purchase from me?"-- @PointBlankSEOCLICK TO TWEET

If you have a company without any affordable advantage and can't think of any reason for someone to buy from you, after that you are not ready to start a company.

Likewise, learn if your items are on Amazon.com. Oftentimes, people or Amazon itself currently sells them. The reason that any person would certainly leave a currently established Amazon.com with tons of product evaluations for you is your affordable advantage. Have a pricing edge, or supply more in quality and also make use of that is nowhere else. Whatever the reason is, you should have one, or else Amazon will certainly take your rumbling.

Note that despite having a competitive advantage, you might not sell quickly. Technique marketing from a dazzling angle. Consider what Buck Shave Club did with that video clip that made them stick in our minds. Be consistent with your voice and also advertising on a lasting and also adapt to the marketplace as you go.

Method too many people don't stay with their benefit and concept enough time or adjust to market changes. As a result, they end up stuck and aggravated. If you see that a specific item is getting a ton of sales, or people have an interest in another thing, don't be afraid to adapt.

Pointer 2: Continue To Invest In Your Brand name

The very best ecommerce niches do not have a lot more competitors than demand. If you discover a specific niche market not currently infiltrated by Amazon and various other mighty brands, it will not be long up until hard rivals emerge. Anything that's successful will be copied.

Linda Bustos

Spend heavily in every aspect of your brand; you need to maintain consumers dedicated to you and lead your competitors. You can not count on doing the exact same thing similarly permanently.

Scheme and also plan at every minute. It might be expanding your product offering or adding registration boxes to a market where no person offers it. You can also try networks your clients go to that the majority of your rivals have not attempted yet.

Trenzy Testimonial & Summary

Designer: Dr. Amit Pareek

Product: Trenzy

Introduce Date: 2019-May-16

Release Time: 11:00 EDT

Front-End Rate: $49

Sales Web Page: https://www.socialleadfreak.com/trenzy-review/

Specific niche: Software program

Trenzy Quality & Advantages

Trenzy Is Loaded with GROUND BREAKING Functions that makes it Most Effective App

Create and upload HOT Trending video clips and material on social media networks in simply one click

Built-In 1-Click Web Traffic System

Legitimately make use of other people's Trending Video clips as well as Produce Automated Revenue

Develop SEO Friendly Sites with Trending Web Content & Offers Handsfree

Manifold Earnings with Built-in Remarketing System

Do Extensive evaluation to Maximize & Boost Profits

100% Rookie pleasant

Promote Personalized Offers with Artificial Intelligence

Integration with significant Autoresponders as well as social media sites apps

No Domain name or Holding required

Accessibility to 1.3 Million Nobility cost-free photos

Completely Set and Forget this System with One Search Phrase

Instantly Convert your HOT Trending Deals in Any kind of Language according to Location

Full Video clip Training consisted of for Immediate Assist

Spin the Curated Material to Make it Distinct for Higher Rankings

Safe, Secure & 100% GDPR Issue

100% Mobile Friendly

How Does Trenzy Work?

Utilizing and also Making Money From Trenzy is as Easy As 1,2,3 ...

ACTION # 1: Enter your search phrases for trending subjects and automation regularity

ACTION # 2: AI software program immediately fetch Trending web content as well as best deal for your niche

STEP # 3: Sitback and also loosen up while Trenzy drives your laser targeted web traffic that exchanges customers, leads as well as commission

Price & Examination

FE- Trenzy Commercial ($47-$67)

Locate the most relevant material in secs for any niche and spin it-- Authority websites & YT

Legitimately utilizing other people's video and also benefiting from it

5 Color Styles

Post it across 9 Social media site channels

Monetize and scale your profits- You can directly drive the cost-free web traffic generated to your associate offer, encash it making use of AdSense or basic gather leads in our system or your favorite Autoresponder. And also you can produce as numerous websites as you want

Self-Optimizing Buyer-Driven Funnels Making Use Of AI Analysed Hyperlinks for Maximising Generates Leads & Profits

Establish as well as fail to remember system with just one search phrase

Provided for you 20 Funnel design templates-- 10 Lead, 8 Coupon & 2 Social

Obtain unstoppable leads in your much-loved Autoresponder or the dashboard (6- MailPrimo, Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse, Continuous Call, SendLane)

Also evaluate your activities and campaigns

Integrate messenger online conversation on your viral websites

Lovely site motif-- Produce attractive website with write-ups & videos

Accessibility to 1.3 Million Nobility complimentary images incorporated

Market your material in 15+ Languages in one click

Produce Search Engine Optimization friendly web pages immediately

No Domain name or hosting needed

Complete A-Z Training

OTO 3- Trenzy Company Permit

Agency License- $197- Offer 100 Customers & include 100 team members

$297- Offer 250 Clients & add unrestricted team members

OTO 1- Trenzy Pro ($47-$67)

A lot more sources for material

Combination with 15+ systems

Or you can connect it with CRMs like Salesforce or mixture soft

Increase engagement & Instantly capture leads from all your site visitors as they communicate on your Article or Video clip web page

Video clip and also short article contrast

Breakthrough And Thorough Analytics

Custom-made Video Clip Gamer

Possessions Library

Team Management

Unparallel Price

OTO 2- Trenzy Layout Club ($47-$67)

Banner ads

10 More Premium Website Shade Themes

Pexels integration

70 themes

Computer animations- On scroll, hold-up, time-- AI additional (No. of visits, minute stay)

OTO 4- Trenzy Reseller Edition ($97)

Let People Sell Trenzy further and also maintain 100% of the earnings

Final thought

"It's A Large amount. Should I Spend Today?"

Not only are you getting access to Trenzy Review for the very best price ever before provided, however likewise You're spending completely without threat. Trenzy consist of a 30-day Refund Assurance Policy. When you choose Trenzy, your complete satisfaction is assured. If you are not entirely pleased with it for any kind of reason within the initial 30 days, you're entitled to a full reimbursement-- no question asked. You've got nothing to lose! What Are You Waiting for? Try It today and get The Following Bonus Now!

[rboren]

  #gallery-0-4 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-4 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-0-4 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-4 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

The Ulysses app showing my writing queue

The Sublime code editor showing a Markdown file from the Calypso source code repository.

As a hacker and writer, I spend a lot of time in text editors. Almost everything I write starts in my favorite text editor. A text editor is my thinking space. It is a place for moving around blocks and tinkering with parts. It is a place to explore my mind and write it the way I want it to read. Iteration and ideation happen in my editor. My notes are not just a record of my thinking process, they are my thinking process.

All of this happens in beautiful, wonderful plain text.

I love that with plain text the focus is on the words, not the formatting. I love that it’s portable and can be used anywhere and everywhere, in any piece of software that edits or displays words. I love how easy it is to create beautifully formatted documents when needed. Most of all, I love how fast it is. I simply work more efficiently since switching to plain text.

Source: Removing the Word shackles: getting started with plain text

Writing this post in fullscreen mode in the Ulysses app, a plain text editor for macOS and iOS

At my company, we say “communication is oxygen”. Most of that oxygen is writing. So far this week, we’ve written 99,786 Slack messages, 1,749 P2 posts, and 5,070 P2 comments using our three level communication flow.

We iterate, we communicate, we make people happy.

793 Slack channels, 441 P2 blogs, 4,628 Zoom video chats

In the age of distributed collaboration, we are constantly writing. Equip students with the writing tools and flow popular with hackers, writers, scientists, and screenwriters—plain text & Markdown. Let’s infect education with the love of plain text. It’s portable, durable, flexible, ubiquitous, and humane. It is indie ed-tech that is not captive to an ed-tech business model or the whim of shareholders.

With blogs, plain text editors, and team chat, we have a wide selection of often free tools that enable the cultivation of authentic writing for authentic audiences. Instead of ELA rubrics that kill the joy of writing with remediation and formulaic prescriptions, students can write about what they care about and share that writing collaboratively with real audiences. Relax control over the writing process. Encourage revision and tinkering without the red ink of assessment. Don’t define and model students into the stilted, joyless unreadability typical of rubric writing. Get out of the way, let kids write, and write alongside them. Let them write not for grades, but to share their lived experience, share their passions, and affect their worlds.

Keyboards, spellcheckers, and assistive tech encourage writing and editing. Let students fill their toolbelts and start writing without shackles.

Below are selections on writing in education, writing for authentic audiences, writing for empathy, writing for English language learners, and writing as a means of accommodating neurodiveristy. At the end are selections on plain text and markdown flow. Plain text + Markdown is my favorite flow, but the important part is writing, collaboration, and connecting with audiences, no matter the tools.

Writing in Education

“I’ve had a fair number of kids that were traditionally disengaged— The most common complaint: ‘I don’t like to write, so I don’t like school.’ When I said, ‘Well, you can type it. You don’t have to write; you can type. And you can use the spell checker, and you can look up words.’ All of the sudden they say, ‘Oh, OK. I’ll do that.’”

“If you’re not a good writer, sitting and writing on a piece of paper is hard. But when they have a computer that can help with spelling, and with grammar, and they can go online and look up words and the pronunciation, and they can hear how it’s said, and they can write it down correctly. Now they feel good about themselves because they’re not getting a paper back with a thousand red marks all over it, correcting grammar and spelling that they don’t necessarily understand in the first place.”

High school students are often reluctant writers, especially when assigned to produce work that is uninteresting and unrelated to their personal lives. However, writing is a vital part of the help desk. Apprentices, both on and off the Communication Team, regularly craft articles for the support blog. My team offers starter ideas, but the apprentices select most topics based on their interests and the support needs of their peers. In this setting, writing feels less stilted, less pedantic, and more authentic. Writing for a real-world audience is vastly different from a traditional school writing assignment where a single teacher is a sole spectator.

Reisinger, Charlie (2016-09-29). The Open Schoolhouse: Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students. Kindle Edition.

Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.

while many parents worked hard to ensure their children were regular readers, they rarely pushed them to become regular writers.

We are now a global culture of avid writers.

As Brandt notes, reading and writing have become blended: “People read in order to generate writing; we read from the posture of the writer; we write to other people who write.” Or as Francesca Coppa, a professor who studies the enormous fan fiction community, explains to me, “It’s like the Bloomsbury Group in the early twentieth century, where everybody is a writer and everybody is an audience. They were all writers who were reading each other’s stuff, and then writing about that, too.”

So how is all this writing changing our cognitive behavior?

• • • For one, it can help clarify our thinking. Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

Poets famously report this sensation. “I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”

Culturally, we revere the Rodin ideal— the belief that genius breakthroughs come from our gray matter alone. The physicist Richard Feynman once got into an argument about this with the historian Charles Weiner. Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process.

Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.

The explosion of online writing has a second aspect that is even more important than the first, though: it’s almost always done for an audience.

When you write something online— whether it’s a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone’s photo, or a thousand-word post— you’re doing it with the expectation that someone might read it, even if you’re doing it anonymously. Audiences clarify the mind even more.

Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly.

When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.

But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.

When asked to write for a real audience of students in another country, students write essays that are substantially longer and have better organization and content than when they’re writing for their teacher. When asked to contribute to a wiki— a space that’s highly public and where the audience can respond by deleting or changing your words— college students snap to attention, writing more formally and including more sources to back up their work.

“Often they’re handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they suddenly were staying up to two a.m. honing and rewriting the entries and carefully sourcing everything,” she tells me. The reason, the students explained to her, was that their audience— the Wikipedia community— was quite gimlet eyed and critical.

Once thinking is public, connections take over.

Source: Thompson, Clive (2013-09-12). Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (p. 50). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

We asked our building leadership teams, and we asked those Principals and Assistant Principals to ask their teachers, to experience a bit of “writing for empathy.” Medical educators have discovered that when doctors write from the point of view of their patients, empathy increases and the quality of care increases. We thought it might be worth seeing if this applied to our educators as well.

So we began, and told them not to be limited by structure – choose any writing mode you’d like – or grammar or spelling or where or how to write – on the floor, standing up, on paper, on phone, on computer – to just find the emotional path and write.

We so often stop our students from writing… we tell them that everything from how they sit to how they spell is more important than communication… and we thus raise children who hate writing.

This became powerful. People not only chose every and any place to write, every and any device to write on, they chose modes from poetry to an email exchange between high school students in class, from narrative to internal monologue to dialogue in the corridor. From tweet and text to song.

It is remarkable what happens when you stop telling people how to write and start encouraging them to write.

“Our kindergartners and first graders are natural writers,” one principal said, “and then we tell them to stop and worry about handwriting and spelling and punctuation, and they never really write again.”

And then we asked these leaders to share with another, and it became magical. The excitement of reading to each other, of listening, of wondering. People leaned into each other, with genuine smiles – smiles of recognition – and heard. The room was filled with the kind of excitement that – yeah – is mighty rare at Principal Meetings, that is – sadly – often rare in Language Arts classes.

Source: SpeEdChange: Writing for Empathy

First, students need to be writing constantly. Learning to write well, like any other skill, takes many, many hours of practice. Second, students need to write for a real audience and to receive regular, structured feedback from their audiences. Other than looking at the grade on the front of the paper, students are usually totally indifferent to the teacher’s opinions of their work. But when they are writing for or presenting to an authentic audience, which has been asked to assess the work being presented— whether it is their peers or someone outside of school— they work much harder to polish their work, and they seek and pay attention to feedback. Writing for a real audience, and writing about things they know and care about, are central to students’ development of an authentic voice in their work.

The problem with the way writing is currently taught, then, is the same problem that we have described throughout this book. Teachers spend an inordinate amount of time teaching the mechanics of writing— parts of speech, grammar, spelling, punctuation— without giving students any reason whatsoever to want to write, because that’s the way we have done it since 1893. And in the last ten years teachers have spent less and less time assigning and grading students’ writing because they must prepare students for meaningless tests that tell us absolutely nothing about the competencies that matter most.

What little writing that gets done in high schools today is almost always practicing short answers to test prompts and memorizing the mechanics of the standard five-paragraph essay, and nothing else. We are told that the new Common Core tests will require more writing, but it will only be more of the same kind of writing.

Computational resources are now affecting aspects of English classes in significant ways. Students type or dictate essays and benefit from embedded spelling and grammar tools. Granted, autocorrect software has a mind of its own. But when it’s almost impossible to write a word like receive, the days of memorizing rhymes like “i before e, except after c, or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh” are over.

In many ways, the story of dyslexics— in school and life— is the story of U.S. education. Driven by standardized tests, schools focus on low-level capabilities (e.g., memorizing the proper spelling of words). High-potential kids (e.g., dyslexics, smart creative types, rebels) get “down-graded” and left behind. Advances in automation shine light on the fact that these low-level tasks (e.g., spelling receive correctly) are incidental to, not essential to, a person’s life prospects.

Source: Wagner, Tony; Dintersmith, Ted (2015-08-18). Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era. Scribner. Kindle Edition.

He was a slow typist. A painfully slow typist. And yet, his typing was about three times as fast as his handwriting, and, in the end there was a perfectly completed job application.

Source: SpeEdChange: Toolbelt Theory for Everyone

 I wrote this book to help you remedy problems that many young writers face when they confront empty screens and pages. These writers experience frustration and even defeat as they strain against contrived procedures with intangible tools. Over time, these tensions propagate a quiet trauma: Children begin to believe that they can’t write, and then they stop trying. How many adults might be able to advocate for themselves or for justice in their communities if negative early experiences with writing hadn’t silenced them? Many children and adults will tell you that writing is beyond their grasp. They can’t wrap their hands around their ideas, and since they learn best by tinkering with things physically, writing remains literally out of their reach. Maybe the problem isn’t the writer. Maybe it’s the way we’re defining and teaching writing.

Many writers need to move, and they need their writing to move as well. They need to write while out of their seats and on their feet, spreading their ideas across whiteboards and tables, lifting pieces up with their hands, cutting them apart, randomizing them, and tacking them into new and completely unpredictable forms. These writers need access to diverse tools and resources— far more than paper, laptops, and iPads. They build their stories using blocks and boards. They blend plot lines using sticky notes and grids. It’s not enough for these writers to study mentor texts. They need to tear them apart— physically. They need to use their hands to play with text in order to become adept.

Making writing requires dynamic spaces, collaborative cultures, specialized tools, and a commitment to using our words to make a meaningful difference for others.

To teach effectively, we must pay attention to how individuals write and respond to what we observe rather than allowing our personal passions, expertise, and assumptions to drive instruction.

Give writers the permission they need to explore writing using diverse tools and processes. Help them discover how they write. Making is an invitation, not an expectation.

Given similar tools and conditions, I’ve noticed that most adept writers will happily tinker with their writing in the same way people tinker inside maker spaces.

Too many have been taught that everything they need to know will be defined and modeled for them.

  Source: Make Writing: 5 Teaching Strategies That Turn Writer’s Workshop Into a Maker Space

We spent thousands dollars, thousands of hours on trying to fix one trait, frankly, perhaps the most irrelevant trait in the world in the 21st century, and that is spelling. God bless spellchecker.

The energy gone into fixing spelling, to worrying about spelling, it’s staggering.

All week we invested time, money, and relationship capital on fixing that irrelevant trait.

We’re not doing the spelling test today. We’re ditching school and going to the zoo.

Source: The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed

Ultimately our diagnoses and the subsequent attempts at intervention allowed people to blame us, two powerless kids, for our failure instead of turning a critical eye toward the environment. It took us fifteen years of personal and academic struggle to stop blaming ourselves, to stop believing that we are inherently defective like “they” thought, and to come to realize how profound an effect the environment had on our inability to succeed. Only as time went on did simple interventions like the ability to get up out of our seats, the use of a spell checker, and progressive ideas like project-based learning and other modifications to the learning environment allow the pathology to slip into irrelevance and enable us to be successful. Our hard wiring is a simple cognitive difference. We all have them. But an oppressive educational environment that blames children for their failures caused us to grow up with the stigma of pathology.

Source: Mooney, Jonathan; Cole, David (2014-07-01). Learning Outside The Lines: Two Ivy League Students With Learning Disabilities And Adhd Give You The Tools F. Touchstone. Kindle Edition.

He starts by asking students to “think about writing a paper around a question that they really want to find an answer to.” Elliott teaches that first step in constructing a semester-long paper is “gathering information about a question you are passionate about.” He adds: “I usually do the research and writing right along with them. They see that I’m doing the same thing they are doing. That’s an old schoolteacher tool — one of the best I’ve run across for sharing power with students.”

Source: The Power of Digital Writing and Connected Learning – DML Central

We are not usually so obvious in our stated biases, but every day in schools I see students punished for their voices, punished for their culturally ingrained reading styles, punished for refusing to over-simplify, because we teach reading and writing in the same way the English like to teach tea drinking.

And so I wonder, (a) where does my communication fit into your school? your Common Core? your library? your classroom? and (b) where does that democracy of voice fit in? How do we embrace that and not squash it?

The world is a place of constant reinvention. If we all follow the rules, the paths, nothing changes. There is a reason the books of the colonials so often fill the Booker Prize shortlists, there is a reason Irish fiction and poetry are prized so much more highly than that of the English or Americans.The rules have never fully taken root away from “the Queen’s English,” and the paths begin in very different places, and it is the uncommon, not the common, which has extraordinary value.

Source: SpeEdChange: Why do we read? Why do we write?

https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/730531183809941504

https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/703383362476613633

https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/672064479027322880

https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/627148313628921856

https://twitter.com/willrich45/status/421632004992413696

https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/799062306969833472

https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/845249095149211648

https://twitter.com/willrich45/status/419958789954342912

Digital Writing for English Language Learners

Blogging is a way to document, reflect, and share pedagogical strategies and teaching tools used in the classroom. With the benefits of blogging as a reflective teaching tool, why not use this tool with our students in the classroom? Teachers are integrating blogging as a communicative storytelling mode for students to share stories, thoughts, ideas, responses, discussions, and many other types of communication in the classroom.

Blogging is limitless in terms of structure. As a result, a blog can be an image or video with a thought-provoking caption. It can be a beautiful quote with thoughts strung to it. It can also be a digital story that moves the reader to think, reflect, and feel. A study conducted by Advanced Placement and The National Writing Project found that three-quarters of teachers believe the use of Internet and digital tools has an “overall positive impact” on students’ research habits and communication skills (Purcell et al. 2012). Another study on the impact of digital tools on students’ writing also found that “96% agree that digital technologies ‘allow students to share their work with a wider and more varied audience’” (Purcell, Buchanan, and Friedrich 2013). Clearly, exposing students to different modes of technologies can play a huge factor in developing and shaping their thoughts and ideas. By providing the opportunity for students to communicate in a framework of multiliteracies, we can even begin to see improvement in their research, writing, and critical thinking skills (Purcell, Buchanan, and Friedrich 2013). Blogging needs to be seen as a “formal” mode of writing because it provides an opportunity for students to engage in reading and writing and in turn to strengthen communication skills. Digital writing for English language learners (ELL) can provide students the platform, space, and opportunity for social, cultural, and communicative support.

Digital writing—including blogging, microblogging, writing on social media platforms, and tweeting—also allows students to gain access and control of their own learning. Students who communicate their learning online can see the wide opportunities that are available to them, and in turn, they start to value those opportunities. Research suggests that allowing students to write digitally empowers them by providing them a choice.

Blogging helps students to see that the language is a tool to communicate with other people in social settings. It can also help them to recognize that their writing is a form of interaction in the digital world. This realization will help them in the long run when building their professional learning portfolio online. By using blogging as a communicative tool, students are embracing digital communication, which in turn opens different pathways and opportunities for them.

How often do we tell students not to use I or me in writing? We tend to steer them clear of first-person pronouns in writing for many reasons: It takes away from the strength of their arguments, it makes a statement subject, it does not sound professional, and many other reasons. However, when it comes to blogging and English language learners, encourage them to use the I pronoun. This will help them with the flow of their ideas. For example, many students feel comfortable starting a sentence with “I think” or “I believe” or “In my opinion.” It is perfectly fine for them to do that because blogging is a self-reflective mode of writing.

Communicative practices have a real-life purpose, and as a result, when assigning blogs, make sure that they have a purpose and a connection to communication practices that we do in the real world.

Social and cultural support for English language learners can come in many forms, and digital writing can help with this. Blogging, specifically, opens pathways for students to learn about one another’s social and cultural norms, and more importantly, students end up connecting with one another. The big question remains: How do we leverage blogging as a tool to connect the teacher and students socially and culturally? As previously stated, blogging helps students to develop an understanding and appreciation of each other’s social and cultural practices. It also helps to break down barriers between different cultural beliefs, and even more so, it helps to shatter stereotypes that we often have about different societies and cultures.

When students blog about their learning, they also inherently discuss their takes on the lesson and what went on in the classroom that day. This helps the teacher to see and identify areas to help students meet their individual learning needs. More importantly, this feedback is vital to improve the teacher’s pedagogy. By seeing how students benefited or didn’t benefit from the lesson, the teacher can implement changes in her teaching style and methodology in the next lesson, ensuring that each student’s learning needs are being met with personalized pedagogy. Blogging can bridge the communication gap between the teacher and students. Many students, especially English language learners, have a hard time sharing their learning progress or lesson reflection with the teacher. Blogging can also merge face-to-face communication with digital communication. If a student is not comfortable having a face-to-face conversation because of a lack of confidence in his or her oral skills, shyness, or cultural barriers, then the teacher can encourage him or her to write a blog post to reflect on how the lesson went.

This standard supports digital writing for English language learners, as collaboration is also one of the key practices that helps English language learners to learn better. Ferlazzo (2016) states that “collaborative writing has been found to be particularly helpful (PDF) to English-language learners (ELLs) in lowering anxiety and increasing self-confidence and motivation.”

“Blogging is immensely valuable for ELLs. While we can expect it to produce significant writing gains, blogging also helps learners grow their listening, reading and speaking skills when incorporated with other activities. Blogging involves a great deal of reflective thought, enabling students to develop thinking skills in English. Furthermore, blogging gives them a voice, validating and celebrating their place in this world. The most rewarding aspect of blogging, however, is when students read their older posts and are able to see their growth.”—Anabel Gonzalez, who has been teaching since 1996.

Source: Digital Writing for English Language Learners

https://twitter.com/RusulAlrubail/status/848690447673434112

Backchannels and Neurodiversity

Ditch That Textbook provides examples of how to use blogs and team chat in the classroom. Chapter 3, Use Technology to Defeat Insecurity, offers good insight into the neurodiversity friendliness of backchannels, something familiar to tech workers. Written communication is a great equalizer and an important part of our culture.

A backchannel is a separate, often text-based, discussion students engage in while they’re receiving information via a lecture, a movie, a television show, or a PowerPoint presentation. Students use a digital device to participate in a behind-the-scenes chat so as not to disturb others trying to listen.

Backchannels provide the perfect outlet for students who have something to say but refuse to open up in class discussions. When everyone participates in the conversation, no one feels singled out. As a result, inhibitions about sharing decrease and the courage to speak up increases. Plus, when everyone types at once, the teacher spends less time calling on students one by one.

Source: Ditch That Textbook Ditch That Textbook: Free Your Teaching and Revolutionize Your Classroom

 I personally believe that the backchannel is the greatest unharnessed resource that we as educators have available to us. It does not threaten me nor bother me that you learned as much if not more from the backchannel the other night — in fact, it makes me feel great that I facilitated the connection.

Source: Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Backchannels and Microblogging Streams

And that’s not even touching on the ways this kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who’d rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it.

Source: SpeEdChange: Bringing the “Back Channel” Forward

Written communication is the great social equalizer.

Remember this if you start to fear your Autistic child is spending too much time interacting with others online and not enough time interacting with others face-to-face.  Online communication is a valid accommodation for the social disability that comes with being Autistic.  We need online interaction and this meta-study demonstrates exactly why that is the case.

I couldn’t help wondering, since the study showed the durability of first impressions and the positive response to the written words of Autistics, with all visual and auditory cues removed, could we mitigate childhood bullying in any way by having a class of students meet first online, in text, and form their first impressions of one another in that format before ever meeting face-to-face?

Getting online was revolutionary and may have saved my life.

But when I got online, no one could see (or smell) that about me. All they could see was my words and ideas, and that was what people judged me by. For the first time in my life, I was not found lacking. I made friends of all ages. I was respected and liked. The difference between offline and online communication could not have been more dramatic.

Source: THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: Autism and the Burden of Social Reciprocity

Plain Text and Markdown

A big part of the problem is that we’re often using the wrong default tool to create our words. When ready to write, the majority of computer users will open a word processor like Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages rather than a text editor like Notepad on Windows or Text Edit on the Mac. We do this even if we’re simply drafting an email or jotting down notes to ourselves. The problem actually lies in the name. A word processor, while capable of being used for the creation of words, is actually optimized for formatting text in order to be printed or read. Whereas a text editor is more focused the creation and editing of your words.

Source: A Plain Text Primer

Where a graphical Word processor might boast that “what you see is what you get,” a text editor can boast “what you see is what is there.” Nothing is hidden.

For this reason, plain text documents are much more stable and sustainable through the process of composition and revision than word processor documents. That doesn’t mean there’s something inherently wrong with word processors. What it does mean is that word processors are the right tools for the job when the job is formatting and processing complex documents, and not necessarily the right tools for the job when the job is writing.

The basic idea behind a plain-text workflow is that you do your composing with a text editor in a sustainable, universal format, and then, only when your text is ready to send somewhere–say, to a journal for publication–do you worry about formatting.

Text editors are tiny pieces of software compared to word processors, so they start instantaneously, load documents almost instantly, and run like lightning even on old hardware. Nothing gets between you and your words.

Source: Writing in Plain Text: A Tutorial for the Non-Techy Writer | surfingedges

Plain text writing (and marking up text elements for later formatting) is simple. If you’ve been socialized in Word (like me), you may disagree at first. But I believe that if you try plain text writing, you’re likely to change your mind and come to enjoy its purity and simplicity. As for myself, I think now that text processors are actually cumbersome, and many writers just got so used to this fact that they don’t question it anymore.

So writing plain text means to separate writing from formatting for the sake of productivity. The essential structural elements of a text are marked up while writing: You can write headings of various levels, add emphasis, add lists and more. What you can’t do: Tweak margins, or choose your first order headings to be 24 pt, and red-colored. All the layout tasks that have nothing to do with the content you’re trying to compose. Take care of layout later. This first instance should be about writing, and writing only.

If you want to publish your text more than once, but in different formats, plain text is very effective – thanks to the use of markup, you can easily convert it. Ulysses, as an example, can use one and the same text to create a formatted PDF, an e-book or standard HTML – with just a few clicks.

Source: Why Plain Text Will Boost Your Productivity as a Writer | Ulysses Blog

Once you start working with plain text documents, you realize the power of their infinite portability and compatibility. You can edit them anywhere, on just about any device, and never break anything. It’s addicting.

The popular Markdown syntax is valuable for text editing because it allows you to add formatting while maintaining this portability and compatibility. You might think that formatting text by typing special characters is nerdy and distracting. Nerdy maybe, but in practice it’s quite the opposite of distracting. Markdown keeps your hands on the keys. It keeps you typing. Screenwriters know the value of this. It’s the butt in the chair that gets the words on the page.

Source: Fountain FAQ – Fountain | A markup language for screenwriting.

Unlike cumbersome word processing applications, text written in Markdown can be easily shared between computers, mobile phones, and people. It’s quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments.

Formatting text in Markdown has a very gentle learning curve. It doesn’t do anything fancy like change the font size, color, or type. All you have control over is the display of the text-stuff like making things bold, creating headers, and organizing lists.

If you have ten minutes, you can learn Markdown!

Source: Markdown Tutorial | Lesson 1

Plain text doesn’t change. Fifty years from now, you’ll still be able to open a plain text file. Until we all have squiggly tentacles on our faces and communicate telepathically, plain text will be a thing.

What about conversion software? Let’s say a tiny black hole swallows up every Markdown converter on the planet. You still have nice, clean plain text.

Source: Why I Use Markdown, & You Should Too – Portent

With Markdown, you don’t entrust your writing to 50,000 corporate shareholders, the companies they control and whatever features they “sunset” or add.

You control your destiny because, yes, you guessed it: It’s plain text.

Source: Why I Use Markdown, & You Should Too – Portent

Walk into a room of coders and ask what the best tools of their trade are—keyboards, text editing software, etc,—and you’re bound to start a war.

But in a world where programmers are fanatically divided, advocating fiercely for their favorite window managers and text editors, there’s one thing many engineers agree on. It’s called Solarized, and for four years, it’s reigned supreme as the color scheme of choice for many coders and the text they have to stare at all day.

After all, coders have, well, rather extreme thoughts about things like color schemes and text editors.

“This is close to people’s hearts,” Yale Spector, a senior developer for WeWork, told the Observer. “People take this shit real seriously.”

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why, why do these people care so much about the most minute details?” It’s because coders, who are also just very particular in nature, have no other tools of their trade but their computer and their mind.

“Text editors are where we live, where we spend so many hours in our day,” Mr. Spector said. “It’s so personal to us, it’s our home. When you get a house, you spend time making it comfortable, because you’re going to be there a long time.”

And, as Mr. Brocken puts it, it’s not just hot rodding—or tricking out your equipment for the sake of ostentatiousness. No, this is about building the perfect tool.

Developers may be overly opinionated, but they are also, by virtue of their work, obsessed with efficiency. For programmers who are building programs and designs right from their imagination, every additional advantage in their work environment is one less barrier between their mind and the machine.

“It may looks ridiculous to the outside observer, but it’s about eliminating that invisible barrier between you and the tool that you’re using,” Mr. Schoonover said. “It’s the carpenter making his own work bench.”

Source: Meet the Man Behind ‘Solarized,’ the Most Important Color Scheme in Computer History

Briefly, plain text is a great format to use because (1) it can be read by any computer or device; (2) it’s future proof, since computers will always be able to read it; (3) it can be synced to all your devices; (4) it can be converted to virtually any format.

Source: Markdown: The Syntax You (Probably) Already Know – ProfHacker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Plain text is ubiquitous. It works on every operating system, and on every mobile device, regardless of who makes it. A wide variety of apps can read it. You’ll never run into file compatibility errors. You can take what you write from one app to another without a thought.

This matters because the tech industry likes to remind us that nothing lasts forever. We see apps shut down all the time. They add in a subscription fee. They lock that one feature you want behind a paywall. It’s annoying, and if you’re invested in an app, whether it’s a notes app or a to-do app, you’re often forced to pay out the nose for a bunch of features you don’t want. Plain text doesn’t suffer this problem because it’s universally readable across platforms, not to mention a bedrock of well, computing as we know it.

Likewise, plain text will never change. Where an app might get updated with new features and a new user interface, plain text is pretty much always plain text. I will never open up an app to find a new design that I hate, or a new user experience I have to learn. Text editors may change, but there’ll always be another, and they’ll never all go subscription-only. This is really important to me. I use plain text every single day for simple tasks. I don’t need anything getting in the way of me capturing text as quickly as possible.

Source: I Still Use Plain Text for Everything, and I Love It

I love that with plain text the focus is on the words, not the formatting. I love that it’s portable and can be used anywhere and everywhere, in any piece of software that edits or displays words. I love how easy it is to create beautifully formatted documents when needed. Most of all, I love how fast it is. I simply work more efficiently since switching to plain text.

Source: Removing the Word shackles: getting started with plain text

Authors and writers of all stripes can learn a lot about creating and managing words from computer programmers, beginning with an appreciation for the simple, durable efficiencies of plain text. Anybody running Unix, Linux, or BSD already knows all about text, because it’s the third prong of the Unix Tools Philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well;

Write programs that work together;

Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

The geeks who made Unix nearly 40 years ago made plain text the universal interface because they believed in economy, simplicity, and reliability.

If Unix is the geek Gilgamesh epic, it’s a tale told in plain text.

Source: Plain Text For Authors & Writers – Richard Dooling

Since its introduction in 2004, Markdown has enjoyed remarkable success. Markdown works for users for three key reasons. First, the markup instructions (in text) look similar to the markup that they represent; therefore, the cognitive burden to learn the syntax is low. Second, the primary arbiter of the syntax’s success is running code. The tool that converts the Markdown to a presentable format, and not a series of formal pronouncements by a standards body, is the basis for whether syntactic elements matter. Third, Markdown has become something of an Internet meme, in that Markdown gets received, reinterpreted, and reworked as additional communities encounter it. There are communities that are using Markdown for scholarly writing, for screenplays, and even for mathematical formulae. Clearly, a screenwriter has no use for specialized Markdown syntax for mathematicians; likewise, mathematicians do not need to identify characters or props in common ways. The overall gist is that all of these communities can take the common elements of Markdown (which are rooted in the common elements of HTML circa 2004) and build on them in ways that best fit their needs.”

Source: RFC 7764 – Guidance on Markdown: Design Philosophies, Stability Strategies, and Select Registrations

Find Your Flow

I like and advocate plain text, but choose the tools that fit your flow. Many of my favorite authors use word processors.

https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/813742764978565120

Others prefer Scrivener.

https://twitter.com/cstross/status/813743264058707968

George R.R. Martin famously uses WordStar 4.0 on DOS.

The important part is writing. Find your flow.

https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/813743371277758464

  Writing in Education and Plain Text Flow As a hacker and writer, I spend a lot of time in text editors. Almost everything I write starts in…

[camillawinqvist]

Letter of intention

Dear Sir or Madame.

My name is Camilla Winqvist and this is my letter of intention as I am applying for the bachelor in Graphic Storytelling at The Animation Workshop. You can find my online portfolio here: https://camillawinqvist.tumblr.com/ My reason for applying might initially sound like a mundane one, but there is no other way to put it. In short: I love art and want to spend the rest of my life doing it. I have previously dipped my feet in other careers, but time and time again I find myself beckoned back by the pencil and the sketchbook. Drawing and illustration have given me a unique voice to express myself, and if art is a language I want to be able to speak it fluently.   It all started when I was a kid. I remember the night where I lied down in the damp, cold grass in our backyard and looked up at the sky, as I often liked to do. But this was the first time I saw it. It had rained earlier that day and the smell of raindrops hadn't quite left the air yet, and I could hear distant shouting from our neighbours down the street. In that moment, I was dazed. Astonished. Somehow this speckled sky managed to make my own worries seem infinitely small compared to the deep, timeless darkness that expanded above me. That night this newfound curiosity about Earth, space, and everything in between, awoke. I started to observe everything around me, letting myself take it in, and then scribbling it down. The walls of my bedroom were covered with drawings of space, people, animals - anything I could think of. I began to write and create accompanying worlds for my drawings and I put the stories down in little notebooks. This is something I still do. I love creating my own worlds and trying to capture the peculiar little anomalies that already surround us. Reading this, you've probably figured out that I'm a bit of an astronomy nerd – which originally led me to the path of becoming a scientist. I initiated my studies at the physics program at Lund University in 2013, but even though I had been excited to start, I quickly figured out that something didn't feel quite right.

While everyone around me were entranced in their notes, listening closely to the professors words, I, on the other hand, was more captivated by his many different facial expressions - trying to sketch and get the right feeling of his hands flapping above his head as he tried to explain the intricate formulas written on the blackboard behind him. I just never felt quite at home. So I changed my whole plan. I took out all of my paints, bought new sketchbooks, and I drew. I drew every single day. I got accepted into Lunnevad Art College and after just the first few days I felt like I truly belonged.

I studied everything from pottery making, to colour theory, life drawing, and graphic printing. During our second year we got to choose what courses to study and we ultimately decided entirely on what we wanted to work with. I chose to focus on painting, and then later on, animation and illustration. I graduated from Lunnevad Art College in 2016 and have since moved to London and started working as a freelancing artist and part-time bartender. I've always been a huge fan of travelling and I'm truly enjoying my time abroad. Coming from the small, shy country of Sweden I'm amazed at the diversity and friendliness of people here in London. They're always happy to let you get to know them and that's what I truly enjoy when it comes to my bartending job.   As for my work as a freelancer I mostly do commissions for private persons. I have also made illustrations for a few different companies and I'm currently working together with an author to design and create artwork for his two main characters from his book series Sam Hain.

I have lots of experience using Adobe Photoshop, as it is what I am currently using for most of my artwork. I'm also very familiar with Paint Tool Sai. When it comes to video editing I have experience using Adobe Premiere as well as Sony Vegas and I've animated short films in TV Paint. I have novice knowledge of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign as well.

On the topic of my professional work I'm very inspired by current digital artists, an example of which is Lois van Baarle, of whom I'm a big fan. She's a Dutch digital artist whose art has been featured on the covers of several Wacom products, and she's done work for Blizzard, Lego, among others. Her art has an iconic style with inspiration from both comic books and Disney and you can look at any of her drawings and instantly tell it's hers. I want to achieve the same thing with my art. I want to develop my own signature style which makes my art instantly recognizable. I also love how she plays with colour. A toned down orange could be juxtapositioned against a neon turquoise or a soft gold next to a rich, deep, purple.

Another current artist I'm inspired by is Igor Artyomenko from Russia. He's most known for his work on the Banner Saga video game series and does absolutely amazing environmental paintings, as well as character designs. Again I'm a fan of his colours, although he uses a more toned down palette than van Baarle. Artyomenko's ability to play with saturation to create depth is something I admire, and I wish to learn more about colours so that I could use them in the same way. His character designs also leave me something to strive for. He has a definitive style to his characters but they always have something unique and interesting about them, and he has an ability to notice the small details that really make a character stand out. An animated series that I really enjoy is Over the Garden Wall, created by Patrick McHale. It is a short series, coming in at only ten episode at ten minutes each, but it is still a truly great one. It features two brothers, Wirt and Greg, as they are lost in a forest, or “the unknown”. The animation is flawless. The amount of detail they put into their characters and settings is astonishing. You can see the individual specks of dust floating around in the sunlit air by the window in one scene, and the characters are visually able to tell you who they are without even opening their mouths. The show not only features great visuals - the story also leaves just enough unsaid to keep you thinking, wondering. It's one of those shows that stays in your head days after you've finished it. Aleksandr Petrov is an animator I absolutely look up to. His short films, usually around ten to twenty minutes long, all look like moving oil paintings. You get mesmerized by the story, but not just the one told through words, but the one of how light contrasts the dark, how the colours interact, how the characters move, what their faces are telling us. My favourite of his films has to be The Old Man and the Sea, based on the story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. The story is an all time classic and combined with the animations of Petrov this film is just breathtaking. Another film maker, and comic artist I'm a huge fan of is Satoshi Kon. He has directed films such as Paprika and Perfect Blue, amongst many others. He's an expert at blurring reality with fantasy. Especially in Paprika, which is my favourite of his films. The story is set in the near future and features a psychotherapist who uses a newly invented device that lets her enter the dreams of her patients. The editing in this film is like no other, just the scene transitions alone oozes of creativity, and Satoshi Kon is a master of composing beautiful scenes. A lot of them have become so iconic that they have been reused in other popular films – Inception and Black Swan being just a few examples. I love how Satoshi Kon can find a way to show you what's happening without actually showing it happen. For example, there is this scene in Tokyo Godfathers where an old man is dying. He is surrounded by windmills that are all turning at a constant speed. As the windmills are slowing down and eventually stop you realize he has passed away. As much as I'm learning by watching and reading great books and films, there are things to be taught from the bad ones as well. Not only should one learn what to do, it's equally important to learn what not to do. Gaming is a big hobby of mine and the Fallout game series is my all time favourite. However, the latest addition; Fallout 4 by Bethesda Game Studios, left something to be desired. Claiming to be a role playing game, you start the game off as either a father or a mother trying to find their infant child out in the post-apocalyptic world. As much as I appreciate the story element, this completely removes the ability to create your own character and choose who you want to be in this game. As the game progresses you realize that the choices you make throughout the game have little to no impact on how the story plays out and it feels like you're going through a written script instead of actually being a part of the world.

Another thing that can truly lessen a work is uninteresting characters. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer is a great example of exactly this. At the end of the book all you have learned about the main character is that she dislikes the rain, and that she's clumsy. Never do we learn why she feels the way she feels or why she wants to do the things that she does. I've always been of the mindset “simple stories, complex characters,” and this book does not live up to that standard.

To expand on this, I also want to talk about stereotypical characters and predictability. I recently watched the pilot for the live action series Supergirl, and only a few minutes in I could already pinpoint what the major characters personalities would be like, what their relationships were and how their story arcs would play out. This is something I try to avoid at all costs in my own work. I love thinking of new ways to tell a story or discovering unique quirks and backstories to give my characters. I want to keep people wondering, pondering, and questioning what will happen. To make them feel like they just have to turn to the next page.

As I'm finishing up my letter I would like to allow myself to dream for a bit. In the future I would love to get the chance to make my own full-length comic. I think it encapsulates everything I love about art. Storytelling, character creation, world building, telling my stories using colours, expressions, movement, and composition. I would get to utilize my whole range of creativity and that thought sincerely excites me. I would also love to work with concept art and character designs for games and films. Storyboarding is also something I find really intriguing.

I think there will always be a place for graphic novels, even in the future. As 3D animation is becoming more and more popular more people will find comfort in actual drawn images and stories and I hope I get to be one of the people who creates them. If I were to get accepted to The Animation Workshop I would finance my studies using student loans from CSN. I also have money saved up if needed. Thank you for reading my letter Best regards, Camilla