#put me in Mosley and associates

[jodielandons]

If Found isn’t a comedy then why do I laugh whenever Sir screams “GABRIELLE!!” Lmaooo that man pacing the five steps he’s allowed HARD

[divinekangaroo]

As much as I live for Tommy’s arc in S6, here are a few inconsistencies on the more political side which have constantly bothered me and research has not been able to reconcile. So if anyone has thoughts let me know!

If Mosley created the BUF shortly after his rally in S5, as he said he would in S5 (he gives Tommy a date early 1930), then Mosley couldn’t be sitting in the House of Commons in Parliament in S6 to watch Tommy. Because as a BUF party leader, he would have resigned Labour and therefore not been in the House unless re-elected to his seat running for the BUF. A possible solution is that he delayed creating his party and resigning Labour until just after his S6 E2 celebration (theoretically, he could announce the BUF’s formation and that party was his announcement, but wait to resign Labour until after marrying Diana) - but given how Tommy was sledged and challenged walking into Mosley’s celebration, and his response to the reporter, it appears that Mosley is already well entrenched as the BUF leader. So, ???????? The only logistical solution I can think of is that Mosley did start the BUF on his original S5 date, but actually won his seat back (which didn’t happen in the real world), putting him in place in Parliament to smirk at Tommy taking the floor and creating a heightened threat - because a fascist got elected.

The flow on issue to all of the above: if the BUF was formed in S5, what happened for four years to this plan for Tommy to come across to the BUF as deputy? Now, in S5 that plan had some weight to it because Tommy was still fairly junior as a minister, but Mosley repeats this plan in S6 as still a given—yet Tommy is Labour Party whip by now, which is a position of some standing and influence. Then there is how Tommys response to the reporter in S6 makes it clear he hasn’t been interacting much with Mosley-as-fascist. This one I can’t reconcile with canon (I have attempted to in fanfic).

Tommy’s housing bill, real world parallel the 1936 Social Housing Act? From what I can tell there’s three readings of a Bill. First reading introduces the Bill by title and intent: I think this is the scene we see where Tommy is personally sledged by other ministers but no one actually opposed the Bill to be tabled. Second reading is where the bill is read clause by clause. It’s a formality because all ministers receive the bill for detailed/reading and challenging but it has to be read at parliament for the record. Then there’s an actual committee formed of ministers to challenge, negotiate and reword the clauses word by word in order that they’ll actually approve to pass the motion. Then once everyone agrees, it goes to parliament for the Third and final reading and is in theory passed to become an Act (legislation). This process gets complicated if it’s a personal not party motion, but also gets complicated as a party motion because even in committee the shadow govn might still oppose the Bill at Third reading. So: let’s say we see Tommy at First reading early in S6, when he speaks to Diana late in S6 he still says he’s putting forward a Bill. That means he has yet to get to Third reading. So, how is it at all possible for him to promise to buy the land from her associates using Treasury bonds? Unless he personally bought up a massive amount of Treasury bonds and will buy the land personally (my theory) then make a huge donation to the government.

More an observation: given the length of time to get through committee and to Third reading, my assumption is that Tommy lived in London or at Arrow for several months after Lizzie left him (all the way to Nov to get close to armistice day?) in order to see through his Bill and put his affairs in order, given that Arrow’s demolition and his speech appears to indicate the Bill has been passed and the land can be used. Given we know Jack Nelson was in England for 14 days only, a lot of the questions about timing in S6 and how to get to Nov 11 Armistice Day can be answered by a many-month gap between Jack’s departure and Arrow House’s demolition. Of course, the question there is then, how is it possible Jack Nelson was just taking Michael’s death and the sale of the opium to Alfie without a worry? Hence Miquelon probably happens after the Bill is passed and very close to Arrow House’s demo and Tommy’s ‘disappearance’ - no ability for Jack to take revenge on him personally, and I’d guess Alfie would be doing something in America to avoid repercussions against Tommy’s family and kin.

So the final scene in the House of Commons where Diana walks in as Mosley’s ‘elected representative’ (this fucking show XD), Tommy thought he would be meeting Mosley. Yet his reason for that meeting was to leverage Diana and her associates for the land purchases. He even has a list prepared, which means he didn’t change his intent when it wasn’t Mosley that showed — and yet, the land purchase was an arc unrelated to Mosley because he doesn’t have Diana’s contacts. So my theory was, Tommy really was intending to tell Mosley ‘hey pass this message on to your girlfriend for me and be sure to make it happen because she refused to give me a commitment last time I asked’. (And possibly because at that point, he was too terrified and too enraged and too ashamed to make any effort to contact Diana again.) what i continue to question in this scene is, if Diana and Mosley agreed Diana would come in Mosley’s stead, why Mosley decided to show up anyway: did they plan the sex-offer-and-reject scene to further muck with Tommy, or did Diana not actually come in Mosley’s stead and so Mosley simply walked in to that scene unexpected and decided to leverage it with a dig at both of them, not just Tommy.

—-

item 1 gives me the most grief; I’ve rewatched those scenes trying to work out what happened but seem to be missing something pertinent to make Mosley’s continued presence in parliament yet as publicly known leader of the fascists make sense.

[queenshelby]

ME AND THE DEVIL – PART ONE

Featuring: Tommy Shelby x Reader

Words: 3555

Warning: Smut, Abuse 

Notes: This is fiction and not historically accurate. It plays somewhere in the middle of Season 5, after Tommy met Oswald Mosley and became affiliated with him but before he planned to assassinate him.

Tag List: 

@lilymurphy03

@deefigs

@theflamecrystal 

@chrisevanshoeee

 @desperate-and-broken

@weepingstudentfishhorse

@severewobblerlightdragon

@captivatedbycillianmurphy

------

You were the oldest daughter of the chief of police in London and married to Oswald Mosley. The marriage between you and Oswald was arranged by your father who was supporting Mosley’s fascist movement.

Your husband was abusive and disrespectful towards you. You despised him and his fascist views. Luckily for you, he didn’t involve you in many political events. You were only obliged to attend functions with him where it benefitted him and his party.

You were aware that he was expanding his party but you didn’t involve yourself with politics, at least so it seemed. You knew that the fascist movement was dangerous and you hoped that, one day, your husband would pay for his sins.

You were not allowed to work, but you were allowed to volunteer at the local orphanage and soup kitchen. As the wife of Oswald Mosley, this was beneficial for his political campaign so he didn’t intervene. Little did he know that this was where you would meet one of his enemies.

Just so it happened that, on a Thursday evening when you were volunteering at the orphanage, you met a mysterious stranger.

Dressed in a comfortable but elegant dress, you unpacked several toys that were delivered from the Womens Association of Birmingham for the children at the orphanage.

The children were excited and you could barely keep up with their demand. Their excitement was overwhelming and their eyes lit up as they took the toys from your hands. It wasn’t often that they received brand new toys and you took joy simply in seeing their excitement. You wanted children of your own, but not with your husband. He wasn’t capable to be a good father and you were glad that, despite numerous attempts, you didn’t conceive.

After years, he told you that you were worthless, not being able to give him a child. But you were somewhat grateful for it. It also meant that he no longer bothered to force you to sleep with him, which never was pleasurable in any sort of way. You were pleased to learn that, after years of abuse, he found whores to be of more interest to him than you.

The work at the orphanage took you away from your miserable life. Working with children was pure joy for you and gave you the courage to inform on your husband to the communist partry. You did it for them, so that they can grow up in a world free from oppression. Your husband was the devil and you knew that very well.

Just as you went to get the last box of toys from the van, a man approached you from behind.

‘Please, let me help you with this’ the man said, taking the heavy box from your hands. He could see that you were struggling with its weight. After all, you were of small statue.

‘Thank you, Mr…’ you said in a way you would usually ask a question.

‘Shelby. Thomas Shelby’ the man said as he walked inside with you.

You showed him where to place the box so that you could unpack it as, all of a sudden, one of the nuns from the orphanage walked towards you from the hallway.

‘Please, Mr Shelby, you do not need to do this’ the nun said with a hasty voice.

‘But it’s my pleasure’ Tommy said as he opened the box and helped you unpack it.

‘Thank you’ you said with a shy smile as you couldn’t help it but stare into his bright blue eyes.

‘No thank you for the work you are doing here Y/N. It is admirable’ Tommy said with a warm smile.

‘I take joy in it’ you said before asking him how he knew your name.

Your question caused Tommy to point to your name tag.

You flushed immediately. Of course, he can read.

‘Very informal’ Tommy said as he observed that the name tag only had your first name on it.

‘Well, I like to be the children’s friend. I am not one of the mistresses or teachers here. I simply volunteer’ you said whilst, the truth was, you were embarrassed of who you were. Y/N Mosley, the wife of a fascist. Of course, you weren’t going to tell him that.

‘We need more kind hearted people like you in a world like this Y/N’ Tommy said as he unpacked the last toy from the box.

‘Please, you make me blush Mr Shelby’ you said shyly while looking up into his piercing blue eyes again.

He was much older than you, probably the same age as your husband, but he was incredibly attractive. Unlike your husband, he appeared kind hearted in his own way.

‘My apologies, it wasn’t my attention to make you uncomfortable’ Tommy said with a smile.

‘It’s quite alright Mr Shelby. Thank you again for helping with this’ you said as you were wondering why he was at the orphanage.

‘Tell me, why are you here? What is your business?’ you asked with curiosity.

‘I am having a meeting with Miss Walsh at 4 o’clock to discuss the funding of the new library for the orphanage. As you know, the orphanage has the facility on site. It’s unused and will need to be fenced. And of course, we will need books’ Tommy said. You could hear the passion in his voice for the project.

‘Are you funding it?’ you asked bluntly.

‘My late wife’s charity is. She cared deeply for children who were abandoned or lost their parents in the war’ Tommy explained.

‘She seemed like a wonderful woman and I am sorry for your loss Mr Shelby’ you said.

‘She was and thank you for your kind words Y/N’ Tommy said.

‘May I offer you a tea? Just while you wait for Miss Walsh?’ you asked.

Tommy agreed and you sat down in the reading room for 15 minutes before Miss Walsh arrived.

You enjoyed your conversation with Tommy. He seemed like a smart man, elegant, firm and yet kind hearted.

The conversations you had were mostly about the orphanage and plans for the education of the children. You loved to read and you liked the idea of a library. You shared ideas for fundraisers and it was evident to you that Tommy was intrigued by you. His eyes wandered everywhere, from your face, down to your hands, which is where he noticed your wedding ring.

‘You are married. Do you and your husband have children?’ Tommy asked.

‘No, we do not. How about you Mr Shelby?’ you asked.

‘A son and a daughter’ Tommy said.

‘Then you are lucky’ you responded just as Miss Walsh arrived.

You said goodbye to Tommy and, just as he was about to leave with Miss Walsh, he asked you whether you would be interested to help with the establishment of the library since you were familiar with literature.

You were surprised that a man like him would personally involve himself with a project like this. It was more common for rich men to simply provide the funds. But, he seemed to care for this particular project, so you agreed.

A few weeks after your encounter with Tommy, the books arrived and you volunteered to sort them and arrange the library for the children.

Tommy came by one afternoon to see how the project came along and offered you his assistance. But most of the time it was his sister Ada who attended the library to catalogue the books with you.

She was a kind woman, socially aware and most defiantly in favour of the communist movement.

Despite your numerous discussions about politics, Ada never thought to mention that her brother Tommy was a politician himself. In fact, she didn’t like to speak about him at all.

Another week later, you were surprised to see Tommy at the library at lunch time.

‘Good Afternoon Y/N’ Tommy said as he brought in another box of books.

‘Mr Shelby, I am surprised to see you’ you said. This was your third encounter with Tommy and you were pleased to see him. You were intrigued by him.

‘I thought you could use some help since my sister is busy with errands today’ Tommy said.

‘So, you came here to help me catalogue books?’ you said sheepishly.

‘Making appearances Y/N, that’s all’ he said as he began to unpack the books.

‘Thank you, Mr Shelby, but…’ you said and before you could continue, Tommy interrupted you.

‘Please, just call me Tommy’ he said as he handed you the books.

You climbed up the ladder to put them onto the higher shelves just as Tommy advised you that, the truth was, that he had meeting with Miss Walsh again but that he set aside some time for the library beforehand.

Tommy and you talked for a while as you shelved the books. You noticed his eyes gaze over you again on several occasions in particular when you stepped up the ladder. He was clearly looking at your ass, possibly even your underwear, but you didn’t mind.

Every time you came down from the ladder, he stood uncomfortably close to you, so close that you could smell the scent of his aftershave. It smelled like musk and he was clearly chewing mint, probably to hide the smell of the cigarettes.

He was handsome, very handsome and the look he gave you every time he handed you more books from the table was intense. A look of want and desire. Or were you imagining it?

Unfortunately, your encounter with him only lasted for about thirty minutes before he had to excuse himself in order to meet with Miss Walsh.

You said goodbye to Tommy with a warm smile and received a smile in return.

Just after he left, you went on with cataloguing the books. It was a slow process and you were the only volunteer on duty that day. Your husband approved. Doing community service was beneficial to his party and political goals. It shows that him and his family care for the community.

But you simply did it because you felt it was right and gave you a purpose.

You spent nearly every day at the library and almost all books were catalogued.

After another half an hour, you had one more box to shelf for the day. You were focused, your mind entirely with the books.

To your surprise, just as you stepped down from the ladder to grab more books for the top shelf, your face was just above Tommy’s face. You couldn’t believe that he was there. You never heard him come back.

‘How long have you been standing there?’ you asked as your foot touched the floor.

‘A few minutes, just enough to admire the view’ he said sheepishly and you weren’t sure whether to smack or kiss him.

But, before you could make up your mind, he leaned in and took the kiss he’s been desperate for since the moment you’ve met.

The kiss was gentle at first, brushing his lips against yours a couple of times, then locking them together in a haste, allowing your tongues to explore each other.

You had never been kissed this way before and gave into him completely.

Your mind told you to stop, to push him away. You didn’t know this man and if your husband was to find out, it would be detrimental for the both of you.

But in your heart, you wanted this so badly. This and so much more.

As your tongues played with each other, coyly at first, then like long-lost lovers, Tommy’s hands ran over your back all the way down to your ass.

His lips tasted sweet and his hands sent shivers through your body.

Without breaking the kiss, Tommy’s hands wandered beneath your skirt, gently and passionately.

‘Not here. The reading area’ you whispered just after you broke away from the kiss.

Tommy nodded just before he planted his mouth just above your clavicle.

While planting gentle kisses over you, Tommy navigated to one of the long desks in the reading area.

He was so gentle, a feeling that was unfamiliar to you. Despite the fact that you barely knew him, you somehow trusted him and wanted him.

Just as your back hit the desk, Tommy lifted you up to sit on it before gently pushing your legs apart.

He moved in between your legs while continuing to kiss you. His skilled fingers began unbuttoning your white blouse, revealing your lace bra.

No words were spoken as Tommy ran his index fingers down the inside of the straps of your bra, over the edges of the cups, then down your cleavage, all while gazing his eyes over your body.

He kept this tease up until you got impatient. Your breathing became heavy as he pulled the bra down, freeing your breasts. Your areolas were covered in goosebumps and your nipples were puffed up. The reading lamp lit all your curves in titillating contrast and you could that Tommy enjoyed what he was seeing.

Not ever had a man looked at you with such desire. You only ever been with one man, your husband, and this was new territory. You actually enjoyed yourself and were feeling guilty about it.

‘So beautiful’ Tommy whispered just before his lips kissed, licked and sucked their way to your stiff nubs on your breasts.

His hands cupped, squeezed and kneaded your smooth flesh and you moaned deeply and gripped the edge of the desk behind you.

Tommy flicked the tip of his tongue across your nipple before nibbling naughtily around it. Not ever had anyone paid such attention to your breasts and you started to feel something that was unfamiliar to you.

You could feel a tingling sensation build up in between your legs and your lace panties were getting wet.

Just as Tommy continued to stimulate your breasts, you gasped and threw your head back as his teeth ever-so-gently brushed up against your nubs again.

Tommy’s hands soon moved from your breasts down beneath your skirt, brushing over the inside of your thighs.

You pushed your legs together for a moment, unsure whether to give in or not.

You despised being touched there by your husband but this was actually enjoyable.

‘Do you want me to stop?’ Tommy asked, noticing your reluctance.

‘No, please don’t’ you said as you decided to let him proceed, opening your legs again.

You were slightly embarrassed by the wetness pooling in between your legs but, to your surprise, Tommy seemed pleased with it.

‘You are so wet Love’ he smirked as his fingers finally brushed over your panties just before he crashed his lips back onto yours.

You moaned into the kiss as his fingers pulled aside your panties and you could feel his finger tips roam over your entrance.

You tried hard to relax as Tommy’s fingers ran up and down your slit and started spread your juices.

He teased your entrance, just slipping in a single finger and only to his first knuckle.

This must be what foreplay was all about you thought as you kept giving in to your moans.

‘Tommy’ you moaned, desperate for more and, just like that, Tommy suddenly bit your neck gently while plunging his finger deep inside you.

Your moans turned to a gasp and a whimper as pleasure flooded your senses. You knew that Tommy had just left a hickey and, whilst you should be concerned, it just made you even wetter.

Tommy kept kissing and biting your neck as he added another finger inside of you and explored you with his fingers. The tip of his finger found many crevices but, unbeknownst to you, he was searching for your g-spot.

‘Fuck, oh god’ you screamed all of a sudden as Tommy’s fingers pressed upwards, earning you smirk from Tommy.

He had just found what he was looking for and, based on your reaction, it was evident to him that he was the first to have found your sweet spot.

Just as he relieved the pressure inside you, he pushed his fingers up again, and again, each time causing you to moan loudly.

‘Shh Love, one of the nuns might hear you’ Tommy whispered sheepishly just as he pulled his fingers out of you.

All these sensations were unfamiliar to you.

‘Please don’t stop’ you pleaded. It felt so good.

Tommy pulled you close for another kiss to shallow your moans before slipping his fingers back inside of you.

His fingers began to push against your g-spot again, running smooth circles and stimulating it just the right way. You were panting. It was ecstasy and you could feel an unfamiliar tension build up in your stomach.

‘I am going to make you come now Love. Try to be quiet’ Tommy said and you had literally no idea what he was talking about until, all of a sudden, he pushed into you with more force.

Your whimpers soon turned into shouts and you clenched onto Tommy’s arms firmly.

It wasn’t long until Tommy could feel your walls tighten around his two fingers.

‘Oh my god’ you moaned before you held your breath, not knowing what was happening to you as you felt your orgasm roll through your body.

‘That's it Love’ Tommy said satisfied as he continued to stimulate you.

You gasped as electricity shot up and down your spine while Tommy kissed you again to soften your screams.

He could hear footsteps approach and quickly withdrew his fingers.

‘Mr Shelby, is everything alright?’ one of the nuns asked loudly.

‘Yes, I am just helping with the books’ Tommy said with a grin on his face as he rearranged his pants to deal with his throbbing erection.

You were quick to button up your blouse before the nun approached.

‘I just thought I could hear a scream, that’s all’ the nun said.

‘Yes, that was me, I caught a splinter from the ladder and Mr Shelby just helped me get it out from my finger’ you said, your face still flushed and your hair messy.

‘Mr Shelby, if you do have a minute, Mr Connel would like to discuss the article in the paper for your campaign’ the nun said. ‘We thought that you had left but when I saw your car I hoped that I would find you here’ she added.

‘Of course’ Tommy said and, just like that he left.

‘It was nice to see you Y/N. Perhaps we meet again sometime soon’ he said with a grin as he followed the nun.

‘Likewise, Mr Shelby’ you responded.

You wanted to so much more but, since you almost got caught, it was probably for the better that you didn’t take this further.

You were hoping to see Tommy again but, for the next couple of weeks, he didn’t attend the orphanage.

You asked his sister Ada about him with some curiosity.

‘My brother is probably busy in Westminster. Although, who knows. I have given up on following politics. Why are you asking?’ Ada said.

‘Politics? Is Thomas a politician?’ you asked surprised and slightly concerned.

‘Yes, he is a member of parliament. Did you not know?’ Ada asked surprised.

‘I had no idea’ you said, wondering whether he knew your husband and whether you were nothing but a political stunt. Was this planned by an opponent? Did Tommy know who you were? Or was it a sheer mistake?

All these thoughts were wandering through your mind as Ada was talking to you and you didn’t listen to a single word she said.

‘Y/N? Are you alright?’ Ada asked.

‘Yes sorry, I am fine’ you said just before finishing up for the day. You had to make your way home soon before dinner.

You excused yourself and headed home. The thoughts however wouldn’t leave your head.

Your husband wasn’t home when you arrived. As usual, he was either with your sister or at the whorehouse.

You didn’t care much and enjoyed the nights on your own. You were no longer sharing a bedroom but you hated to cross his way when he was around. A black eye here and there or some bruises and scratches were the norm when he was there.

The next morning, Oswald walked through the door at around 8 o’clock, just in time for breakfast.

‘Did you buy yourself a dress for tonight?’ he asked after shouting at the maid. The coffee was too cold for his liking.

‘Oswald, please’ you said, trying to reason with him as the maid left rather upset.

‘Then you get the fucking coffee, wife!’ Oswald shouted and you got up, taking his cup and walking towards the kitchen.

‘There you go’ you said as you returned with a fresh cup from the kitchen.

‘See, that wasn’t that hard now, was it? Even my fucking wife could manage’ he said to the maid as he took a sip.

‘Now dear, did you get yourself a dress? Something outstanding for the gala?’ Oswald asked.

‘Of course. You will approve. It is very elegant and expensive’ you said.

‘Good. We need to make an impression. You will meet the new members of my party and, as you know, all politicians judge each other. There is no room for mistakes’ Oswald explained.

‘Of course, I understand. Now would you please excuse me. I will need to freshen up’ you said before Oswald waived you away

[formulinos]

Hyperfixation Corner | The 1982 Formula One World Championship, Part 1 | Background: The FISA-FOCA war

there are wacky seasons in formula one. some have 5, 6 drivers fighting for the championship right until the end. there are mid-season changes. but then there is one who separated weak boys from repressed men and created the collective generational trauma for those who went through the absolute fucking hell that was 1982 formula one world championship. fittingly enough, the person who won it wasn't the greatest winner, but almost literally the one left standing. this time on hyperfixation corner, we take a long, hard look at the events that shaped the season and what exactly happened. as the schedule goes:

background: the fisa-foca war

physics for psychopaths: the killer regulations of the 70s-80s

heating the tires: the drivers strike in kyalami

the 1982 formula one world championship, or, the triumph of keke rosberg and the grief of ferrari

this is the first part of a series i'm doing this week, fruit of a month of investigation and bingewatching. please consider giving me any sort of sign of life once you read it! liking and reblogging is great, but comments and asks are just fine too! even just a letter saying "dumb" will suffice. we also touch some heavy topics - even though i don't go into detail - so please be careful as you read it! thanks a lot and see you soon :D

So, we're usually used to Big Characters in F1 having their rivalries, like drivers in different teams, drivers in the same team, teams against teams, teams against themselves, Ferrari against everything, you know how it goes. So you'd expect we kick things off with drivers in each others throats or team beef right? Yes, this isn't Formula 1's Worlds Best Friend Championship, but the scenes were mostly provided before the season even started - and to be more precise, freaking 3 years prior - by the head honchos at FISA and FOCA (I bet you know what we're talking about but I just boiled the jug and got some Lipton I had in the pantry here).

It all starts with this guy called Bernald, Bernie for short. He had tried to become a driver but he retired after seeing a number of car accidents. Then, he managed two drivers, but they both passed away after racing incidents (one of these dudes was Jochen Rindt btw, the only posthumous F1 WDC). At this point he should have been like "fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me" to the god of races, but he put his clown make-up on and it actually worked. He bought a lil team in 1972 called Brabham and finally started making his way to the toppermost of the poppermost.

You see, Bernald Ecclestone the Third, as fucked up in the head as he is, actually had a galaxy brain idea: what if we fucked around and unionised? He proceeded to propose this to several teams and in 1974 they formed the Formula One Constructors Association (miss FOCA if you're nasty). Bernie's triumph was that he got people like Colin Chapman (from Lotus, then a Behemoth of racing) and Frank Williams (Claire Williams' dad)  by his side and managed to get all chassis builders effectively behind him. With time, the manufacturer teams (Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Renault, responsible for their own engine construction) were like "hm. perhaps… these guys want to have rights?? but we are already here? fucked up!" further opening a rift motivated by the technological tussle between these two factions of F1.

Miss FOCA in 1974 - amongst these lads there is Max Mosley The Lawyer (and future FIA president) kneeling down in the middle, dude with the Elf shirt is Ken Tyrrell, Willy Wonka by his side is Colin Chapman (Lotus) together with Frank WIlliams. the little head on Frank's right is Luca Di Montezemolo (then Ferrari's official "spokesperson" - Enzo was in Maranello as always) and right at the top inside the motorhome, smiling like a bitch is Bernie. Lazy to name everyone, I'm sorry for the historical disrespect. 

On the other side of the paddock we had the FIA, who were also kinda like "fucked up!" For them, Bernie and co. had become a nuisance since they were openly talking about how all the money in Formula 1 shouldn't go just to the FIA and the manufacturer teams, but the constructors should see a larger chunk of it as well. To counteract FOCA, the FIA turned the sub-sector responsible for F1 into an autonomous committee called FISA - Federation Internationale du Sport Automotive - which was presided by the same man that ran the FIA, that bitch Jean-Marie Balestre. By 1978, the split in Formula 1 was pretty clear between FISA and the manufacturers v. Bernie (and his lawyer, that bitch Max Mosley) and FOCA. Of course, Bernie always had his sights on something and this time, it was one thing and one thing only: the television rights.

cinematic parallels: 'persona' (1966) dir. ingmar bergman / jean-marie balestre and bernie ecclestone talking / 'chungking express' (1994) dir. wong kar-wai

For the public, this only became known back in 80s and it was the perfect moment for Bernie because the drivers started getting properly involved as well. They had already started to really wonder if the shit barriers, weak cars and overall lack of medical care helped them at all, but with the hiring of Prof. Sid Watkins (only done by insistence of Bernie) two years prior and the implementation of new safety measures, action was taken in the shape of a drivers' protest right at the start of the season, demanding improvements on tracks. Of course, FISA would take the stand of "there is a race to be had here" and FOCA would seemingly take the more humane stand (and i'm not gonna claim they weren't sincere about it since the bizarre amount of deaths up until then must have taken its toll to the people who were there to live it). Either way, for Bernie, things were all coming together.

Right at the start of the decade the situation was bad, real bad, Michael Jackson. It kinda still looks like a picnic in the spring compared to 82, but the mess… Before the Spanish Grand Prix we had: 2 drivers protests for safety measures (in Argentina and Brazil, race weeks 1 and 2), 1 FOCA dick boasting session where the manufacturer cars did way better (South Africa, race week 3), a LOT of accidents, one of them involving Clay Regazzoni. He had an accident so bad that everything below his waist was paralysed for the rest of his life and that was genuinely a good ending as he could have died) (United States, race 4), 1 cancelled GP (Mexico, almost race 5). When it was time to get back to it after all of this, the FOCA drivers show up, but they fail to appear to the drivers briefings. But maybe they got the wrong time table right? Nah, same thing happens at the sixth race. The FISA teams are full hoes mad at the lack of Respect they think they're being given and Jean-Marie, taking very seriously his role as the president of the governing body responsible for all things F1 and taking a very neutral stand, decides to 

Exclude the Spanish grand prix from official records, which means people could race if they wanted to, it just wouldn't mean anything and no points would be granted to the championship, irrelevant because:

All FOCA drivers that took part in the boycotts would also get their racing licenses stripped, so it's not like they would be ever allowed to compete in any FIA sanctioned championships, eh? Grande Jean-Marie, his mind ugh! 

Yep, that went well. The FISA teams just headed back home because they still had licenses and weren't going to risk their cars in a non-championship race when they actually could still fight for one, while FOCA and their gang went ahead anyway out of pure contempt and spite. It was a lovely sight to the people who stayed to watch, since most of the attendees didn't turn up once they found out the race was null and teams like Scuderia Ferrari Mission WinNextTime were headed back to their headquarters - this footage from Spanish media shows a bit of what was the mood there, you can see the "abandoned" Renaults and Alfas and the rest of the staff still working while the audience was around.

Shit hit the fan hard, another GP got cancelled and after tons of death threats, constructors on his neck and a little bit of jazz, Jean-Marie granted the drivers their licenses back. It was the end for 1980s bickering on track, but off it there was still a major discussion about the 1981 calendar as Certain People *glares at Bernie Ecclestone* were starting to attempt to throw a coup on the FIA and create their own championship as retaliation for FISA's ban on "ground effects" - more on that in section 2. Discussions were so heated that the Argentina GP had to be cancelled since it were supposed to kickstart the season in January and by December they were still trying to deal with the whole situation.

Bernie held on to the idea of a side championship just enough that it fucked up the calendar dates and then dipped back to F1, leaving Balestre with no other choice than delay the South African race to April. However, the organisers were like "listen, buddy, you don't grow grand prix on trees. you can't just ask us to postpone a grand prix like that, we have a huge infrastructure all set, tickets and promo and sponsors and we still have a contract with FOCA..." The result? Juan-Maria tried to bluff and said that if they wanted to they could go on with the February race, but if they wanted the FIA seal of approval, then it had to be April. Since there wasn't a single soul in the 80s that wasn't petty, Kyalami took the bluff and the opening round of the championship was actually a non-championship race that, once again, only featured FOCA cars, as the FISA backers decided to just stay home. Cindy, this is scenes, and the perfect time for a Bern Attack.

Bernie had created drama and it came the time for him to be as cold as my therapist. He first lured Balestre and FISA in like "oh, this is nonsense, we have been fighting and for what. the fans are suffering and we just got to television broadcasts! we had races cancelled and our tyre suppliers are about to quit! we're grown men, god dammit, we should do as gentile men do and settle this with an… Agreement? maybe we should meet in FISA's address, place de la…. Concorde?". John-Mary took the bait and when the FISA representatives opened the door, there were Bernie and that nazi bitch Max Mosley. I even bet they got glitter ink pens and scented paper for this because I know I would have. Anyway, apparently they spent over 13 hours talking it out and after much deliberation, they whipped out the first Concorde Agreement™, a big top secret contract that no one knows exactly what it says - and honestly idk why, it's been 40 years FIA, release the Ecclestone cut - but it mainly stated two things:

From that point onwards all teams that signed it (therefore signing up for the championship) had the obligation of turning up and racing - no more strikes, babeh! This also ensured that FISA wouldn't look that bad for the audience, because, check this out

Commercial rights are owned from now on by FOCA, who would lease them to tv broadcast stations and, in return, split the money between the teams and themselves, with a chunk left for FISA.

It's not a bad agreement per se, but when Jean-Marie left the room he was like "wait a minute…who are you?". Turns out the agreement didn't please FISA that much and they would remain engaging in petty conflicts for another two whole years, thus making the 1981 season the prelude to the absolute hell of 1982. Feature key points of 1981 besides the calendars?

Nelson Piquet won the WDC for Brabham (lol) and Williams the WCC

Lotus's OG chassis was banned and they had to go with a modified version of the previous season;

Goodyear dipped right before the season started so they had to improvise w Michelin until Pirelli came through;

tbh every single car at one point was accused of being illegal for one reason or the other and specially the Brabham, that used something called a hydropneumatic suspension to make it legal during scrutineering - more on this later;

Belgium GP was at Zolder and it was horrible start to finish. Due to the overcrowded grid, a mechanic was ran over and later succumbed to the injuries, leading to a drivers protest. The show still went on, only for the same thing to happen to a marshal while he attempted to help a stalling car. 

(next up: "physics for psychopaths: the killer regulations of the 70s and 80s")

[hazelnmae]

Lies Travel Faster Part Two: Chapter 6

Summary: Sophia Murphy’s past is coming for her. Can she outrun it?

Tags: Tommy Shelby x Original Female Character

Warnings: angst; smut; violence; language; rape/non-con; death

Chapter 6 Read Chapter 5 here

“I’m pregnant,” Ada blurted out from nowhere.

Sophie nearly choked on her drink, but was able to swallow the shock before she accidentally spit whiskey all over her friend.

She looked at Ada, surprise spreading across her face, but before Sophie could ask any clarifying questions, Ada saw them coming.

“Yes, I know who the father is. And no, you don’t know him,” she said.

“Ada, that’s wonderful!” Sophie took her friend’s hand and gave it a strong squeeze.

Ada was glowing, clearly happy about the news, so Sophie chose not to press about the details. She was worried for her friend, but she was happy to finally be catching up after so long away.

The two sat at the corner booth in the Garrison while the bustling pub carried on around them. The conversation, as to be expected, eventually shifted to Tommy. Sophie found she couldn't spend much time with anyone in Birmingham, and especially not his family, without him becoming the center of conversation.

She didn’t need to admit the wild range of emotions she felt about the situation, about Tommy, as Ada was able to suss it out by just looking at her.

"Tommy's really been struggling," Ada said.

Sophie knew this. Arthur had mentioned it more than once. And Sophie could see it on his face. He’d looked more tired than he had before. Was more short tempered. Seemed constantly in a foggy haze. And she’d seen him drink more whiskey than ever.

“He’s always struggled, hasn’t he? Facing the war and losing a wife will do that to a man, even one as tough as Tommy.”

“He’s not so tough,” Ada said, chuckling.

She was right. He had softened to her before she left for America. She’d witnessed another side of the infamous brutal gangster. Had even come to believe it was all a mask he wore to most of the world. She had seen beyond it, and she knew Ada always had as well.

“The truth is, I think losing you has pushed him over the brink,” Ada replied.

Her heart sank. That’s the last thing she’d wanted to consider. She couldn’t bear having hurt him and had convinced herself he’d never loved her as deeply as she thought. Despite all of her effort, there had been a part of her that would sneak to the surface and tell her otherwise.

“He didn’t lose me, Ada.”

“Of course he did. And he’s been desperate to have you back, even if he won’t admit it.”

________________________

Sophie woke from a fitful sleep and drowsily mad a cup of coffee to try and force herself more alert. It was early, too early, and all she wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep off the whiskey still flowing through her system and forming a miserable headache between her eyes. Damn you Ada, letting me drink enough for the both of us, she thought.

Despite having risen early, she found herself rushing out the door for her meeting. She’d taken too long trying to hide the dark circles under her eyes and was anxious to be late.

As she arrived at Charlie’s yard, she realized she was right on time. Tommy was already there, as was Arthur, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. With them stood a man she didn’t recognize. They were just wrapping up a conversation as she approached. The man looked at Sophie, tipping his hat, and greeting her with a thick Scottish accent.

“I think you’re free to go now, Mr. McCavern,” Arthur said, clenching his fists.

“Not until you’ve properly introduced me,” the man responded, not taking his eyes off Sophie.

Arthur took a step toward the man, but Tommy raised his hand and held his brother back.

“Sophie, this is Jimmy McCavern, a business associate,” Tommy said, training his stare on Jimmy. “This is Sophia Murphy.”

She chose not to shake his outstretched hand, and nodded politely instead.

As he walked away, Sophie noticed the goosebumps that had formed on her arms. She didn’t know who he was or how he was wrapped up with the Shelby clan, but she trusted Arthur's judgement and didn’t care to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary in his company.

“I thought you said he’d be gone before she got here,” Arthur said to his brother.

But Tommy didn’t say anything in response and just took the rifle off Arthur’s shoulder and turned to Sophie.

“Let’s see it then,” he said, checking the cartridge to ensure it was loaded and giving her the gun, looking her in the eye for the first time all morning. He removed a cigarette from the case in his breast pocket, ran it across his lips, and lit it, all too casually.

“What do you mean?” she asked, annoyed that Tommy clearly expected her to read his mind.

Tommy just pointed at the target set up about 100 meters down the length of the yard.

Sophie knew she could make that shot, had made more difficult ones in recent months, but still she didn’t understand why he was asking her to prove it.

Arthur was similarly confused.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Tom,” he said. “Not Sophie!?”

But Tommy didn’t budge.

She looked him in the eye and determined to prove herself. Just what she was attempting to prove, and why she wanted to, she had no idea.

She leaned against the unlit fire pit, crouching behind it and ignoring the fact that her skirt was soaking in mud. She readied the rifle against her shoulder, trained her sights, and pulled the trigger as she let out a deep breath. As always, her eyes slammed shut at the sound, but she kept them shut and held her breath until Arthur spoke first.

“Fucking hell!!!” he laughed loudly. “Who would have ever guessed there’s a sharpshooter behind that sweet face of yours, love!!??”

Tommy said nothing and instead walked toward the target to inspect the mark left by the bullet. As he expected, it’d pierced the middle of the bulls-eye. He knew she’d be perfect for the job. And as much as it pained him to think of putting her in harms way, he knew he needed her if he was actually going to pull it off. He threw his spent cigarette on the ground.

Now the only thing he had to do was convince Sophie she was going to shoot Oswald Mosley.

____________________________

“Are you fucking mental?” she asked, after Tommy had explained the details of the plan.

He didn’t answer.

“Of course you are,” she said. “You know, I knew I should have listened to Arthur and to Ada. I didn’t want to believe you were losing your mind, but fuck, Tommy, clearly you already have.”

Tommy stalked toward her, quickly, and pushed her against the damp wall of the barn so fast she hadn’t seen it coming.

He was sick of people calling him crazy. He was sick of everyone questioning his ideas and intentions. He was sick of no one listening to him. But mostly, he was just sick. And that angered him the most. Tommy knew that whatever was happening to him wasn’t healthy. He knew he needed to get his head sorted. That the hallucinations, the paranoia, the constant inventory he had to take of the world around him to ground himself, were all going to catch up with him. But fuck if he wasn’t going to run from it for as long as he could. He knew no other way.

And admitting any of that to Sophie was out of the question.

He held her jaw with one hand, his other propped against the barn next to her head as he pushed with all his weight. He could tell he was hurting her, but she looked him dead in the eye, defiant still.

Tommy knew his plan was risky. But he had to kill the message. And to that, he had to kill the man. Sophie was the only hope he had.

Just as he was about to loosen his grip and let her go, she spoke.

“I nearly came back to Birmingham twice,” she said. “Once when Arthur phoned to say he was worried about Charlie, after he was thrown from the horse. But Michael talked me out of it. He said Arthur was exaggerating.”

Arthur had been right to be worried. Charlie was in hospital for several weeks. But he had been alright--suffering from a broken arm and lots of bruises to be sure, but in no real danger.

Tommy had no idea Arthur had told her about that. He realized then that his brother had probably told her much more.

“And the second time?” he asked, resisting the overwhelming urge to kiss her now that he stood so close. Even there, in the muck and the mud, she smelled sweet and radiated a warmth he’d hopelessly missed every day since she’d been gone.

“The second time was when Arthur phoned to say he was worried about you.”

Tommy let go of her then, but remained close, resting both hands on either side of her head now, and leaning forward. He looked at their shoes, unable to take her intense eye contact any longer for fear she’d see straight through him.

“He was right to be worried, wasn’t he, Tommy? You are going a little mad, aren’t you?”

And he realized it was too late. She'd already seen straight through him.

Instead of answering, Tommy leaned in and kissed her.

It was different from the kiss in his office. It was real, somehow--laced with heat and passion. Slow and steady at first, but building to a frenzy when he pressed his body against hers.

Sophie knew it was a mistake, but couldn’t help kissing back. She’d wanted this to happen since stepping back on English soil. But she was terrified of what it might mean.

Tommy was supposedly with Jesse. Sophie was now a hired gun working for him. Both Mosley and this McCavern fellow were clearly circling the waters.

But most of all, Tommy was unwell. She wasn’t even sure if he was fully aware of what he was doing.

For that moment, though, that brief moment, she pushed it all down and allowed herself to feel whole again. Things finally felt real in that moment, wrapped in his arms, feeling the heat radiate from him, and kissing him like her life depended on it.

And it very likely did.

__________________________

Tag list full of the most wonderful people: @justanothershelby @evelynshelby @l0tsofpennies @sympathyfortheblinderdevil @actuallyazriel @huntersvibe @porcelainjokersmadness@julietswildchild @geeksareunique @brianaisasongbird @ilycosimo 

[go-diane-winchester]

Dear Misha Collins

I don't think you know how to handle your career.  There are mistakes that you are making to your own detriment.  I am doing the decent thing here by pointing them out to you.  When you are an actor, you are the salesman and the product.  These two elements are a benefit to an actor when he manages these two things cleverly, which you have not done.  These two elements are symbiotic.  You need them both.  And the dominant element is the salesman.  If the product is good, but the salesman sucks, the product is not appreciated. 

Take Sam and Dean Winchester as a good example.  Sam is a flawed hero.  He is also, to an extent in the earlier seasons, something of an anti-hero although not a full blown villain.  Dean wasn't as flawed and his swashbuckling gung-ho nature was easier to enjoy than Sam's pensiveness.  Those who didn't know much about the BTS of the show in the early season, latched on to the lead characters.  At that time they didn't know the actors.  For many of them, Sam appeared kind of self-righteous and grumpy.  Yes, he was handsome, but so was Dean who are the more funnier, showier character, so it was easy to latch onto him.  Dean also bonds with other characters faster than Sam does. 

When the first cons were held, people were enthusiastic about meeting the actors who play Sam and Dean expecting the actors to be exactly like their characters.  When they realized that Jared is absolutely nothing like his character and was, by nature, quite a loveable and happy young man, they loved him back enthusiastically.  But they encountered Jensen's reserved nature, some thought he was shy whilst others thought he was a snob.  Because Jared was such an awesome salesman, his product [Sam] became more palatable to the audience.  Jensen realized that as a salesman, he had a little work to do.  Being construed as shy is not bad, but being seen as a snob is definitely not a good look.  So he started trying to change his public image, despite his reserved nature.

So you have to examine your audience and make necessary changes to your salesman pitch, so as to not put off your target market.  Then people started to see meaningfulness in the friendship that J2 share.  Some liked the chemistry their character's shared.  The actors acknowledged that these ideas existed but didn't shoot them down.  Jensen said that he understood it was a ''hot fantasy'', which is very accurate.  They just requested that fans not ask them questions on the subject, which makes sense, because why would you want my opinion on your fantasy.  That is ridiculous.  These two groups, Tinhat fans and wincest fans, have been around for 13 years, without making a peep.  You don't hear about them, unless you go looking for them.  And unlike a few nasty people on Twitter, the majority has since the beginning, respected J2.

Part of the credit for this goes to the actors themselves.  They didn't overindulge this subsection, because that would be an idiotic sales pitch.  I don't think you understand why.  Why is it that Sam and Dean's popularity hasn't waned?  They have shouldered the burden of a show that is now in its fourteenth season.  They are getting more popular and mass media has an eye on them, which is why they are invited on talk shows, sporadically.  You were invited on Larry King, but it was not because of your work on the show, it was for your charity project.  And your charity project is not your livelihood.  Your acting job is, and it isn't looking very good.  You weren't even a series regular last year, and most people didn't seem to mind. 

Here is where your sales pitch is going wrong.

You fragment the total viewing population of the show

You do this by your con etiquette.  The fans who buy tickets to watch your panel are a heterogeneous group of people.  The problem with having this type of audience, is that you have to curb your language around them, because children attend cons too.  You use vulgar language.  You also speak about sexually explicit things like shipping.  The parents and older siblings sitting in the audience might be offended, and that never occurred to you.  That is very baffling.  The parents who are not offended stay on and those who are, won't watch a Misha panel again with their kids.  Fragmentation.  You have broken your total con audience in two. 

When people ask you about shipping, you don't politely acknowledge it and move on.  You ''lay it on thick'' as they say.  There is a lot that is wrong with that. 

Any straight male fan who genuinely admires your character is not likely going to sit through something he doesn't care about.  Especially since you become very explicit.  He will feel kind of grossed out, as he should, not because he's homophobic but because this is not his jam.  By overdoing the shipping thing, you have forced a decision out of this fan as to whether he wants to pay good money to sit through this nonsense again.  The next time he attends con, he is going to spend his money elsewhere.  That also goes for straight female fans who don't like shipping.  Because not all women like slash.  And they will try not to attend you panel again because it didn't entertain them.  Second fragmentation.

There are other ships in the fandom.  That is the natural progression of things went one ship appears on a show or movie.  That initial pairing pulls all the other characters in.  So almost everyone of the well known actors on Supernatural have been slashed with another actor.  All except Tahmoh Penikett and Alexander Calvert, to the best of my knowledge.  I am not sure why Tahmoh is ignored but it might have something to do with his character killing Kevin.  I think Alex is not slashed because every other man is a father figure on the show, and Alex plays a baby.  You tend to indulge mostly the destiel fanbase, and destiel is discussed in almost all your panels.  What is wrong with that?  You isolate people who don't like destiel for whatever reason.  If they don't like a pairing, they are not going to sit through a panel where that pairing is sporadically discussed.  That is not what they paid for.  In a convention, where audience members have been asked not to ask shipping questions, and every other guest honors the rule except you, it makes you look unprofessional and a rule breaker.  That is not a good look for a salesman.  Third fragmentation. 

So what if you speak about destiel?  You have fans.  They love you.  How is that detrimental to your popularity?  I will explain that further down. 

You bite the hand that feeds you

If you have been employed on a show for ten years, you cant badmouth that show.  Especially when you are incorrect.  In 2013, you said that the show was 'gratuitously misogynistic', during one of your panels.  Since then, the show has been bringing in unnecessary female characters.  This is aggravating for fans who were watching the show since before you got casted.  They didn't like most of the female characters, and yes the non-approving fans were all female. Ratings were still good and the show was popular.  There were female characters whom the fans had no problem with, for example, Missouri Mosley, Ellen Harvelle, Pamela Barnes and to a certain extent even Ava. 

Ever since your statement, CW and associated twitter pages blew up with accusation from  ''concerned fans'' who were now asking for ''representation'' on a show that was already nine years old, despite managing to be misogynistic.  So now, we have characters are extremely unpopular like Claire Novak, Jody Mills, Donna Whatshername and even Mary Winchester.  The spinoff for these inadequate females bombed due to lack of ratings.  The show invested time, resources, money and effort into a spin-off that failed, because you said something stupid that made them look bad.  The day they figure it out, you will leave the show with a reputation of being problematic.  And word travels in Hollywood. 

You overestimate your knowledge

You tend to speak up for a lot of different people.  Usually I would admire that, because it is a sign of inclusiveness - not a bad trait to have.  You, however, are very heavy handed with it.  And you speak about subjects like you know them.  You have an inadequate knowledge of slash fiction and yet you speak about it and you speak wrong.  I have already done an article on that subject.  You speak about feminism and misogyny and women's rights which makes me livid, because as I previously pointed out, you say the wrong things.  And as a women, I would prefer to speak up for myself.  I don't need a voice box speaking incorrectly for me. 

You also speak about LGBT issues.  LGBT teens who make up a small part of your already small fanbase, like that.  After all, they are kids and they don't know any better.  Grown ups, are generally, getting irritated.  Because if you wanted these people to have rights, you will let them speak instead of speaking for them.  Right now, only you and your destiel fans have a voice on the subject of LGBT, and collectively, you do a lot of damage to that community.  Non-destiel fans are constantly fighting off destiel fans because of their ''deep'', stereotypical and damaging analysis of Dean's sexuality.  They are becoming dissatisfied, but because you are not a mainstream actor and a household name, you fly just under the radar.  The day GLAAD releases an official statement about you and your fans, you are not going to like it.  Neither is CW.

You don't control your termites

In the past year and a half, your destiel fans have:

verbally bashed Jensen Ackles on Twitter

sent him a death threat

threatened to burn down his house

threatened to poison his beer so his brewery will shut down

smeared J2's reputation over a harmless joke they made at Nolacon [yep, those were your fans - their profile pictures and names gave them away]

were planning to hire a plane so that they could fly the words ''Pedowitz sucks'' outside Mark Pedowitz's office

threatened to kidnap Jared's children

slandered Jared by saying that Jared abuses his wife, whilst pretending to be her number one fan on Instagram 

They only have one motivation for doing this:  YOU. 

And its not because they love you so much.  Its because you overindulged something that was essentially a harmless pastime, you have turned them into junkies and you are their only dealer.  The day you switch off their juice with finality, you will see a very ugly side of these termites, who are eating away at the foundations of Supernatural.  

Because you over spoke about destiel, these troublemakers are now the majority of your fans.  Outside of destiel, they have no interest in you.  The Misha-led con recently didn't do very well, did it?  Due to fragmentation you have lost many fans, and mishandling of your product caused you to use all the others.  How many fans do you have left?  Less that 80 000.  That is my estimation.  Those are the majority of the fans who petitioned for Wayward Daughters.  The standard audience didn't give a hoot about that stupid project.  Why did the shippers care so much?  Because Wayward Daughters was a fan-backed project.  The fans made it happen.  They assumed that if they could succeed in that, then maybe they could make destiel canon too.  For them, destiel is endgame.   

Supernatural as a total audience of 3 million.  Less that 80 000, is not an impressive number.  Unfortunately 80 000 are still inaccurate, because this was not a ''landlocked'' survey.  It was done via the Internet, which means that fans from all over the world could vote.  So they don't fall under the category of the 3 million viewers who tune into Supernatural in America, every week.  You fans are not Supernatural's core audience.  You did that to yourself.  These fans are also mostly teens.  That is why they are so loud compared to other fan subsections.  They have no mortgages to pay.  They don't have to face rush hour traffic and they can fixate on destiel without much interruption.  And since they are kids, they understand social media better than you and I.  So they know how to use their resources. 

I want to point out though, that not all destiel fans are problematic.  Some are civil and level headed.  I feel sorry for them because their reputation is tarnished due to the majority.  And an ok ship, that they enjoy, is ruined.

The only thing that is your saving grace, for many fragmented fans is your anti-Trump stance.  I hate him too, but I also hate Hillary.  She is no better than him.  However, even that is baffling because if you are brave enough to tweet and irritate Trump, who is unfortunately your President, why don't you have the courage to deal with your fans, in defense of your co-stars and the show that has employed you for ten years.  Especially when these fans are mostly children.  So you are not afraid of President Trump, but little girls scare you?  Because my vantage point, I can see that this doesn't make you look good. 

You used to be one of my favorites amongst the additional cast, until I got fragmented out of your circle.  I even liked destiel, until it turned into a vile beast.  You are now one person, that I cant write a slash story for.  Because you have made it difficult for me to like you. 

I thank you for your time, Mr Collins, and I hope some of what I said, gets through to you. 

Sincerely

An ex-Misha Fan

[yasbxxgie]

Randy Weston, Pianist Who Traced Roots of Jazz to Africa, Dies at 92

Randy Weston, an esteemed pianist whose music and scholarship advanced the argument — now broadly accepted — that jazz is, at its core, an African music, died on Saturday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his lawyer, Gail Boyd.

On his earliest recordings, in the mid-1950s for the Riverside label, Mr. Weston almost fit the profile of a standard bebop musician: He recorded jazz standards and galloping original tunes in a typical small-group format. But his sharply cut harmonies and intense, gnarled rhythms conveyed a manifestly Afrocentric sensibility, one that was slightly more barbed and rugged than the popular hard-bop sound of the day.

Early on, he exhibited a distinctive voice as a composer. “Hi-Fly,” which he first released in 1958 on the LP “New Faces at Newport,” became a standard. And he eventually distinguished himself as a solo pianist, reflecting the influence of his main idol, Thelonious Monk.

But more than Monk, Mr. Weston liked constantly to reshape his cadences, rarely lingering on a steady pulse.

Reviewing a concert in 1990, Peter Watrous of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Weston, “Everything he played was edited to the essential notes of a phrase, and each phrase stood on its own, carefully separated from the next one; Mr. Weston sat rippling waves of notes down next to glossy and percussive octaves, which led logically to meditative chords.”

At 6 feet 7 inches tall, often favoring flowing garments from North or West Africa, Mr. Weston was an imposing, though genial, figure whether performing onstage or teaching in university classrooms. Even before making his first album, he was giving concerts and teaching seminars that emphasized the African roots of jazz. This flew in the face of the prevailing narrative at the time, which cast jazz as a broadly American music, and as a kind of equal-opportunity soundtrack to racial integration.

“Wherever I go, I try to explain that if you love music, you have to know where it came from,” Mr. Weston told the website All About Jazz in 2003. “Whether you say jazz or blues or bossa nova or samba, salsa — all these names are all Africa’s contributions to the Western Hemisphere. If you take out the African elements of our music, you would have nothing.”

As countries across Africa shook themselves free of colonial exploitation in the mid-20th century, Mr. Weston recorded albums that explicitly saluted the struggle for self-determination. “Uhuru Afrika” (the title is Swahili for “Freedom Africa”), released in 1960, included lyrics written by Langston Hughes, and sales were banned in South Africa by its apartheid regime.

That album — and others throughout his career — featured the marbled horn arrangements of the trombonist Melba Liston, who left an indelible stamp on Mr. Weston’s oeuvre.

In 1959 he became a central member of the United Nations Jazz Society, a group seeking to spread jazz throughout the world, particularly in Africa. In 1961 he visited Nigeria as part of a delegation of the American Society for African Culture, beginning a lifelong trans-Atlantic exchange.

After two more trips to Africa, he moved to Morocco, in 1968, having first arrived there on a trip sponsored by the State Department. He stayed for five years, living first in Rabat and then in Tangier, where he ran the African Rhythms Cultural Center, a performance venue that fostered artists from various traditions.

Mr. Weston drew particular inspiration from musicians of the Gnawa tradition, whose music centered on complex, commingled rhythms and low drones. While in Morocco he established a rigorous international touring regimen and played often in Europe.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Weston released a series of high-profile recordings for the Verve label, all to critical acclaim. Those included tributes to his two greatest American influences, Duke Ellington and Monk, as well as a record dedicated to his own compositions, “Self Portraits,” from 1989.

Mr. Weston earned Grammy nominations in 1973 for his album “Tanjah” (for best jazz performance by a big band), and in 1995 for “The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco” (in the best world music album category), a recording that he produced and released under his name but on which he left most of the playing to 11 Moroccan musicians.

In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts gave Mr. Weston its Jazz Masters award, the highest accolade available to a jazz artist in the United States. He was voted into DownBeat magazine’s hall of fame in 2016.

Randolph Edward Weston was born in Brooklyn on April 6, 1926. His father, Frank, was a barber and restaurateur who had emigrated from Panama and studied his African heritage with pride. His mother, Vivian (Moore) Weston, was a domestic worker who had grown up in Virginia.

Though his parents split up when he was 3, they stayed on good terms and lived near each other in Brooklyn. Randy spent time with both throughout his childhood, receiving his father’s teachings about the cultures of Africa and the Caribbean while absorbing the music of the African-American church from his mother, who made sure that Randy and his half sister, Gladys, were in the pews every Sunday.

In his memoir, “African Rhythms” (2010), written with Willard Jenkins, Mr. Weston recalled that his father — a supporter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association — hung “maps and portraits of African kings on the walls, and was forever talking to me about Africa.”

Mr. Weston wrote of his father, “He was planting the seeds for what I would become as far as developing my consciousness of the plight of Africans all over the world.”

Mr. Weston took classical piano lessons as a child but did not fall in love with the instrument until he started studying with a teacher who encouraged his already growing interest in jazz, particularly the music of Ellington, Count Basie and the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

Mr. Weston was drafted into the Army in 1944 while World War II was underway, serving three years in an all-black unit under the military’s segregationist policies and rising to staff sergeant. While stationed in Okinawa, Japan, he was in charge of managing supplies, and frequently tried to share leftover materials and food with local residents, many of whom had lost their homes in the war.

Upon returning to Brooklyn, he took over managing his father’s restaurant, Trios, which became a hub of intellectuals and artists. Mr. Weston began playing jazz and R&B gigs in the borough, seeking wisdom from older musicians. He became particularly close to Monk.

“When I heard Monk play, his sound, his direction, I just fell in love with it,” Mr. Weston told All About Jazz in 2003. “I would pick him up in the car and bring him to Brooklyn, and he was a great master because, for me, he put the magic back into the music.”

Heroin use was rampant on the jazz scene then, and Mr. Weston sometimes used the drug, though he never developed a full-blown addiction. In 1951 he left New York, seeking a fresh start in Lenox, Mass. He made frequent trips to the Music Inn, a venue in nearby Stockbridge, and while working there he met Marshall Stearns, a leading jazz scholar with strong beliefs about jazz’s West African roots, who was giving lectures and leading workshops there.

Mr. Weston started to perform regularly, and he and Mr. Stearns collaborated on a series of round tables about the history of jazz. Mr. Weston met musicians from across the African diaspora, including the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, the Cuban percussionist Cándido Camero and the Sierra Leonean drummer Asadata Dafora.

When he returned to Brooklyn, he was brimming with ideas about the synchrony of African tradition and jazz innovation.

He later received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and United States Artists, as well as awards from the Moroccan government and the Institute of the Black World.

He held honorary doctorates of music from Brooklyn College, Colby College and the New England Conservatory, and had served as artist in residence at universities around New York City. Mr. Weston’s papers are archived at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

He is survived by his wife, Fatoumata Mbengue; three daughters, Cheryl, Pamela and Kim; seven grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild. Mr. Weston’s first marriage, to Mildred Mosley, ended in divorce. A son, Azzedin, is deceased.

Mr. Weston remained in good health late in life, performing most often with a rotating group he called African Rhythms.

In 2016, he released his 50th and final album as a bandleader, the two-disc “African Nubian Suite,” which featured an orchestra-size iteration of African Rhythms. Through music and spoken word, the suite traces humanity’s origins back to the Nile River delta.

His last public concert was in July at the Nice Jazz Festival in France, with his African Rhythms Quintet. At his death, his website listed performances scheduled through October.

For Mr. Weston, music was a way of connecting histories with the present, and a communal undertaking. Looking back on his career, he told All About Jazz: “I have been blessed because I have been around some of the most fantastic people on the planet. I have become a composer and become a pianist. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Photographs:

Randy Weston performing in 1963

Randy Weston at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2011

[solacekames]

This account sounds very credible to me. A few observations:

This guy hasn’t atoned for his actions, and probably never will due to his privilege as a white guy to just fade away from activism, but he’s at least acknowledged his lack of morality with some degree of honesty.

Once you leave a far right organization, your greatest danger is not leftists or antifa, who don’t care about you anymore, it’s your own ex-buddies coming to stab you. That’s why he’s kept the dirt on them, obviously. Smart move.

A lot of alt righters in the comments are claiming this is fake because he calls their movement “white supremacy,” which is a term they dislike because it makes them seem older, like Boomers instead of the millenials and Gen Z that they are. But "white supremacy” is still the mainstream word for it, and once people leave their cults and abandon the jargon, they’re going to start using the mainstream words again.

Here it is. Warning for misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, suicide and general Nazism.

So I actually intended to post this to a confession sub, but it seems it automatically triggers the spam filters. I typed up my full "story" here. As far as proof goes, I don't really have much to offer as I've burned most of my materials, but I do have this video from the night before the rally that might help set the stage of what I was involved in.

https://streamable.com/3lrrw

So this is so something I've had mulling in my head for some time now and I just really wanted to get my thoughts out there. I feel like it would be healthier. Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I am a former white supremacist who helped organize the Charlotessville rally. My actions have destroyed the lives of countless people and lead to the death of a young woman.

I suppose I should start from the beginning so there is a little better context about my involvement. My beginnings as a white supremacist began a few years back when I first stumbled upon a podcast called “The Daily Shoah”. For those who don't know, this is probobly the largest alt-right podcast out there, run by Mike Penovich and Jesse Dunstan (better known as Mike Enoch and Seventh Son) of “therightstuff.biz”. At first, I didn't even take what was being said to heart. It was mostly just dark entertainment, but after having their words filling my ears for hours at a time every week, I began to actually take what they were saying to heart. I think when a lot of people imagine what turns people into white supremacist, they think of a middle aged bike gang member bruning crosses, but I was just a young college student who thought the N word was funny. It took a few weeks, but I soon internalized their arguments. The problem with having multiple podcasts drowning out the outside world is essentially you get hours and hours of pure confirmation bias filling your head with nobody to talk about these things with. Knowing your life would be over if you discussed these things with your real friends and families, you quickly just st art ignoring them in favor of other white supremacists. Most of the other people who I began consorting with were not at all the sterotype I mentioned before. Like me, they were mostly just well spoken young guys looking for others to talk about these things with. Of course “these things” were ethno-nationalism, gas chambers, and holocaust memes.

At the time, the alt-right was not really known to anyone, and their antics mostly just stayed to trolling the comment sections of National Review. I quickly gained a foothold in that community. About a year in or so, they began what they would call “Standard Pool Parties” and I became an organizer for my area. My group of fellow white supremacists grew and my sphere of outsider friends shrank. We had begun to look like a real community.

Around the end of 2016, the even that really sprung our clique into the mainstream occurred, and I was in attendance. This was the “NPI” conference in DC run by Richard Spencer, and we were celebrating the recent election (short note: I don't want to bring politics into this if possible, its just important for the context here). Multiple news outlets were in attendance filming, and near the time Richard was set to give his speech, the liquor was flowing and the attitude was festive. Before the speech, Mike Enoch got up in front of the crowed and began leading chants of various kinds, the kind of chants that would get a 1940s German soldier giddy. By the time Richard gave his “Hail Trump and Hail Victory” line, the crowd didn't stand a chance. They were all too ready to throw up Nazi salutes, and the cameras were all too happy to capture them.

A short aside on Richard: I had worked with him a few times and only one word can begin to describe him: sociopath. He seemed to take joy in leading around particularly young men and building up his little cabal. He would say anything for a camera to be shoved in his face and used his status among of the alt right to sleep with the few women it had. He never showed any remorse for the kids that would be doxxed and become unemployable, in fact he encouraged it on multiple occasions. I was one of those people who he encouraged to self-doxx, and I myself help multiple kids ruin their lives. More on that later.

So now I can start telling the story of Charlotessville. A few months before the “Unite the Right” rally most of you know about, there was a more private rally held at Charlotessville. This event was organized by a particularly vile individual who goes by “Eli Mosley”, someone who would brag about killing children in the military among many of disgraceful actions. Those aren't the worse of his sins, but out of respect for his largest victim I'll leave that out. Of course, this is someone I looked up to. This particular Charlotessville event was relatively uneventful, which is why you never heard about it. However, these was a particular Daily Caller journalist in the audience named “Jason Kessler”, a Charlotessville native. In the weeks following the event, he announced he was going to lead a larger event, and event that would be known as “Unite the Right”. He did this unilaterally, and in fact Eli himself detested the fact that this event was going to happen at all, but it proceeded. I was one of those excited to put this rally on, and as such took up an organizing role.

It was the months leading up to the event that multiple red flags began to go off. The number one issue that was likely responsible for the death of Heather Heyer was the approach to security. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was looking forward to a fight with antifa and would use any and all justifications for the use of weapons and armor at the event. The police had promised us proper protections, but the head of security (who went by “Ajax”) insisted we build our own shield wall. It was my bright idea to literally use a Roman Phylanx formation to surround the event, like the Larpers we were. This is where a lot of disagreement amoung different cliques and organizations came about. There were three main groups in attendance: American Vanguard, Identity Evropa, and Traditionalist Workers Party. I won't say who I was affiliated with.

American Vanguard was preparing for war. They wanted to burn a large jewish ephagy, as well as a pride flag. They also were planning fights and battle stratageys on their own before the event. James Fields was with American Vanguard the entire event, but they deny that he was a member. They were the ones responsible for the “Blood and Soil” chants most of you had heard. Here is a picture of them before the rally

https://i.imgur.com/77VHOOe.png

Identity Evropa could be said to be the more moderate of the bunch. In fact, before the event, Nathan Damigo (their leader) had told individual members NOT to bring any shields, helmets, or weapons. He was promptly called a cuck and eventually undid the descision. Traditionalist Workers party could be said to worst of the bunch, because they were the ones that invited the “National Socialist Movement”, a group of straight up skinheads. Before, the event was only going to be 500 or so. With NSM invited, it swelled to well over a thousand.

With all of these problems evident, we continued with the event. By this time, I had a fairly large personal circle of associates who I had went with. The torchlight march is where things went bad. There was one guy who had caused trouble at previous events who made the decision to jump at protesters and start a fight. The following day, he did the same thing, and was likely responsible for the event being shut down. I don't know if I need to spend more time recounting the events that occurred, before you all know the rest. A riot ensued, and a young girl died. I watched her pictures played on the news as she was declared dead, and you know what? I felt no remorse. Nobody did. The “higher ups” as they were called, basically sent out a memo saying she was a “dumb cunt who got what she deserved”.

Why did this feel normal for me? Well it all comes back to how I came to become a white supremacist. By the time this event occurred, I associated with essentially nobody outside the alt right. When this woman died, we all just saw it as a “aww shucks” moment. In fact, Richard created a press conference where he tried to put together as much evidence as he could to show it was in self defense.

So why did I leave? In fact, it had little to do with Heather Heyer, but rather what I realized I had begun to do. The kind of encapsulation I had woven myself and others into was destroying out lives and we didn't even know it. I brought at least 7 people along with me whom I had personal gotten into radicalism. Kids as young as 17. We saw no problem with showing their faces out in the open because we assured ourselves that the alt-right was “going big”. I told these kids that Charlotessville would make history, and if their picture was taken and they were made unemployable, they could just be taken care of and before alt-right figures.

Thats what my best friend thought before his picture was taken, and he committed suicide a month later. He didn't want to go. I told him he would regret that decision for the rest of his life. Well his life didn't last long enough to regret it, so I was right.

This is the most dangerous thing about what radicalization does to people. In reality, the alt-right has had little effect, but it has encouraged countless people to essentially fall down a slipperly slope without even knowing they are doing it. Take the case of a young man named Nick Fuentes, a kid I had associated with in my time. He had a lot going for him. He was a 18 year old polysci student at Boston College. He had his own show on a burgeoning broadcast network. He was smart. He was going places. So what did our cabal do? We dragged him down to our level. He was mostly just a pro-trump talking head, but he was caught saying “Jews make my life worst” on camera. This is where most people would shut up, apologize, and rebuild. Well me, and many others, pressured him to double down, and double down he did. He became a prominent anti-semetic twitter personality, to the point where he was kicked out of his school and now lives alone in his mom's house. And like so many others who fall into radicalization, his small group of fans prop him up and assure him he has greatness ahead of him. At 19 years old, his entire life is over and he doesn't even realize it.

As for me, I know its sounds strange that I didn't say very much about my actual white supremacist beliefs. Oddly enough, after my best friend killed himself, I myself feel into depression. After some time, I managed to get back on my feet and start getting back to work on my actual life and school. As I started back toward bettering my life, my old beliefs just sort of feel away, as if I never had them. I cut all contact with the alt-right, and now it feels as if they didn't exist. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm not only responsible for the death of Heather Heyer, but my best friend, as well as my previous friends who find their lives in shambled

I confess because every day I feel like I'm living a lie trying to build a life for myself. I'm sure one day, when I have a career, the truth will come out and I'll have to answer for it. Until then, I hope I can be a warning sign for others who might fall into the trap I did, alt-right or not. Its not worth it.

Proof: As far as proof, I've gotten rid of most everything that would remind my of my past life, but I do have this video from the night before Charlotessville that I doubt you're going to find anywhere else.

EDIT: At someone else's suggestion I've copied the story into the text field.

[dontshootmespence]

Cast your mutuals as cm episodes

Okay this was hard and took forever. Also it goes by the seasons (and MY fav episodes) instead of by mutuals so here we go.

First episode that came to mind was L.D.S.K. and that one goes with @veroinnumera because LDSK was arguably one of the best episodes of season 1, like just totally skilled and amazing, kind of like one of my many talented tumblr children who only recently started writing fanfic, but is amazing at it. :D

Next episode if Riding the Lightning, and I love the episode because it’s not a usual CM formula episode, kind of like @phoenix-transcending who always writes outside the box ;)

The Fisher King Part 2 is one of my fav openers of a season and one of the first people to inspire me to write fic was @bookofreid

Sex, Birth, Death is arguably one of the most gut-wrenching episodes not involving the team. It’s early on in the series and absolutely brilliant, also like @criminal-minds-fanfiction one of the CM fandom’s angst queens.

Jones is the first episode we meet William LaMontagne Jr. and due to my continuing conversation with @rmmalta that JJ and Will are meant for each other and not someone else on the team, I have to pair the two.

Seven Seconds, the episode in the mall, is one that always has my heart in my throat no matter how many times I see it and similarly, my wifey @remember-me-forever-silent-angel‘s writing always has me on the edge of my seat and wanting to vom (in a good way :D)

Taz @ilikepipecleanerswitheyes has an amazing URL that i might cry if she ever changed and I must give her the episode the URL comes from, Season 3 episode 7, Identity.

One of my more recent mutuals, the lovely @bitchinprentiss is a super Reidiss fan, which means that I must give her one of the best episodes for the two of them, Minimal Loss.

Demonology is a very Emily-centric episode and I think that means I gotta give that to my babe @prentissluthor.

Amplification might be one of my fav episodes in the entire series, and someone who is equally brilliant is @illegalcerebral.

Someone’s fics that always make me cry because they are so amazing is @spencerthepipecleaner and that means I gotta give her the episode that always makes me cry, 100.

Mosley Lane was the first episode directed by the babe MGG so that one goes to @spencereidings.

JJ (episode lol) has to go to the super JJ fangirl @marvelfanlife.

I love the episode Coda because of the super amazingness that is Spencer with children. It is bursting with adorable. Kind of like @princesswagger14.

Another Emily heavy episode is Lauren, which I have to give to our very own Emily @criminal-navy-writings.

I’m gonna give my babe @comehealinmyarms Dorado falls because it’s an amazing episode and has awesome Emily x Morgan moments.

Snake Eyes is a very sexy episode and someone who has written some seriously sexy fics is @spencerdamnreid.

Profiling 101 is a fantastic episode where the team teaches a class about profiling, and someone who I believe is an amazing example of how to write amazing fics is @stunudo.

Hit and Run are episodes that always give me the feels and someone whose fics give me all the feels is @sapphicpage.

The Wheels on the Bus is a fav episode of mine and for some reason @static-001 is calling out to me in association with it.

I cannot explain why but Zugzwang makes me want to pair it with @kalie-bee.

#6 is an episode where I didn’t see the ending coming and someone who’s written fic like that (at least to me) is @ubdqwriting.

The Replicator is an episode I always go back to and someone who’s fics I always go back to when I’m in need of inspiration is @livingtheobsessedlife / @ssa-avenger because she was the impetus for me starting to write my own fic.

Route 66 is the episode where Hotch’s stab wounds from Foyet come back to haunt him. It has an awesome dreamlike quality which I associate with @dearspencerreid.

Hannah @reiding-and-writing is the sunshine of the CM fandom and that means I have to pair her with a very heavy Penelope Garcia episode, The Black Queen.

The lovely @imagicana is another JJ superfan so I gotta pair her with 200.

The episode Gabby, where the little girl goes missing, really hits me in the feels and that’s making me think @captainreid.

Someone who always puts a smile on my face is @original-criminal-fanfics and an episode that always makes me laugh and puts a smile on my face is Rabid, where Spencer and Penelope have their fitness test.

Angels and Demons is the last we see of the lovely Alex Blake and LOKI i can’t tag you! 

If the Shoe Fits is the Cinderella inspired episode, and although her AU is Beauty and the Beast and not Cinderella, it makes me think of @beautiful-bau-beau.

I gotta give @k8callahan Nelson’s Sparrow because it’s when one of her “FAVORITE” characters bits the bullet.

The lovely @b-a-u-tiful makes me think of Mr. Scratch because it’s an awesome later episode and she is one of my more recent mutuals.

@spxcxrrxid I don’t know why you make me think of A Beautiful Disaster but it’s what happened lol.

The Crimson King is the debut ep for Luke! And someone who writes amazing Luke fic is @lookwhatyoumademequeue.

@wonderboygenius you make me think of Taboo another Luke centric episode!

THAT WAS HARD! I’m sorry if I forgot anyone I suck balls. :D

[penniesforthestorm]

“I’m officially requisitioning this chicken”: ‘Justified’ Season 1, Episodes 6-9

As we move into the second half of Justified’s first season, things are heating up all over Kentucky. We get more insight into the operations of the Crowder clan, plus some even larger adversaries who’ll come into play further down the line. These notes cover Episodes 6 through 9, the next batch will be 10-12, with the finale getting its own entry. Notes on the pilot are here and Episodes 2-5 can be found here. Drop me a line any time-- if I could be sitting next to you in a dive bar, I would be. (Not much for Jim Beam, though, or, if I’m being honest, bourbon in general, owing to some unfortunate shenanigans in my early 20s. Mine’s a Jameson and ginger ale, with a squeeze of lime.)

Episode Six: “The Collection”

-We open with Raylan visiting Boyd, on his feet again after the shooting, and Boyd bending Raylan’s ear about his newfound ministry. Raylan doesn’t buy it for a minute, and he asks Boyd for dirt on Arlo.

-Raylan passes along Johnny Crowder’s warning to Ava about Bo-- she’s not overly concerned. Art, coming to pick Raylan up for the day’s work, is not terribly pleased to find Ava in his motel room.

-Case of the week: civil forfeiture, centering on a man named Owen Carnes trying to offload paintings purchased with stolen cash. Art and Raylan pick up a gallery owner, Karl Hanselman (Robert Picardo) in Cincinnati, and drive him down to Carnes’ place. Carnes and the gallery owner begin discussing his collection of Hitler paintings. Art, in disbelief, asks, “You mean Adolf?”

-Raylan, disgusted, wanders out and finds Carnes’ wife, who doesn’t seem particularly surprised or upset at the turn of events. I have in my notes “another blonde in trouble Jesus Raylan”--there’s nothing untoward, but... dude.

-On the way back to Cincinnati, Hanselman tells Raylan, with a smirk, to come see his “collection” any time. Raylan, never one to mince words- “I’d rather stick my dick in a blender.”

-Raylan finally meets ADA Vasquez, after some folderol at the office involving the now very dead Owen Carnes. Later, Winona shows up, asking Raylan to run a list of names through various criminal databases. Raylan visits Gary, and informs him that if Winona comes to grief through association with any of Gary’s shady dealings, Gary’s going to make another enemy.

-Back at the Carnes place, Raylan unravels the scam Caryn Carnes and the horse trainer, Greg Davis, are trying to pull-- he knows Owen didn’t kill himself, and he pulls Davis to his side by telling him, in an abstract way, about Gary, and how many more people he might have to kill. “Where will it end?” he asks.

-Finally, he goes to see Hanselman, and reluctantly agrees to see ‘the collection’. This is a great moment- the camera stays on Hanselman and Raylan as H. explains how his father used to work for Hitler, “a very charismatic man who knew who was to blame”. After the war, dad recanted publicly, but held onto his repugnant views in private. The camera then shows us shelves of glass jars filled with ash-- Hanselman has been tracking down Hitler’s paintings and burning them, in revenge.

-Raylan goes to see Boyd, and asks him to forget about Arlo. “I met a man whose whole life was crippled,” he explains. “I’m just going to let that old dog lie.”

Episode Seven: “Blind Spot”

-We open with Ava in the hardware store. Johnny Crowder comes in and loudly asks the proprietor for some specialty items-- rope, duct tape, plastic sheeting, and a shovel, on orders from the soon-to-be released Bo Crowder. Aunt Helen sees his bluff and raises him, aiming a shotgun at him-- a warning he wisely heeds.

-Later, Raylan visits Ava and she talks about Bowman, explaining that things weren’t miserable all the time. “I keep going back and forth, between light and dark,” she tells him. Just as they’re getting comfy, a masked intruder bursts in, blasting away, but Raylan manages to wrestle him out through the open second-floor window, firing off a few shots.

-Sheriff Mosley takes Raylan to question Johnny Crowder. On the drive, he explains his beef with the Crowders-- a certain Henry, widely known as ‘the good Crowder’, raped and killed Mosley’s ten-year-old niece. Johnny, for his part, knows nothing about the shooting, and confesses his affection for Ava.

-the next morning, we see a man watching Ava outside the Harlan County Sheriff’s Office. We then catch up to the actual shooter-- a cringing kid called Red, and we get a name for Ava’s watcher, Mr. Duke.

-Raylan gets chewed out by Art, since he has now literally tampered with the investigation against Boyd Crowder-- “Were you in her bedroom?” Unusually, Raylan has no smarty rejoinder.

-Ava and Winona share a strained conversation in the courthouse-- “You ever get tangled up with a law enforcement officer?” Winona asks. They’re interrupted by Sheriff Mosley, who asks Ava to come with him.

-Raylan visits Boyd, looking for answers. After a false start, Boyd explains that Bo didn’t order Ava to be shot, and plants a flea in Raylan’s ear-- what if Ava wasn’t the target?

-Answers arrive quickly: Mosley is in cahoots with the Miami cartel. Duke was supposed to kill Raylan, but, since Duke isn’t familiar with Kentucky, Mosley supplied Red. Mosley shoots Duke to prevent his mistake being exposed, and hatches a plan to bring Raylan to the cartel. Red, driving a bound and gagged Ava, gleefully expounds on Ava’s desirability among the straight men of Harlan County. Ava frees herself enough to strangle him, and the chase ends with Raylan and Ava free and Mosley under arrest. In a passing comment, Mosley brings up the Dixie Mafia, and their current alliance with Miami.

-Finally, we meet Bo Crowder (M.C. Gainey). Boyd’s ongoing conversations with Raylan have not gone unnoticed by his fellow inmates, and just as they start beating on him for being a snitch, Bo intervenes. “It’s good to see you, Daddy,” Boyd says with a smile.

Episode Eight, “Blowback”

-At a diner in Lexington, the newly-released Bo slides into a booth with Ava. He’s out early courtesy of Mosley’s arrest, and he delivers a truly nasty innuendo about ‘homemade pie’ before Raylan arrives on the scene.

-Case of the week: a prisoner, Cal Wallace (Deadwood’s W. Earl Brown), is in Lexington for a few hearings, pending transfer to a ‘supermax’ facility.

-Winona arrives home in the middle of the afternoon, to find an unexpected guest-- Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), self-styled ‘home security consultant’ and possessor of a luxuriant blond coiffure. Right away, Winona smells a rat, and sends Duffy packing, but not before he snidely sends his regards to Gary.

-Prisoner Wallace places the Marshals’ Office under a hostage situation, and Art tells Raylan that if he gets a clear shot, he should take it. Raylan, due for a meeting with Vasquez, begins chatting with Wallace, attempting to defuse the situation. Wallace is a colorful sort-- he has no particular illusions about escape or amnesty. Eventually, Raylan teases out that Wallace is furious with the prison system for dehumanizing him, and under mounting pressure, offers Wallace some fried chicken, sending Tim Gutterson out to get it before Lexington SWAT arrives.

-Winona confronts Gary about Duffy’s visit-- he initially tries to play dumb, but then gets irritated when he realizes how much she knows. Duffy was on the list of names that Winona gave to Raylan in E6.

-Another parable from the Book of Raylan Givens: “People in terrible situations stay alive not because they think things will get better, but because they want to see how the story ends.” For now, Cal Wallace’s story ends in fried chicken, a shot of bourbon, and not dying on the carpet.

-Unfortunately for Raylan, he still has to meet with Vasquez, who brings bad news: thanks to Raylan hopping into bed with Ava, the case against Boyd Crowder has essentially disappeared. Raylan goes to greet an ebullient Boyd. “Who are any of us to fight the will of God?” Boyd proclaims. Raylan promises that he’ll see Boyd locked up again before long, as Boyd practically skips into his father’s arms.

Episode Nine: “Hatless”

-Raylan, on a week’s suspension, is drinking away his sorrows when he eavesdrops on two bros talking derogatorily about women. “I didn’t order assholes with my whiskey”, he sneers, and all three go outside. Hilariously, it’s the middle of the afternoon. In short order, Raylan gets the tar kicked out of him, and one of the troublemakers even steals his hat. Winona, who he was supposed to meet, finds him on the ground. (One has to wonder how many times she found him in these exact circumstances.)

-at Raylan’s motel, Winona asks him about Duffy as she tends to his wounds. As yet, he doesn’t know much, but it paints an unpleasant picture.

-Gary, meanwhile, goes to visit his old college friend Toby, a former football star. He’s trying to worm money out of him, but Toby tells him he can’t spare any. He offers, instead, to provide a little intimidation.

-Raylan tracks down Duffy in his shabby office. Duffy’s lackey makes a few menacing remarks, and Raylan, his face still raw from the bar fight, calmly says, “I already got one ass-kicking; I’m not looking for another”, but mentions that if Duffy goes after Gary and Winona, they’ll have more to discuss. After Raylan leaves, Duffy orders his pal to tail him and ‘put him in the ground’.

-Duffy makes a phone call to his boss, a Mr. Arnett, asking him for more instructions. Gary shows up with Toby, who gets slightly carried away with his role as a heavy. Gary, meanwhile, blabbers on about how Arnett could double his money on the land deal if he just waits.

-And it’s our buddy Arnold Pinter, back from a disappointing sojourn in Tahiti. (An aside: in my experience after more than a decade in NY, there are few people more parochial than born-and-raised Brooklynites. And, y’know, fair dues, it’s a great place, but it’s really fucking funny to this Montanan.) Pinter gives Raylan the rundown on Duffy and Arnett-- Arnett is with the Dixie Mafia, operating out of Frankfort, and Duffy is a dangerous loose cannon.

-Raylan tracks down Duffy’s sidekick Billy, who turns out not to be so tough on his own-- he reveals that Duffy plans to kidnap Winona that very night. Raylan immediately goes to get Winona. On the drive to safety, she tries to explain why she’s with Gary, and says maybe the most devastating thing she’s said so far, “I needed a little hope in my life.”

-After a talk, Raylan and Gary go to confront Duffy and Arnett. Gary offers Arnett the deed to his proposed ‘shopping destination’, and to everyone’s surprise, Arnett accepts. Duffy quite literally goes ballistic, screaming at Arnett, “Show me the Benjamins the homies are always rapping about!” But cooler heads (eventually) prevail, and Raylan takes Gary back to Winona.

-Finally, Raylan recovers his stolen hat, thanks to the bartender. He mocks the thief, saying, “That’s a ten-gallon hat on a twenty-gallon head.”

[queenshelby]

The Judge’s Daughter (Part One)

Featuring: Tommy Shelby x Virgin!Reader

Words: 8,700

 Warning: Angst, Blood, Gore, Mention of Suicide, Mention of Miscarriage, Drugs, Racism, Smut

Tag List:

@lilymurphy03  @deefigs @theflamecrystal  @chrisevanshoeee  @desperate-and-broken  @weepingstudentfishhorse  @captivatedbycillianmurphy  @fookingshelby  @livinginfantaxy  @rosey1981  @atomicsoulcollecto  @peakyboyslover  @nerdy4itall  @elenavampire21  @hanster1998  @mariapaiva13  @fairypitou  @harry-is-my-sunflower  @zozeebo  @lauren-raines-x

………

 Challenging Times

In early 1930, times were hard. The Wall Street crash in 1929 caused many men to lose their fortune. Your family had also lost money on the stock exchange. A lot of money.

Your father was a wealthy judge and now, he was just a judge. Your family home had to be sold and your father moved into a medium sized apartment in London with one of his maids.

Since your mother had passed away in 1920, your father had often sought comfort in his employees. There was one maid in particular who was of interest to him. Her name was Catherine and she was 10 years your father’s junior.

You accepted his relationship with her but soon felt uncomfortable to live with them in the London Apartment.

But your father wasn’t the only family member who lost his fortune in the stock market crash. Your brother had also lost a lot of money. So much money that he could not repay his gambling debt to one of London’s most notorious criminals.

As a result, your brother committed suicide. His mental health had always been troubled ever since he’s been to France, fighting for England in the First World War. Your brother was much older than you and it was almost a miracle when your mother fell pregnant again and gave birth to you after three miscarriages.

Your brother adored you and protected you whenever necessary. He was kind hearted but, unfortunately, got himself involved with the wrong people on several occasions which is when he began gambling.  

Following your brother’s death, your father struck a deal with the man to whom the gambling debt was owed, releasing three of his gang members from prison.

The debt was forgiven and you inherited your brother’s small cottage north of London.  Regardless of your father’s actions, he began to despise criminals who involved themselves in illegal gambling activities. Your father was known to be particularly harsh when it came to offences of this kind.

He once told you a story about a man who used to be a prominent criminal who made his fortune through race fixing and illegal gambling activities. That man was now a member of parliament and your father despised him.

Being Jewish, your father’s hate for this man increased even more when he became the deputy leader of the British Union of Fascists.

The man’s name was Thomas Shelby and you met him once at a gala organised by the socialist party in Westminster. He was a smart man but he was also extremely rude and insulted your father at the gala following a dispute they had earlier in the day.

Your father threatened him and told him that, one day, he will ensure his downfall. It was your father’s mission and it was dangerous.

With that threat in mind and heated political events unfolding around the country, your father asked you to move to the countryside. Take up your brother’s cottage and lay low until things were taking a turn.

It took you quite some time to build up the courage to move into the house where your brother took his own life. But, you eventually did, taking up your brother’s work at the property while attending nursing school every second week.

The cottage was free standing but behind a larger house owned by wealthy Londoners. Their wealth seemed to have been unaffected by the stock market crash and, just as your brother did, you attended their yards and animals on the small farm in exchange for a wage and free food from the produce.

You also spent some time renovating the cottage which was rather dated.

The cottage had two bedrooms, one of which you converted entirely to a studio for your paintings. You enjoyed painting and you were quite good at it.

The other bedroom you redecorated with your own furniture.

The downstairs area consisted out of a small living room with a fire place and a small kitchen and bathroom.

It wasn’t much, but it was a place you could call your own. It was home.

Initially following your move, you would travel to London occasionally to visit your father and his mistress. You wondered when he would finally propose to her. She had been waiting for years.

When you visited, you would often sit in one of his open hearings. You were quite interested in the political and legal situation in the country especially following recent events.  

Notably, it has been six weeks since the assassination attempt on Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.

Being Jewish yourself, you, just like your father, despised fascism.

The event at which the assassination attempt occurred was visited by many Jews, protesting against the establishment of the party and their obscure ideas. Despite your father’s instructions not to get involved, you were one of the protestors on the day and, although not openly, you have been associating yourself with the communists.

Your newfound friend Jesse Eden had since led several more protests you attended. Being only 20 years young, you believed that you could make a difference and convince people that their support for fascism was wrong and immoral.

The problem was that your father was at the centre of it all.

Following the assassination attempt on Oswald Mosley, two Jews were arrested and appeared in your father’s court. The prosecution didn’t have enough evidence for a conviction and the men walked free.

No one really knew who was behind the assassination attempt. There were no witnesses and everyone who may have witnessed the attack had since been found dead.

Regardless of this, for some reason, the leaders of the British Union of Fascists seem to have believed that a Jewish man by the name of Alfie Solomons was behind the attack. But there was one little problem, Alfie Solomon was dead. Or wasn’t he?

The men that were arrested used to work for Alfie Solomons and took the fall until your father set them free for lack of evidence.

A week after this decision, a Jewish owned factory was bombed. The factory was owned by the men who were set free by your father and a company owned by a Trust.

Ten men were killed and, following some arrests, it became evident that Jimmy McCavern was behind the attack.

Jimmy McCavern was the leader of the Billy Boys and, over the course of another week, your father was able to make a connection through some documents admitted to evidence between Jimmy McCavern, Alfie Solomons and a man named Thomas Shelby who was the deputy leader of the British Union of Fascists.

An arrest warrant was issued against Jimmy McCavern and Thomas Shelby by the London police following your father’s advice to them. Since, apparently, Alfie Solomons was dead, no arrest warrant could be made against him.

Thomas Shelby was the first member of parliament who was subject to such warrant and your father may have just, like this, gotten himself a lot of enemies.

The men he had against him now were not only the Billy Boys but also the Peaky Blinders and it was too dangerous for you to continue to visit him in London.

Unfortunately, little did you know that the danger was about to lurk just in front of your doorstep.

An Unexpected Visit

It was a Wednesday evening at 8pm that you heard a rather loud knock on the front door of your cottage.

You didn’t expect anyone and approached the door with your loaded gun. It’s not that you had ever shot a gun, but you bought yourself one two days ago just in case you needed it.

‘Who is it?’ you asked from behind the closed door.

‘It’s Jesse Eden’ you’ve heard from behind the door and you immediately recognised Jesse’s voice.

You put the gun aside and unlocked the door.

To your surprise, Jesse wasn’t alone and your chin dropped as you saw the man standing right in front of you. You remembered him. He was the man who stood beside Oswald Mosley during his speech in Birmingham and you had met him before at a gala at Westminster.

His name was Thomas Shelby.

‘I think we have met before Miss Rosenberg’ Tommy said.

‘Yes, we have Mr Shelby’ you said nervously and frightened at the same time. You immediately wondered whether Jesse was under duress by him. Why otherwise would he be here with her you wondered.

You invited them both inside after Jesse made the request to come in. She wasn’t sure whether they had been followed.

To your surprise, Jesse soon told you that she required your help. According to her, Thomas Shelby had to lay low due to the arrest warrant issued by the London police.

If Thomas Shelby was to be arrested, he may be killed in prison before a hearing could be conducted.

Accordingly, Jesse asked you to hide him at your house until the charges against him are dropped.

‘You mean until the chief of police has been bribed enough to drop the charges?’ you chuckled in response to her request.

‘I wish it would be that easy Love’ Tommy said as he looked at the pictures on your living room wall. His hands were in his pockets and he almost looked unbothered by the situation.

‘You cannot be serious Jesse. You seriously want me to hide this man at my house?’ you said in disbelieve.  

‘I am afraid I am serious Y/N’ Jesse responded.

‘Well, a fascist hiding at the house of a Jew, how ironic’ you said angrily, still unsure why Jesse was helping him.

‘I know we have gotten off on the wrong foot at the Westminster gala Miss Rosenberg, but I would greatly appreciate your help’ Tommy said, recalling his argument with your father in your presence in late 1929.

‘You think Mr Shelby?’ you chuckled. ‘You insulted my father and my entire family’ you said.

‘And for that, I apologise’ Tommy said politely but firmly.

‘Jesse, you need to explain to me why you are helping this man. I do not understand it’ you said.

‘I cannot give you more information Y/N. You just need to trust me on this, alright?’ Jesse asked almost fearfully.

‘Alright, but why me?’ you pondered.

‘Because you are the daughter of the judge hearing this matter. No one will think to look for me here, at your house’ Tommy explained.

‘Jesus’ was all you could respond with to Tommy’s comment.

‘Y/N, trust me, please. It’s for the cause’ Jesse said.

‘I find this hard to believe, but alright, he can stay’ you responded.

Not long after you agreed to house the deputy leader of the British Union of Fascists, Thomas Shelby, Jesse made her way back to Birmingham. It was a three-hour drive and she had to hurry before anyone became suspicious.

‘You will have to sleep on the lounge. Please help yourself to any food, water and drinks’ you said while you walked into another room to fetch a blanket, pillow and change of clothes for Tommy.

You still held on to your brother’s clothes which should have fitted Thomas just fine.

‘I thank you for your hospitality Miss Rosenberg and I apologise for intruding your space. I should be out of your hair within the week’ Tommy said as you came back to the living room and handed him everything he needed for his stay.

‘I am doing this for Jesse, not for you Mr Shelby. Although I do not quite understand why she is helping you’ you said just before you sat down in one of the arm chairs.

‘Let’s just say, we had a thing once, eh’ Tommy smirked.

‘I didn’t think that she would fall for a man like you’ you said.

‘A man like me, eh?’ Tommy chuckled.

‘Yes, a socialist turning to fascism. It’s rather disappointing’ you said.

‘Sometimes we do what we have to do Miss Rosenberg’ Tommy said.

‘Yes, if we didn’t, you wouldn’t be staying here, trust me’ you said before excusing yourself.

You made your way to your studio, painting and drinking wine. It was what you enjoyed most and you wanted to space from the stranger now living with you in the small cottage. A man you had literally nothing in common with and who you despised.

While you were painting, Tommy made use of your telephone and enjoyed some of your late brother’s whiskey.

It was obvious to you that he was struggling with being cooped up in your cottage and, just as your thoughts got lost in your paintings, you heard some a cracking noise near the door of your studio.

‘What are you doing?’ you asked as you noticed Tommy walking into your studio, looking through your many paintings.

‘You are talented. These paintings are extraordinary’ Tommy said.

‘Thank you, Mr Shelby’ you said with surprise. Had he really just complimented you?

His presence and closeness sent shivers down your spine. It wasn’t that you were frightened but you were clearly intimidated.

‘What are your plans, Miss Rosenberg?’ Tommy asked as he kept looking through the paintings.

‘My plans?’ you asked.

‘Your plans for the future? What are they?’ Tommy asked.

‘I am studying to become a nurse. Perhaps, one day get married and have children. The usual’ you said shyly.

‘Well, let me tell you, marriage is overrated’ Tommy chuckled before he asked how old you were.

‘I am 20’ you responded.

‘Still young with a life of opportunities ahead of you. Don’t waste them on the cause’ Tommy said.

‘Coming from a man who wastes his political career on fascism’ you said, causing Tommy to chuckle.

Your comment instantly sparked a political debate between you and Tommy which soon erupted into a heated argument.

During the argument he told you that you were too young to understand, ignorant and naïve and you were keen to throw him out of your house right then and there.

But, you bit your tongue and reminded yourself of the promise you made to Jesse.

You couldn’t stand him and his arrogance any longer and went to your bedroom, leaving him to debate about politics with himself.

Things Must Change

The next morning, you woke up early to attend the garden, ignoring Tommy as you left the house.

But, it wasn’t long until Tommy joined you in the garden. It was obvious to you that he was clearly bored.

‘What happened to the people who lived at the large house over there?’ Tommy asked as he walked outside to have a cigarette. You didn’t allow him to smoke inside the house.

‘They are in France for their annual vacation. Apparently, their fortune was unaffected by the stock market crash’ you responded.

‘Lucky them eh’ Tommy grinned as he grabbed some of the leather gardening cloves and a bucket from the side of the house.

Wearing his expensive suit and with the bucket in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth he walked over to the berry bushes where you were standing.

‘I might as well make myself useful eh’ he said jokingly as he began picking some berries.

‘Uhm yeah…but these aren’t ripe’ you giggled as you observed Tommy picking off some of the raspberries.

‘Right. Well, I usually don’t garden’ Tommy chuckled.

‘I couldn’t tell’ you laughed, causing Tommy to smile back at you.

This was the first time you noticed him smile. It was a gentle smile and it suited him.

Tommy helped you in the garden for the remainder of the day. It wasn’t like he had something else to do other than make phone calls to his brother and someone by the name of Kent.

You managed to keep your arguments to a minimum and you started to worry that you were slowly beginning to enjoy his company.

Later that evening, following dinner, you even sat down together in front of the fireplace in the living room to drink whiskey and wine and make some conversation.

‘I have been checking on your calls, contacting the directory because I wanted to make sure that I am safe with you being here. I have been told that the last call from my number was made to the Crown Investigations Office’ you said with surprise as you poured Tommy a glass of whiskey. After everything that happened in the past, you still didn’t trust him.

‘That’s correct’ Tommy said.

‘The only reason I could think of as to why you were talking to an officer of the Crown while you have an arrest warrant against you is if you were working for the Crown yourself. Otherwise, you would be mad tipping them’ you said.

‘I was just trading information that might be useful. In exchange, I am hoping for the arrest warrant against me to be dropped’ Tommy explained.

‘Mr Shelby, do you actually believe in fascism? I have not heard you speak about your party’s ideals since you’ve been here. We spoke about politics but you still seem to be a socialist at heart. So tell me, why do you follow this mad man Mosely? I am curious’ you said.

‘The thing about political parties is that they take the course into the direction in which they are steered. Much like a car. But just like with a car, if you fill it with the wrong fuel and the engine breaks down as a result, you will be going nowhere’ Tommy said as he took a drink.

‘And you are the fuel Mr Shelby?’ you asked with curiosity.

‘Yes, I am the fuel Miss Rosenberg’ he said.

‘Your intention is to undermine Mosley on behalf of the Crown. Jesse knew and this is why she helped you, isn’t it?’ you said after pondering on about what Tommy had just told you.

‘And now that you know this as well, it makes you my accomplice. I might be able to use your help Miss Rosenberg’ Tommy said.  

‘If it helps to end fascism, perhaps I am willing to give it’ you said with a smile. ‘But I am curious now Mr Shelby. Was it you who initiated the attack on Mosley?’ you asked.

‘I rather not answer Miss Rosenberg’ Tommy said.

‘I understand. Also, you can call me Y/N now that we aren’t enemies after all’ you said.

‘Alright Y/N, then I insist that you call me Tommy’ he responded.

After some more conversation you decided that it was time for you to make your way to bed. It was late and you had to get up early to attend the animals.

Nightmares

Falling asleep that night was easy. You felt much safer now despite Tommy’s presence. You knew he wasn’t going to harm you.

But just as easy as you had fallen asleep, you were woken up by a loud noise coming from the living room at 1am.

‘Tommy, are you alright?’ you asked worryingly as you walked downstairs in a haste, wearing nothing but your silk nightgown.

‘My apologies, I didn’t intend to wake you’ Tommy said as he sat on the lounge, covered in sweat.

You initially thought that he might haven gotten sick until you saw a small empty bottle on the living room table. Your brother used to have one just like it which he carried around everywhere. It contained Liquid Opium and helped him sleep. He took it every night until, one day, he stopped. The withdrawal was barely manageable and his addiction soon rebounded.

You knew what this was. You had seen it before.

‘I will make you some tea to help you sleep’ you said kindly as you observed Tommy’s struggles.

‘I don’t think that tea will help me sleep Love’ Tommy chuckled.

‘My brother used to have nightmares after France. When he returned home, my mother made this for him and he managed to get at least some sleep. It’s worth a try’ you said with a warm smile. You knew Tommy had been to France. You had spoken about it when you spoke about your brother earlier that evening.  

‘I suppose why not, eh’ Tommy said as he walked to the bathroom to clean himself off with a cold wet flannel.

After you put on the kettle, you walked to the studio and grabbed some more of your brother’s clothes.

‘These should fit you’ you said shyly as you handed Tommy a clean plain shirt and pants.

‘Thank you, Y/N’ he said as he took the clothes.

This was the first time you saw Tommy without a shirt and, despite his level of exhaustion, it was quite a sight. He certainly was a very attractive man.

After Tommy had gotten himself changed, you sat down next to him and handed him the cup of tea.

‘Do you want to talk?’ you asked.

‘It’s the middle of the night Y/N, you should get some sleep’ Tommy said.

‘It’s alright. I am not tired’ you said with a warm smile.

That night Tommy spoke with you about everything. About France and his late wife Grace who visited him in his dreams. He didn’t know why, but he felt as though he could talk to you and trust you.

At 4am, you eventually fell asleep on the lounge next to Tommy which is where you woke up the next morning covered with a warm blanket.

The fire was lid and there was a note on the coffee table as you woke.

‘Borrowed your hunting rifle, will be back by 8’ the note said.

You didn’t know how to hunt and had been telling Tommy how your brother shot bucks whenever you came to visit him at the cottage from London. You would then prepare it with veggies from the garden just the way your mother had shown you.

You thought that, perhaps, Tommy was better equipped than you when it came to hunting. You struggled enough even just to slaughter a chook from the farm and your intake of meat was clearly lacking as a result.

Attacked

With Tommy gone, you decided to attend to the horses. Grabbing your shovel and rake, you walked into the stables.

But, just as you walked inside, you could hear a loud noise from behind the barn.

You wondered whether it was Tommy and approached the back area of the property carefully. After all, he had a loaded gun and you certainly didn’t want to get shot accidently.

Just as you walked to the side of the property, you saw a strange man.

‘Hello Love’ the man said, cocking his gun.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’ you asked holding on to your rake tightly.

‘We’ve got a dispute to settle with some Jews Love. Now be a good girl and put down this rake would you’ the man said firmly.

You obliged and the man approached you slowly.

‘Now Love, we will be having a good time and then we will visit your father’ the man said just before he called for another man who was at the back of the barn.

Within an instant, the man grabbed your wrists and pushed you against the outer wall of the barn.

‘Such are pretty thing aren’t you’ the man said as he aimed to cover your mouth while moving away your skirt.

But, just when the man’s hand reached your mouth, you bit him firmly just before yelling for help.

‘You fucking bitch’ the man said as he reached for his gun.

In this moment, you heard a shot. The other man was hit, but barely and went to check out where the shot came from.

With both men distracted, you ceased the moment and pulled out the gardening scissors you were carrying in your thin jacket. Within an instant and without thinking, you rammed the scissor into the neck of the man who was still standing right there in front of you.

This was all it took for the man to fall to the ground. You couldn’t help it but scream as your hands and blouse were covered in the man’s blood.

You were besides yourself, sitting on the ground next to his dying body in shock, unable to do anything.

After what felt like an eternity, you saw Tommy approach you, making his way through the veggie patch carrying your hunting rifle and covered in blood himself.

‘Are you alright Y/N?’ he asked as he kneeled down next to you, comforting you.

‘There is another man Tommy, he walked to towards the berry field’ you said.

‘I know. He’s dead now and so is the third man who was driving them here’ Tommy said.

‘Did you kill them?’ you asked.

‘Yes, I did’ he said and, just in that moment, you threw his arms around him.

This is when you realised that he had been injured and was in agony himself.

‘Tommy, you’ve been shot’ you said with worry as you saw blood staining through his white shirt.

‘Yes’ was all he managed to say at this point as he was losing blood.

‘We will get you to a hospital’ you said in a haste.

‘No hospital Y/N. I will be taken into custody if I set foot in a public place like this until the arrest warrant has been dropped’ Tommy said.

You could see the agony on his face as he held onto the side of his chest. He was in pain. A lot of pain.

‘You are nurse, aren’t you?’ Tommy asked, breathing heavily.

‘I am a student nurse Tommy. I have not practiced on a life person’ you said worryingly.

‘Well, it’s about time then eh’ Tommy chuckled.

‘Tommy, you can’t be serious’ you said.

‘I am serious Y/N. I need you to do this, please’ Tommy said.

‘Alright, common’ you said nervously. It wasn’t like you had a choice. Tommy was bleeding a lot and his wound needed attention immediately.

With haste, you walked inside with Tommy and placed a towel over the lounge and got your first aid kit as well as a bottle of vodka from the dining room.  You then went to the bathroom quickly to get a bowl of clean water and more towels.  

While you were getting everything ready, Tommy made a phone call to his brother Arthur, giving him your address. By that point, Tommy was barely able to stand up.

As you returned from the kitchen, you helped Tommy to remove his blood-soaked clothes.

You gasped for a moment. You weren’t sure whether the blood or the sight of his naked body took away your breath.

‘You’ve got whiskey?’ Tommy asked.

‘Tommy, I don’t think it matters which alcohol I use to clean out your wound’ you said as you got everything ready on the table.

‘To drink. Trust me, I’ll need it. I am out of Opium’ he said, his breathing still laboured.

‘Yes, of course’ you said before you poured him a large glass of whiskey and handed it to him.

He drank all of it in an instant before lying down.

‘This is going to hurt’ you said as you cleaned your hands and the tweezers from your first aid kit with some of the vodka.

‘I know’ he said, taking in a deep breath.

‘You have to stay still’ you went on as you reached for his wound which was still profusely pouring blood.

‘I know’ he said again before closing his eyes and holding on to the edge of the lounge in anticipation.

As soon as you entered the wounds with your fingers and the tweezers, all that you could hear was a loud grunt.

‘Fuck’ Tommy screamed as your fingers went in deeper, retrieving the bullet from his wound. By this point, you were breathing as heavily as him.

‘I’ve got it Tommy, don’t move now’ you said as you carefully pulled the bullet out of his flesh.

Tommy took in a deep breath and, with another loud grunt, you dislodged the bullet.

It was intact and you sighed with relief while Tommy opened his eyes, looking at you in agony.

‘Now I will clean up the wound and stitch it, alright?’ you asked, causing Tommy to nod.

He let out another loud grunt as you poured some of the vodka over his wound before handing him a clean towel to apply pressure to the wound while you prepared the stitches.

His face was expressionless when you placed the stitches. You knew that the worst pain was over but, nonetheless, you were surprised by how well he had handled it.

This was when you noticed several large scars across his chest and arms. Almost too many to count.

‘You have been shot before, haven’t you?’ you asked while Tommy looked almost relaxed when you placed the sixth stitch.

‘Just a few times’ he smirked.

While you placed the last stitch, you could hear a car pull up in front of your door.

You opened the door quickly before applying a bandage around Tommy’s chest.

‘Fucking Hell Brother’ Arthur shouted as he walked into the living room with Isiah.

‘Arthur, this is Y/N’ Tommy said by way of introduction.

You quickly shook Arthur’s hand by which he was rather surprised.

‘Who the fuck did this?’ Arthur asked.

‘The Billy Boys. But they weren’t after me. They were after her’ Tommy explained.

‘Why?’ Arthur asked.

‘Because she is the daughter of the judge hearing the McCaven matter. I assume they wanted to send a message’ Tommy said.

‘Did they see you?’ Arthur asked.

‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter. They are dead’ Tommy responded.

‘Alright, what do you want us to do with the bodies? Send a message?’ Arthur asked.

‘Burry them behind the property. This never happened. They just disappeared and never made it here. By the time McCaven finds out the arrest warrants will be dropped and I can deal with the situation and Mosley’ Tommy instructed.

Arthur and Isiah attended the bodies as instructed by Tommy. You were surprised how quickly and efficiently they made the bodies disappear without any evidence whatsoever. It was clear to you that they had done this kind of thing before.

Before they left, Tommy gave Arthur a note to give to Jesse Eden and a note to give to a person named Kent.

In return Arthur gave Tommy three guns, a change of clothes and a bottle of opium.

After Arthur and Isiah had left, you made sure that Tommy was resting. After all, he had lost a lot of blood and you didn’t want him to pull a stitch.

Tender Moments

‘Do you have any more of that tea?’ Tommy asked as he held on to the bottle of opium that Arthur had given him. He starred at it, but didn’t open it.

‘Yes, sure. I will make some’ you said.

You were surprised by Tommy’s request but didn’t dare to argue.

You sat down next to him to have some tea while he placed the bottle of opium on the table in front of him.

‘Tommy, don’t’ you said.

‘Don’t what?’ he asked.

‘The opium, don’t take it’ you said.

‘Well, then put it away somewhere I cannot find it eh’ Tommy said as he handed you the bottle and you obliged with his request.

Tommy knew he would be regretting this soon, at night when his nightmares would wake him once again. It wasn’t the pain he couldn’t handle, but rather it was Grace’s visits in his dreams and dreaming about France hat destroyed him.

He was afraid of going to sleep but he needed sleep badly especially after today and so did you.

‘Are you not going to sleep?’ Tommy asked as clock struck midnight and you were still there with him talking about matters which he never talked to anyone about. He felt like he could confine in you and, despite your young age, you understood and you cared.

‘I don’t think I can. Not after what happened today. Not after what I have done’ you said as tears were building up in your eyes for the third time that evening.

‘Y/N, listen to me, alright?’ he said, caressing your face gently.

‘What you have done saved your life. These men were here to hurt you and now they can’t. You are safe now’ Tommy said as tears began to run down your cheek.

‘I killed someone Tommy’ you said in disarray.

‘You killed a bad man’ Tommy said as he used his thumbs to wipe away your tears.

‘It’s still a man Tommy’ you said before pressing your head against his chest. ‘Will the picture of him ever leave my head?’ you asked.

‘No Y/N, it won’t. But your guilt will, that I promise’ Tommy said. ‘Now, let’s get you some rest, eh?’ Tommy said.

‘Will you come with me Tommy?’ you asked nervously, knowing that your question was somewhat unusual.

‘Come with you? To bed?’ Tommy asked with surprise.

‘Yes, just to sleep by my side. I am scared Tommy’ you said.

‘I never had a woman ask me to join her in her bed simply for the purpose of sleeping, but alright, I suppose I can do that’ Tommy smirked before he followed you upstairs.

As Tommy lied down next you, bandaged up and wearing not much more than his white undergarments, you could feel something unusual. It was almost like some sort of warmth which was flowing through your chest.

‘Do you want me to turn off the light?’ Tommy asked as he got comfortable on the large white pillow, facing you and starring into your dark eyes.

‘Not yet. Perhaps we could talk for a little longer’ you said as you looked into his comforting blue eyes.

‘Alright, what you want to talk about?’ he asked and this is when you brought up his current wife Lizzie and his children.

‘What about your wife and children, where are they?’ you asked.

‘They are in Scotland, where, apparently they are safe from all this and from myself’ Tommy said with some disappointment.

‘From yourself? But they are your children’ you asked with some confusion.

‘They are, but they are indeed safer without me until I sort things out’ Tommy explained.

‘Do you miss your wife’ you asked.

‘No, I do not miss my wife. She filed for divorce six weeks ago’ Tommy said.

‘You do not seem upset about it. Why is that?’ you asked.

‘Because I know that it’s the right thing to do, to keep her safe. Our relationship was never one made of love. I never loved her the way a husband should love his wife. But, she is mother of my daughter and she cares deeply for my son. I trust her. She’s always been loyal to me and to the Company’ Tommy explained.

‘That’s nice…to have someone like this in your life’ you said.

‘It is indeed. Now you should get some rest eh’ Tommy said as he turned off the bedside lamp.

To his surprise, as soon as he turned off the light, you leaned over towards him carefully and rested your head on the uninjured side of his chest.

He let you and wrapped his arm around you, pulling you close until you drifted off to sleep.

This was the first time for Thomas Shelby since he came back from France that he shared a bed with a woman other than his wife who didn’t have any sexual interactions with. To his surprise, despite the pain after having been shot, he slept better than he had expected. In the absence of nightmares, he was well rested until, after five hours of sleep, the next morning you heard a loud bang on the door.

Taking a Turn

You walked downstairs again with your loaded gun in your hand.

‘Who is it?’ you asked as you approached the door carefully.

‘Jesse Eden’ the person said and you quickly opened the door while Tommy came walking downstairs, out of your bedroom.

‘I actually just came here to make sure you didn’t kill each other but it looks like you’ve managed to become acquainted’ Jesse giggled.

‘It’s not what it looks like’ you said as Tommy walked out of your bedroom wearing nothing but his undergarments.

‘I assume Tommy has informed you about our past relations. But, for the record, I no longer have any interest in the man, so it’s quite alright with me if it is what looks like Y/N’ Jesse laughed.

‘You are no longer interested, eh?’ Tommy said to Jesse with a cheeky smile.

‘Unless you have forgotten, you ended up marrying someone else’ Jesse said.

‘Should I give you two some privacy?’ you asked as you felt uncomfortable being caught in between their conversation about old times.

‘No Y/N, there is no need eh Jesse?’ Tommy said with a laugh.

‘No there is not. Arthur came to see me last night to give me your note. But he hadn’t said anything about you having been injured’ Jesse said.  

‘It’s alright, she’s a nurse. I got lucky’ Tommy chuckled.

‘Well, I am glad because I have information from one of my informants that will be of interest to you now that you are still alive. The Crown prosecutor was removed from the case and so was the chief of police. Apparently, it was found out that they both involved themselves with illegal prostitutes at some of your brothels’ Jesse said.

‘Now that is interesting, isn’t it?’ Tommy smirked.

‘You obviously knew and blackmailed them. The man in charge of the matter is now your friend Lawrence Staghill who, I believe, is filing for a motion to dismiss for lack of evidence in front of the judge who still owes you a lot of money. So, it looks like that everything is going to plan for you once again Thomas Shelby OBE. You should be free to leave after the next three days. The case is to be heard after the weekend’ Jesse said.

‘You hear that? Three more days and I will be out of your hair Y/N’ Tommy said.

‘I can’t wait’ you said cheekily and with a hint of sarcasm.

Jesse stayed for a little while longer before heading back to Birmingham and you made sure that, for the entire day, Tommy rested.

It was hard for Tommy to rest. It was almost like he needed to do something at all times. He wasn’t a man who could ever just sit still and, say, read a book. His mind had to busy constantly and he loved to be challenged.

For you, the day went by quickly and looking after Tommy was almost like looking after a child who refuses to listen.

Gone Too Far

‘I see you made yourself a bed on the sofa again’ you said as you noticed Tommy putting the blanket and pillow on the sofa.

‘Whilst I enjoyed our pillow talk, I figured that last night was an exception. Unless you think you might have difficulty sleeping again’ Tommy smirked.

‘I think I just might’ you said with a smile as you finished brushing your hair.

‘Alright, I will take my pillow and blanket upstairs then eh’ Tommy said.

‘Alright, see you up there’ you smiled, causing Tommy to chuckle.

This was strange indeed, but he figured that, at least, the bed was more comfortable than the lounge.

‘So, what do you want to talk about tonight, eh?’ Tommy asked as you walked into the bedroom with a glass of water and two white pills.

‘I went to the chemist today. This should prevent infection’ you said you said as you handed him the glass and the tablets.

‘Thank you’ Tommy said as you lied down next to him.

He swallowed the tablets and waited for you to say something, start a conversation of some sort.

But you didn’t. You lied there quietly, your dark eyes gazing over his half naked body.

In this moment, he didn’t know what came over him but, just as he leaned to lie on his uninjured side, he ran his hands through your hair and his eyes met yours.

‘I haven’t met anyone quite like you’ Tommy said.

‘Why is that?’ you asked.

‘I am not sure. There is something about you that intrigues me. That doesn’t happen very often’ Tommy said and, just as he did, you leaned forward and your lips met his.

His lips were soft and still tasted like whiskey.

Reluctantly at first, he returned the kiss, gently but passionately.

It was a short kiss and your tongues never touched by the time you lips drifted apart.

Once your lips separated you starred at each other, questioning in your mind what had just happened between you.

With embarrassment, you pulled away and turned around quickly.

‘Goodnight Tommy’ you said after you turned around. You turned off the night light and pulled your blanket over you tightly.

‘Goodnight Y/N’ Tommy said with a slight chuckle, still facing into your direction.

Despite the fact that Tommy had been on your mind now for days, you were surprised by your own actions and wanted to pretend that the kiss between you just moments ago didn’t happen.

You knew about his past, the killings, the illegal businesses, everything. He was a man you knew you shouldn’t get involved with. He was also still married and, at least in the eye of the public, he was a fascist.

You tried very hard to ignore the fact that he was lying next to you, half naked. The fire was lightening the room slightly and you simply couldn’t close your eyes, starring to the other end of the room.

For ten minutes you tried to lie still, but couldn’t. You fidgeted and kept starring up and then to the side again.

‘Do you want me to help you go to sleep?’ Tommy asked as he noticed your restlessness, which instantly broke the silence between you.

‘Help me go to sleep?’ you asked with some confusion and without turning around to face him. You were still to embarrassed to look at him.

‘Yes’ Tommy said as, suddenly, you could feel his body moving closer towards yours but still separated by your individual blankets.

‘What do you mean by that Tommy?’ you asked with some ignorance and, just when you did, you could feel the back of your blanket lift slightly.

Within seconds, Tommy’s fingers trailed over your bare shoulders downwards over your small breasts which were covered by nothing but your silk nightgown.

Your nipple turned hard instantly at his touch and you let out a deep sigh.

‘Tommy, I have never been with anyone before’ you said, allowing his touch but worrying about what he was intending to do to you.

‘Don’t worry Love, I am not going to fuck you. At least not in the conventional way’ Tommy chuckled as his fingers circled over your hard nipples.

You had no idea what he could possibly mean by that. Did he not find you attractive? What was he going to do to you then if not that?

‘So, you don’t want me?’ you asked curiously while small moans escaped your lips as the tips of his fingers continued to run circles over your nipples.

‘I want you alright. But I am not keen on tearing my stitches’ Tommy said as his hands began to take hold of your breasts harder.

You moaned at his touch and felt a strange and unfamiliar sensation build up in between your legs.

It wasn’t long until you felt his fingers move downwards over your stomach until they finally began teasing the top of your mound through your panties.

‘Tommy, I don’t think I will be going to sleep with you touching me like this’ you said with heavy breath.  You wondered how on earth this was actually going to help you go to sleep.

‘I hope not’ Tommy laughed quietly. ‘But once I am done with you, you will sleep very well, that I promise’ he whispered into your before biting your earlobe gently.

You took in a deep breath and moaned quietly. The feeling of his hot breath was intense.

‘So do you want me to continue?’ he whispered.

You couldn't say yes. But you also couldn't say no. Instead, all that escaped your lips was another soft moan.

‘I need to hear you say it Love. Tell me you want me to keep going’ he said.

You whimpered under his touch, your hips now rocking to meet his hand. But he held firm.

‘I...it feels really good’ was all you could manage to say.

‘And you want me to continue?’ he asked as his fingers moved a little lower, over your panties, expertly brushing over your clit.  

‘Yes Tommy, please continue’ you moaned and, just like that, Tommy slit his hand beneath your panties, running his fingers directly over your wet slit, dipping only the top of them into you gently.

He then began to rub his wet finger tips over your clit, circling around your hard nub with light pressure.

‘Oh my god Tommy’ you moaned as you never felt anything just like that.

After a minute or two, Tommy gently slid one finger into you, looking out for any cues from you to ensure that he didn’t hurt you now that he knew that you were a virgin.

You were so tight, it was almost too much to start and he could feel the resistance of your hymen within you. But he kept going, carefully and gently thrusting his finger in and out of you at a slow pace.

You moaned softly and Tommy loved pulling a reaction out of you. It was almost like it was his goal to break your normally stoic composure.

Tommy wanted to know that you were enjoying what he was doing.

He began sliding his finger in and out of you all the way slowly at first, but not long after he started to build speed.

You enjoyed the alternating feeling between emptiness and fulness inside of you and were making the most delicious noises now. Your eyes were completely closed and you were moaning louder.

Suddenly Tommy slipped a second finger inside of you just to give you a little extra jolt and you reacted better than he could have expected.

It was slightly painful at first but the mild pain soon subsided and turned into pleasure.

‘Tommy, oh god...fuck’ you moaned as you began squirming just slightly and moaning a bit louder.

As his fingers kept thrusting in and out of you, your breathing became heavier and your legs began to quiver.

His thumb soon gave extra attention to your clit while he kept up with the movement of his middle and index finger.

Your moans kept getting more frequent now and you were certainly getting wetter too as Tommy kept going faster and harder.

You couldn’t believe how good he was making you feel with his fingers but you also didn’t know what to expect when an overwhelming sensation of warmth and tingling overcame you slowly.

‘Tommy, I don’t know if this is right. It feels strange’ you moaned as your legs began to shake and you couldn’t control your movements.

You tried to squirm away as the feeling was too unfamiliar to you. But Tommy persisted, pushing his hand firmer against you and his fingers even deeper inside of you.

‘Does it feel good?’ Tommy asked, knowing already what your answer would be as he could feel your walls tightening around his fingers.

‘Yes Tommy’ you managed to let out in between moans.

‘Then its right Love’ Tommy smirked. ‘Just relax and let go eh’ Tommy whispered.

You moaned once again, louder than before, and gave into the sensation.

It was intense, so intense that you had to clench onto the sheets and, just like this your orgasm washed over you.

You were a shaking mess and Tommy kept up the speed with his fingers until your orgasm slowly began to subside.

‘Fuck, what the hell just happened?’ you said once you began to calm down and while Tommy still stroked the outside of your now soaked mound.

‘Did you never have an orgasm before?’ Tommy asked surprised and with curiosity.

‘Like this? No. Never’ you said. Of course, you pleasured yourself before but the sensation was different, way less intense than what Tommy just managed to do to you.

As Tommy removed his hand from you, you turned around, your cheeks flushed. It was almost like you were embarrassed to look at him after what had just happened.

‘Feeling relaxed now?’ Tommy asked with a grin on his face.

‘Yes…uhm…thank you’ you said shyly.

‘It’s my pleasure’ Tommy said with a smile before giving you gentle kiss. You could have spent all night just kissing him. He was good at it and his lips were full and soft.

‘You should get some sleep now, eh’ he said after your lips drifted apart and he caressed your face.

‘Is there anything I could do to return the favour?’ you asked shyly, feeling somewhat guilty about the way he made you feel with nothing in return.

‘No, not tonight Love’ Tommy said as he pulled you closer. Whilst he had the desire to be with you that night, he was still not well enough after his injury and felt as though he should give you time. You were inexperienced and this was new territory for you, possibly overwhelming. Just like this, you had awoken the soft and gentle side of Thomas Shelby and that, in itself, brought him out of his own comfort zone.

He did not know what to do or how to act. The only woman who had managed to do this to him after he’s fought in France was his late wife Grace and he was certain that he would never meet another woman like this again. A woman he would care for in the same way he cared for Grace. Having met you changed everything for him that night and he struggled with the idea to accept his fade, especially with a woman half his age and who was the daughter of the man who tried very hard to bring him down.

Thus, as you leaned your head against his chest carefully, making sure that you didn’t lean against his wound, he couldn’t help but stare at you and ponder about what had brought him to you. Perhaps it was meant to be.

‘What’s wrong Tommy?’ you asked as you began to notice his eyes being fixated on you as he ran one of his hands through your hair gently.

‘Nothing, just enjoying the moment’ he said.

‘Me too Tommy’ you responded before closing your eyes and drifting off to sleep.

Change of Heart

The next morning, when you woke up, Tommy was not by your side. His side of the bed was empty.

But, when you walked downstairs you could see him, sitting in the dining room area with a pen and paper.

You weren’t sure what he was writing and you weren’t sure how to approach him after last night.

You decided to go with a kiss and, just after you said good morning and leaned in to kiss him, Tommy pulled away.

That was unexpected and you looked at him, full of questions.

‘Last night was a mistake Y/N for which I apologise. I should not have been temped’ Tommy said.

‘A mistake? Right’ you said as you walked over to the kitchen bench to boil the kettle. Small tears were running down your eyes and you tried hard to hide them from Tommy.

You had begun to care for him and you most clearly were developing feelings for him.

‘Y/N?’ Tommy said as he noticed you being upset.

‘Tommy, please just give me some space alright’ you said as you walked into the studio with your cup of tea.

You were embarrassed and you felt weak. Yet you wanted to be strong.

Were you too naïve, failing for a man like him?

[hazelnmae]

Lies Travel Faster Part Two: Chapter 5

Summary: Sophia Murphy’s past is coming for her. Can she outrun it?

Tags: Tommy Shelby x Original Female Character

Warnings: angst; smut; violence; language; rape/non-con; death

ALSO WARNING: This chapter, just as the previous one, includes the events of S5. So from this point forward, beware of S5 Spoilers.

Chapter 5 Read Chapter 4 here.

Despite getting only a few hours of sleep, Sophie arrived at Charlie’s yard right on time. It was so early the sun was barely up, the fog barely lifting. She was surprised to find Polly and Arthur there, with no sign of Tommy.

She stood next to Arthur by the fire, nudging him with her shoulder as she took her place there. Arthur slapped her back and smiled, ear to ear.

“It’s good to have you home, love,” Polly said with a smile.

“Yeah, it’s good to see you too, Pol. And congratulations. Exciting news.”

Polly just nodded in a way that made Sophie uneasy. Surely Polly would be over the moon to have a grandchild on the way, but she barely perked an eyebrow at the comment.

Tommy, as he so often did, stalked up to the group so quietly they hadn’t heard him approach. Sophie was startled to turn and find him standing on the other side of her, lighting a cigarette.

“You’re late,” she said instinctively, falling into a comfortable rapport without thinking.

“Right, well, we’re all here,” he said, no more concerned with her comment than if she’d made a frivolous observation about the weather. “Let’s discuss business.”

Tommy went on to explain that he wanted to hire her to corner and kill a man in Chinatown. Arthur explained that he was a “bad man,” which was clarified by Polly to mean that he was a pimp, dealing in young children.

“Fucking kids, Sophie,” Arthur added.

Sophie’s mouth went dry and her stomach tightened. It was sickening, to be sure, but she couldn’t make sense of why the Shelby family had become involved. Things had certainly changed since she’d been gone.

“So you’re in the business of improving the world now?” Sophie asked to no one specifically.

“It’s a particular opportunity,” Polly answered.

Sophie just looked to Tommy for further explanation, knowing he’d been the one to make the decision and would be the one to explain it.

“A particular opportunity for £50,000,” he said, answering her unasked question. “This pimp is blackmailing a senior member of the House of Lords--a very wealthy man.”

And then she understood. The family was scrambling after the crash--looking for other ways to procure easy money. They were returning their focus to less than honest means, having to let go of legitimate business for a time to build back up their reserves.

Fucking Michael, she thought.

Somehow, though, it felt oddly comforting to her. She’d fell in with the family when they were only beginning to move into legitimate money. To know they were rediscovering their roots felt natural. She thought perhaps she did have a place in this world still.

“I still don't understand. You have the muscle, why do you need me for this?” She asked.

Tommy let out a deep sigh. He wasn’t accustomed to having to justify his decisions. In the last two years, he only had to explain himself to Polly. To have Sophie back, needing explanation from him, questioning his authority, was going to prove more difficult than he remembered. But it was, at the same time, somehow exhilarating. He’d forgotten how it felt to face a challenge like her.

“We received intelligence from a senior police officer in Scotland Yard. They can clear the streets for us, they feel the same way about this pimp as we do, but they can’t protect us from his men. And his men know us," he said. "But they don’t know you--not by sight.”

“Plus you’re slippery. Proven that already,” Arthur added with a grin, pulling her into a side hug.

The three of them just looked at her now, awaiting an answer.

Tommy’s stare tore through her, as it always had. She felt the urge to refuse him. To tell him this wasn’t what she’d signed up for. But she knew if she did, she’d lose him once and for all.

But another part of her, a part deeper inside, pulled at her to accept the offer. To let the rage that had been building inside her do the work she knew she could do.

Sophie nodded.

And with that, Tommy tossed his cigarette on the ground and straightened his hat.

“Good,” he said. “Get it done. I’ll collect the payment and we’ll get you out of that fucking flat on Watery Lane.

__________________

Sophie took her time down the hallway toward Tommy’s office. She enjoyed being the only woman in a hallway full of powerful men. Men wondering who she was and why she was there. Women had only begun making their way into Parliament and continued to confuse their male counterparts with their fierce acumen, and Sophie could have easily been one of them. A single look at Sophie and these men knew she wasn’t to be trifled with.

And it felt good to no longer be trifled with.

The smile she’d been wearing drained from her face as she turned the corner into Tommy’s office. His door was open, but when he looked up to see her enter, he motioned for her to shut it as she entered.

She did as he wanted then crossed the room to sit in front of him.

Tommy hadn’t been expecting her but, as usual, didn’t let any surprise he may have experienced to show on his face.

“I hear you did well," he said, reaching into his drawer and removing a roll of bills. "You didn’t need to come all the way to London to collect your cut."

Sophie looked at the money. Then back at Tommy, before picking it up and placing it in her purse. She didn’t need to count it to know it’d be enough.

“I didn’t come to London to collect. I’m looking for a flat. Meeting Ada here soon. Thought I’d stop by to see your office,” she said, lighting a cigarette she’d taken from his desk without asking.

Tommy opened his mouth to speak, leaning forward on his elbows, when the phone rang and interrupted his effort.

“Let him in,” was all he said to the secretary who’d called.

Sophie noted how his demeanor changed in that moment. He’d started out the same overly confident, powerful, and commanding presence she knew him to be. But whoever was coming through those doors to meet him was a force that made him anxious. She could read it in the way he leaned back in his chair and tossed his glasses on the blotter. The familiar gesture as he pinched the bridge of his nose. The way he straightened his lapels and collected himself.

As the doors to his office opened, Sophie stood and moved out of the way. The man that entered the office had an incredible air about him. If Tommy Shelby was intimidating, this man was terrifying. He had a brashness about him. A pretension. A Machiavellian posture that frightened her to the core. She could tell, in that instant, that he was evil.

And he looked straight at her.

Tommy cleared his throat, trying to move the man’s attention from Sophie, but it was no use. She suddenly understood why he’d been so uneasy to welcome this man into his office.

“Mr. Mosley, this is my business associate. Sophia Murphy. Sophie, this is Sir Oswald Mosley.” Tommy gestured between the two of them, clearly unhappy to make the introduction, but knowing he’d had no choice.

Mosley reached out a hand and Sophie responded by giving him her own. His handshake was firm, almost threatening. But it wasn’t his touch that repulsed her. It was the look in his eye. The way he let his eyes trail up and down her body, without restraint. The way he licked his lips before he spoke.

“Business associate. And what is it you do?” Mosley asked in a suggestive tone.

Sophie was accustomed to men like this expecting her to be something she wasn’t. Mosley wasn’t the first crooked piece of shit to assume she was only valuable for what lay between her legs. But something about the way he said it put her on edge.

“Well, as of late, I'm a hired assassin,” she said batting her eyelashes and flashing him a sly smile, taking a note from Tommy’s book and letting the outside mask what she felt on the inside.

She’d caught him off guard and watched his Adam's apple bob up and down as he swallowed.

“I suppose you two have something important to discuss, so I’ll be off,” she added after a brief pause. She returned to Tommy’s desk to extinguish her cigarette.

“Why don’t you wait for me outside, darling,” Tommy said. “I won’t be long here and I can walk you out.”

She stopped in her tracks, floored by what he’d said.

Darling. Darling? Sophie wondered if she’d heard correctly or if she was losing her mind.

Tommy stepped around the desk and placed his hands on her arms, turning her to face him so that her back was to Mosley.

Then he looked deep into her eyes and kissed her.

It was a soft, slow kiss. But it was deep. And she felt it in the recesses of her stomach.

She’d thought about his lips, his tongue, his kiss, so many times over the last two years. Had imagined him pulling her in close, tilting her chin toward him, kissing her with want . She’d pictured it in her mind. She’d longed for it.

But she was shocked it’d actually happened.

And when he pulled away, she was immediately disappointed to see in his eyes that it had all been for show. That moment of pure ecstasy fell away from her like broken glass.

She hesitated, but eventually turned to leave the office--her legs a little unsteady beneath her--nodding at Mosley as she went.

_____________________

When he emerged from the office a few moments later, Mosley drank her in again. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Murphy. Perhaps we’ll meet again soon.”

Sophie forced a smile at him, physically shuttering as he walked away from her.

Tommy approached from behind her, placing her coat on her shoulders. She thanked him softly and the two walked down the hall together, down the stairs and toward the exit.

After they found themselves in a fairly quiet hallway, Sophie found the courage to say what was on her mind.

“I’m not sure you remember the first day we met,” she said without looking at him.

“I remember.”

“Then you remember me telling you I wouldn’t fuck anyone for you.”

“I don’t want you to fuck anyone,” Tommy said, as if it were obvious.

“So flirt with him, then? Perhaps tease him? Or am I to extract information from him?” She asked sarcastically.

Tommy stopped walking. It took a few steps before Sophie realized and turned to face him.

“I don't want you anywhere near him,” Tommy said now, the conviction on his face unlike any she’d ever seen.

“Then what was that for, Tommy? That show back there?” Sophie’s voice was growing uneasy--the anger rising so fast she couldn’t control it.

Tommy stood silent, pulling a long drag from his cigarette. His eyes darted around the hallway over her shoulder and refused to make direct contact with hers. Sophie understood what it was he wanted to say, but refused to vocalize.

“Okay, first of all, what makes you think for a second that Oswald Mosley wants me?”

But that question, too, went unanswered.

“Do you really think kissing me in front of him is going to stop anything? He doesn't strike me as the kind of man who gives up on what he wants.”

And it was that comment which cut Tommy to his core.

He didn’t think himself the type to give up either. But he had. He’d let Sophie go without a fight. He didn’t stop her from leaving. He didn’t go to America immediately to bring her back. He simply gave up the fight before it ever started.

“I could tell the way he looked at you that he wanted you,” was all he said, looking away again.

He was growing anxious again, like he had before Mosley had entered his office. Sophie, constantly conflicted, felt the urge to comfort him.

“I don't need protection, Tommy,” she whispered softly, stepping closer to him.

He tossed his spent cigarette on the floor, and pushed past her, continuing his way toward the exit. Sophie rolled her eyes and followed after him.

“You do from him,” was all he said in response.

__________________

Read Chapter 6

As always, thank you so much for reading! Comments and feedback ALWAYS appreciated!! XOXO

Tag list full of lovely folks:  @justanothershelby @evelynshelby @l0tsofpennies @sympathyfortheblinderdevil @actuallyazriel @huntersvibe @porcelainjokersmadness@julietswildchild @geeksareunique @brianaisasongbird @ilycosimo 

[daynamartinez22]

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 325

Click on the video above to watch Episode 325 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 325. The first Hump Day hangouts in this lovely month of February, it’s the third of February 2021. We got almost the whole crew here. Today, we’re gonna roll through do some introductions, check in with everybody. Got a couple quick announcements, and then we will get into your question. So if you’re watching live, and you got questions, go ahead and put them on there. If you’re not watching live, it’s too late. But you can always go to semantic mastery comm HD questions and ask your questions ahead of time we do. First come first serve. And so we just ask that you try to limit it to one question. If you’re live, you can ask more if there’s you know, everyone’s had a chance to get through their questions. But again, if you’re not able to join us live, we get it either you’re in a different time zone or you got something going on, just ask your question, you can always check out the replay. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. So you get updates on that and you will be good to go.

All right, so I’ll go counterclockwise today, Chris, how you doing today?

Doing good here. super happy to be here. As I said, I can’t believe first month is a world ready for this year. So yeah, like if you haven’t started to work on your dreams and goals. Like it’s time to do it now. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, this month went pretty pretty quick. Marco. How about you? How you doing today? I like the shirt by the way.

Yeah, I represent tropics, man. By the way, you know what yesterday was really in. In America, right?

It was.

It was Tuesday and all of America. It was Groundhog Day.

It really was Groundhog Day. Yesterday’s when we say that every week. But it really was yesterday. Punxsutawney Phil said that we’re gonna have six more weeks of winter. So now six, six more weeks of sun, at least, is about to say maybe 6600. I don’t know.

It’s endless. It’s endless. There it is. I can’t help it. As I said, gotta represent tropics. Warm weather is POFU man, it’s being where you want to be rather than when you have that where you have to be. And if you’re where you have to be right now.

It’s gonna sound redundant, but you don’t have to be where you have to be. You can break out of that rut is the POFU path.

Join us POFU Live, get catch the replays from the past powerful lives that we’ve done. Get into the right mindset. Then go chase after, as Chris said, not only your dream, but to find what your profile is and get after it. Because that’s what that’s going to give you everything that that you need in order to have the lifestyle that you want. So that’s my thought for today. Come get some What can I say?

Marco you gave me a good reminder. I just put that on the page for anyone. You can check out poofy live recordings just pop the link in there from 2020

Hernan, how are you doing today?

Looks good, man. Good. I just wanted to sign a petition to let the Latinos enter sooner to the Zoom Room, you know, that will be pretty cool. I’m banging out there at the door and it’s raining and it’s cold and everything. I’m good, man. I’m good. I’m really good. Excited to be here. So,

Bradley, how you doing today?

I’m good, man. Busy as hell. But you know, the alternative would be not being busy. So I’ll take it.

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Well, we got a couple quick announcements. Marco, I’m going to hand things over to you in a minute I want you to if you can update everyone on how the charity webinars are going and what people can do. If they’re not quite there yet. First of all wanted to say, first, thanks for watching, you know, we realized that there’s a lot of people who watch the replays and you know, we appreciate you guys watching if you can come live, it’s great. We love interacting with people. And like I said earlier, you can always go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and that’s where you can join us live or just go ask your questions ahead of time.

If you’re new to semantic mastery mgib heavy hitters club and you want to find out how to shield your site never worry about algorithm updates or maybe you just want to figure out what this SEO shield thing is that you keep hearing us talk about along with a lot of other things head over to the SEO shield right the word the SEO shield calm and that is free training you can get and you’ll find out about all about the SEO shield and a whole lot more.

All right beyond that you can get our step by step processes for getting results with SEO with the battle plan. Find out about that battleplan.semanticmastery.com. And for those of you who are either agency owners or maybe you’re a consultant, you’re kind of starting out you’re wondering how you can grow get more clients, scale your team things like that. I highly suggest you go over to 2xyouragency.com there is some fantastic training that Bradley Mosley put together. I know Hernan had some of that as well. But if you’re in that area where you know, you know you want to grow, and this is what you’re doing, then you definitely want to check out that training. And then if you’ve got an established business, whether it’s brick and mortar, whether it’s digital marketing online, then the mastermind is the place for you. And you can find out more about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. Last, but certainly not least, I mentioned MGYB at the beginning, but if you’re not familiar, it’s mg y v.co. That’s where you can get all the dumb few services stuff like syndication networks, V SEO shield that I was talking about link building press releases, and a whole lot more. So go and check that stuff out. So with that out of the way, Marco, I do want to come back to you can you give us just an update on the charity webinars? And in case somebody hasn’t seen the last few Hump Day Hangouts kind of what’s going on with that? And how can they get involved?

I posted the in the group chat, right, that chat app, that 1990s shout out.

Man is fantastic. We have Bradley on the very first one. And he showed how to manipulate entities through ads. People think ads, you just pay Google and that’s it. But if you use it in very specific ways, you can really hyper-target your people and really get your campaign working for you and working for your brand. And using that brand plus keyword Association. That’s, that’s just so important right now, you don’t necessarily that the geographical targeting, of course, takes place when you’re setting everything up. So it doesn’t your ad will need to include your geographical area, because you’ve already done your geographical targeting, according to their likes and dislikes, or their history, what they’ve, what they’ve been through right now. Google is now giving you people who are hyperfocus. And whatever it is that you’re offering, who have an affinity even for what you’re offering, maybe not directly related, but enough so that the person could be interested in whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s a fantastic way to relate your brand, to the keywords in the niche, especially the top keywords in the niche. Then we had Dixon Jones, for those of you who have been like under a rock for the past 20 something years, Dixon Jones is of majestic fame. I mean, he was the CEO, or the marketing director for Majestic SEO later to become majestic.com. Now he’s an inlinks in Lynx dotnet. And it’s one of you’re big into artificial intelligence. It’s one of the applications that we’re using in order to target the entities. Of course, we do entity based, worry less SEO. And what that means is simply we don’t worry about Google updates because we’re doing everything that Google wants at the presentation layer.

So imagine having the perfect present presentation card, where you’re coming in the door, and that card gets you in to talk to the people in that business. But it’s what you’re doing. That’s your presentation, that’s your website. If you do that correctly, Google is going to just roll out the red carpet for anyone coming to see your website. And they’re going to send more and more people. And if you’ve set everything up, right, these people will convert through ads through organic means. And that and that that conversion, I can’t tell people how much it means right now. Because Google is following everything until the end. And they’re seeing completion of that goal, that person trusting you enough to give you their information to give you their phone number to give you their credit card information, whatever it is, they’re trusting. And if you can establish a pattern where people are trusting you, you become a trusted authoritative source. In the niche, you’re giving people that finding the information that they’re interacting with your videos, I this is all part of building out your entity, they find you in social media, and they come to the website or they go to other social media, a lot of people do that they research the company, right? They’ll come to look at it on the web, they look at it through mass, we do so much. It took me longer than usual. Because I have this entity series planned out its ad. It’s Dixon Jones talking about content, and how entities apply in content and how you can manipulate that Jordan is going to be talking about branding and entities. We’re gonna have Brian Carroll come in and talk about entities in images, which is like an often-ignored part of SEO or something like that we just do as an aside, and you can get millions and millions of views into your images if you’re doing it correctly.

After that, we’ll close it all up and we’ll probably have like a think tank session we might have people come in special. I haven’t decided on the last one yet but it’s going to be all of our entities and all of that for the price of a donation.

Standing now for someone who hasn’t yet where can they donate it and what do they need to do? The information is on the page. You go to the CSV the webpage, the donation page, make a donation. I’m not asking you to know that right. Your heart will move you to donate, your heart will tell you to donate. Put your wallet is going to dictate how much. And so we’ve had people donate $1, we’ve had people donate a couple of $1,000. And everywhere in the middle has been fantastic. And so I’m not going to limit you. I mean, you do what you can, and what your heart moves you to do and what the wallet allows the information is on the page. If not, then you just write to Gmail, the Gmail address is also on the bait, and you can get direction from there.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Marco. With that said, Guys, I think we’re ready to jump into questions. Anything else?

All right, let’s do it.

Okay, standby. I’m trying to think I found something I was looking for an answer to one of the questions, and I was doing some research. Anyway, let me find the damn screen and I’ll grab it.

Should You Create One Root Page In Gsite That Links To The Money Site’s Services Or Should You Create Individual Service Pages?

All right. Tell me you guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct. Good to go. Yep. All right. So the first question is from looks like Hugo says, with our G sites, is it better to create inner pages for our services? Or just have one page with all of the services on there with links to the corresponding pages on the money site? Also, would it be overkill to make location pages on the G site? Or is the root page enough and then add internal links from there? Well, Hugo, we talked about theme mirroring. So, however, you have your primary site structured, which know should be with Silas structure, if you know if necessary, but that’s pretty much how you should be structuring your websites anyways.

Then you want a theme mirror that right? That’s what we call theme Mariano’s. The term Originally, I guess invented or whatever from network Empire. But it’s a perfect description of what it is that we’re doing. When we say theme mirroring if you don’t understand what that is, one of the things you could do is go check out the SEO shield calm, that’s the seoshield.com. And you go through that training, which will give you some insight as to what the mirroring is and how to do it with your G site. Also, there’s another resource that I can send you to that’s free also, which is semanticmastery.com/process, if you go to the website section on that because it’s basically a process doc that talks about entity based SEO and why we use all the components that we do for the SEO shield and what we teach at semantic mastery. And there’s a website section in that process training that talks about mirroring and how to structure silos on your website and ultimately mirror those onto your G site and into your drive stack. So the short answer is, you know, it’s better to mirror your site to mimic the structure of your primary website. So yes, it would be better to have separate pages for each one of your top-level services, as long as it’s, you know, a top-level service that would have its own silo or category on your money site if that makes sense. Mark, do you want to come on that? No, I totally agree. We’re, we talked theme mirroring so much.

But people get confused. Maybe they think Elementor and Divi, rather than the theme that we’re talking about, which is how your website is constructed how the content on your website is constructed how you’ve constructed the categories. That’s the theme that we’re talking about, because you’re going to take those, and you’re going to move them to the G site as extensions. The branded stack is usually the same for everyone. But what’s going to differ is when you order those extensions, according to how you set up your website, if you’re local. This is where some complexity comes in. Because you have to decide city page services, like how many cities are you going up? But what about states? Are you going to go after different states? How are you going to do this because you develop that on the website, how it is that you’re going to target that you have that plan? Please don’t build out this intricate Mind Map of how it is that you’re going to build the website, choose three categories. Leave it that way, and see where Google leads you through analytics search console and insights in the GMB Google will tell you. It’s really interesting if you use it correctly, people are being misled because they’re being told that analytics and search console and insights are not accurate. They’re not for the most part, but that’s because the information could be backed up a little bit. But it’s AI working in there. And it’s AI talking about the impressions and where are you getting impressions, how you’re getting impressions, the pages that are getting impressions, and how people are interacting with the pages that are getting impressed that there’s a lot of valuable information in there. And so that’s how you’re going to start building out than any other category. According to the information that you’re getting, you’re going to copy that copy into the D site extension, the GMB will be set up the same way your press release tasks will be built the same way. I’m not gonna say how I’m doing press releases. Exactly. Bradley has an excellent course. Right? Local PR Pro, follow that. And then behind that, it’s, of course, always link building, and embeds and link building into your embed.

But the setup from the beginning, both at the content and the structure level, the theme level is on the website, and also at the button level at the code level, your schema has to be tight, has to be correct. So you’re just sending the messaging in code to the bot and the messaging when the bot comes crawling your content because it’s going to look for entities also in the content. Again, watch this past Monday’s replay, to talk which talks totally about content, and entities and content.

Yeah, just to clarify, so theme mirroring, we’re talking about topical themes, guys. So when I’m talking about a WordPress theme, we’re talking about topical themes. That’s so when your theme marrying, you’re mirroring the topical structure of your site, your main site onto your other assets, your other branded assets where possible so that you know and again, we can do that with the drive the G site drive stack, you can do with press releases, GMB posts, and we try to mirror that same topical theme structure across all of those assets. Because it kind of creates that mirror and mirror that picture and picture like mirror image type thing that Marco talks about with iframe stacking. And again, I just wanted to point out where that is, if you go to that URL, I shared semantic mastery comm slash process, it’s free guys. This is a process street process template. And if you go into the website tab here, you can scroll through and I talk about simple silos, complex silos, physical versus virtual silos. Then I also talk about using tags, for those of you doing local, which is what pretty much all I do. I use tags silos to create location-based silos instead of typical categories. structure. It works really, really well it also eliminates some of the complexities or the conflicts that occur if you try to use a traditional category, silo structure on a WordPress site where you’re sharing the same location silos across multiple topical categories, or vice versa, trying to share topical categories across location silos, there, it creates URL conflicts and conflicts if you try to use all just the traditional category structure. So I talked about that, and why I use tags, and how I do it, at least on a conceptual level, in this process, street doc here. Okay. So again, I would recommend you highly, highly recommend that you go through this. And you can learn about okay.

Would It Be Considered Overkill To Create Individual Location Pages In Gsite?

It’s a good question, though. So the next part of that was also would it be overkill to make location pages on the G site too? Or is the root page enough? And then add internal links with the same answer, right? It’s the same answer.

If you have location pages on your money site, and yes, you’re going to want to also mirror those pages on to your G site. Now.

I can’t get into this here, because this would be more advanced. But if you’re using category structure for topical silos, which is the way I do it, so like, for Sir, I deal only with me, with contractors. So we talked about when I say topical silos and meaning the products or services that a contractor would sell, in my case, it services, right? So each top service or primary service that they sell goes create, you know, you create your own category on a WordPress site for it. So that would be the topical things are the topical silos I should say, but the location-based silos, I do that using tags. So when you get to a G site, obviously, you can’t do it that way. But with G sites, you can get away with a lot of other things.

You have to go and you have to join a mastermind or heavy hitter club in order for us to get into the getting into that. But the short answer would be for location pages if you have them on your website, your primary site, and you’re going to want to mirror those on the G site as well. Okay. So hopefully that some of that training will shed some light on that for you.

Do You Use The Traffic You Get From YT Ads To Local Business?

Alright, so the next question is when you recommend sending traffic via YouTube ads, do you use these for local businesses also? Yes, absolutely. I mean, again, that’s pretty much all I do. I’m working on a national project now. But for the last several years, all I’ve done is local and I love YouTube ads for local traffic well, and display ads, too. But YouTube ads are working really, really well right now if you know how to, you know how to do it, and I just talked about exactly how to do it on Marco’s charity webinar. Exactly. I mean, it’s a, it’s a course, I’m gonna, I’m gonna cut that out and create my own ads course out of it, I’m gonna, I’ll sell it for 997. So it’s less than $1,000. What a bargain.

Do you do a video ad or as a text ad? Okay. I mean, if you’re doing YouTube ads, it’s going to be a video ad. So I’m not sure what you mean by is a text ad. Okay. Now, you can do, by the way, you can do text ads on YouTube through the Google Display Network, but they suck. Don’t use text ads on YouTube through the Display Network, because what you end up getting and trust me ask me how I know if you if so what if I’m setting up a Google Display Network ad and I’m using responsive text ads to be run on the display network? Which I do. I always go into exclusions and exclude youtube.com. Right. So I make that an excluded site so that none of my tech my responsive text ads will show on youtube.com. And the reason why is you will see you will get a ton of clicks that are probably from kids that are on their parents iPad or iPhone or mobile phone or whatever tablet or whatever that is on YouTube watching like nursery rhyme videos and things. You know, that kind of stuff like children’s videos. And because of the way that the text ads display on YouTube, they get clicked on really easily, and you will burn through the budget with non-relevant clicks incredibly quickly. So don’t do it. So when I’m talking about advertising on YouTube, I’m talking about video ads. Does that make sense?

  And yeah, that’s really, really good. There’s, it works. If you get it’s all about audience targeting guys or proper targeting. It doesn’t have to be audiences, I found audience targeting to be the best. When you combine relevant audience targeting with geographic targeting, you can get in and you have to do testing. Again, I covered all of this and the markers charity webinar last week. But you have to do testing to identify which audiences are the best Google will tell you certain audiences or give you access to pre certain predefined audiences. But you still need to test because Google’s not perfect. And sometimes their audiences Aren’t you know, by testing different audiences, you’ll find, like, let’s say you test six different audiences, you might find two that are working incredibly well and the other four are not working so well. So you know, to stop using those other four and redirect all of your efforts into the two that are producing. So again, I would encourage you to go contribute to Marco’s charity, and then you can get access to the replay, where you’ll get a lot more information about that. Okay.

It’s a good question.

How Do You Bulk Update The EXIF Data Of Photos?

All right. The next one is how do I batch change EXIF data for photos? What is the best tool for that? Okay, I’ve always used I’m going to, I’m going to tell you three things. Number one, I’ve always used geo center dot d, which is free. It’s desktop software. It’s a geo center. I think it’s dot d.

Just Yeah, that’s it. You can download this as desktop software. And you can, you can essentially open up a folder full of images. And then you can batch edit the EXIF data for all the images in that folder. That’s what I’ve always used. I’ve used it for years and years and years is this it’s free to download. In fact, that’s what sitting right there is geo center on the top of my computer up there or my desktop, I should say. But now

I’m using local Viking because I’m using local Viking for GMB, post-management, and just kind of managing multiple GM bees I’m testing with it. I just started testing within about maybe two or three weeks ago. And they have a really cool EXIF data editor within Local Viking which works great because you can create EXIF data templates. And so whenever you upload an image, you can just select one of the templates and it will automatically fill in all of the data based upon the templates that you created. So that works really really well but an alternative that if you don’t need a GMB management tool, and I have not used this one but mass optimizer Pro, I know a lot of our members Semantic Mastery use this and swear by it. And this is a great tool because it’s got it does image optimizing video optimizing. And there’s all kinds of really cool add ons and things like that mass optimizer has and I know the developer behind this, you know is good. He saw that I think his name’s Lloyd Farrell or something like that. But I know that he’s really really solid. We’ve got a lot of people that use this in our group. So I would also recommend this one even though I can’t speak for it personally, I have not used it. I know it’s a good tool.

But I want to add to that yeah, that it’s a great question is not this coming Monday because that’s the branding bridge Jordan Fowler talking about your brand and entities and how you should bridge that gap. But the following one with Brian Caddo is all about manipulating images. And if you want to know what’s best to use and how to use it, Brian’s gonna come on and give you guys a great presentation on just that manipulating images. All it takes us is a donation, follow the information on the page, follow the instructions, send me or sorry, my personal assistant, send her the proof of the webinar or she’ll be the one who answers and since you all have information so you can access not only that one but all the previous charity webinar replays.

What Are Your Thoughts On Bot Traffic And How Should You Deal With It?

All right, the next question is from Eddie says my site is getting lots of quality traffic since doing link building to my SEO shield, a 45% spike so far. That’s should be a good testimonial. Okay, so my site is getting lots of quality traffic since doing link building to my SEO showed a 45% spike so far. But now I’m also seeing a spike in bot traffic. Yeah,  there’s no way around that. I’m wondering if anyone ever sees this, wondering if it matters wondering if you guys might be able to offer an explanation and or any thoughts on bot traffic like this? What to be wary of etc? Thanks. Yeah, well, it just goes to show you that the link building is working, because it’s causing a whole bunch of other bots to follow links to come to find your site. And so I mean, that’s just proof in the pudding that it is working. There’s not really anything that you can do about it. You can filter that out from like Analytics reports by setting up filters. But I don’t know that you can prevent that. Marco, what do you say?

Well, yeah, you can actually, this is what I’m currently using and what the dev developer is actively currently using. I dropped it at the bottom of the chat, we use GitHub, and they have an up to date list of bad bots.

So all you have to do is copy and paste that into your .htaccess file that’s constantly updated for any time they find a bad bot, it goes on the list goes on. And so you see, there’s plenty of bad bots, those you need to block that goes on the ht access. If you don’t want that particular bot on your website, block it ht access. As a matter of fact, use a black hole, we use a black hole so that anybody not following the rules that we’ve set for it goes in a black hole and never gets out.

That means that they’re in a trap. And now what you can do is bend that buck like forever. But it’s just that a black hole plugin in WordPress is fantastic for getting rid of bots that do not follow your robots.txt rules. There’s a black hole plugin. It’s a black hole plugin.

I don’t know if it’s called Black Hole. But yes, there is we use it. I’m afraid to start searching the black hole plugin on a live webinar. As

I say search it. I’m not sure that you know not safe for work type stuff. No, but it’ll take you to wordpress.org.

So what is it called again? Black Hole, white hole? Is it all one word or one? Let me try that.

We don’t have that many questions anyway. No, I’m just curious. I’d like to look into that. I don’t I mean, I

yeah, I forgot about spider spanker. And those types of bot blocker plugins and things like that, but you’d like to just use the ht access, but the black hole one word bad bots. It’s the wordplay here. I’ll give you the URL in slack. If you can’t find it there. Black Hole for bad bots. That’s it. A fantastic plugin that in conjunction with your ht access, uses that htaccess with that list from GitHub. It’s constantly updated. And that’s the great thing about it yet. It does require a little bit of manual work, but it’s well worth it because it’ll save you a headache when those bad bots come crawling and start doing nasty stuff on your website. Very cool. I learned something new today. I’m gonna check it out, man.

That’s pretty cool. I like that. Thank you. So there you go. That was a great answer.

All right, moving on. Next one.

If I can find it. Okay.

When you talk about mirroring, okay. Chrissa says when you talk about mirroring your money site content on your G site, do you copy-paste the content or iframing the content would either work

But either way works the same, I just iframe. So that’s the thing, okay.

When I have a drive stack built by MGYB, you know, they create all the files and folders and all this stuff and they find content that’s relevant. And they create, they add content to the pages that they create, as well as the embeds that they do with the files and folders.

Once I get that back, I don’t add any additional content, I add pages like crazy, right, and then I add the iframes. But typically, my pages consist of nothing other than iframes that are relevant. So in other words, when I’m theme mirroring, right, so when I’m mirroring the topical theme and creating pages that correspond with pages on the money site, then I embed those money site pages into the G site, as well as, and I’ve talked about this before. But like, for example, if I’ve got a particular keyword that I’m trying to push, and I need to add sub-pages to the money page on the G site, where then like, because remember on with what we teach, we talked about using the blog, and the syndication network, to add depth to a silo. So you publish supporting articles placed within the correct silo, with internal linking done properly up to the money page in that silo, right. And those syndicate out across the syndication network, there’s that money site, or excuse me, the money page link, right, the internal link to the money page that you’re trying to rank that goes out across the syndication network profiles. So now you’ve got those published posts on the syndication network, so you can extract those URLs and then embed those into the money, the G site pages, right, so that you’re adding additional relevancy, as well as additional prop properties, branded properties, entity, you know, tier-one entity properties into the G site. So you’re creating all of that relevancy. It’s like a big, you know, black hole never-ending, you know, mirror and mirror type image of, of all this relevancy is specific to a particular keyword or keyword theme. Right. So I don’t add any additional content, the only thing that I would add other than usually other than the iframes, from the relevant content for that theme, mirrored pages, is I will create an internal linking structure within the G site. So that I’m linking, you know, daisy-chaining posts together, and linking up to the proper. So it’s the same sort of internal linking that I do on the money site I do on the G site. So that’s the only additional text that I add, I add a page header iframes and then links internal links to, you know, to accomplish the internal linking within the G site that I’m trying to do other than that I don’t have any other text, not that you can’t, I just don’t because the text is already on the pages that I’m I framing into the G site page, I just use the G site is basically a container, if that makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that? It’s perfectly fine to use your own content, copy-paste away. JOHN Mueller finally had to come out and say there’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

It was a couple of days ago or yesterday, I can’t remember when he said it. We’ve been saying it for years. No such thing as a duplicate content penalty, use your content, you are not going to complain to yourself about your own content. The only time that you can get into problems with using content multiple times is if you’re using somebody else’s content. And they come with a DMCA and tell you to take it down or they’re going to take you to court if you use Getty Images start you if you use somebody else’s YouTube videos, it depends, right? As far as your content is concerned, copy and paste away or just hire us to do the extensions for the extension for you. We know what we’re doing. We’re going to do it right. And yes, we are going to use your content when we create that extension.

Yeah, and we will use an iframe of the page and we’ll live in whatever else we can on that extension page.

Does Google Lower Your Rankings In Serps If You Check Your Position In Incognito Window?

Okay, so BB is up with several questions. I would expect anything else? He says, Hey, guys, does Google lower your rankings in the SERPs if you check your position for a keyword in your own device or an evening in or in an incognito window? Where does Google hide your page in the SERPs when you make a search from your own device? Okay, a couple of things. I don’t know if Google? I mean, I can’t imagine that they do. I know that. I have to tell clients often to stop searching for keywords when done running when I’m managing Google ads for them because it creates impressions without a click-through which lowers your click-through rate which lowers your ad rank, right, which your overall quality score. So but as far as SEO, I don’t know, maybe Marco can answer that. Well, as far as SEO, the same thing happens impressions increase, but there aren’t any click-throughs. And then they are if there are any click-throughs there won’t be the final goal that goes to the Google is looking for because it’s you looking through your own website, and that doesn’t carry the same value. It never does. I mean, unless you’re, but it takes so much intricate work to go into your own stuff. And to set a goal and to complete the goal to pay yourself. I mean, you’d have to get a whole different credit card and use it from a different IP that there’s just so much involved in that you’re better off just getting a Craigslist gig and paste that pay some college students 25 bucks each to do that. Going back to what you said, it doesn’t make sense. Why would you? Why would you if you can just go into the historical data and analytics, search console, and GMB insights and get any information that you need? Other than you know, if you do it once in a while just to check one keyword that you really keen on ranking.

But I mean, I wouldn’t want Why. Why would we be you’re always asking questions of these theoretical questions. When Google would lower your rankings and we can’t know whether Google would lower your rankings, I can’t tell you that the impressions will increase. The CTR click-through rate will decrease. And then the effect of that could mean lower rankings, but not because you went in search, but the effect that that search had on your overall numbers.

Yeah, so. And it’s funny because maybe does ask a lot of these theoretical questions all the time that it’s kind of fun, actually. Anyways. So the other thing was, he was asking, you know when you make a search from your own device, does Google hide your own website from the SERP? Well, it can if you don’t have your if you go to google.com, and the bottom right corner, you’ll see where it says search or settings, if you click that, expands a menu, click on Search settings, and make sure that you have do not use private results selected, because if you have used private results, then what happens is yes, Google will start to customize search results based upon your behavior from previous searches for the same query. Does that make sense? So in other words, if you’re if you are using if you have private results turned on, which I think is by default, I think, but it’s by default that it’s turned on. Now, if you’re in an incognito window, it shouldn’t matter. Because it should always be private results. That’s kind of the whole point of an incognito window. But if you’re searching from a logged-in account, and it’s got us private results turned on, which again, I think is the default setting. Then if you are searching a query multiple times, and you’re scrolling through results, and you’re clicking on other results, but not clicking on the result, you know, your project or your website, then Google learns that that is not that particular result isn’t relevant to you, hence, you never, which is you know, why you never click on it. Google determines that that’s not relevant to you. So it will start to, you know, not show that result to you, because you’re scrolling and clicking on other results, but never on that one if that makes sense. So yes, I’ve seen that happen, where if you’ve got private, I’ve had clients contact me and say, I’m doing searches for, you know, this keyword, and I’m not seeing my website ranked anywhere. And I say, Are you searching logged in? It’s because Google is showing it’s because you probably searched that multiple times and didn’t click through. And because of that Google is hiding it from you. Because it’s determined, it’s not it’s a non-relevant result for you. If you go into an incognito window, or Firefox, or something else, that you’re not logged into, do that search. And then I’ve had the clients contact me back and say, Oh, I see it now. Thank you. So it’s just a matter of, you know, again, I don’t know that that’s your what you’re talking about, BB.

But I know that, again, I’ve had clients reach out to me say, I’m not seeing my own website for this search when especially after I send them a monthly report. That’s typically when I will get that kind of a question from a client is they’ll be like, well, I’m seeing the report saying that we’re ranked for this, this and this, and I’m not seeing it when I do a search. And then I say, Where are you logged in? Do you have it? You know, if you do an incognito window, you’ll probably see it and then, you know, generally, they see it. So again, I would check that again, that’s just a search google.com check the bottom right corner for settings, click on Search Settings and turn that off. But if you’re using an incognito window, you shouldn’t see it anyways.

anything else you want to add to that?

No. Okay.

Have You Tried And Succeeded In Making Money With Affiliate Offers Using Gsite And RYS Only?

Number one, same question as number one, but multiple search requests on the same device. Same answer, same answer, same answer. Have you ever tried and succeeded in making money with G site RYS with affiliate offers without backlinks, backlinks, PRs, and embeds? Oh, we’ve made money from our watch our stuff. I mean, I used to do affiliate stuff. We did a lot of launch jacking for about a year and a half, and I had a VA is that would build drive stacks around products that were being launched. And we did quite well off that. But the reason why and I actually just had a couple of new mastermind members join in, I had a call with them, as we always do, we have onboarding calls with new members. And they’re in the affiliate marketing space. And they were doing a lot of launch jacking too. And so we had a discussion about that. And part of the reason I got away from that is that it’s like a never-ending hamster wheel, right? You, you constantly have to be building for new product launches, and they have a very short lifespan that they typically produce affiliate revenue, and it’s usually just during the launch period. And, and so it’s just, you know, it’s like, it’s reworked, it’s a lot of rework a lot of constantly building. And I like building assets that produce long term. But yes, you can absolutely, literally do it now, without, again, when it comes to like a launch jack, because there’s not, at least initially, there’s not a whole lot of competing SEO, a lot of people competing in the SEO space for those that you know, product name, then g stacks, you know, g sites and drive stacks can work really well. But if you want to get the best results from them, then link building is obviously going to, it’s going to help least that’s been my experience. So what do you think link building? I know it’s a must now it’s a mosquito, you’re just not going to build up the activity, relevance, trust, and authority that you need to rank it at the time that you need to rank you’re going to have to be building it up over time. Remember, Jason Quinlan, when he was doing the shiny object reviews, how he used to just jacked everything. But that’s because he started out and he built on that shiny object reviews website, where it became like one of the authoritative websites in that niche in the launch jacking niche, because he not only did our stuff, he not only used to jack our stuff but everybody else’s stuff. He’d be right there. Ranking top three, yeah, he would, he would launch jack our own launches and beat us out. Yeah. Which is fantastic, because he’s just making us money. But what I’m saying is, you have to build up to that like we used to be able to rank an empty folder, we show that live, right? Remember that? It within less than a minute, we ranked an empty folder, those days are gone. The algorithm works differently. So we have to apply different methods. This isn’t a static or monolithic niche, or the market that we’re in the SEO space is very fluid. Because it’s there’s AI in it, the algorithms are constantly getting information. And so we need to be able to adapt to how it’s working out our way is what we’ve done is it has become an enter integral part of building out the entity and giving the entity the trust and authority that it needs so that it can start ranking. But without the linking. And without the iframe embeds. And without press releases, especially with a launch tag, you set up that personally, like just before the launch, and like right during the launch, so that you get in front of everybody. Once you have the trust and authority, you’re going to see how it becomes progressively easier to rank, for subsequent launches. That’s how Jason Quinlan used to do it. And I’m sure it’s alive and well right now. It’s just not something that we do, because there’s lots more money elsewhere. Yeah, and that’s, that’s kind of, in that discussion I had last week with our new mastermind members, we were talking about that I said, you know, if you want to, if you want to do affiliate marketing and launch jacking, then I recommend see where we made a mistake. My team that was, you know, it was to VA is that we’re doing it full time for many, many months, at least.

Anyway, my mistake was we were creating, we were just building SEO assets, targeting the product name alone, that’s it. So they were standalone or orphaned assets, there was net, we never built authority to them. And what I said was, last weekend, I was talking to the new mastermind members was like, if you’re gonna if you want to do launch jacking, then I recommend you build a brand, exactly what Marco was just talking about. Because over time, that brand will crew authority and become an entity and a trust, you know, become well it will become powerful to where at some point, you’ll get to a point where you can, you know, create a subfolder right, so basically a silo for a new product that your launch jacking, and it will rank because of all of the benefits that it’s getting from all of the authority built to that brand itself, the branded drive stack and G site. So my point is if you want to do launch jacking you know then. Like drive stacks can be incredibly powerful once you build power to them, so that when you add additional expansions, right additional, basically silos or categories, product services, whatever you want to do they know they’ll benefit instantly from the power already accrued if that makes sense. So I don’t know that again, I don’t think I haven’t done this in a long time. But I don’t think creating a G site and drive stat for a product without any backlinks or anything would do much of anything right now. I don’t. It’s not like they were five years ago. Right? You have to power them up. But I mean, the amount of power that you can push into them is incredible, which is what we’ve been proving for years now.

Any other comments you want to add to that?

No. Okay.

What Link Should You Use To Point To Preceding Posts In A Current GMB Post?

Aaron’s up he says, a question about GMB posts. Some automated services like local Viking include previous posts linked to the post immediately preceding the current post. Is this okay, or are you recommending specific links to proceeding posts?

Yeah, no, that’s fine. I’m going to show you how I’ve taught my team to do it manually. And I’ll show you why in just a moment. Explain why. But no, that’s fine. That that that works. I prefer to do it manually because we have a lot more control over it. Just some of the stuff Marco’s teaching I can’t get into specifically what it is, but it’s some of the stuff Marco is teaching what you can do with GMB is crazy.

But here’s what I was getting at. Like here, I just went to Semantic Mastery his GMB site, guys, the URLs that come from the posts URLs themselves, they’ll take you to like the SERP version of the URL, right, which is like a really, really long, ugly URL. And I know you can use the previous posts in those posting apps, and that’s fine, you can do that. Okay, it’s definitely easier, it does provide some benefit if you’re siloing your posts correctly.

But what I prefer to do is my VA is go in and she manually creates the silos with GMB posts. And if she’s let’s say that these two posts were going to be siloed together, then what she’ll do is when she goes into the post, publish this post, which would link to this post, she’s going to link to this URL here. That one right there, because that’s like an inner page on the GMB website, as opposed to just the post URL. And that’s the way that we do it. Again, I don’t know if Marco wants to come up, you know what Marco wants to say about this. But the way that we do it is manually now and by actually extracting the previous post URL, like the inner page URL, basically. And that’s the way that we do it. What do you say, Marco? That’s as far as that’s gonna go because if they want more information on how to do this, it’s local GMB Pro, and then the heavy hitter club. And then you can just manipulate the crap out of GM B’s to the point where Google does whatever you want Google to do.

There you go.

So yeah, I mean, again, you can use the previous post function. We did that for a long time, and you can absolutely get a benefit from it. But you can get more benefit by using the inner page URL from the GMB website. And so it’s in my opinion, it’s worth the extra effort to do that manually.

If you know what you’re doing, you can push a lot of power that way. So.

Okay, if I’m setting this up manually, which link do I use the link to? Yeah, I just showed you. Okay, so that’s good.

Wayne is making another comment as usual.

Let’s see, where are we at? Aaron another GMB post question. Did I miss something? No, I’m calling Wayne a spammer. Oh,

yeah, it’s funny cuz sometimes Wayne will be on a mastermind webinar and he’ll make a comment. And I’ll just assume it’s a smartass comment when he was being 100% genuine or sincere. And then I realized later that he was actually being sincere, but it’s hard to tell when the boy that cries wolf all the time. It’s hard to tell who’s been in series or not.

Do You Recommend Having One Or More Links Pointing To A Money Site From Your GMB Page?

Anyway, Aaron says another GMB post question. Do you recommend having just one link to a money site per page? Or should the post have as many links as possible to the money site page and other assets? This is a heavy hitter question. I understand. Thanks.

We’ll just remember this, you can put links in the text part of you know, the Text body of the post, but those are all nofollow links, which doesn’t mean that they can’t help. But the only place that there’s a do-follow link is the button URL. Right. So the link that you add to the CTA button, that’s the do follow so it’s only one dofollow link per post, no matter how many links you put in the next part of the post. And here’s the other thing I would recommend. I’ve noticed with GMB posts lately if we include NAP data. So name address phone number, then Google will often reject those posts. And I’m not sure why they do that. But if I put if I had if we try to publish a post that has the name, address, and phone number in there

And it rejects it. If I just pull the phone number off, for example, a lot of the times it will I’d repost the same exact post and do nothing else, but pull the phone number out of the post itself, it will accept it. And I don’t know why that is. I’m just assuming that Google wants people to interact with the GMB posts instead of calling. I don’t know, I don’t know what the reason for that is. But I’ve noticed that a lot lately, we’ve had a lot of rejected posts because a lot of the post templates that I was using would automatically include the NA p was part of the call to action. But we’ve had to go back and kind of edit a lot of those templates to remove that because we were getting a lot of rejected posts, and now they’re not being rejected. So why I told you that is because I would be, I would not recommend putting a whole bunch of text links in the text body of the post, because it looks spammy, right? And you only get 1500 characters in a GMB post anyway, so why would you want to fill that up with a bunch of URLs? If they’re all nofollow links, that’s my opinion, you get one powerful link from the button. So what I like to do is a text link in the text body to the previous post to silo posts. And if I’m siloing posts and trying to push from the button URL power to something specific, but most of the time, I’m using the button URL to link to the previous post, if that makes sense. And that’s about as far as I can go with that. Marco, what do you want to say about it? No, all of this with how many get into why? And the Why is only shared and heavy hitter sometimes in the semantic mastery mastermind. It’s in the paid groups, I’m not going to get into it here. There are people paying a lot of money for that information. So it’s not gonna happen.

Yeah. So I mean, as I said, I use the button, the button URL you want to think about, that’s your most powerful link within the GMB posts. So use that strategically, right, but you can link from within the GMB posts to other assets. And typically, I’ll just link to another, you know, tier-one entity asset basically, within the text part of the posts. And that’s good for navigation for the user. But for SEO, the button link is the one that you want to focus on.

Okay.

Brian says keep it simple, stupid. You’re damn right.

How Would You Rank In All US States With Semantic Mastery’s Stack Targeting?

Next question, we have a stack targeting only one state. What if we want to rank in all states of us? Wasn’t you were actually answering this question on Facebook, weren’t you Marco?

I believe I was. Yeah. sworn I saw this thread also on Facebook.

Okay, let me finish the question. We have a stack targeting only one state. Whatever you want to rank in all states of the USA, please explain deeply. Yeah, no, I’m not in Humpty. But yeah.

So yeah, I mean, it’s funny cuz mark.

Wayne was actually asking about this in the mastermind, too. But, you know, this is what I would recommend. And this is, you know, again, it’s going to be very high level. But if at MGYB, right, that’s where you can order the drive stack expansions, right? That’s how I would do it, I would take whatever, I would create a separate drive stack expansion, or drive expansion, whatever you want to call it, for every state. That’s how I would do it. So I know that’s a big undertaking. But if you’re asking how I would do it, I would have a separate expansion built into my branded stack for each state. And then you could, if your theme earring on like a complex silo structure within each state drive stack expansion, you could break it down even further into counties or regions, or, you know, regions or counties, and all the way down, ultimately, to a city level. So I mean, it can get huge and massive, but that’s the way I would do it if I was going to do it.

It’s a mess. Paintsville, right, yes. But it has to be done manually. Because the new g sites don’t accept scripts. Well, at least not yet. We’re constantly looking to see if scripting will ever be opened again into the cset. We have our own way, we have our own way of making it work, which we’re not going to give away because it costs a lot of money for us to develop that.

But having said that you would build. So this is why it pays off to have a brand. Because if you have one stack that’s targeting one state, and it’s not Brandon, that you’re already like geo limited.

If you put that stack into a branded stack, now you have the first state in that branded stack, you have the first extension, and all you would have to do is copy whatever you did in that stack into all of the subsequent stacks for every subsequent state, and you would develop a page for each of the state stacks.

You want to go even deeper. In each state stack, you could then develop a city-specific dry stack so that then you could break down the state into the major cities in that state. And then I guarantee you that by the time you start building out those city pages, in each of those states, you are going to be ranking just like when you pop that folder in there, whether you get any traffic Now, here’s the problem. By doing that, you’re obviously going after something that’s geo-targeted, where a three-pack will probably be dominating most of the traffic. So maybe when you expand in all 50 states, you’ll get enough traffic, where it won’t matter that you’re targeting something that’s mostly local, you’ll get you’ll generate enough traffic organically through that, but by ranking, maybe top five organically, but if it’s dominated by that map pack and the ads and everything else, that you’re running into it, you’re going to spend a whole lot of time, maybe a whole lot of money, and maybe not see a return for the massive investment that you have to make, whether it’s money, and whether or whether it’s sweat equity.

Yeah, and you know, what’s interesting is, and it just something you said triggered this for me, Marco. But you know, here’s just an example. I’m doing a lot of organic stuff. Right now, I’m working on a national project right now, which I’ll be sharing in the mastermind. when it’s appropriate. It’s not yet. But so I’m going to be doing something similar to what we just described. But what Marco was talking about, you know, with the maps pack in the ads, and everything, it’s crazy. But what I mean, what I’m seeing now, I mean, not that this is new, but it just it seems like organics getting pushed further and further, in this case, it’s not popping, but in a lot of the times, you’ll see the carousel ads, like the Google guarantee ads at the top, then paid ads, then the map. And you literally got to scroll away below the fold to even get to the first organic listing. It’s crazy. And why is that? Because Google’s pushing more and more paid? Even a lot of you see that’s the paid position in the maps pack. And then like I said, the carousel, it’s just it keeps pushing the organic rankings further and further down. So it’s crazy.

What Is The Alternative Way Of Doing Scripts For Stacks?

Anyway, ah, scripts for stacks are no longer working. What is the alternative way of doing that? We don’t have one yet. Is that right?

I mean, we do. That’s how we create dissects and G sites. Now, the extensions, we have our own, we’re not going to give that away.

Okay, there you go.

Can We Copy Images And Content From Google And Directly Put Into The Stack?

Can we copy images and content from Google and directly put them into our stack without any modification? I wouldn’t recommend that. Personally, I don’t, I’ve had from copying images in the past years ago, you know, I’ve gotten hit with extortion letters, where I had to pay so that I didn’t they didn’t sue me for copyright infringement.

So I’ve had to do that. And I’ve learned a long time ago, I don’t just copy images ever. I go by stock photos if I need to, or, as we’ve talked about many times before, YouTube is great for getting images, guys, because you just go find a video that’s relevant. Just you know, set it on an HD setting.

Pause the video at a frame that you want to take a screenshot of. And that becomes a photo that works great. And I’ve you know, I do I use a lot of YouTube photos, like photos that I take from YouTube videos for stuff. But I don’t like to use copied images ever, ever.

Period. anybody’s want to comment on that. So imagine that 30 frames per second? How many images you could get out of a five-minute video? Yeah, yeah, some will be blurry or whatever. But imagine how many you can get up out of a video. People are you’re doing your big favor by creating YouTube video content that you can then turn into images. Yeah, and here’s a trick for that. If you go search your keyword on YouTube, then use the filters for the results. Once the results come up, use the filters and switch it to HD only anyone the age, so that will remove all the videos that you know don’t have HD but at least I think 720p.

And I always switch it to like 1080 P or whatever if available and then use what do they call it the premiere mode or whatever where theater mode or whatever where it expands and makes the video bigger. Once you make it bigger, take your screenshot. And then when you shrink the font because if it’s blurry, and once you shrink it down, it becomes less blurry, right? When you make it more to a usable size that you’re going to use in a blog post or a GMB post or something like that. When you make the screen smaller becomes sharper. Right, that makes sense. So that’s that’s just the way I do it. It works really, really well.

I never have a shortage of images is what I’m saying.

I’ve heard that we cannot put money site link into our stack anymore. Is that true? I don’t know where you heard that. Yeah.

I don’t know.

Any other questions about RYS Academy? You’re welcome to ask it in the group.

We have a Facebook group of people who have paid for the training. Yeah.

That’s funny. Look at that username.

Are you gonna say it, homosexual?

Money is cool. I got no problem with that.

Will You Release Version 2 Of Local GMB And PR Pro?

I barely solved capture. What’s up, guys? All right, Robert says I’ve already subscribed and watched local GMB and PR Pro. Well, you have version two of these tutorials, or has Google made minimum updates to GMB. I mean, there are guys, there’s no reason to redo stuff. If you know, the foundation hasn’t like, the principle hasn’t changed. The GMB dashboard really hasn’t even changed. There might be some additional services and things like that, or you know, things that you can edit within GMB. But what we teach on how to manipulate Google My Business that hasn’t changed? Not a bit. So, you know, if like, the dashboard was to change significantly, or there were some significant new things that needed to be addressed. And yeah, of course, then we just update what’s already there. Because again, the foundation part, the foundational part of the training hasn’t changed. The fundamentals haven’t changed. It’s what I’m saying.

Okay.

Can You Replicate OneDrive?

What about OneDrive? Don’t think you can replicate there as well? Yeah. I mean, as Marco always says, Why? If we can do everything that we want to do by manipulating Google Google’s own properties, why bother? I know that several people over the last few weeks have talked about starting to experiment with OneDrive, by all means, do it. Yeah. Yeah. That is No.

Does Google redirect with a steep pass with step pass with Oh, does Google redirect with step pass real PageRank? To dofollow link isn’t it?

Depends on the redirect.

He’s talking about what the redirect page in between? That’s fine. Yeah.

About 50% of it gets passed, right? Yes, somewhere, somewhere. somewhere? Less than 100. Yeah. Already greater than 85. But they’re dirt. There are two links on there. Just probably around 50, that’s passed, maybe left is Google is MGYB offering Google account verification or is that no longer possible? No, I don’t think we’re that’s been paused. All right. No, it’s not impossible. It’s happening. They’re getting. You get into a lot of problems. We’re trying to fix it. And if we ever do it, we’ll open it. And if not, then sorry, because it’s Google spamming Google and taking advantage and they try to close it up and we try to get in and it’s a cat and mouse that is just too much of a headache. And we ended up refunding a whole lot of money every time we open it up.

All right. Well, thanks to everybody for being here.

  Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 325 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 325

Click on the video above to watch Episode 325 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 325. The first Hump Day hangouts in this lovely month of February, it’s the third of February 2021. We got almost the whole crew here. Today, we’re gonna roll through do some introductions, check in with everybody. Got a couple quick announcements, and then we will get into your question. So if you’re watching live, and you got questions, go ahead and put them on there. If you’re not watching live, it’s too late. But you can always go to semantic mastery comm HD questions and ask your questions ahead of time we do. First come first serve. And so we just ask that you try to limit it to one question. If you’re live, you can ask more if there’s you know, everyone’s had a chance to get through their questions. But again, if you’re not able to join us live, we get it either you’re in a different time zone or you got something going on, just ask your question, you can always check out the replay. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. So you get updates on that and you will be good to go.

All right, so I’ll go counterclockwise today, Chris, how you doing today?

Doing good here. super happy to be here. As I said, I can’t believe first month is a world ready for this year. So yeah, like if you haven’t started to work on your dreams and goals. Like it’s time to do it now. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, this month went pretty pretty quick. Marco. How about you? How you doing today? I like the shirt by the way.

Yeah, I represent tropics, man. By the way, you know what yesterday was really in. In America, right?

It was.

It was Tuesday and all of America. It was Groundhog Day.

It really was Groundhog Day. Yesterday’s when we say that every week. But it really was yesterday. Punxsutawney Phil said that we’re gonna have six more weeks of winter. So now six, six more weeks of sun, at least, is about to say maybe 6600. I don’t know.

It’s endless. It’s endless. There it is. I can’t help it. As I said, gotta represent tropics. Warm weather is POFU man, it’s being where you want to be rather than when you have that where you have to be. And if you’re where you have to be right now.

It’s gonna sound redundant, but you don’t have to be where you have to be. You can break out of that rut is the POFU path.

Join us POFU Live, get catch the replays from the past powerful lives that we’ve done. Get into the right mindset. Then go chase after, as Chris said, not only your dream, but to find what your profile is and get after it. Because that’s what that’s going to give you everything that that you need in order to have the lifestyle that you want. So that’s my thought for today. Come get some What can I say?

Marco you gave me a good reminder. I just put that on the page for anyone. You can check out poofy live recordings just pop the link in there from 2020

Hernan, how are you doing today?

Looks good, man. Good. I just wanted to sign a petition to let the Latinos enter sooner to the Zoom Room, you know, that will be pretty cool. I’m banging out there at the door and it’s raining and it’s cold and everything. I’m good, man. I’m good. I’m really good. Excited to be here. So,

Bradley, how you doing today?

I’m good, man. Busy as hell. But you know, the alternative would be not being busy. So I’ll take it.

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Well, we got a couple quick announcements. Marco, I’m going to hand things over to you in a minute I want you to if you can update everyone on how the charity webinars are going and what people can do. If they’re not quite there yet. First of all wanted to say, first, thanks for watching, you know, we realized that there’s a lot of people who watch the replays and you know, we appreciate you guys watching if you can come live, it’s great. We love interacting with people. And like I said earlier, you can always go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and that’s where you can join us live or just go ask your questions ahead of time.

If you’re new to semantic mastery mgib heavy hitters club and you want to find out how to shield your site never worry about algorithm updates or maybe you just want to figure out what this SEO shield thing is that you keep hearing us talk about along with a lot of other things head over to the SEO shield right the word the SEO shield calm and that is free training you can get and you’ll find out about all about the SEO shield and a whole lot more.

All right beyond that you can get our step by step processes for getting results with SEO with the battle plan. Find out about that battleplan.semanticmastery.com. And for those of you who are either agency owners or maybe you’re a consultant, you’re kind of starting out you’re wondering how you can grow get more clients, scale your team things like that. I highly suggest you go over to 2xyouragency.com there is some fantastic training that Bradley Mosley put together. I know Hernan had some of that as well. But if you’re in that area where you know, you know you want to grow, and this is what you’re doing, then you definitely want to check out that training. And then if you’ve got an established business, whether it’s brick and mortar, whether it’s digital marketing online, then the mastermind is the place for you. And you can find out more about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. Last, but certainly not least, I mentioned MGYB at the beginning, but if you’re not familiar, it’s mg y v.co. That’s where you can get all the dumb few services stuff like syndication networks, V SEO shield that I was talking about link building press releases, and a whole lot more. So go and check that stuff out. So with that out of the way, Marco, I do want to come back to you can you give us just an update on the charity webinars? And in case somebody hasn’t seen the last few Hump Day Hangouts kind of what’s going on with that? And how can they get involved?

I posted the in the group chat, right, that chat app, that 1990s shout out.

Man is fantastic. We have Bradley on the very first one. And he showed how to manipulate entities through ads. People think ads, you just pay Google and that’s it. But if you use it in very specific ways, you can really hyper-target your people and really get your campaign working for you and working for your brand. And using that brand plus keyword Association. That’s, that’s just so important right now, you don’t necessarily that the geographical targeting, of course, takes place when you’re setting everything up. So it doesn’t your ad will need to include your geographical area, because you’ve already done your geographical targeting, according to their likes and dislikes, or their history, what they’ve, what they’ve been through right now. Google is now giving you people who are hyperfocus. And whatever it is that you’re offering, who have an affinity even for what you’re offering, maybe not directly related, but enough so that the person could be interested in whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s a fantastic way to relate your brand, to the keywords in the niche, especially the top keywords in the niche. Then we had Dixon Jones, for those of you who have been like under a rock for the past 20 something years, Dixon Jones is of majestic fame. I mean, he was the CEO, or the marketing director for Majestic SEO later to become majestic.com. Now he’s an inlinks in Lynx dotnet. And it’s one of you’re big into artificial intelligence. It’s one of the applications that we’re using in order to target the entities. Of course, we do entity based, worry less SEO. And what that means is simply we don’t worry about Google updates because we’re doing everything that Google wants at the presentation layer.

So imagine having the perfect present presentation card, where you’re coming in the door, and that card gets you in to talk to the people in that business. But it’s what you’re doing. That’s your presentation, that’s your website. If you do that correctly, Google is going to just roll out the red carpet for anyone coming to see your website. And they’re going to send more and more people. And if you’ve set everything up, right, these people will convert through ads through organic means. And that and that that conversion, I can’t tell people how much it means right now. Because Google is following everything until the end. And they’re seeing completion of that goal, that person trusting you enough to give you their information to give you their phone number to give you their credit card information, whatever it is, they’re trusting. And if you can establish a pattern where people are trusting you, you become a trusted authoritative source. In the niche, you’re giving people that finding the information that they’re interacting with your videos, I this is all part of building out your entity, they find you in social media, and they come to the website or they go to other social media, a lot of people do that they research the company, right? They’ll come to look at it on the web, they look at it through mass, we do so much. It took me longer than usual. Because I have this entity series planned out its ad. It’s Dixon Jones talking about content, and how entities apply in content and how you can manipulate that Jordan is going to be talking about branding and entities. We’re gonna have Brian Carroll come in and talk about entities in images, which is like an often-ignored part of SEO or something like that we just do as an aside, and you can get millions and millions of views into your images if you’re doing it correctly.

After that, we’ll close it all up and we’ll probably have like a think tank session we might have people come in special. I haven’t decided on the last one yet but it’s going to be all of our entities and all of that for the price of a donation.

Standing now for someone who hasn’t yet where can they donate it and what do they need to do? The information is on the page. You go to the CSV the webpage, the donation page, make a donation. I’m not asking you to know that right. Your heart will move you to donate, your heart will tell you to donate. Put your wallet is going to dictate how much. And so we’ve had people donate $1, we’ve had people donate a couple of $1,000. And everywhere in the middle has been fantastic. And so I’m not going to limit you. I mean, you do what you can, and what your heart moves you to do and what the wallet allows the information is on the page. If not, then you just write to Gmail, the Gmail address is also on the bait, and you can get direction from there.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Marco. With that said, Guys, I think we’re ready to jump into questions. Anything else?

All right, let’s do it.

Okay, standby. I’m trying to think I found something I was looking for an answer to one of the questions, and I was doing some research. Anyway, let me find the damn screen and I’ll grab it.

Should You Create One Root Page In Gsite That Links To The Money Site’s Services Or Should You Create Individual Service Pages?

All right. Tell me you guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct. Good to go. Yep. All right. So the first question is from looks like Hugo says, with our G sites, is it better to create inner pages for our services? Or just have one page with all of the services on there with links to the corresponding pages on the money site? Also, would it be overkill to make location pages on the G site? Or is the root page enough and then add internal links from there? Well, Hugo, we talked about theme mirroring. So, however, you have your primary site structured, which know should be with Silas structure, if you know if necessary, but that’s pretty much how you should be structuring your websites anyways.

Then you want a theme mirror that right? That’s what we call theme Mariano’s. The term Originally, I guess invented or whatever from network Empire. But it’s a perfect description of what it is that we’re doing. When we say theme mirroring if you don’t understand what that is, one of the things you could do is go check out the SEO shield calm, that’s the seoshield.com. And you go through that training, which will give you some insight as to what the mirroring is and how to do it with your G site. Also, there’s another resource that I can send you to that’s free also, which is semanticmastery.com/process, if you go to the website section on that because it’s basically a process doc that talks about entity based SEO and why we use all the components that we do for the SEO shield and what we teach at semantic mastery. And there’s a website section in that process training that talks about mirroring and how to structure silos on your website and ultimately mirror those onto your G site and into your drive stack. So the short answer is, you know, it’s better to mirror your site to mimic the structure of your primary website. So yes, it would be better to have separate pages for each one of your top-level services, as long as it’s, you know, a top-level service that would have its own silo or category on your money site if that makes sense. Mark, do you want to come on that? No, I totally agree. We’re, we talked theme mirroring so much.

But people get confused. Maybe they think Elementor and Divi, rather than the theme that we’re talking about, which is how your website is constructed how the content on your website is constructed how you’ve constructed the categories. That’s the theme that we’re talking about, because you’re going to take those, and you’re going to move them to the G site as extensions. The branded stack is usually the same for everyone. But what’s going to differ is when you order those extensions, according to how you set up your website, if you’re local. This is where some complexity comes in. Because you have to decide city page services, like how many cities are you going up? But what about states? Are you going to go after different states? How are you going to do this because you develop that on the website, how it is that you’re going to target that you have that plan? Please don’t build out this intricate Mind Map of how it is that you’re going to build the website, choose three categories. Leave it that way, and see where Google leads you through analytics search console and insights in the GMB Google will tell you. It’s really interesting if you use it correctly, people are being misled because they’re being told that analytics and search console and insights are not accurate. They’re not for the most part, but that’s because the information could be backed up a little bit. But it’s AI working in there. And it’s AI talking about the impressions and where are you getting impressions, how you’re getting impressions, the pages that are getting impressions, and how people are interacting with the pages that are getting impressed that there’s a lot of valuable information in there. And so that’s how you’re going to start building out than any other category. According to the information that you’re getting, you’re going to copy that copy into the D site extension, the GMB will be set up the same way your press release tasks will be built the same way. I’m not gonna say how I’m doing press releases. Exactly. Bradley has an excellent course. Right? Local PR Pro, follow that. And then behind that, it’s, of course, always link building, and embeds and link building into your embed.

But the setup from the beginning, both at the content and the structure level, the theme level is on the website, and also at the button level at the code level, your schema has to be tight, has to be correct. So you’re just sending the messaging in code to the bot and the messaging when the bot comes crawling your content because it’s going to look for entities also in the content. Again, watch this past Monday’s replay, to talk which talks totally about content, and entities and content.

Yeah, just to clarify, so theme mirroring, we’re talking about topical themes, guys. So when I’m talking about a WordPress theme, we’re talking about topical themes. That’s so when your theme marrying, you’re mirroring the topical structure of your site, your main site onto your other assets, your other branded assets where possible so that you know and again, we can do that with the drive the G site drive stack, you can do with press releases, GMB posts, and we try to mirror that same topical theme structure across all of those assets. Because it kind of creates that mirror and mirror that picture and picture like mirror image type thing that Marco talks about with iframe stacking. And again, I just wanted to point out where that is, if you go to that URL, I shared semantic mastery comm slash process, it’s free guys. This is a process street process template. And if you go into the website tab here, you can scroll through and I talk about simple silos, complex silos, physical versus virtual silos. Then I also talk about using tags, for those of you doing local, which is what pretty much all I do. I use tags silos to create location-based silos instead of typical categories. structure. It works really, really well it also eliminates some of the complexities or the conflicts that occur if you try to use a traditional category, silo structure on a WordPress site where you’re sharing the same location silos across multiple topical categories, or vice versa, trying to share topical categories across location silos, there, it creates URL conflicts and conflicts if you try to use all just the traditional category structure. So I talked about that, and why I use tags, and how I do it, at least on a conceptual level, in this process, street doc here. Okay. So again, I would recommend you highly, highly recommend that you go through this. And you can learn about okay.

Would It Be Considered Overkill To Create Individual Location Pages In Gsite?

It’s a good question, though. So the next part of that was also would it be overkill to make location pages on the G site too? Or is the root page enough? And then add internal links with the same answer, right? It’s the same answer.

If you have location pages on your money site, and yes, you’re going to want to also mirror those pages on to your G site. Now.

I can’t get into this here, because this would be more advanced. But if you’re using category structure for topical silos, which is the way I do it, so like, for Sir, I deal only with me, with contractors. So we talked about when I say topical silos and meaning the products or services that a contractor would sell, in my case, it services, right? So each top service or primary service that they sell goes create, you know, you create your own category on a WordPress site for it. So that would be the topical things are the topical silos I should say, but the location-based silos, I do that using tags. So when you get to a G site, obviously, you can’t do it that way. But with G sites, you can get away with a lot of other things.

You have to go and you have to join a mastermind or heavy hitter club in order for us to get into the getting into that. But the short answer would be for location pages if you have them on your website, your primary site, and you’re going to want to mirror those on the G site as well. Okay. So hopefully that some of that training will shed some light on that for you.

Do You Use The Traffic You Get From YT Ads To Local Business?

Alright, so the next question is when you recommend sending traffic via YouTube ads, do you use these for local businesses also? Yes, absolutely. I mean, again, that’s pretty much all I do. I’m working on a national project now. But for the last several years, all I’ve done is local and I love YouTube ads for local traffic well, and display ads, too. But YouTube ads are working really, really well right now if you know how to, you know how to do it, and I just talked about exactly how to do it on Marco’s charity webinar. Exactly. I mean, it’s a, it’s a course, I’m gonna, I’m gonna cut that out and create my own ads course out of it, I’m gonna, I’ll sell it for 997. So it’s less than $1,000. What a bargain.

Do you do a video ad or as a text ad? Okay. I mean, if you’re doing YouTube ads, it’s going to be a video ad. So I’m not sure what you mean by is a text ad. Okay. Now, you can do, by the way, you can do text ads on YouTube through the Google Display Network, but they suck. Don’t use text ads on YouTube through the Display Network, because what you end up getting and trust me ask me how I know if you if so what if I’m setting up a Google Display Network ad and I’m using responsive text ads to be run on the display network? Which I do. I always go into exclusions and exclude youtube.com. Right. So I make that an excluded site so that none of my tech my responsive text ads will show on youtube.com. And the reason why is you will see you will get a ton of clicks that are probably from kids that are on their parents iPad or iPhone or mobile phone or whatever tablet or whatever that is on YouTube watching like nursery rhyme videos and things. You know, that kind of stuff like children’s videos. And because of the way that the text ads display on YouTube, they get clicked on really easily, and you will burn through the budget with non-relevant clicks incredibly quickly. So don’t do it. So when I’m talking about advertising on YouTube, I’m talking about video ads. Does that make sense?

  And yeah, that’s really, really good. There’s, it works. If you get it’s all about audience targeting guys or proper targeting. It doesn’t have to be audiences, I found audience targeting to be the best. When you combine relevant audience targeting with geographic targeting, you can get in and you have to do testing. Again, I covered all of this and the markers charity webinar last week. But you have to do testing to identify which audiences are the best Google will tell you certain audiences or give you access to pre certain predefined audiences. But you still need to test because Google’s not perfect. And sometimes their audiences Aren’t you know, by testing different audiences, you’ll find, like, let’s say you test six different audiences, you might find two that are working incredibly well and the other four are not working so well. So you know, to stop using those other four and redirect all of your efforts into the two that are producing. So again, I would encourage you to go contribute to Marco’s charity, and then you can get access to the replay, where you’ll get a lot more information about that. Okay.

It’s a good question.

How Do You Bulk Update The EXIF Data Of Photos?

All right. The next one is how do I batch change EXIF data for photos? What is the best tool for that? Okay, I’ve always used I’m going to, I’m going to tell you three things. Number one, I’ve always used geo center dot d, which is free. It’s desktop software. It’s a geo center. I think it’s dot d.

Just Yeah, that’s it. You can download this as desktop software. And you can, you can essentially open up a folder full of images. And then you can batch edit the EXIF data for all the images in that folder. That’s what I’ve always used. I’ve used it for years and years and years is this it’s free to download. In fact, that’s what sitting right there is geo center on the top of my computer up there or my desktop, I should say. But now

I’m using local Viking because I’m using local Viking for GMB, post-management, and just kind of managing multiple GM bees I’m testing with it. I just started testing within about maybe two or three weeks ago. And they have a really cool EXIF data editor within Local Viking which works great because you can create EXIF data templates. And so whenever you upload an image, you can just select one of the templates and it will automatically fill in all of the data based upon the templates that you created. So that works really really well but an alternative that if you don’t need a GMB management tool, and I have not used this one but mass optimizer Pro, I know a lot of our members Semantic Mastery use this and swear by it. And this is a great tool because it’s got it does image optimizing video optimizing. And there’s all kinds of really cool add ons and things like that mass optimizer has and I know the developer behind this, you know is good. He saw that I think his name’s Lloyd Farrell or something like that. But I know that he’s really really solid. We’ve got a lot of people that use this in our group. So I would also recommend this one even though I can’t speak for it personally, I have not used it. I know it’s a good tool.

But I want to add to that yeah, that it’s a great question is not this coming Monday because that’s the branding bridge Jordan Fowler talking about your brand and entities and how you should bridge that gap. But the following one with Brian Caddo is all about manipulating images. And if you want to know what’s best to use and how to use it, Brian’s gonna come on and give you guys a great presentation on just that manipulating images. All it takes us is a donation, follow the information on the page, follow the instructions, send me or sorry, my personal assistant, send her the proof of the webinar or she’ll be the one who answers and since you all have information so you can access not only that one but all the previous charity webinar replays.

What Are Your Thoughts On Bot Traffic And How Should You Deal With It?

All right, the next question is from Eddie says my site is getting lots of quality traffic since doing link building to my SEO shield, a 45% spike so far. That’s should be a good testimonial. Okay, so my site is getting lots of quality traffic since doing link building to my SEO showed a 45% spike so far. But now I’m also seeing a spike in bot traffic. Yeah,  there’s no way around that. I’m wondering if anyone ever sees this, wondering if it matters wondering if you guys might be able to offer an explanation and or any thoughts on bot traffic like this? What to be wary of etc? Thanks. Yeah, well, it just goes to show you that the link building is working, because it’s causing a whole bunch of other bots to follow links to come to find your site. And so I mean, that’s just proof in the pudding that it is working. There’s not really anything that you can do about it. You can filter that out from like Analytics reports by setting up filters. But I don’t know that you can prevent that. Marco, what do you say?

Well, yeah, you can actually, this is what I’m currently using and what the dev developer is actively currently using. I dropped it at the bottom of the chat, we use GitHub, and they have an up to date list of bad bots.

So all you have to do is copy and paste that into your .htaccess file that’s constantly updated for any time they find a bad bot, it goes on the list goes on. And so you see, there’s plenty of bad bots, those you need to block that goes on the ht access. If you don’t want that particular bot on your website, block it ht access. As a matter of fact, use a black hole, we use a black hole so that anybody not following the rules that we’ve set for it goes in a black hole and never gets out.

That means that they’re in a trap. And now what you can do is bend that buck like forever. But it’s just that a black hole plugin in WordPress is fantastic for getting rid of bots that do not follow your robots.txt rules. There’s a black hole plugin. It’s a black hole plugin.

I don’t know if it’s called Black Hole. But yes, there is we use it. I’m afraid to start searching the black hole plugin on a live webinar. As

I say search it. I’m not sure that you know not safe for work type stuff. No, but it’ll take you to wordpress.org.

So what is it called again? Black Hole, white hole? Is it all one word or one? Let me try that.

We don’t have that many questions anyway. No, I’m just curious. I’d like to look into that. I don’t I mean, I

yeah, I forgot about spider spanker. And those types of bot blocker plugins and things like that, but you’d like to just use the ht access, but the black hole one word bad bots. It’s the wordplay here. I’ll give you the URL in slack. If you can’t find it there. Black Hole for bad bots. That’s it. A fantastic plugin that in conjunction with your ht access, uses that htaccess with that list from GitHub. It’s constantly updated. And that’s the great thing about it yet. It does require a little bit of manual work, but it’s well worth it because it’ll save you a headache when those bad bots come crawling and start doing nasty stuff on your website. Very cool. I learned something new today. I’m gonna check it out, man.

That’s pretty cool. I like that. Thank you. So there you go. That was a great answer.

All right, moving on. Next one.

If I can find it. Okay.

When you talk about mirroring, okay. Chrissa says when you talk about mirroring your money site content on your G site, do you copy-paste the content or iframing the content would either work

But either way works the same, I just iframe. So that’s the thing, okay.

When I have a drive stack built by MGYB, you know, they create all the files and folders and all this stuff and they find content that’s relevant. And they create, they add content to the pages that they create, as well as the embeds that they do with the files and folders.

Once I get that back, I don’t add any additional content, I add pages like crazy, right, and then I add the iframes. But typically, my pages consist of nothing other than iframes that are relevant. So in other words, when I’m theme mirroring, right, so when I’m mirroring the topical theme and creating pages that correspond with pages on the money site, then I embed those money site pages into the G site, as well as, and I’ve talked about this before. But like, for example, if I’ve got a particular keyword that I’m trying to push, and I need to add sub-pages to the money page on the G site, where then like, because remember on with what we teach, we talked about using the blog, and the syndication network, to add depth to a silo. So you publish supporting articles placed within the correct silo, with internal linking done properly up to the money page in that silo, right. And those syndicate out across the syndication network, there’s that money site, or excuse me, the money page link, right, the internal link to the money page that you’re trying to rank that goes out across the syndication network profiles. So now you’ve got those published posts on the syndication network, so you can extract those URLs and then embed those into the money, the G site pages, right, so that you’re adding additional relevancy, as well as additional prop properties, branded properties, entity, you know, tier-one entity properties into the G site. So you’re creating all of that relevancy. It’s like a big, you know, black hole never-ending, you know, mirror and mirror type image of, of all this relevancy is specific to a particular keyword or keyword theme. Right. So I don’t add any additional content, the only thing that I would add other than usually other than the iframes, from the relevant content for that theme, mirrored pages, is I will create an internal linking structure within the G site. So that I’m linking, you know, daisy-chaining posts together, and linking up to the proper. So it’s the same sort of internal linking that I do on the money site I do on the G site. So that’s the only additional text that I add, I add a page header iframes and then links internal links to, you know, to accomplish the internal linking within the G site that I’m trying to do other than that I don’t have any other text, not that you can’t, I just don’t because the text is already on the pages that I’m I framing into the G site page, I just use the G site is basically a container, if that makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that? It’s perfectly fine to use your own content, copy-paste away. JOHN Mueller finally had to come out and say there’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

It was a couple of days ago or yesterday, I can’t remember when he said it. We’ve been saying it for years. No such thing as a duplicate content penalty, use your content, you are not going to complain to yourself about your own content. The only time that you can get into problems with using content multiple times is if you’re using somebody else’s content. And they come with a DMCA and tell you to take it down or they’re going to take you to court if you use Getty Images start you if you use somebody else’s YouTube videos, it depends, right? As far as your content is concerned, copy and paste away or just hire us to do the extensions for the extension for you. We know what we’re doing. We’re going to do it right. And yes, we are going to use your content when we create that extension.

Yeah, and we will use an iframe of the page and we’ll live in whatever else we can on that extension page.

Does Google Lower Your Rankings In Serps If You Check Your Position In Incognito Window?

Okay, so BB is up with several questions. I would expect anything else? He says, Hey, guys, does Google lower your rankings in the SERPs if you check your position for a keyword in your own device or an evening in or in an incognito window? Where does Google hide your page in the SERPs when you make a search from your own device? Okay, a couple of things. I don’t know if Google? I mean, I can’t imagine that they do. I know that. I have to tell clients often to stop searching for keywords when done running when I’m managing Google ads for them because it creates impressions without a click-through which lowers your click-through rate which lowers your ad rank, right, which your overall quality score. So but as far as SEO, I don’t know, maybe Marco can answer that. Well, as far as SEO, the same thing happens impressions increase, but there aren’t any click-throughs. And then they are if there are any click-throughs there won’t be the final goal that goes to the Google is looking for because it’s you looking through your own website, and that doesn’t carry the same value. It never does. I mean, unless you’re, but it takes so much intricate work to go into your own stuff. And to set a goal and to complete the goal to pay yourself. I mean, you’d have to get a whole different credit card and use it from a different IP that there’s just so much involved in that you’re better off just getting a Craigslist gig and paste that pay some college students 25 bucks each to do that. Going back to what you said, it doesn’t make sense. Why would you? Why would you if you can just go into the historical data and analytics, search console, and GMB insights and get any information that you need? Other than you know, if you do it once in a while just to check one keyword that you really keen on ranking.

But I mean, I wouldn’t want Why. Why would we be you’re always asking questions of these theoretical questions. When Google would lower your rankings and we can’t know whether Google would lower your rankings, I can’t tell you that the impressions will increase. The CTR click-through rate will decrease. And then the effect of that could mean lower rankings, but not because you went in search, but the effect that that search had on your overall numbers.

Yeah, so. And it’s funny because maybe does ask a lot of these theoretical questions all the time that it’s kind of fun, actually. Anyways. So the other thing was, he was asking, you know when you make a search from your own device, does Google hide your own website from the SERP? Well, it can if you don’t have your if you go to google.com, and the bottom right corner, you’ll see where it says search or settings, if you click that, expands a menu, click on Search settings, and make sure that you have do not use private results selected, because if you have used private results, then what happens is yes, Google will start to customize search results based upon your behavior from previous searches for the same query. Does that make sense? So in other words, if you’re if you are using if you have private results turned on, which I think is by default, I think, but it’s by default that it’s turned on. Now, if you’re in an incognito window, it shouldn’t matter. Because it should always be private results. That’s kind of the whole point of an incognito window. But if you’re searching from a logged-in account, and it’s got us private results turned on, which again, I think is the default setting. Then if you are searching a query multiple times, and you’re scrolling through results, and you’re clicking on other results, but not clicking on the result, you know, your project or your website, then Google learns that that is not that particular result isn’t relevant to you, hence, you never, which is you know, why you never click on it. Google determines that that’s not relevant to you. So it will start to, you know, not show that result to you, because you’re scrolling and clicking on other results, but never on that one if that makes sense. So yes, I’ve seen that happen, where if you’ve got private, I’ve had clients contact me and say, I’m doing searches for, you know, this keyword, and I’m not seeing my website ranked anywhere. And I say, Are you searching logged in? It’s because Google is showing it’s because you probably searched that multiple times and didn’t click through. And because of that Google is hiding it from you. Because it’s determined, it’s not it’s a non-relevant result for you. If you go into an incognito window, or Firefox, or something else, that you’re not logged into, do that search. And then I’ve had the clients contact me back and say, Oh, I see it now. Thank you. So it’s just a matter of, you know, again, I don’t know that that’s your what you’re talking about, BB.

But I know that, again, I’ve had clients reach out to me say, I’m not seeing my own website for this search when especially after I send them a monthly report. That’s typically when I will get that kind of a question from a client is they’ll be like, well, I’m seeing the report saying that we’re ranked for this, this and this, and I’m not seeing it when I do a search. And then I say, Where are you logged in? Do you have it? You know, if you do an incognito window, you’ll probably see it and then, you know, generally, they see it. So again, I would check that again, that’s just a search google.com check the bottom right corner for settings, click on Search Settings and turn that off. But if you’re using an incognito window, you shouldn’t see it anyways.

anything else you want to add to that?

No. Okay.

Have You Tried And Succeeded In Making Money With Affiliate Offers Using Gsite And RYS Only?

Number one, same question as number one, but multiple search requests on the same device. Same answer, same answer, same answer. Have you ever tried and succeeded in making money with G site RYS with affiliate offers without backlinks, backlinks, PRs, and embeds? Oh, we’ve made money from our watch our stuff. I mean, I used to do affiliate stuff. We did a lot of launch jacking for about a year and a half, and I had a VA is that would build drive stacks around products that were being launched. And we did quite well off that. But the reason why and I actually just had a couple of new mastermind members join in, I had a call with them, as we always do, we have onboarding calls with new members. And they’re in the affiliate marketing space. And they were doing a lot of launch jacking too. And so we had a discussion about that. And part of the reason I got away from that is that it’s like a never-ending hamster wheel, right? You, you constantly have to be building for new product launches, and they have a very short lifespan that they typically produce affiliate revenue, and it’s usually just during the launch period. And, and so it’s just, you know, it’s like, it’s reworked, it’s a lot of rework a lot of constantly building. And I like building assets that produce long term. But yes, you can absolutely, literally do it now, without, again, when it comes to like a launch jack, because there’s not, at least initially, there’s not a whole lot of competing SEO, a lot of people competing in the SEO space for those that you know, product name, then g stacks, you know, g sites and drive stacks can work really well. But if you want to get the best results from them, then link building is obviously going to, it’s going to help least that’s been my experience. So what do you think link building? I know it’s a must now it’s a mosquito, you’re just not going to build up the activity, relevance, trust, and authority that you need to rank it at the time that you need to rank you’re going to have to be building it up over time. Remember, Jason Quinlan, when he was doing the shiny object reviews, how he used to just jacked everything. But that’s because he started out and he built on that shiny object reviews website, where it became like one of the authoritative websites in that niche in the launch jacking niche, because he not only did our stuff, he not only used to jack our stuff but everybody else’s stuff. He’d be right there. Ranking top three, yeah, he would, he would launch jack our own launches and beat us out. Yeah. Which is fantastic, because he’s just making us money. But what I’m saying is, you have to build up to that like we used to be able to rank an empty folder, we show that live, right? Remember that? It within less than a minute, we ranked an empty folder, those days are gone. The algorithm works differently. So we have to apply different methods. This isn’t a static or monolithic niche, or the market that we’re in the SEO space is very fluid. Because it’s there’s AI in it, the algorithms are constantly getting information. And so we need to be able to adapt to how it’s working out our way is what we’ve done is it has become an enter integral part of building out the entity and giving the entity the trust and authority that it needs so that it can start ranking. But without the linking. And without the iframe embeds. And without press releases, especially with a launch tag, you set up that personally, like just before the launch, and like right during the launch, so that you get in front of everybody. Once you have the trust and authority, you’re going to see how it becomes progressively easier to rank, for subsequent launches. That’s how Jason Quinlan used to do it. And I’m sure it’s alive and well right now. It’s just not something that we do, because there’s lots more money elsewhere. Yeah, and that’s, that’s kind of, in that discussion I had last week with our new mastermind members, we were talking about that I said, you know, if you want to, if you want to do affiliate marketing and launch jacking, then I recommend see where we made a mistake. My team that was, you know, it was to VA is that we’re doing it full time for many, many months, at least.

Anyway, my mistake was we were creating, we were just building SEO assets, targeting the product name alone, that’s it. So they were standalone or orphaned assets, there was net, we never built authority to them. And what I said was, last weekend, I was talking to the new mastermind members was like, if you’re gonna if you want to do launch jacking, then I recommend you build a brand, exactly what Marco was just talking about. Because over time, that brand will crew authority and become an entity and a trust, you know, become well it will become powerful to where at some point, you’ll get to a point where you can, you know, create a subfolder right, so basically a silo for a new product that your launch jacking, and it will rank because of all of the benefits that it’s getting from all of the authority built to that brand itself, the branded drive stack and G site. So my point is if you want to do launch jacking you know then. Like drive stacks can be incredibly powerful once you build power to them, so that when you add additional expansions, right additional, basically silos or categories, product services, whatever you want to do they know they’ll benefit instantly from the power already accrued if that makes sense. So I don’t know that again, I don’t think I haven’t done this in a long time. But I don’t think creating a G site and drive stat for a product without any backlinks or anything would do much of anything right now. I don’t. It’s not like they were five years ago. Right? You have to power them up. But I mean, the amount of power that you can push into them is incredible, which is what we’ve been proving for years now.

Any other comments you want to add to that?

No. Okay.

What Link Should You Use To Point To Preceding Posts In A Current GMB Post?

Aaron’s up he says, a question about GMB posts. Some automated services like local Viking include previous posts linked to the post immediately preceding the current post. Is this okay, or are you recommending specific links to proceeding posts?

Yeah, no, that’s fine. I’m going to show you how I’ve taught my team to do it manually. And I’ll show you why in just a moment. Explain why. But no, that’s fine. That that that works. I prefer to do it manually because we have a lot more control over it. Just some of the stuff Marco’s teaching I can’t get into specifically what it is, but it’s some of the stuff Marco is teaching what you can do with GMB is crazy.

But here’s what I was getting at. Like here, I just went to Semantic Mastery his GMB site, guys, the URLs that come from the posts URLs themselves, they’ll take you to like the SERP version of the URL, right, which is like a really, really long, ugly URL. And I know you can use the previous posts in those posting apps, and that’s fine, you can do that. Okay, it’s definitely easier, it does provide some benefit if you’re siloing your posts correctly.

But what I prefer to do is my VA is go in and she manually creates the silos with GMB posts. And if she’s let’s say that these two posts were going to be siloed together, then what she’ll do is when she goes into the post, publish this post, which would link to this post, she’s going to link to this URL here. That one right there, because that’s like an inner page on the GMB website, as opposed to just the post URL. And that’s the way that we do it. Again, I don’t know if Marco wants to come up, you know what Marco wants to say about this. But the way that we do it is manually now and by actually extracting the previous post URL, like the inner page URL, basically. And that’s the way that we do it. What do you say, Marco? That’s as far as that’s gonna go because if they want more information on how to do this, it’s local GMB Pro, and then the heavy hitter club. And then you can just manipulate the crap out of GM B’s to the point where Google does whatever you want Google to do.

There you go.

So yeah, I mean, again, you can use the previous post function. We did that for a long time, and you can absolutely get a benefit from it. But you can get more benefit by using the inner page URL from the GMB website. And so it’s in my opinion, it’s worth the extra effort to do that manually.

If you know what you’re doing, you can push a lot of power that way. So.

Okay, if I’m setting this up manually, which link do I use the link to? Yeah, I just showed you. Okay, so that’s good.

Wayne is making another comment as usual.

Let’s see, where are we at? Aaron another GMB post question. Did I miss something? No, I’m calling Wayne a spammer. Oh,

yeah, it’s funny cuz sometimes Wayne will be on a mastermind webinar and he’ll make a comment. And I’ll just assume it’s a smartass comment when he was being 100% genuine or sincere. And then I realized later that he was actually being sincere, but it’s hard to tell when the boy that cries wolf all the time. It’s hard to tell who’s been in series or not.

Do You Recommend Having One Or More Links Pointing To A Money Site From Your GMB Page?

Anyway, Aaron says another GMB post question. Do you recommend having just one link to a money site per page? Or should the post have as many links as possible to the money site page and other assets? This is a heavy hitter question. I understand. Thanks.

We’ll just remember this, you can put links in the text part of you know, the Text body of the post, but those are all nofollow links, which doesn’t mean that they can’t help. But the only place that there’s a do-follow link is the button URL. Right. So the link that you add to the CTA button, that’s the do follow so it’s only one dofollow link per post, no matter how many links you put in the next part of the post. And here’s the other thing I would recommend. I’ve noticed with GMB posts lately if we include NAP data. So name address phone number, then Google will often reject those posts. And I’m not sure why they do that. But if I put if I had if we try to publish a post that has the name, address, and phone number in there

And it rejects it. If I just pull the phone number off, for example, a lot of the times it will I’d repost the same exact post and do nothing else, but pull the phone number out of the post itself, it will accept it. And I don’t know why that is. I’m just assuming that Google wants people to interact with the GMB posts instead of calling. I don’t know, I don’t know what the reason for that is. But I’ve noticed that a lot lately, we’ve had a lot of rejected posts because a lot of the post templates that I was using would automatically include the NA p was part of the call to action. But we’ve had to go back and kind of edit a lot of those templates to remove that because we were getting a lot of rejected posts, and now they’re not being rejected. So why I told you that is because I would be, I would not recommend putting a whole bunch of text links in the text body of the post, because it looks spammy, right? And you only get 1500 characters in a GMB post anyway, so why would you want to fill that up with a bunch of URLs? If they’re all nofollow links, that’s my opinion, you get one powerful link from the button. So what I like to do is a text link in the text body to the previous post to silo posts. And if I’m siloing posts and trying to push from the button URL power to something specific, but most of the time, I’m using the button URL to link to the previous post, if that makes sense. And that’s about as far as I can go with that. Marco, what do you want to say about it? No, all of this with how many get into why? And the Why is only shared and heavy hitter sometimes in the semantic mastery mastermind. It’s in the paid groups, I’m not going to get into it here. There are people paying a lot of money for that information. So it’s not gonna happen.

Yeah. So I mean, as I said, I use the button, the button URL you want to think about, that’s your most powerful link within the GMB posts. So use that strategically, right, but you can link from within the GMB posts to other assets. And typically, I’ll just link to another, you know, tier-one entity asset basically, within the text part of the posts. And that’s good for navigation for the user. But for SEO, the button link is the one that you want to focus on.

Okay.

Brian says keep it simple, stupid. You’re damn right.

How Would You Rank In All US States With Semantic Mastery’s Stack Targeting?

Next question, we have a stack targeting only one state. What if we want to rank in all states of us? Wasn’t you were actually answering this question on Facebook, weren’t you Marco?

I believe I was. Yeah. sworn I saw this thread also on Facebook.

Okay, let me finish the question. We have a stack targeting only one state. Whatever you want to rank in all states of the USA, please explain deeply. Yeah, no, I’m not in Humpty. But yeah.

So yeah, I mean, it’s funny cuz mark.

Wayne was actually asking about this in the mastermind, too. But, you know, this is what I would recommend. And this is, you know, again, it’s going to be very high level. But if at MGYB, right, that’s where you can order the drive stack expansions, right? That’s how I would do it, I would take whatever, I would create a separate drive stack expansion, or drive expansion, whatever you want to call it, for every state. That’s how I would do it. So I know that’s a big undertaking. But if you’re asking how I would do it, I would have a separate expansion built into my branded stack for each state. And then you could, if your theme earring on like a complex silo structure within each state drive stack expansion, you could break it down even further into counties or regions, or, you know, regions or counties, and all the way down, ultimately, to a city level. So I mean, it can get huge and massive, but that’s the way I would do it if I was going to do it.

It’s a mess. Paintsville, right, yes. But it has to be done manually. Because the new g sites don’t accept scripts. Well, at least not yet. We’re constantly looking to see if scripting will ever be opened again into the cset. We have our own way, we have our own way of making it work, which we’re not going to give away because it costs a lot of money for us to develop that.

But having said that you would build. So this is why it pays off to have a brand. Because if you have one stack that’s targeting one state, and it’s not Brandon, that you’re already like geo limited.

If you put that stack into a branded stack, now you have the first state in that branded stack, you have the first extension, and all you would have to do is copy whatever you did in that stack into all of the subsequent stacks for every subsequent state, and you would develop a page for each of the state stacks.

You want to go even deeper. In each state stack, you could then develop a city-specific dry stack so that then you could break down the state into the major cities in that state. And then I guarantee you that by the time you start building out those city pages, in each of those states, you are going to be ranking just like when you pop that folder in there, whether you get any traffic Now, here’s the problem. By doing that, you’re obviously going after something that’s geo-targeted, where a three-pack will probably be dominating most of the traffic. So maybe when you expand in all 50 states, you’ll get enough traffic, where it won’t matter that you’re targeting something that’s mostly local, you’ll get you’ll generate enough traffic organically through that, but by ranking, maybe top five organically, but if it’s dominated by that map pack and the ads and everything else, that you’re running into it, you’re going to spend a whole lot of time, maybe a whole lot of money, and maybe not see a return for the massive investment that you have to make, whether it’s money, and whether or whether it’s sweat equity.

Yeah, and you know, what’s interesting is, and it just something you said triggered this for me, Marco. But you know, here’s just an example. I’m doing a lot of organic stuff. Right now, I’m working on a national project right now, which I’ll be sharing in the mastermind. when it’s appropriate. It’s not yet. But so I’m going to be doing something similar to what we just described. But what Marco was talking about, you know, with the maps pack in the ads, and everything, it’s crazy. But what I mean, what I’m seeing now, I mean, not that this is new, but it just it seems like organics getting pushed further and further, in this case, it’s not popping, but in a lot of the times, you’ll see the carousel ads, like the Google guarantee ads at the top, then paid ads, then the map. And you literally got to scroll away below the fold to even get to the first organic listing. It’s crazy. And why is that? Because Google’s pushing more and more paid? Even a lot of you see that’s the paid position in the maps pack. And then like I said, the carousel, it’s just it keeps pushing the organic rankings further and further down. So it’s crazy.

What Is The Alternative Way Of Doing Scripts For Stacks?

Anyway, ah, scripts for stacks are no longer working. What is the alternative way of doing that? We don’t have one yet. Is that right?

I mean, we do. That’s how we create dissects and G sites. Now, the extensions, we have our own, we’re not going to give that away.

Okay, there you go.

Can We Copy Images And Content From Google And Directly Put Into The Stack?

Can we copy images and content from Google and directly put them into our stack without any modification? I wouldn’t recommend that. Personally, I don’t, I’ve had from copying images in the past years ago, you know, I’ve gotten hit with extortion letters, where I had to pay so that I didn’t they didn’t sue me for copyright infringement.

So I’ve had to do that. And I’ve learned a long time ago, I don’t just copy images ever. I go by stock photos if I need to, or, as we’ve talked about many times before, YouTube is great for getting images, guys, because you just go find a video that’s relevant. Just you know, set it on an HD setting.

Pause the video at a frame that you want to take a screenshot of. And that becomes a photo that works great. And I’ve you know, I do I use a lot of YouTube photos, like photos that I take from YouTube videos for stuff. But I don’t like to use copied images ever, ever.

Period. anybody’s want to comment on that. So imagine that 30 frames per second? How many images you could get out of a five-minute video? Yeah, yeah, some will be blurry or whatever. But imagine how many you can get up out of a video. People are you’re doing your big favor by creating YouTube video content that you can then turn into images. Yeah, and here’s a trick for that. If you go search your keyword on YouTube, then use the filters for the results. Once the results come up, use the filters and switch it to HD only anyone the age, so that will remove all the videos that you know don’t have HD but at least I think 720p.

And I always switch it to like 1080 P or whatever if available and then use what do they call it the premiere mode or whatever where theater mode or whatever where it expands and makes the video bigger. Once you make it bigger, take your screenshot. And then when you shrink the font because if it’s blurry, and once you shrink it down, it becomes less blurry, right? When you make it more to a usable size that you’re going to use in a blog post or a GMB post or something like that. When you make the screen smaller becomes sharper. Right, that makes sense. So that’s that’s just the way I do it. It works really, really well.

I never have a shortage of images is what I’m saying.

I’ve heard that we cannot put money site link into our stack anymore. Is that true? I don’t know where you heard that. Yeah.

I don’t know.

Any other questions about RYS Academy? You’re welcome to ask it in the group.

We have a Facebook group of people who have paid for the training. Yeah.

That’s funny. Look at that username.

Are you gonna say it, homosexual?

Money is cool. I got no problem with that.

Will You Release Version 2 Of Local GMB And PR Pro?

I barely solved capture. What’s up, guys? All right, Robert says I’ve already subscribed and watched local GMB and PR Pro. Well, you have version two of these tutorials, or has Google made minimum updates to GMB. I mean, there are guys, there’s no reason to redo stuff. If you know, the foundation hasn’t like, the principle hasn’t changed. The GMB dashboard really hasn’t even changed. There might be some additional services and things like that, or you know, things that you can edit within GMB. But what we teach on how to manipulate Google My Business that hasn’t changed? Not a bit. So, you know, if like, the dashboard was to change significantly, or there were some significant new things that needed to be addressed. And yeah, of course, then we just update what’s already there. Because again, the foundation part, the foundational part of the training hasn’t changed. The fundamentals haven’t changed. It’s what I’m saying.

Okay.

Can You Replicate OneDrive?

What about OneDrive? Don’t think you can replicate there as well? Yeah. I mean, as Marco always says, Why? If we can do everything that we want to do by manipulating Google Google’s own properties, why bother? I know that several people over the last few weeks have talked about starting to experiment with OneDrive, by all means, do it. Yeah. Yeah. That is No.

Does Google redirect with a steep pass with step pass with Oh, does Google redirect with step pass real PageRank? To dofollow link isn’t it?

Depends on the redirect.

He’s talking about what the redirect page in between? That’s fine. Yeah.

About 50% of it gets passed, right? Yes, somewhere, somewhere. somewhere? Less than 100. Yeah. Already greater than 85. But they’re dirt. There are two links on there. Just probably around 50, that’s passed, maybe left is Google is MGYB offering Google account verification or is that no longer possible? No, I don’t think we’re that’s been paused. All right. No, it’s not impossible. It’s happening. They’re getting. You get into a lot of problems. We’re trying to fix it. And if we ever do it, we’ll open it. And if not, then sorry, because it’s Google spamming Google and taking advantage and they try to close it up and we try to get in and it’s a cat and mouse that is just too much of a headache. And we ended up refunding a whole lot of money every time we open it up.

All right. Well, thanks to everybody for being here.

  Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 325 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[olusheyi31]

#BlackMusicMonthProfile (Day 23)(1 of 2)Earl Stevens (born November 15, 1967), better known by his stage name E-40, is an American rapper, songwriter and actor. He is a founding member of the rap group The Click, and the founder of Sick Wid It Records. He has released twenty-eight studio albums to date, appeared on numerous movie soundtracks, and has also done guest appearances on a host of other rap albums. Initially an underground artist, his 1995 solo album In a Major Way opened him up to a wider audience. Beginning in 1998, he began collaborating with more mainstream rappers outside the Bay Area. He rose to even higher mainstream popularity in 2006 with his single "Tell Me When to Go" which was produced by Lil Jon.E-40 made his rap debut in 1986, with the EP Let's Side as a member of The Click. The EP was co-produced by Mike Mosley and Al Eaton and was released on Sick Wid It Records, an independent label founded by E-40. In 1992 they released second album, Down and Dirty, and in 1993 E-40 made his solo album debut. Federal, a nine-track LP/14-track CD produced by Studio Ton and released by Sick Wid' It Records in association with SMG (Solar Music Group), a regional distributor. After a talent show at Grambling State University, the emcee and his cousin B-Legit decided to attempt a career in rap. Together, and with his sister Suga-T, they released their 1993 mainstream radio hit Captain Save a Hoe. They moved back to Vallejo and teamed up with D-Shot, E-40's brother, to form the group MVP or Most Valuable Players. E-40's gospel singing uncle (Saint Charles) helped them put out the record.In 2003, E-40 began hosting E-Feezy Radio, a weekly program on San Francisco hip-hop radio station KMEL that showcased Bay Area hip hop.On March 30, 2010, E-40 released two albums called Revenue Retrievin': Day Shift and Revenue Retrievin': Night Shift.[10] Both include guest appearances from Too Short, Snoop Dogg, Gucci Mane, Bobby V more. They debuted at numbers 47 & 49 respectively on the 200. In 2018, E-40 announced the "Definitions" album trilogy.[19] He released his twenty-fifth studio album The Gift of Gab on August 23, which was followed by his twenty-sixth studio https://www.instagram.com/p/CBxV4YBpQ-g/?igshid=r4dc7l0fdotx

[penniesforthestorm]

“You boosted a Gremlin?”: ‘Justified’ Recap, Season 1, Episodes 2-5

For those just tuning in, I have taken on the ambitious and probably foolish task of recapping the FX series Justified-- my notes on the pilot are here. I’m batching them together in order to make slightly less work for myself; we’ll see how it goes. In this first chunk of Season 1, the series is pretty clearly still finding its feet, but there’s some great stuff here. Again, I will be making connections to later material, so keep that in mind...

Episode Two: “Riverbrook”

-Raylan visits Boyd in the jail’s infirmary, and Boyd expounds on his newfound faith. It’s tempting, given what we’ve seen so far, to dismiss this ‘conversion’ as a smokescreen, but this, to me, constitutes a grave misreading of Boyd’s character. This is not someone who does things by halves.

-Raylan also picks up Dewey Crowe, to transport him back to Harlan. Despite his broken nose, Dewey appears to bear Raylan no particular ill will, and chatters on about his Florida escapades, including a stint working at Disney World. He wanted to play Goofy, but couldn’t get the hang of the Jet-Ski.

-Case of the week: a group of convicts who hire out as a band to play at parties escapes their minders, and Art tells Raylan to be on the lookout. My one complaint here is that Art refers to them as a ‘bluegrass band’-- not with a full drum kit and a resonator guitar, they aren’t, and I would expect Art to know that, but that’s just me.

-Raylan encounters the bandits at a gas station, and the elder, Cooper, dispatches his associate and takes Raylan’s guns, wallet, and hat before locking him in the storeroom. At least Raylan had time for a corny musician joke (Q. “How do you tell if there’s a shitty drummer at the door?” A. “The knock speeds up.”)

-Next morning, Art tells Raylan that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is investigating him, in light of the shooting in Miami and the incident with Boyd Crowder. “Say you’re in the first grade, and you bite a kid every week-- people might start to think of you as a biter.”

-Winona drops by to tell Raylan that he’s made Gary extremely nervous.

-As Raylan, Tim, and Rachel track down Cooper, Tim fills Raylan in on his past as a sniper in Afghanistan-- they were encouraged to make up stories about their targets to pass the time, until some got too emotionally involved. Raylan asks Tim if he was one of them, and Tim doesn’t answer.

-Raylan tells another corny joke, this time to Ava: “Know why Pentecostals don’t have sex standing up? It could lead to dancing.”

Episode Three: “Fixer”

-Art brings Raylan news that his father, Arlo Givens, has been arrested. Raylan remains uninterested.

-Case of the week: Arnold Pinter (David Eigenberg), a reluctant Brooklyn transplant, former bookie, and confidential informant may be under threat. He attempts to introduce Raylan to the delights of a chocolate egg cream, but Raylan settles for vanilla ice cream.

-Turns out, Arnold is trying to scam a lowlife named Travis Travers (license plate: TNT 6969), with the help of aspiring landscaper/enforcer Curtis Mims. 1 heads-up-- Curtis used to work for an organized crime outfit in Detroit.

-Major theme of this episode is people wanting out: Arnold wants to return to Brooklyn, Ava has ideas about Costa Rica, Raylan just wants to be anywhere other than where he is. He tells Ava that when he and Winona were young, they both swore never to come back to Kentucky.

Episode Four: “Long in the Tooth”

-We’re in LA this week, on the trail of the so-called “Crazy Dentist”, whom Raylan knew in a previous life as Rollie Pike (played by Alan Ruck). Pike escaped Raylan’s clutches in Brownsville, owing to Raylan’s unfortunate ice cream habit.

-Rachel is in charge, to make sure Raylan doesn’t make more work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In the car, Raylan clumsily tries to ingratiate himself by expressing sympathy for ‘how hard it must have been’ for Rachel to progress as far as she has, and she rightly calls him out, “Why? Because I’m black, or because I’m a woman?” 

-Rollie, with his receptionist/accomplice Mindy in tow, attempts to steal a car, and ends up trading with a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued veteran, Mr. Jones. Seeing that Mr. Jones has lost his leg, Rollie thanks him for his service. Jones replies, “I lost the leg to diabetes. But you’re welcome.”

-Raylan and Rollie have a chat, and we get our first glimpse of the Miami cartel-- two guys in a car, watching Raylan, while the older of the two talks to ‘Gio’ on the phone.

-LAPD finds Rollie’s car, driven by Mr. Jones, who has no time for cops. “I was greasing slopes in the Mekong Delta while you were still sucking your mama’s tit-tays.”

-Episode ends with a desert standoff near the border-- Rollie and Mindy (suffering the after-effects of food-truck ceviche), Raylan, the cartel flunkies, and a sniper on the other side. Rollie explains to Raylan that he wanted to become a dentist after seeing the Rankin-Bass Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer special as a kid, with the character Hermie the elf. “The little gay dude?” Raylan asks, incredulous. (My mother loves that movie, and I’ve probably watched it every year at Christmas. I went through an adolescent period of hating it, and I still would rather watch almost anything else, but it’s just One of Those Things. At least we don’t do Christmas Eve lutefisk anymore.)

Episode Five: “The Lord of War and Thunder”

-Case of the week: A stakeout; they believe a fugitive is hiding at his ex-wife’s house. Raylan decides to offer some free yard work, and the woman skeptically agrees.

-Major character introductions in Harlan: Arlo Givens (Raymond J. Barry), Raylan’s criminally-inclined estranged father, first seen breaking into a property he’s been renting out. He calls the local sheriff, Hunter Mosley (Brent Sexton), himself, and explains that the tenant, Stan Perkins, is behind on his rent.

-Raylan’s Aunt Helen (Linda Gehringer), now married to Arlo, calls and asks Raylan to come down and bail his father out of jail. She explains that she has a restraining order preventing her from going onto the premises. Raylan goes to visit Perkins, suspecting something else is going on, and Perkins hints that he is also trying to leave Kentucky.

-on a comic note, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Vasquez (Rick Gomez) brings Ava Crowder in for questioning, and has court-reporter Winona to take notes. Winona excuses herself abruptly, explaining her marriage to Raylan.

-Arlo, taking revenge on Perkins’ ‘nephews’ for threatening Helen, cites “the great Henry Aaron” before lighting into the pair of them with a baseball bat. He collapses from a heart attack, and Helen calls Raylan to the hospital.

-this week’s corny joke, courtesy of Arlo: he and his friend were being menaced by a bear, and his friend hurriedly put on sneakers. Arlo told him he couldn’t possibly outrun a bear, and his friend said, “I don’t have to be faster than the bear, I just have to be faster than you.”

-In conversation with Raylan, Arlo reflects on his own father, a Bible-thumping preacher. Rebellion, it seems, is a constant in the Givens family. When Helen comes up, Arlo asks where she was. “Down in the parking lot, giving blowjobs for cash,” she replies. “Were they paying, or were you?” Arlo fires back, not without affection.

-First appearance of Johnny Crowder (David Meunier): cousin to Boyd and Bowman, played baseball with Raylan in high school. He seems amiable enough-- he informs Raylan that Perkins is trafficking OxyContin, and passes along a warning: Bo Crowder, father of Boyd and Bowman, is due to be released from prison, and will be looking for Ava.

That’s all for now, the next installment will cover Episodes 6-9.