#sidebar cause i went back to edit other things in the post but like

[sharkieboi]

love the way I have to talk to my grandma on the phone that is simultaneously “you suck and you’re mean to my mom and also mean to the rest of the family, and you’ve also purposefully isolated yourself from a lot of our family so that’s why no one wants to answer your calls” and “I love you so much and you mean the world to me and i’m desperately trying not to make this an abandoned connection, both individually and for the family”

[phoenixyfriend]

A Smattering of Ideas for a Neji Time-Travel Fic

[EDIT: okay so viewing the post on dash or sidebar blog completely ruins the bullet nesting for some reason. Please open it in a new tab.]

Okay so I actually wrote the first chapter or two of this like... almost a decade ago probably, but the concept was:

Neji, upon dying, gets sent back, and he's perfectly healthy again, pretty much exactly as he was just before getting mokuton-stabbed... except the seal damage wasn't reversed, so he's blind.

I think he ended up like riiiiiight before the Hyuuga Incident, so about of age with Kakashi & co.

But yeah like imagine telling Hiashi about it.

We have a new Jounin! It's a blind Hyuuga.

His seal is gone! He's technically your nephew.

He needs to be retrained for blindness! He needs to be protected for the information he carries.

He's a time-traveler!

Have fun.

The Hyuuga clan has like a million things going on but future Neji is just finding his younger self and Hinata to cuddle them.

He can't see shit but he Needs To Hug Baby Hinata

She's so small? She needs to be protected?

"Sir, you're blind now." "If Lee can be a ninja without chakra, I can be a ninja without eyes." "Sir. Sir that's--that's not the same thing, you can't--SIR." "I'll ask Hatake for advice." "He's still got half of his--SIR!"

Neji is a genius, if there's anyone who can pivot their entire fighting style from "I can see everything" to "I don't need to see anything" it's someone like him. Especially with the "I need to protect all these smols and be strong enough to force people to take my advice seriously if necessary" motivation

BUT But But for the first few days, it's just like. Sir. I understand you want to protect this small child, but you walked into three walls in the past hour. Please st--sir.

Fun option is "Neji spills all the beans... to Hiashi, not the Hokage."

Hiashi: Okay so like. Give me a few days to come up with a cover story for your existence. Neji: That's fair. Hiashi: Do. Do you want me to send in Hizashi or...? Neji: I'll tell him the truth if you do. Hiashi: That's, uh... that's fine. Neji: Then yes. Please. Hiashi, thoroughly unnerved for a variety of reasons: Right. I'll go do that.

Relevant: "Stop trying to convince me to put the Caged Bird Seal on a man who is already blind."

Since that's the ostensible reasoning of the seal, and like. You can't make that argument about keeping the eyes safe when the eyes don't... work.

Courtesy of @firebirdeternal​, along with a bunch of other stuff but especially this:

ooooh feels moment: Neji starts his retraining to become Strong Enough without his eyesight, guess who sees him working his ass off to overcome a disadvantage and thinks "Oh, there's a person I should Be Friends With!"

Part of me just went "Gai gets injured on a mission and, while waiting out his medical leave, gets assigned to Neji as a guide/sparring partner"

Or, well, not assigned. He's just doing one-armed pushups in the training yard with a cast on half his limbs after breaking out of the hospital and zeros in on Neji like "Ah yes, medically inadvisable training, a Bonding Activity!"

Neji goes from "I can see everything" to "I can't see shit but if you're within arms reach you're fucked"

A lot of it comes down to Neji building up non-Byakugan sensing abilities, I think?

It won't help him read, but it'll sure help him avoid getting punched.

I think that's really the crux of his New Style, however he works it out, instead of having this Massive Range of perfect perception he just trains his other senses until he still has that perfect perception effectively, just in like a two foot radius around his person

and then he goes full Rock Lee and trains speed and reaction time until that two feet is enough

I want Daredevil-style bitchiness at some point, in the "Okay, I'm sure the contract is lovely, but do you have it in braille, perhaps?" sense

And Toph-style stuff

Genma, in the Jounin lounge: "Hey guys I think I've got a design finished for the new tattoo I'm gonna get, what do ya'll think?" 'holds up scroll' Kakashi: "Why would you get a tattoo of an ugly couch?" Genma: "It's not an ugly couch it's the Hokage Monument!" Neji: "It looks perfect to me" Genma: "Thank you! I worked really hard on-..... why do you feel the need to do these things."

Also I want Neji to have the same approach as Matt to a cane. He can make do without it, but it sure does make his life easier when he's off-duty.

Like, yes if he focuses his entire, highly trained person, on perceiving his surroundings, he can sense his way around. But that is very tiring

Like that is a lot of work to be doing, when you are just trying to get to the coffee shop for a bagel

Neji learns Sage Mode solely because he wants to be able to tree-hop again

Neji visits Kakashi like "I can't ask the Inuzuka for this because their dogs are clan-specific, but do you know where I can find a guide dog that can double as a ninken in the field?"

Neji asking Gai to help him pick out a feminine yukata because if ANYONE is going to not judge...

Listen I'm just really invested in what Naruto SD told us about how often Neji cross-dresses

Someone asked me which summons Neji learns Sage Mode from, and 

I mean, Hashirama supposedly just. Learned it? Without summons?

So maybe Neji does that and just learns from Jiraiya or something

Though it's not... particularly safe.

Birdie had the best response

learning it Without a Summon is very much in the vein of Neji's past attitudes towards Special Secret Techniques, given that he learned the Kaiten with no help even though it was a Secret Technique of the Hyuuga.

"I know it's possible to do, so the hard part is already over, the rest is just figuring it out and doing it"

Neji: I'm here, I'm queer, I'm blind as fuck.

Neji hanging out with Gai and Kakashi is, admittedly, not that different from hanging out with Lee and TenTen

Kakashi is a bit more likely to join in on the shenanigans than Tenten was, but he's still just as available for "We're judging you" sessions

Neji, sipping tea as Gai yells: this is my comfort zone.

Neji with a white cane: This is my whacking stick. Hiashi: Don't you mean walking stick? Neji: No.

Because... what ninja wouldn't ensure that any normal part of their daily life was fit for battle.

Like if Karin can hide lockpicks in a photo and a knife in her glasses, Neji can ensure his white cane is suitable for battle.

(Going off the earlier Daredevil comparisons, I’d say this is similar to Matt turning his cane into billy clubs sometimes.)

Neji, assuming the role of Chief Babysitter for SmolNeji and Hinata, senses Lee and Tenten at the park. Nudges SmolNeji: "Go, be friends with them"

SmolNeji, watching Lee faceplant into the dirt while trying to jump off the swing while Tenten chases two boys around with a weird frog she found: ".... why"

Neji: "Just trust me"

Also consider older Neji giving baby Hinata shoulder rides

Baby Hinata is delighted by this whole affair.

More time with big brother, and a new even bigger brother? Best times.

Bigger brother needs help reading sometimes and Hinata is so excited to help. Hiashi even approves because helping older Neji read things like menus and the like is helping Hinata learn how to read, so it benefits everyone.

Consider also: Neji encouraging the smols to play with bby Naruto, a Hyuuga elder (or possibly Hiashi, but I want him to be a confused accomplice) complains exactly once and Neji exudes such a powerful "Do not test me" energy that he just kind of. Drops it.

Neji's attitude towards baby Naruto is somewhere between "They're good dogs Brent" and "I died for him once already, do you think I'd hesitate to kill?" and it depends entirely on how seriously he thinks you're talking shit about him

Neji plays with the smols, including smol Naruto, by just being the Perfect Straight Man. Just taking every nonsense thing Naruto says Completely Seriously and using deadpan reactions to chaos to make them giggle. This drifts into Feels for Naruto when he's the first adult who takes his "I'm gonna be the Hokage" completely seriously

"Of course, chibi-Hokage-sama"

Hiashi: "What.... are you.... doing?" Neji: "Ah, Hiashi-sama. Please exercise caution, the floor has mysteriously transformed into molten rock. I suspect enemy action, but have no further intelligence at this time" SmolNeji, Hinata, and Naruto: 'wild giggling as they dangle from rafters/stand balanced precariously on chairs'

Hiashi takes one step into the room and all the kids start screaming so loud he steps back out in shock

Neji out in Konoha just Causing Shit with plausible deniability

Listen. Neji is PETTY.

Someone describes Naruto as "the annoying blonde child with the whiskers, you know, the skin brat" and Neji says "I'm a sensor and have encountered no demonic chakra"

"okay just avoid the blonde kid with the whiskers"

"I don't know how to tell you this..." 

"Sir, I know you're new in town, but that kid isn't really good news--" "A child can't be news unless they're recently born." "No, I mean, didn't anyone tell you to avoid the blonde kid with the whiskers?" "Naruto's blonde?"

Possibly "Hinata's blonde?"

He just, aggressively misunderstands that any insinuation about Naruto is about the Hyuuga heir instead

Birdie said they like the idea that he uses the aggressive deliberate misunderstanding to force people to either be embarrassed by how they're acting by having to spell it out or give up in quieter shame

Sometimes Neji gets tired of being obtuse and just lets Gai do it for him

Gai babysits on occasion, SmolNeji is aghast, Hinata mostly just confused, Naruto is delighted

Naruto is just Stars In Eyes about Gai

Kakashi: this is not the excuse I expected to have for visiting Naruto but I'm taking it

[bunchofbooks]

It’s Time for Kyrsten’s Opinion: Flowers in the Attic Review Edition

Flowers in the Attic is the first book in the Dollanganger series but VC Andrews. It follows the Dollanganger family; the four children, Chris, Cathy, Carrie, Cory and their mother, Corrine. They were a perfect family, until their father is suddenly killed in a car accident on the way home from work one evening. The four children must stay hidden in the attic of their estranged grandparent’s estate for the sake of inheritance. Their mother assures them this is only temporary - one night at most; but the days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. And the months turned into years with no glimmer of escape. 

While this book was a really enjoyable read it was also a really heavy read. Under the cut I have posted a spoiler free review of the book, with my thoughts and opinions including content warnings.

Before I even start getting into the review I wanted to jump right into the content warning. A quick sidebar, I first heard about VC Andrews through the podcast, My Favorite Murder. The women who host it were talking about reading this book in middle school and high school, I thought that it can’t be too bad if they read it when they were that young. The woman who was ringing me up at the store when I bought it also said she read it when she was in middle school and said it was intense, but that she was a baby so it probably wasn’t that bad. I just want to know WHERE WERE THEIR PARENTS?!?! This book needs a lot of content warnings and I’m hoping that I cover all of them here even if I don’t get into all of them in the review. Content warning for: death of a parent, abuse / neglect, self - mutilation, incest (holy incest Batman), suicidal thoughts, victim blaming, and death of a child. 

The estranged grandmother is a vile woman who is abusive and neglectful of her grandchildren. She dangles the threat over the children and Corrine that all she has to do is tell one of their maids that Corrine has 4 children from her marriage and they can kiss that inheritance goodbye. The neglect seems obvious, these kids are locked in an attic 24/7, in the dead of summer and on the coldest nights during the winter, but she also at points is angry with the children and refuses to bring them food because they broke one of her many rules. One part in particular that sticks out to me is when she tells Cathy she can either cut all of her hair off or they can go one week without food. When Cathy does not agree and the kids are able to ration what little food they have left for the entire week, she drugs Cathy and dumps tar in her hair so she must shave it off; and even after she cuts off her hair, the grandmother still does not bring the children food.The children become so hungry that Chris cuts his arm and forces his younger sisters and brother to drink his blood (insert my screaming here). The grandmother whips her adult daughter and then makes her show the marks left to her young children so they see what she is capable of. The grandmother attacks Chris and Cathy, whipping them both and then beating Cathy until she is unconscious with a hair brush. 

 However, the grandmother is not the only culprit here. Corrine, while she starts out as being loyal to her children, starts coming up to the attic less and less once she starts getting some money from her father, leaving them to fend for themselves. At one point she leaves for days, not telling her children where she is going or when she will be back. When she does come back she does not understand why her children are not excited she had been on a trip nor do they want to hear about it or see what she has brought back for them. Corrine gaslights her children, saying that they chose to come with her. They chose to make these sacrifices of staying in an attic all this time. They chose this life for themselves. As if they had a choice in the matter at all. Corrine then leaves them in the attic. . . again. 

The children are told by Corrine that they must only stay in the attic for one night, until she can get back into the good graces of her estranged father so they can get the inheritance. The children ask what she did to make her family disowned her out the way they did and for a little bit, all Corrine will tell her kids is that she did something that her family did not approve of. Instantly I’m thinking, oh she stole money, she ran off and got married, she got pregnant before she was married. It takes place in the 1950’s so while that isn’t the end of the world today, I can see how an affluent family would want to keep that out of the public to save face. NOPE I WAS VERY WRONG! I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE WRONG ABOUT SOMETHING IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! The mother was disowned by her family because she was in a relationship with her father’s step brother - or her half uncle - but don’t worry no one else thinks it’s wrong (except for the grandmother and grandfather who are painted to be the villains in all of this)  because he was so much younger than Corrine’s father and they were only half siblings. Have no fear though, because this is not the only instance of incest that we get to read about in Flowers in the Attic! Cathy - who narrates the story - and her older brother, Chris, begin a relationship. Which somehow goes from creepy to creepier. Cathy catches Chris spying on her when she is naked. Even more concerning was during the same scene, Cathy tells Chris to go away and he ignores her to keep staring at his sister. When Chris and Cathy are kissing in bed, Cathy tells Chris to stop and he says that what they are doing is not wrong, because they are only kissing and not having sex. . . However Chris your thinking is flawed because they do have sex, which will be brought up at my next therapy appointment and every therapy appointment from now until my dying day. While it is not a long scene, it is certainly graphic and more brother / sister sex scenes than I ever wanted to read. After they have sex, Chris is saying how he feels awful for what they did and Cathy says that she is to blame because she wears short clothes that don’t fit. If this were a youtube video this is the point I would insert the clip of someone screaming bitch what the fuck. 

Flowers in the Attic,  while definitely one of the most intense books I have ever read was enjoyable. There were aspects of it that I thought were amazing. VC Andrews was able to make it feel like I was in Foxworth Hall with the Dollanganger children in the attic and could make me feel claustrophobic even if I was reading outside or on a train. You really felt like time was ticking by and you were also waiting for the grandmother to catch you doing something wrong (not quite having sex with your brother, maybe something a little less. . . weird, like looking at your hair in the mirror, which is in fact a rule that the grandmother has because we don’t promote vanity. No sir, not at Foxworth Hall). VC Andrews would drop it on you like a bomb that all of this time had passed, the seasons bled into one another flawlessly. She would have one of the children say something, for instance, “sometimes eight months can feel like eight years”, and it hits you like a ton of bricks that it has been eight months since they first entered that attic, while also dropping that they should have been there only for one night. 

Another thing that I loved was how much VC Andrews made me hate Corrine. Corrine Dollanganger is truly one of the most awful fictional parents I have read, but she isn’t instantly an awful person. At the beginning she is a wonderful mother who I genuinely believe would have done anything for her children. However, slowly VC Andrews would peel back these layers and show how having this money corrupted Corrine. Some of her finer moments include asking her 14 and 12 year old to provide a quality kindergarten education to her five year old twins so when they went back to school they wouldn’t be too far behind. Ma’am your children are literally  living in an attic they’re going to have much bigger issues other than being behind in school. When the youngest son, Cory accidentally locks himself in a trunk, she is nowhere to be seen nor does she want to hear it, but she acts like mother of the year because she brings toys to the kids. However, the most infuriating thing about Corrine is how she causes so many fights among the children. Cathy tries to point out how messed up their situation is, but Chris does not want to hear about it and jumps to defend the mother who couldn't care less about him. Cathy at the age of twelve was left taking care of herself, including going through puberty, and her five year old brother and sister and Corrine would get all of the praise from the children when she came in to do the bare minimum! I would get so angry with this fictional woman! 

The last fifty pages were absolutely wild. There were so many surprises twists that I did not see coming! Sometimes when books have all of these twists at the end I’m like, yeah okay let’s speed this along, but with Flowers in the Attic I could not get enough. I was caught off guard but it didn’t feel like it was phony in any way. I was sitting in the living room reading and I gasped and was freaking out about the ending. 

My biggest complaint about the book would be the dialogue, specifically Chris. It was completely unrealistic for anyone to speak like that, even more so a seventeen year old boy. The children would talk in these elaborate metaphors and seem so worldly when Cathy says before that they lived a pretty sheltered life prior to the attic. Chris would say things to the twins like we shouldn’t quibble, as if they would know what that means?! Just say fight Christopher! At another part he is in a fight with his mother who had left them in an attic and says, “when you look and register do you see how healthy they have grown”. This is a direct quote that comes out of a child’s mouth. I understand that he was smart and read all of these books about medicine, but his dialogue specifically is what stuck out to me as unrealistic. Had VC Andrews ever met a 17 year old boy? Overall he just seemed like an unrealistic character. He kind of felt like he was there to be this convenient character that could fix almost every problem they came across. Cory and Carrie wanted a playground? Oh wow Chris comes in and saves the day because he knows exactly how to build one. . . in an attic. . . where they are living. Cathy is sick? Oh well Chris just read this book about childhood illnesses, they just have to make sure he gets plenty of fluids. Cory wants to keep this mouse that he found with its leg caught in a trap? That’s awesome because Chris can conveniently make a mouse sized splint for a little mouse leg. 

Overall, I really did enjoy my time reading this book. I have some theories about the rest of the series and am interested to see how the rest plays out. 

Would I recommend this book? Yes, but I would be sure to let someone know the content warnings. I would not recommend this book to someone in middle school or early high school. It was a lot. 

Will I keep reading the series? Definitely! 

[shadowofthelamp]

Can I get a basic run down of each of your au’s? It’s really hard to keep track and I wanna understand what people are talking about

*cracks knuckles* Alright, let’s do this. I’ll probably just link this in my sidebar at this point, because these are getting built up pretty rapidfire and if you aren’t on tumblr as much as I am you’re pretty liable to miss something.

Now with tag links, going chronologically so you can catch up if you want to! Some of them have a lot of posts, though, just as a warning.

-Time AU: The original. Twix is accidentally sent back in time- why is still a bit fuzzy but I think it involves the Voot malfunctioning when a time machine is installed. She runs into Dib when rummaging around in the basement lab in his house for parts, and lets it slip that she’s his daughter from the future. Her skin is just not-green enough to slip past his radar, and a DNA text confirms that she is in fact related to him, but her lips are sealed about who her other parent is. 

She needs to break into Zim’s base to get the necessary tools to finish fixing the Voot to go back home, and Dib assumes she wants to expose Zim like she does, so she has to keep on his good side to get what she needs. It’s weird to say the least, seeing her parents fighting and Dib as a kid- especially since Zim looks basically the same.

After she finally fixes the Voot, it starts jumping through alternate dimensions before she finally makes it home, and she meets several alternate versions of herself. 

The tag needs to be cleaned up on this one- it was the first au and has scattered posts of the others still in it but it’s going to take a while to edit down to the individual ones, fair warning.

-Tallest AU: Zim is “co-Tallest” with Tak, and Dib is a rebel fighter trying to take down the empire- sort of a bounty hunter on the side too. Twix is created during a fight when Zim tries to rip Dib’s throat out with his teeth, as you do. Zim is yanked out of public view while pregnant- can’t let the Empire know one of the Tallests has a defect that allows him to reproduce naturally. When he comes back, Twix is declared an experiment of his to create an heir with alien DNA to help her be taller, stronger, and more resilient. She’s kind of a spoiled brat in this one, and has absolutely no idea who Dib is. 

When she’s about 12, Dib as a bounty hunter was enlisted to kidnap her in an attempt to rile up Zim and get rid of his heir in one fell swoops, having no idea that she’s his daughter. Eventually, that’s discovered, and she slowly learns what life is like for everyone who isn’t her, while Dib learns to be a parent and care for her instead of having to just rely on himself all the time. Things are pretty tense at first, though.

Eventually, after Zim gets her back, she’s injured during a fight and Zim and Dib make a reluctant truce while she heals, eventually becoming sort of ‘rivals with benefits’- Zim won’t kill him if he’s captured, and Dib won’t take headshots. Dib also gets a collar so he can walk around the Massive without somebody sniping his head off, although he’s very grumpy about this.

Eventually, Dib manages to convince Zim that he’s nothing more than a mascot for the empire, there to blow shit up to show their power. (Tak is the real leader, Zim doesn’t really have the power he thinks he does, and Tak was brought in as co-Tallest to do most of the real ruling and give an air of competence, with the Control Brains doing the rest.) This takes ages, and involves Zim being so deep in denial he literally shoots Dib in the leg to get him to shut up, but it needles at him until he accepts it. Needless to say, pisses him off. They run off together, something Tak’s actually pretty happy about because she figures he’ll just die without the protection being a Tallest gives him. Twix comes with them, and start causing problems for the Empire wherever they can.

Dib gets a robot arm at one point, we haven’t 100% decided on how, and they end up having a second kid, a boy named Kit. (Kit Kat. Thank the discord for that one.)

-WLOD AU: Based on the alternate future in Dib’s Wonderful Life of Doom. Dib is the villain in this one- Twix was made when Zim attempted to escape captivity and bit Dib in the process. She’s kind of a nervous, timid wreck, and Zim is incredibly protective of her. She doesn’t see the world outside of the lab until main!Twix stumbles across this world and helps break her and Zim out, bringing them to her reality and asking Membrane to help her ‘cousins’. They end up settled somewhere else. (She ends up good friends with Moth!Twix.)

The running joke with this one is if the other Dibs meet this guy they just beat the crap out of him.

When Twix eventually dies of health complications from being experimented on, Zim pretty much snaps. He goes back to his home dimension and burns down everything even remotely related to Earth and Dib and ends up conquering the Empire, his grief giving him laser focus and allowing him to work past his defects. He goes on pretty much on a multi-decade rampage, twice as ruthless as anyone else and blowing up planets with ease. One day, though, while he’s with the ground troops he sees a scared child who was orphaned by his attacks and sort of snaps back to himself. He ends up adopting them, and several others in an attempt to atone for himself. He trains them up, fully expecting one of them to end up killing him when they find out he was the one that orphaned them, but when they find out about Twix they tend to just leave over killing him.

He ends up dying near her grave of illness/old age.

-Human AU: This one’s gotten revamped. The old one is after the line, to explain the old fanart in that tag. (I… never really liked this one as much as the others because it didn’t feel Zim-like to me and Dib was barely a presence- and he was barely himself too.)

Honestly this one is still a bit of a joke, but Zim’s got a more mad-scientist edge to him, primarily with strange toys, furbies in particular. He makes lots of them and their house is overrun- Twix has no idea it isn’t normal. He enjoys making people squirm with his creations and ends up having a bit of a rivalry with Swap Zim.

______

Old version: Zim and Dib were both sort of academic rivals at school, but ended up paired together for a science pair project and became friends. They’re roommates at college and begin dating, and Twix just comes from a regular old broken condom, oops. Zim was kind of a party animal but cuts back for her sake. His water actually breaks during an important exam but he insists on finishing it, despite Dib’s blood pressure going up about 500%. Zim’s a Bio major, I haven’t really settled on Dib yet. Zim ends up working at Membrane Labs, though. 

Zim’s also a big fan of musical theater, and gets roped into subbing in as Billy Flynn on the campus production of Chicago while four months pregnant. Gir is his younger brother and currently in high school.

-Irken AU: This one’s set a bit earlier in the timeline, when Zim was still working at the labs for military research. (See the canceled episode The Trial.) He met Dib there, and at one point they ended up locked in for a whole weekend on accident. At one point they got into a fight, one thing led to another, and Zim ended up pregnant. He only found out when he started getting sick and went to the hospital. The problem? That’s a defect that hasn’t happened in a long time- he’s whisked to the Control Brains, labeled defective in both mind and body, and sent off to Foodcourtia so no one has to deal with him.

When Dib finds out, he steals a ship and goes to rescue him. Zim is completely miserable, exhausted, overworked, and all around pissed this is happening. He lashes out at Dib for doing this to him before completely collapsing since his body hasn’t gotten a chance to rest in too long, and his instincts tell him that Dib is safe because he’s the other parent. Gir is a malfunctioning food service drone that snuck aboard the ship. They have to figure out what’s going on because this kind of thing hasn’t happened in centuries.

Dib was initially only interested in studying Zim because of the rarity of natural-born smeets, but as time goes on they end up getting closer, especially because Zim gets clingy as time goes on. There are two endings to this one- either they keep wandering around space, or they end up on Earth since it’s uncharted and no one will bug them there. Twix comes from an egg and has three siblings (possibly more) in this one!

-Pilot AU: Related to the Time AU- while jumping around, she gets stuck in the pilot universe. She very much doesn’t like it, especially since Dib starts stalking her instead. When he finds out she’s his daughter, he gets even more obsessive about how and why she came back, and she has to escape him to keep going home.

-Adoption AU: This is the angstfest one kicked off by a particular anon- Zim has a miscarriage, but at some point afterwards when Twix is jumping through the multiverse, she runs into them. After realizing what happened, she finds a version of herself that lost both of her parents and brings her to meet the ones that never had her, and they’re all happy.

-Zimvoid AU: Twix lands in the Zimvoid from the few most recent comics. Not a lot of plot to this one, it’s just fun to imagine. The Zims meeting after Twix is born is under PZA Au, and the Dibs meeting is ‘Meet me in the dibpit’ which is the best tag out of all of these lmao

-Species Swap AU: Dib is, similar to in the irken au, there to study local flora and find uses for them. Gaz is the invader, sent here for her catastrophic body count on every other mission she’s had. She finds out Earth has good games and is just ‘eh, whatever’ and basically puts the mission on hold, letting Dib start stalking the one human that truly interests him- Zim. He’s almost irken-like, and clearly incredibly intelligent- and destructive!

I made a whole plot explanation for this one here.

Dib is actually the one to have her in this au. It’s also a running joke and I’m heavily considering making it canon that this Zim is the one that actually succeeds in taking over the world.

-Mothman AU: Dib is an actual mothman, and so is his family. Variation on this one: One has irken Zim, one has human Zim. Other Dibs find this version of Dib hot. Twix is raised in the woods and her only real friends are her parents, Gir, and Tulip. (Keef’s adopted daughter.)

In the irken au, Zim is actually accepted relatively fast by Membrane who thinks he’s just a strange, stunted moth. After having Twix he ends up growing wings and neck fluff because mothmen are actually a very distant cousin of irkens that diverged millions of years ago, and carrying Dib’s kid kickstarted the process. He also dies for like two minutes because giving birth to an egg a third of your size really sucks. (He’s fine, once Dib got him to the recharging chamber he woke back up when his Pak reactivated him, he was just really low on charge after a birth lasting like two days.)

In the human au, he’s not so lucky- Dib has to keep his relationship a secret, and Membrane only finds out when he sees Zim, already pregnant. Dib gets into a big fight with him because humans killed his mom and Membrane is pissed he’d get into a relationship with one. Things do end up working out eventually, once Twix is born Membrane is fascinated by her, but tensions are still pretty high for a while. Earlier in this version, Zim actually found out he was pregnant when he gets accidentally shot by someone who was aiming at Dib and had to go to the hospital and they took a pregnancy test before doing the x-ray. (In all aus where Zim is human, including swap, he’s a trans guy, and this one is set in the 1970′s/80′s. He ran away to live in the woods for a reason.)

-SU AU: Steven Universe AU! This one’s covering most of the plot of Steven Universe up to this point, so it got long. Link here. (For the aesthetic, think more Gravity Falls and late over early SU: Deep woods and dark colors.)

-Capture AU: A sort of flip of the WLOD au. Zim wins and keeps Dib prisoner, although he enjoys riling him up so Dib is much more of a firecracker than WLOD Zim is. Zim gets the itching feeling he’s missing something and uses a blood sample from Dib to get himself pregnant, but he realizes he can’t raise the kid alone without killing her (and plays it off as making Dib help with something he’s made it clear he hates) so he lets Dib out but on a very tight leash. This one is definitely on the darker end.

-Scandal AU: Zim is Tallest, Dib is an irken scientist. They ‘grew up’ together but Zim shot up and forgot about Dib because- well, his memory’s canonically pretty garbage and besides he often misremembers things anyway. Dib is hauled in front of him for causing problems at the labs like letting the specimens free because he hates his coworkers, and they just kept shoving him at successively more important people because he managed to keep slipping away before being fully punished and it ends up getting all the way to the Tallest.

Dib gets pissy at Zim because he’s expecting to get thrown out the airlock or whatever, before realizing just how terrible of an idea that is and that Zim could do something a lot worse. Mostly he’s just mad that Zim left him behind, but Zim, who only has faint inklings of Dib being familiar, decides to keep him around on basically a whim.

Things evolve from there, with Zim doting over his new ‘toy’ who treats him like an equal (which he didn’t realize he wanted, because duh, he’s the Tallest, why would he want to be anything other than shallowly worshipped?) while Dib has to walk the VERY careful tightrope of staying alive by not pissing Zim off while also not rolling over completely and betraying himself. (And that might lose Zim’s interest as well.) Things get even messier when oops, there’s eggs now.

-Treasure Planet AU: What it says on the tin, an au based off the movie Treasure Planet! Plot summary here, AU mostly belongs to @64bit-trash and @yeehawimscared.

-Dibbrane AU: Dib turns out to be a much better clone of his father and doesn’t realize that Zim is an alien. Zim ends up getting attatched to him because he takes him seriously as a fellow scientist and genuinely enjoys his company, and eventually they get married- all without Dib finding out what he really is. Twix ends up more like show-Dib, determined to prove to the world that there’s a world hidden underneath their own, and Zim ends up her ‘alien rival’ in order to train her. She doesn’t realize she’s half-alien… yet. Fuller synopsis here.

-Amnesia AU: Zim was a personal pet project of Tallest Miyuki’s, and treated him as a son, planning to raise him to succeed her, taking down the heightarchy in the process. She ends up assassinated by Red and Purple in an attempt to get enough power to laze around for the rest of their lives, and Zim is blamed for it. A lot of irkens are bitter and jealous for the attention he got, especially for someone so short, so it’s easy enough to do. 

While imprisoned, he tore up his Pak in an attempt to get rid of the grief and trauma of seeing his mother dead and ended up more defective, having mostly forgotten who he was before. The timeline ‘syncs up’ with iz show canon. He crashes OID2 and gets sent to Earth, and over the years enters a relationship with Dib and gets pregnant. When that’s discovered, he gets pulled back and his memory is wiped again, and when the baby is born, she’s taken away to see if they can shape her into a soldier.

Zim is used for more tests and Skoodge tries to help him, and ‘Brid’ is shuffled between career tracts before being sent out with the soldiers while still 11- practically a smeet. She meets Dib, who’s been looking for both Zim and his lost child. She promises to take him to Zim, but is going to try and bring him as a new species of alien to her superiors to get brownie points because she’s treated kind of like shit by the other trainees for being such a freak. (She always wears a helmet to cover her nose and hair.)

Eventually their paths cross as they get arrested and thrown into a cell near Zim’s, but Zim doesn’t realize he’s even got a daughter, much less this one, so there’s a while to figure things out.

All this time, Miyuki uploaded herself before her death into a side control brain that only Skoodge knows, and they stumble across her, and she helps fill in the gaps.

Aaaaaand I’ll go back and add more to this post if we get more, if I forgot one feel free to tell me.

[shinelikethunder]

This is a horrifically long post already and I’m about to make it longer, but this is a fascinating glitch and I managed to dig up more details and a possible explanation. The tl;dr version: Post is from October 2016, OP edited the image in November 2016, and even on desktop, the photoset URLs are original but the image permalink uses the edited version.

So desktop and mobile may be looking at different bits of the same data, rather than talking to separate data sources that contradict each other. The upshot is the same (*points up at previous reblogs*); the difference is mainly in how egregious a technical disaster it implies. As it happens, I love rubbernecking all the ways Tumblr is a shambling mess, so you guys get gory details.

First source of details: Desktop Tumblr has a “Reblog Graphs” feature you can opt into if you enable experimental features. For whatever reason (probably so it can build the graph from the beginning instead of scrolling back through notes), Reblog Graphs has access to the root post even though it was deleted... including its tags:

#greek mythology #tagamemnon #rape tw #edit on 11/3: the wiki page was updated with less ambiguous language about what poseidon did #so i have updated this post accordingly

Reblog Graphs also shows the first hop’s worth of reblogs, people who got it directly from the OP, and those are dated October 26, 2016.

So we have triple confirmation that the glitch isn’t from some baroque variation on “edited reblog + deleted root post,” it’s from the OP editing the image on a photo post that already had some reblog chains floating around. (And hell, I needed triple confirmation before ruling out the first possibility, because Tumblr’s data is super extra-garbage specifically in the case of old posts with edited reblogs or a missing/renamed OP.) Confirmation #1: OP’s tags. Confirmation #2: Even in the days of editable blockquotes, rebloggers could generally (barring weird bugs) only edit the commentary, not the image of a photo post. Confirmation #3: Editable reblogs went away in 2015, and the first wave of reblogs on this post is from a year later.

Okay. So what gives? Well, if you’re a total nerd, you can dig around in the actual machine-readable data that Desktop Tumblr crunches when it loads more posts on the fly. I used Firefox’s developer tools to spy on my own network chatter as I opened up the post I’m reblogging from in the in-dash sidebar, and lo and behold, buried in the post data:

"image_permalink": "https://ruffboijuliaburnsides.tumblr.com/image/190795384947", "photos": [ { "original_size": { "url": "https://66.media.tumblr.com/fb1421e411a2e199bc95ae0cba0a49d3/tumblr_ofnofabhcE1ue441bo1_1280.jpg" ...

The image permalink leads to a page that shows the post-edit image (https://66.media.tumblr.com/57795969ba3e4feb831c2d922ff23ca0/tumblr_ofnofabhcE1ue441bo1_r2_1280.jpg), even though it’s under the reblogger’s URL. The actual photoset data still references the original.

Now, it’s possible the desktop and mobile versions of Tumblr are talking to different data sources that contradict each other, which would indicate an infrastructural clusterfuck that’s impressive even by Tumblr standards. But it’s also possible, and more likely, that photosets and image permalinks are defined slightly differently and reference slightly different things, and desktop and mobile are looking at different parts of the same data because nobody realized this exact combination of circumstances would result in franken-posts like this one.

(Note #1: The first reblog with screenshots of the discrepancy is from January 16, 2020, meaning it’s unlikely that this is some caching glitch caused by the current mid-February server migration.)

(Note #2: Yes, it is still bad that desktop and mobile show different versions of the same post, and that OP’s edit can retroactively affect some aspects of pre-edit reblogs. Tumblr took away editable reblogs for a reason, y’all. I hope they fix this bug before someone uses it maliciously.)

(Note #3: I have zero insider view into Tumblr’s workings and haven’t even examined what the mobile app is doing. This is all conjecture and morbid curiosity.)

shout out to my fave under-appreciated unbreakable transgender hero

[thepapersim]

Tumblr Theme help 101

 This post is for @georgiaglm , everybody else feel free to ignore it! (:

Note: I reconstructed your code by extracting the source of your Tumblr webpage, so it looks different than in the Tumblr editor.

PHOTOBUCKET: You’ve uploaded your picture with Photobucket. Recently Photobucket changed their policies, and now 3rd party hosting (uploading your picture to Photobucket and then posting it somewhere else) is a paid service. Accounts that do not pay for that package, have all their pictures replaced with this image.

Some accounts already suffer from this, other accounts (like mine) haven’t yet. It seems yours hasn’t either, but there is a chance your avatar (and other images) may end up like this anyway. However, this is not a pressing matter yet as it still works - just a heads up.

AVATAR LINKING TO PHOTOBUCKET: Right now, when someone clicks on your avatar they get sent to your Photobucket. This is because of a piece of code you probably copied from Photobucket.

The lines highlighted in red can be safely deleted to delete the linking. There is also an option to make your avatar link back to your blog’s homepage.

By replacing the line in orange with ‘ http://georgiaglm.tumblr.com/ ‘ you can make your avatar link back to your homepage, or refresh your homepage if they’re already there.

UNEVEN SIDEBAR: The reason your avatar picture on your sidebar looks uneven is because of margins, best explained with a picture.

The sidebar is 150 pixels wide. 2 pixels (on each side) are the grey border/shadow which leaves us with 148 pixels of sidebar (the green + the blue).

The green is the margin - an area where nothing is allowed to be. Note how the test and icons stay inside the blue? That’s the ‘working space’.

The picture (being 150 x 150 pixels) is too wide, that’s why it pops out at the right side. But the left and top sides are still aligned with the blue.

So in order to be centered, the image needs to fit into the blue (on the first pic). To do so, if must be 118 pixels wide. The height can stay the same. I found out by code, but the math says the same: 150 - 2 (border) - 30 (2 times 15 margin) = 118.

I checked for you in photoshop, and you should be able to crop the picture to 118 pixels width without much problem!

GAME ICONS: This is an easy to fix problem. <br /> is html-code for ‘enter’. After every image there is a <br /> (or break) which causes them all to go under eachother. 

So all these red breaks and more can be deleted in order for everything to be next to eachother instead of what it is now. However, because I like to overdo things, I’ve already edited the code for you so you can just paste it over the original.

<!-- TS4 Original --> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/64f514141ca64e9f8a065b0b1ea04ef7/tumblr_inline_ojr8orgCoO1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="TS3 Original" title="TS4 Original" width="20px"> <!-- TS4 Expansion Packs --> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/c1fbfcdd59eafe48a3199d4b1a41b0e3/tumblr_inline_ojr821odh91qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Get to Work" title="Get to Work" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/b0cf8f12c22f80771a795ce206c27057/tumblr_inline_ojrfduNBLL1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Get Together" title="Get Together" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/d99a850cfc6e20eb9f49c0838985e9f3/tumblr_inline_ojrfdzGKln1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="City Living" title="City Living" width="20px"> <!-- TS4 Game Packs --> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/734a46e88cfa332de1085331c9fe11b8/tumblr_inline_ojr8ph7B0X1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Outdoor Retreat" title="Outdoor Retreat" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/1c841fca9f651755518f5ac2a54db5d1/tumblr_inline_ojr8pnEmVO1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Spa Day" title="Spa Day" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/f28f64b1a5b57376bd676037bf6536af/tumblr_inline_o871tfFKvp1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Dine Out" title="Dine Out" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/3ee8dc1cfca13fd8b65ae5b2a220ec34/tumblr_inline_ojr8744MWk1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Vampires" title="Vampires" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/539c4ec10e8c3c4d3679954a83efdc09/tumblr_inline_oqtu9qvguV1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Parenthood" title="Parenthood" width="20px"> <!-- TS4 Stuff Packs --> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/b086a498cb50b31004b59fc8b6318f1a/tumblr_inline_ojr8r1R5ds1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Luxury Party" title="Luxury Party" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/cbe0d632e3574832dd4682975ffaed33/tumblr_inline_ojr8r9kcBx1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Perfect Patio" title="Perfect Patio" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/942b19a3ebe662a70adab76883ee919c/tumblr_inline_ojr8rizcVw1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Cool Kitchen" title="Cool Kitchen" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/dbd529523c81b7131ed0ca0b52f01cf3/tumblr_inline_ojr8weJhbN1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Spooky Stuff" title="Spooky Stuff" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/ad6916d146d4980ea5c2b003c3990a24/tumblr_inline_ojr8tcXF8L1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Movie Hangout" title="Movie Hangout" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/feff80dcff4b529563d143f966c3bb0a/tumblr_inline_ojr8tlL0vC1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Romantic Garden" title="Romantic Garden" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/9ff3d7e810cdcd617a69fd5a3575bf00/tumblr_inline_ojr82qBJfA1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Kids Room" title="Kids Room" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/36d4b19325db348db5aeafc056a5745c/tumblr_inline_oabewr3RLH1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Backyard" title="Backyard" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/6fc3763bf20acf22d5971049e9642e2a/tumblr_inline_ohsdn0Ypf01qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Vintage Glamour" title="Vintage Glamour" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/3337c97cbc2fa22f8ae59e8492edc9c2/tumblr_inline_onmr2g5B5U1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Bowling Night" title="Bowling Night" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/778776a15f230e59ddebbfe1aa1f8c7e/tumblr_inline_orsyb8cAGN1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Fitness" title="Fitness" width="20px"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/2aeff5cda31b1a9aac50e4ae39e8d18a/tumblr_inline_ov3wrrhiWZ1qkgiz5_500.png" border="0" alt="Toddler" title="Toddler" width="20px">

When you do so, be sure to only past it over the things I edited. So, make sure you start with <!-- TS4 Original --> and end your selection at title=“Toddler” width=“20px”> then CTRL+V paste this code over it.

I hope this covers everything, and I hope you can make sense of it! ^-^’ If you need any more help or if you don’t understand something/something went wrong, I’ll be here!

MISSING FOLLOW BUTTON

Okay, so this is something very much out of my league. My friend who studies software engineering (and knows more about code than I ever will) couldn’t find the actual problem, and this was something I literally didn’t know how to fix.

HOWEVER!

I don’t like giving up when trying to help people, so I googled, and googled, and googled until I found a Tumblr-post by another blog who had a fix for it! :D (I have sent them a personal thank you for providing this fix)

The problem wasn’t your fault at all, it was present in the original code you downloaded all along. As you can see here (http://roxiespreviews.tumblr.com/theme58) the theme preview doesn’t have a follow button either. I pasted the code into a sideblog of mine, and had the same problem.

SOLUTION: First, let me explain what the Z-Index is (from what I learnt today). It’s a method to stack layers. If something has a ‘Z-Index:3‘, it will appear in front of anything on the same spot with ‘Z-Index:1‘ or ‘Z-Index:2‘. The higher the number, the more in front it appears.

What the theme-creator did, is make all the Z-Index be something like “Z-Index:99999” or “Z-Index:9999999” even. Because of that they went over a limit (I think) and just disappeared. So what the person from the fix suggested was changing all those Z-Index:999999′s into numbers between 1 and 10. That way, they won’t hit the limit but still be in the right order.

I changed their values to the number of 9′s there were at the beginning. So ‘Z-Index:99999’ turns into ‘Z-Index:5’, etc.

Now comes the more difficult part, where you’ll have to change those digits yourself. I hope I made it clear enough!

STEP 1: Go to the HTML page when customizing your theme. This is where you pasted the code before. Scroll to the top and click somewhere at the top so your cursor will be on that line.

STEP 2: Press CTRL+F and the search bar will open. Enter “Z-Index” into the search bar. It should jump to somewhere in the middle of the code.

STEP 3: Now you have to manually go to every ‘Z-Index’ and change the values. I’ve made a before and after picture of every situation, so you know exactly where and when to do what.

You can move to the next ‘Z-Index’ by clicking the downward arrow. If your screen doesn’t move to the next ‘Z-Index’ while you clicked the arrow, could be it did move to the next one but it is in the same view. Try looking at the bottom of the screen if you can see it.

Here is everything I changed to make it work, from top to bottom, so you can check if you missed anything.

CHANGE 1:

CHANGE 2:

CHANGE 3:

CHANGE 4:

CHANGE 5:

CHANGE 6:

CHANGE 7:

CHANGE 8:

CHANGE 9:

CHANGE 10:

CHANGE 11:

Those should be all! Then click ‘Update Preview’ (nothing will change) and save, and open your blog/refresh!

Then it should look like this. Well, except for the green and the Simphoria part - that’s my old blog. :’)

I hope you understand it all, and please, if you don’t, just ask about what you don’t get/confuses you :D

[mybesthostingreview]

How to Create a Website from Scratch FAST (10 minutes)

It is so easy and fast to create a website from scratch. If you’ve never done it before, watch the video below. It is so much easier than you think!

Approximate transcription of above video:

Hello. David here from mybesthostingreview.com, and this video is a quick start guide for creating a website from scratch. I don’t have a domain, nothing. I don’t have a hosting account, and I’m pretty sure I can get something up real quick. I think the limiting factor is actually how fast A2 System automatically sets it up, which sometimes is nearly instantaneous and other times there’s a queue, and so it can take maybe like an hour or so. At least right now, I’m on my let’s see, the URL, mybesthostingreview.com/best-hosting-company-favorite/. I’ll usually have a link here in the sidebar. You click on that, and you click on A2 hosting. And I’m going to create a new one, we’re going to go to; so you want to do shared hosting and click here. And I’m just going to do hosting versus hosting dot net. Alright, so another kind of hosting comparison site. Alright, it’s available. I already knew that. Okay, so I’m gonna do twelve months, even though for three years, seventy-one dollars is really good, because the price does go up after the second year. But I’m just gonna do this right here. So, we’re not gonna select this. You know, you might want to select this, if this is a serious website, if you plan on taking shopping cart stuff then you might want to do that, but no I don’t need that. This is kind of silly because their support is already so good. Let’s choose, this is fine, USA. Nope, definitely don’t want that. Let’s encrypt? Railgun, no, no. You don’t really need anything else. So thirty-five dollars, that’s a pretty good deal. Let’s go ahead and continue. No, we don’t want any more add-ons. Almost, almost had that checked. Fifty dollars. What was the domain registration? Huh, I thought, sometimes it comes with free registration, maybe it’s because their a, the coupon is so far off. This is still a really, a really good deal. I wonder if this has, comes with, oh ID protection. Yes, we definitely want that. We don’t want any spammers, or anything on that sort. Add to cart. Continue. Okay, so sixty dollars, and actually almost half of it is the domain registration. And I think you get. There’s some way to get a free domain, but I think with such a deep coupon, where you’re getting like seventy dollars off. That you don’t, you don’t get a free domain registration. I think that when you pay this annually, you should get a free domain. I bet if you message them, they would give it to you. Okay, so we are gonna check out. Let’s see. Use default contact. Add new contact. Okay, I’m gonna fill this out. I’m gonna pause this real quick. One quick tip on a, making a password. The security. I never trust these passwords strength estimators. Really when you want to do a password, you want it to be as long possible. I basically just mash the keyboard, and make sure I have a, characters, upper case and lower case, and numbers. And really a, twenty As is more secure, then a seven random characters. Because, with each additional character, it becomes exponentially more difficult. So, that’s a really quick tip. Or, if you really want to remember the password. I copy and paste it somewhere else. If you want to remember the password. Smash together like three or four words, that normally, would be, not not go together pretty, very commonly. So that’s a quick tip there. Okay, so I’ve filled out the credit card information, and I clicked order, and then I’ve ordered. And, so I actually had to change. I wanted to, I didn’t want them to think that I had used my own. Cause that’s a, this is an affiliate link, when you click on this, I do get some credit. I didn’t want them thinking that I’m trying to, you know, get my own. Get credit for my own account. So, I went back and they wouldn’t let me use the same one. So, I got a slightly different domain. So, it looks like there’s already a C panel login. So, we can login here. Oh, this is great. Okay. And, so we’re gonna install Word Press. Install. And I’m not gonna do the [inaudible 00:04:47]. I’m just gonna do [inaudible 00:04:49]. And we’re just gonna do posting versus posting. Oh wait. No, we want this directory to be blank. Posting. Host company comparisons. Okay. I’m gonna put in a user name and password, and I don’t want to show it in this video. Okay, so I went ahead and put that in, and I’ve got an email. I’m gonna show you how to set up and email it. Again, really quick. This is the beauty of C panel. I’ve got advanced. I do like to do automatic backups once a month. And let’s go ahead and do two. And then we click, install. Alright, and this is actually really quick. Okay, so we want to go ahead. This happens all the time, it’s I don’t. Oops. Hopefully we can edit out that password or I’ll change it. Let’s install again. This is really quick. So, I’m, I don’t want to pause the video, because I want to show you how quick this typically is. It says this may take three to four minutes, but in my experience, that is on the high end. But we’ll see. Does look like. [inaudible 00:06:03] I’m just gonna let the clock get ticking. Oh, notice I’m at six minutes and we. Oh, it’s got a unique. I’m going to go ahead and copy this. Cause that’s a unique login. Which is secure. It looks like they installed something, but actually let’s just click through to here. So this, the site is not up yet. It takes some time for the domain registration and everything to come through. So, be come through I mean propagate the internet. So, Word Press is actually installed. And at this point, we’ve spent really probably less then ten minutes of time, and we’ve already got a Word Press site up. So, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna pause this video, and then I would recommend you go do something else for a little bit. Maybe just wait to the end of the night or something, and then wait till the next day. But notice again, we’ve bought a domain. We’ve bought hosting. We’ve gone into the C panel, and we have done, and we’ve installed Word Press. All in less than ten minutes. Actually, let’s go back here and I’m gonna show you how to do the, the email. So, we’re gonna set up an email. [inaudible 00:07:27] If you can’t find it, you just go “email.” Email accounts. So we’re just gonna do contact. I’m gonna do generate, but I’m gonna pause, cause I don’t want someone hacking my email. Okay, that took all of ten seconds. I’ve created this. And if you want to set up an email client, you can do that. Another thing that I often do. We’d go back here, and you type in “Forward.” If you want, what you can do is you can add a domain forwarder. So, we’ve got contact at and then put like your main email address there. I went ahead and did that so it’s going to my personnel account. So, now I don’t need to, I can put this email in wherever I want. Let’s see if, the. [Background awww] So, again this is not to do with A2 hosting. This has more to do with like the internet as a whole, and it propagating. And that’s really the limitation here. And if it weren’t for that, we’d be able to get in and do some basic things with Word Press. Which, I’m going to show in the video. Again, this is eight and a half minutes from start to finish, and we are most of the way through a simple set up of a website. Again, this is so easy, and this is part of why. Let’s go back to. Let’s see. Let’s go back to. Why I love the C panel. You see how fast we did that. There’s some advance things that you can do in here, but just email address and Word Press. That’s pretty much all you’ll ever need. You can ignore everything else in here. There’s some other things that you can do, especially if you do hire a website technician. Which I’m gonna talk about in a minute. So, I’m gonna pause this and I’m gonna come back to it later. And we will take a look at, once the website propagates. I’ll take a look. I’ll show you the back end and some of the simple things you can do. It’s really not, not as bad as you think. And it’s very very simple to get a simple set up, and to start actually building content on the internet. [The next day] Okay, this is part two of a quick website set up, uh, guide, and it’s the next day. And the site is up and running, and you can see here. I’m at hostingversushosting.com and you know, I probably could have just waited. Gone and done something else for twenty minutes and then come back, and it would have been fine. Or an hour tops, under most circumstances. But, here we are in the next day, and it’s pretty simple with Word Press. Just go slash wdadmin to login. I’m gonna pause while I login. Okay, I have logged in for the first time. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on. If you’ve never done Word Press, don’t worry. It’s actually pretty simple. There’s a lot of stuff you can ignore, but another important point here is that we never really need to go back into the hosting account. Other than to like manage billing. That’s the good thing about Word Press. So all that C panel stuff, you don’t really need to, need to use it. I’m gonna go ahead and dismiss these things. A lot of times, I’ll go in here and I’ll see kinda what plug-ins, and I’ll disable any plug-ins that are already enabled. But the plug-ins are what enable you to do a lot of things really quickly and easily. You can also go into the themes and there are tons and tons of free themes. So, at this point, let’s say. Alright, let’s say we really like. Okay, we really like this one. Alright, so we’re just gonna go install. Activate. I’m gonna hold control and I’m gonna click on this, so we can keep this open. And you can see, I’ve essentially got a site up now. And now all you gotta do is add content, which is, you know, I say. All you’ve got to do, that is a, a significant portion of what you’d be working on, but at the same time, in about ten minutes of work, we’ve gone from having no website, no domain. We [inaudible 00:11:15] bought a domain, to having bought a domain, and having a basic website up. And there are lots of paid plug-ins. Paid themes that you can get. And those tend to be pretty inexpensive. I think that you can get some pretty good themes for anywhere between twenty and one hundred dollars. That will enable you to, give you more options in terms of your design. I personally don’t like themes that kinda make, make this small post right here. I should be able to go into here. So we’re right, you know, I can customize, and if I had like a different image; I’m sure I could. Let’s see. Logo. [inaudible 00:11:57] You do a logo here, and a header image. I could change this. I could remove the image. Let’s go ahead if we do hide image, you can see what it looks like. I’m not gonna save it. Just cause I want to keep that right there for now. Let’s, we can go look at some additional themes. Personally I, the twenty seventeen theme is actually not bad. I kind of like it. So, I’m gonna go ahead and activate that one. And I’m gonna customize the, these are default free themes. Again, and there’s some really good paid themes, and also if you want to hire someone to. If you want to hire someone to create a custom theme for you, or to edit and clean up a paid theme or a free theme for you, that’s really not that expensive, when compared to other websites. Because, it’s so easy to find someone. To find someone to edit Word Press, because it’s the most common content management system, or CMS. Okay, and so, what I would do if you really wanted someone. If you really a newbie, at managing a website, you can still do a lot in here by yourself. Just watch, there’s a bunch of Word Press tutorials in an hour, you can know the vast majority [inaudible 00:13:21] of the basics of adding content to where you need to add it. But what you can also do, is you can go to ofwork.com, this is where I would normally go to find someone. This is how I found my long term contractors, who I call my website technicians. They’re not. I separate graphic designers from website technicians. You could also find graphic designers here. I would probably start with a logo. You can hire someone, maybe even on like fiver.com. I wouldn’t do any, anything other than like graphic design with fiver. But, there’s, uh, you can buy logo design. A lot of these, I do have an account. But I’m not gonna login. Actually, here. Let’s login. Okay, so I’m logged in. We go to graphic design, logo design. This is probably where I would start, if you really are gonna outsource some of this. You can find logos. Fifteen dollars, you know, five dollars, is you know, which is how this website started. It used to be where people could get logos for five dollars. It’s gonna be pretty hard. So, lets check this guy out. I want. You want somebody with a lot of ratings. And you wanna really read, cause sometimes, you know, the basic. So you kinda, you probably do want the high resolution [inaudible 00:14:37] and it’s a hundred dollars to get the source file. That’s pretty expensive. I think you can probably find one where you can get the source file. That’s pretty important, for the long term. You know, viability of your business. But, also if you’re just getting started out and you’re trying, uh, go on a budget. Still, just getting the, the basic logo is gonna get you a long way. You can always come back and have it redesigned, you know, a year or two later if things are going really well. You can also probably get website. Web and mobile design. Let’s check that out. So we might want to search, let’s just search the page for Word Press. And we’ll create a Word Press website design. Alright, so. And, you know, read different things here. I mean a hundred and sixty dollars is not bad, for getting a legit web design. I mean, it used to be thousands of dollars. I mean this is a premium one. He’s got good reviews. This gig has, it’s only got ten reviews. So I’d probably look for one that had a little bit more. But it’s hard to find. A lot of these. You have ta look around on here. I don’t use this all that often. But this is another way to get things designed. You know, if you’re not a graphic designer. But let’s say, you’re making a blog. You wanna make a blog post. You can just go in here, and it’s just simple. This is a new blog post. Content, content, content, more. Click publish. And we go here, and [inaudible 00:16:20] I have to set it up right now. This is a new blog post. See how easy that was. And then there’s also pages that you can create. I’m not gonna go into all the different ways to create this, but the point is that at again in about ten or twelve minutes of work, we got a brand new site. Brand new domain, that didn’t exist twenty-four hours ago up and running, and ready for you to put your mark on it. Ready for you to add your own creativity. Another important thing here. Similar to the themes, is there’s a lot of free plug-ins. You can go, plug-ins, and you can go featured and popular. Anti-spam, that’s not bad. Popular contact form seven. This is one I use a lot. I like that. Lot of people like to use this even, and it has a bunch a good reviews. I never use it. I do a lot of SCO and really it’s not, it’s not really that important to me. There’s a bunch of, it’s a bunch of fluff in my opinion. Woo Commerce is okay, for if you’re doing E-Commerce. All-in-One SCO pack is very similar to Yost. I mean in the point here, is that, a lot of this stuff is free. And really simple SSL [inaudible 00:17:28], if you have an SSL certificate. A security certificate purchased through your hosting company, you can set it up. This is the final step. Once they get it setup. So all these free plug-ins, like a lot of this stuff would’ve cost you hundreds of dollars if not thousands of dollars to get a web designer or web developer to do it for a non, a website that doesn’t have content management system. Okay, and so that’s one of the beauties of Word Press. There’s also just like, just like there’s paid themes, there’s also paid plug-ins. There’s a lot of good paid plug-ins. Honestly though, you probably want to keep these light. Contact form seven is probably the best one that I saw on there, that you’re gonna want. It makes it real easy to have contact page, or contact us in different places. And again, this video isn’t meant to be like an all the things you could do with Word Press. It’s just sort of like a quick getting started with a website. Again, this is a brand new website. Hostingversushosting.com, did not exist twenty-four hours ago, super important. And, you know, I hopefully, this demystifies for lot of people. I don’t have a website, I don’t know how to get started. Will, this is a really, you know got. You can get started in, and again ten to fifteen minutes of work. Now, if you like this video. Ten to twelve minutes. If you like this video please, please click the thumbs up. Please subscribe, and I appreciate you watching. Let me know if you have any questions. You know, submit whatever questions you want. If you have any, if there’s any specific recommendations, or you’ve started this and you’re having an issue; go ahead and make a comment. Or shoot me a message, and we’ll go from there. Thanks. Have a great day. Bye.

The post How to Create a Website from Scratch FAST (10 minutes) appeared first on My Best Hosting Review.

from My Best Hosting Review http://www.mybesthostingreview.com/websites/how-to-create-a-website-from-scratch-fast-10-minutes/

[myupdatesystems-blog]

How To Master Your Website Even If You Are Not Tech-Ie

New Post has been published on https://myupdatesystems.com/how-to-master-your-website-even-if-you-are-not-tech-ie/

How To Master Your Website Even If You Are Not Tech-Ie

My website redesign went over-budget… I had three days to fix a long list of stuff, and my budget was running low, real low… and it turned out to be a Good Thing.

Although the “concept” of this website has started months ago, I have taken the time to let it brew because I want every move to be INTENTIONAL, to reflect how I want to do ME in my business.

4 weeks ago, I finally felt the click. The time was ripe, so I went ahead and contacted my web gal, Jenn, for the project. I outlined a scope, set a budget, prepare all the materials and necessary information (down to the hex#) to help make the process as smooth as possible. I thought I covered everything.

Of course, there is always Murphy’s Law. The theme we originally selected did not allow her to make the website the way we wanted (haha, so much about “plug-and-play”!) Then the sign up box under the header got all scrambled up when viewed on mobile.

Jenn ended up developing a custom theme for the site, and we had to come up with solutions for the mobile hiccup. Long story short, we ran out of time and budget.

It was Saturday and I was getting nervous about the list of “fixes” that needed to get done because I had a guest blog post going live on the next Tuesday with the author bio pointing to the new site.

The list was quite daunting… fixing homepage layout, adding a testimonial rotator, adding links to the footer, cleaning up social share icons, revisiting some sidebar content, figuring out URL redirect, setting up business email with the new domain name, going over layout of critical pages to make sure nothing is broken, synching up all Mailchimp lists and info with the new URL and email address, and installing a trigger-box for list building… And Jenn still had to code the homepage on Monday!

I decided that instead of toiling my thumbs, sweating buckets and putting pressure on Jenn, I would pitch in and check some stuff off the list.

And I did. I fixed some homepage layout stuff (figuring out html while chasing two kids was… interesting), hooked up the testimonial rotator, got all the sidebar and footer content sorted, figured out how to use a plug-in to set up redirect, reviewed layout of I-don’t-know-how-many pages (including 70 blog posts)… even tested a few pop-up plug-ins to see which one I like, and fixed the.php file for the shopping cart – without breaking anything!

On top of that, I did some research and came up with a solution for the scrambled sign up box on the header, created a new Photoshop file for Jenn so she can get it going first thing on Monday.

Yep, all in one weekend, while herding two kids and with family in town. Came Monday, Jenn was able to go in and focus on setting up the homepage and fixing the header sign up, and we got it “good to go” by the end of the day. PHEW!

Even though I was on hyperdrive and lost some sleep (the adrenals ain’t happy about that), it turned out to be a valuable learning experience.

I feel so much more empowered and confident about handling all things WordPress – not just what I can do to fix something, but also where to find the resources/information to tackle a problem. That means I didn’t just solve the crisis at hand, but also learned a bag of tricks and gathered a box of tools that will save me time, money and panic down the road.

It’s not about “doing it all by myself”. It’s not about proving something. It’s not about saving VA budget.

It’s about being able to be flexible and “not freak out” – because when sh!t happens at the 11th hour (and it will), you still have to roll up your sleeve and fix it. It’s better to feel confident and prepared, rather than spending the time and effort to start learning and panicking (which does NOT help with the thinking bit.)

It will cut frustration and panicking – energy drains that are not conducive to putting good vibe out there to attract the clients you want.

WordPress basics is NOT rocket science. First Thing you need to do to Conquer “Technology” is to stop saying “I am not tech-ie”

If you go in thinking you can’t handle it, you will look at the bumps and hiccups as evidence that you can’t handle it. Really, it’s that simple. It may sound like some trite personal development stuff… but that’s true and let’s roll with it for a moment.

You don’t have to be “tech-ie” to make things work on WordPress, or to hook up your online marketing. I had a client who asked a friend that teaches computer stuff in the university to help her with website, email marketing, social media and whatnot… of course, that friend has NO idea what Mailchimp is about, or how to make Facebook work for a business.

If you are thinking “tech-ie-ness” is what you need, you are barking up the wrong tree.

A lot of times, learning the basics (even the intermediates) is about having the clear head and the openness to ask the right questions.

Clear head comes from having the confidence in yourself that you CAN do it. Many competent coders don’t get it right the first time (I have witnessed this time and again during my 10 years working closely with these guys in online marketing agencies.) It is about having the confidence to keep at the troubleshooting – TRUST that you can do it, and think creatively.

How to Become the Master of Your Website

Of course, it’s not like you tell yourself you can do it and you can (I am not that out there.) Managing a website does take some solid skills and practical knowledge, so here are a few things to help you empower yourself and take charge so you can be the Master of your website:

(note: being the “master” does not mean you have to know how to do everything. It is about having the control so you can manage what comes up and devise solutions for the problem at hand)

Educate yourself on the basics – you don’t have to know how to code, but understanding the basics, knowing what to ask and using the correct terminologies can help facilitate the process. There will be fewer chances of miscommunication – which can lead to your web guy building something totally different that what you *think* you are getting, wasting precious time and money. I also find that developers show you more respect and are less likely to give you BS if you take the initiative to know your part.

If you hire someone to set up a website for you, ask for a 30-minute walkthrough as part of the service package so you feel comfortable making changes on your own, instead of having to wait a few days just for some minor adjustments to be made.

Check out this plug-in called Sidekick – it provides interactive, real-time, narrated guides through the WordPress administration area.

Don’t forget good ol’ Google! Ask the right question, and focus on your end goal so you don’t get sucked into the rabbit hole.

If you purchase themes and plug-ins, chances are the merchant offers some kind of support, such as a forum or help desk. Make good use of them – most sellers are very helpful and I had good experience with many of them.

If you have an email newsletter service provider and need to hook up your sign up form to your website, call customer support or submit a help ticket. Personally I have great experience with Mailchimp email support.

Know where to find help when you need it – there are many websites where you can post a task and developers will respond with a quote. E.g. Elance.com, oDesk.com, and Codeable.io.

A few “DUH” tips to save you time and frustration:

(I learned them the hard way… )

Clear Cache! Yes, simple as that! As you edit and save and edit more and save more, your browser gets gunk up with stuff. It not only impacts the load time (which can be frustrating for the impatient) you may also be seeing things that have already been updated but are still showing up because the browser is “remembering it.”

Less Is More when it comes to plug-ins. Those bells and whistles may look cool but the more plug-ins you have the more likely a code conflict will occur. Deactivating all the plug-ins (except the ones you can’t live without) and then reactivating them one by one to see which one is causing trouble, can often help troubleshoot a lot of issues.

Take a break. I can’t tell you how many times I walk away from nearly trashing my computer and come back with new solutions that worked magic.

Don’t Forget These Website Soulwork

You never know what variety of sh!t is going to hit the fan when the 1’s and 0’s are having a party, so SHOW UP to whatever shows up to you. And TRUST that you can do it (or have the resource to find someone who can!)

Fears* may be holding you back from asking the right questions, or asking any question! (Having humor helps if you end up asking the stupidest question… make a joke and laugh about it. I do that all the time.) – The fear of INADEQUACY – if you feel like you are not good enough, you don’t have the confidence to challenge others. You may not want to ask questions because it may reaffirm your limiting belief that you don’t know enough. – The fear of being VULNERABLE – if you don’t want to appear vulnerable, you may “puff up” and appear that you know it all. You don’t want to ask questions that make you appear not knowledgable. – The fear of MISSING OUT – if you are afraid that if you don’t “act now” and get it done you may miss out on something – and this fear drives you to make hasty decisions before you have all the facts. E.g. how many times we succumb to pithes like “buy this plug-in now for $97 or you will be the only one left without these cool features on your website!”, and ended up with a bunch of “stuff” on our hard drive – never installed, never put to use – only adding guilt and even make us feel we must be dumb because we can’t figure out what to do with it.

(Recap) If you go in thinking you can’t handle it, you will look at the bumps and hiccups as evidence that you can’t handle it. Pat yourself on the back every time you figure out something, because it gives you the encouragement to do more.

If you don’t preconceive what you can or cannot do, you may be pleasantly surprised by what’s possible.

Your potentiality is only limited by the fence constructed with what you tell yourself. Mind your words

Ling Wong, Business Artist and Chief Freedom Fighter at business-soulwork.com, provides Business Soulwork + Marketing Activation for the Maverick Entrepreneur to build a business that is a full expression of their creativity and individuality.

Ling helps her clients supercharge their actions not only through practical strategies and marketing tools, but also through their growth and development – so they not only grow their business, but also LET THEIR BUSINESS GROW THEM. Through her “left brain meets right brain” approach, she helps her clients uncover their truth and tap into their intuition, then ground those light bulb moments with practical strategies and marketing tactics.

[netmaddy-blog]

How To Master Your Website

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/how-to-master-your-website/

How To Master Your Website

My website redesign went over-budget… I had three days to fix a long list of stuff, and my budget was running low, real low… and it turned out to be a Good Thing.

Although the “concepting” of this website has started months ago, I have taken the time to let it brew because I want every move to be INTENTIONAL, to reflect how I want to do ME in my business.

4 weeks ago, I finally felt the click. The time was ripe, so I went ahead and contacted my web gal, Jenn, for the project. I outlined a scope, set a budget, prepare all the materials and necessary information (down to the hex#) to help make the process as smooth as possible. I thought I covered everything Page Papi.

Of course, there is always Murphy’s Law. The theme we originally selected did not allow her to make the website the way we wanted (haha, so much about “plug-and-play”!) Then the sign up box under the header got all scrambled up when viewed on mobile.

Jenn ended up developing a custom theme for the site, and we had to come up with solutions for the mobile hiccup. Long story short, we ran out of time and budget.

It was Saturday and I was getting nervous about the list of “fixes” that needed to get done because I had a guest blog post going live on the next Tuesday with the author bio pointing to the new site.

The list was quite daunting… fixing homepage layout, adding a testimonial rotator, adding links to the footer, cleaning up social share icons, revisiting some sidebar content, figuring out URL redirect, setting up business email with the new domain name, going over layout of critical pages to make sure nothing is broken, synching up all Mailchimp lists and info with the new URL and email address, and installing a trigger-box for list building… And Jenn still had to code the homepage on Monday!

I decided that instead of toiling my thumbs, sweating buckets and putting pressure on Jenn, I would pitch in and check some stuff off the list.

And I did. I fixed some homepage layout stuff (figuring out html while chasing two kids was… interesting), hooked up the testimonial rotator, got all the sidebar and footer content sorted, figured out how to use a plug-in to set up redirect, reviewed layout of I-don’t-know-how-many pages (including 70 blog posts)… even tested a few pop-up plug-ins to see which one I like, and fixed the.php file for the shopping cart – without breaking anything!

On top of that, I did some research and came up with a solution for the scrambled sign up box on the header, created a new Photoshop file for Jenn so she can get it going first thing on Monday.

Yep, all in one weekend, while herding two kids and with family in town. Came Monday, Jenn was able to go in and focus on setting up the homepage and fixing the header sign up, and we got it “good to go” by the end of the day. PHEW!

Even though I was on hyperdrive and lost some sleep (the adrenals ain’t happy about that), it turned out to be a valuable learning experience.

I feel so much more empowered and confident about handling all things WordPress – not just what I can do to fix something, but also where to find the resources/information to tackle a problem. That means I didn’t just solve the crisis at hand, but also learned a bag of tricks and gathered a box of tools that will save me time, money and panic down the road.

It’s not about “doing it all by myself”. It’s not about proving something. It’s not about saving VA budget.

It’s about being able to be flexible and “not freak out” – because when sh!t happens at the 11th hour (and it will), you still have to roll up your sleeve and fix it. It’s better to feel confident and prepared, rather than spending the time and effort to start learning and panicking (which does NOT help with the thinking bit.)

It will cut frustration and panicking – energy drains that are not conducive to putting good vibe out there to attract the clients you want.

WordPress basics is NOT rocket science. First Thing you need to do to Conquer “Technology” is to stop saying “I am not tech-ie”

If you go in thinking you can’t handle it, you will look at the bumps and hiccups as evidence that you can’t handle it. Really, it’s that simple. It may sound like some trite personal development stuff… but that’s true and let’s roll with it for a moment.

You don’t have to be “tech-ie” to make things work on WordPress, or to hook up your online marketing. I had a client who asked a friend that teaches computer stuff in the university to help her with website, email marketing, social media and whatnot… of course, that friend has NO idea what Mailchimp is about, or how to make Facebook work for a business.

If you are thinking “tech-ie-ness” is what you need, you are barking up the wrong tree.

A lot of times, learning the basics (even the intermediates) is about having the clear head and the openness to ask the right questions.

Clear head comes from having the confidence in yourself that you CAN do it. Many competent coders don’t get it right the first time (I have witnessed this time and again during my 10 years working closely with these guys in online marketing agencies.) It is about having the confidence to keep at the troubleshooting – TRUST that you can do it, and think creatively.

How to Become the Master of Your Website

Of course, it’s not like you tell yourself you can do it and you can (I am not that out there.) Managing a website does take some solid skills and practical knowledge, so here are a few things to help you empower yourself and take charge so you can be the Master of your website:

(note: being the “master” does not mean you have to know how to do everything. It is about having the control so you can manage what comes up and devise solutions for the problem at hand)

Educate yourself on the basics – you don’t have to know how to code, but understanding the basics, knowing what to ask and using the correct terminologies can help facilitate the process. There will be fewer chances of miscommunication – which can lead to your web guy building something totally different that what you *think* you are getting, wasting precious time and money. I also find that developers show you more respect and are less likely to give you BS if you take the initiative to know your part.

If you hire someone to set up a website for you, ask for a 30-minute walkthrough as part of the service package so you feel comfortable making changes on your own, instead of having to wait a few days just for some minor adjustments to be made.

Check out this plug-in called Sidekick – it provides interactive, real-time, narrated guides through the WordPress administration area.

Don’t forget good ol’ Google! Ask the right question, and focus on your end goal so you don’t get sucked into the rabbit hole.

If you purchase themes and plug-ins, chances are the merchant offers some kind of support, such as a forum or help desk. Make good use of them – most sellers are very helpful and I had good experience with many of them.

If you have an email newsletter service provider and need to hook up your sign up form to your website, call customer support or submit a help ticket. Personally I have great experience with Mailchimp email support.

Know where to find help when you need it – there are many websites where you can post a task and developers will respond with a quote. E.g. Elance.com, oDesk.com, and Codeable.io. A few “DUH” tips to save you time and frustration:

(I learned them the hard way… )

Clear Cache! Yes, simple as that! As you edit and save and edit more and save more, your browser gets gunk up with stuff. It not only impacts the load time (which can be frustrating for the impatient) you may also be seeing things that have already been updated but are still showing up because the browser is “remembering it.” Less Is More when it comes to plug-ins. Those bells and whistles may look cool but the more plug-ins you have the more likely a code conflict will occur. Deactivating all the plug-ins (except the ones you can’t live without) and then reactivating them one by one to see which one is causing trouble, can often help troubleshoot a lot of issues. Take a break. I can’t tell you how many times I walk away from nearly trashing my computer and come back with new solutions that worked magic. Don’t Forget These Website Soulwork

You never know what variety of sh!t is going to hit the fan when the 1’s and 0’s are having a party, so SHOW UP to whatever shows up to you. And TRUST that you can do it (or have the resource to find someone who can!)

Fears* may be holding you back from asking the right questions, or asking any question! (Having humor helps if you end up asking the stupidest question… make a joke and laugh about it. I do that all the time.) – The fear of INADEQUACY – if you feel like you are not good enough, you don’t have the confidence to challenge others. You may not want to ask questions because it may reaffirm your limiting belief that you don’t know enough. – The fear of being VULNERABLE – if you don’t want to appear vulnerable, you may “puff up” and appear that you know it all. You don’t want to ask questions that make you appear not knowledgable. – The fear of MISSING OUT – if you are afraid that if you don’t “act now” and get it done you may miss out on something – and this fear drives you to make hasty decisions before you have all the facts. E.g. how many times we succumb to pithes like “buy this plug-in now for $97 or you will be the only one left without these cool features on your website!”, and ended up with a bunch of “stuff” on our hard drive – never installed, never put to use – only adding guilt and even make us feel we must be dumb because we can’t figure out what to do with it.