#something else that could be solved by a more refined research question i think

[yuri-puppies]

kiki floke to thistle scale of transracial adoptee coping mechanisms

[abigailshorel6]

Evaluation

LO1 Demonstrate your ability to develop a clear understanding of the relationship of research to your practice in forming a personal and critical viewpoint in the realisation, refinement and production of your Major Project.

At the project I was really stuck with what I wanted to do all I knew is that I wanted it to be typographically based. Extensive research and reflection into design allowed me to find my interests and discover problems in design that led me to my brief. I found that looking at lots of digital design projects they often feel flat, I think this over digitalisation of design and influence of AI has really impacted the skills and craftmanship we used to see in design. Through this project I wanted to highlight how human nature can be involved in design even in a digital space. The 7-38-55 Rule also really helped to push my project, understanding how much body language and facial expression impacts communication highlights how much tone is lost in digital design. I think my project helped to solve this problem. I think I did a much better job at this project in defining these problems and motivations behind my project which makes it feel more grounded and relevant in the design world outside of uni. I also did a much better job at defining my target audience and keeping them in mind throughout my project.

I took in as much typographical work as I could throughout this project to help push my work. As my project explores new concepts in design I couldn't find project that were super similar. Without having that super direct project I felt I was able to lead with my development, own judgments and critical reflection which made an innovative/unique project that I am really proud of.

My project had so much scope and there are so many more avenues of it I would love to explore. If I have time between now and the grad show I would love to add more emotions to the typeface such as anger/fear. I would also love to explore emotionally reactive advertising like me and Ciaran discussed as I think this could lead to something really interesting.

LO2 Demonstrate sustained and effective development of a practical working methodology to a topic that you have defined and which includes speculation on new and effective approaches that are at the forefront of Visual Communication practice.

I really pushed myself with learning new software with this project. Blender has become popular in modern design and pushes 3d work hugely. Learning new softwares that are at the front of design practice is important to me so I'm glad I had the chance. I spent about a week following tutorials and experimenting with settings/tools on blender to create my system. I found the tutorials online really limiting so I found creating my own system the best option, this also allowed me to really own the project and not feel like it was just someone elses system.

Development was something I really focused on throughout this project. I really struggled with finding my system and style of my typeface. I really enjoyed creates lots of different typographical experiments and being critical on myself and asking others options helped me push the project. Usually I leave designing quite leading leading me to just pick a direction and go with it but throughout this project I explored so many different methods constantly questioning them which made my outcome so much better than others.

LO3 Demonstrate an ability to authoritatively and independently project manage ideas, practice, time and work strategies in the production of a well realized body of work, reflecting the complexity of the major project and engaging effectively with academic support and resources.

I found time management difficult this project due to the amount I took on. Alongside my major project I also worked on d&ad, ISTD, penguin brief and JDO. Taking on these project helped me improve my design skills and gain a greater understanding of the design field which helped add context to my project. Due to how much I took on I found that I had to be strict with time management. My main method of this was creating to do lists each day as evidenced on my tumblr, having these soft deadlines and timeplans helped me create achievable goals and keep my project moving.

This project was the most complex I have taken on with depth of research and realisation of design. I taught myself Blender which was a lot to take on but was well worth my while. Blender allowed my typeface to be systemised and created some really interesting letterforms I don't think I would of thought of myself.

My subject matter had so much scope to it which kept me excited throughout, there were always more avenues to explore. After the hand in there is defiantly more I would like to explore with project. This project led me to create my biggest body of work yet. I have only ever created one typeface before that had 26 characters but for this one I created 468 characters. Obviously this took a lot of time but I think it was worthwhile. It made my project feel so much more impressive alongside all my different assets.

I found academic support pushed my project hugely, critical reflection in tutorials pushed me to develop my work much more than I would usually making a much better outcome. I found Ciarans feedback refreshing and super useful this term, my editorial work has completely transformed making my final outcomes look so much more refined and professional.

LO4 Demonstrate an ability to critically reflect on the process of your major project documenting its relation to both personal and wider professional contexts, practices and debates.

Throughout this project I was a lot more critical with myself as I had such a big ambition to create a project I was really proud of. Considering my secondary research and my projects relation to contemporary practice. My project is something that I felt was missing in professional design. My project feeds into the debates of digitalisation of design and the rise of AI highlighting how human nature can be present in type design. I also feel my project provides a fresh approach to communication involving tonality which is often lost in digital design. The idea of incorporating body language and facial expressions is something I would love to see explored by others and the ways this could help online communication and those with autism. I think if I had more time I could of done more in-depth secondary research as I feel some areas are lacking but I did as much as I could at the time.

[zenithastra]

Albedo - Creation

Part two of “stories I want to port over from the old blog”. I’ll post a few more tomorrow. 

Albedo was a master of alchemy. It was rare for him to find a problem he couldn’t solve with some ingenuity. Others called him a genius, but Albedo merely thought his work was simple for someone like him. 

However, tomorrow was a very special day- the day of your birth- and he had yet to find that perfect gift. The institution of gift-giving was already a foreign enough concept. He’d mostly relied on Sucrose to tell him what to buy for who. But this time, with only a week to prepare, she’d stubbornly put her foot down. “They’re your partner,” Sucrose said. “Figure it out yourself.” So, not one to be deterred by a challenge, decided the solution was simple: if he couldn’t buy the right gift, he’d simply make you one. And at the beginning of the week, he thought it would be simple. He could make anything. It wouldn’t take much to create something perfect for you. 

His first instinct had, of course, been alchemy. A new weapon seemed like a good start, and Albedo could make most of the things the blacksmith would need. The ore he’d have to find on his own, but he could break those open without much effort. But about halfway through the process of refining some old Hilichurl scrolls into something usable, Albedo realized this creation wouldn’t really be his. It would be the blacksmith doing all of the work. Therefore, the present wouldn’t be very personal, something Sucrose had drilled into him numerous times since you and he had started an official courtship. 

So, his first idea was discarded. 

His second plan was to make some jewelry. Albedo was pretty good at fashioning gemstones and other precious materials into various shapes. Retrieving said gems wasn’t particularly hard. Plenty of materials had been left behind by adventurers who didn’t understand exactly what was needed to transmute a gem into one of a larger size. But again, just before he started building this potential gift, he stopped. He realized that he was not creating anything. Just building something out of things that others had left behind. And that just wouldn’t do. He needed something different. Something he could make with only minimal help from others. 

So, he continued thinking. 

His third idea was arguably the easiest to execute, but it was not something Albedo had done before. You baked for him often, frequently bringing by delicious chocolate or fruity snacks during his long work hours. And you were a natural baker, something that still mystified him. And while he believed you were special, he decided that it couldn’t be that hard to make something for you. Baking was just another form of alchemy, after all. For an extra personal touch, he gathered all of the base ingredients himself and spent an entire day turning his sweet flowers into sugar, his wheat into flour, and procuring everything else he needed. And when all of that had gone off without a hitch, all Albedo had to do was follow a recipe Sucrose had graciously given him and the cupcakes would be ready. 

And yet, for some reason, that’s not what happened. And a few hours later, Albedo was left perplexed with two trays of inedible baked goods. When he inquired with Sucrose as to why that happened, she asked him a variety of questions that only confused him more. Yes, he followed the recipe. Yes, he’d set his timers right. No, the ingredients weren’t expired. Yes, he’d been paying attention while they were baking. No, he didn’t have a clue why they turned out that way. 

And so, plan number three was quite literally thrown out.

Now there he was with less than a day before your birthday, staring at a small package of rose seeds. He’d purchased them from Flora on a whim and slowly convinced himself that this was the right gift. Flowers rushed to maturity through the use of alchemy. It would have been better if he had somehow gathered the seeds himself, but Albedo knew he was running out of time. Normally, attempting something like this would take days of preparation, experimentation, and lots of research. Albedo had hours at most, and anyone who could have helped him had already gone home for the day. 

So, he did the only thing he could do. He got to work.

He started with a single seed, examining it as closely as he could. He detailed its shape, size, and weight. Reviewed everything he knew about cultivating flowers and gathered anything that could possibly be used as a pot. Thankfully, he’d already gathered dirt samples for another experiment, something he could ask Sucrose to replace. After he poured the packet onto the table, he was disheartened to see there were only ten. Even if everything went perfectly, he’d be short the dozen that Sucrose had once told him was a special number. 

Six, He decided. If twelve was the perfect number, then six would be just as good. He knew it was a logical leap, but it made him feel better as he planted each seed into their respective pot. For the first one, he tried special alchemy infused water that had worked well on the various Dragonspine flora. And the seed did grow, but it withered almost instantly in the warm air. 

One down. Only three more mistakes to go. 

The second one was a bit more successful as Albedo fed it a concoction of water from Starfell lake and a growth formula he’d made on a whim a few weeks prior. But that plant didn’t have the shine he wanted. It wasn’t quite as large as he’d seen other roses, nor was it the right color. Instead of a vibrant red, it was a meddling mix of pink and black. He assumed it was the growth formula that had been wrong and moved on without it. 

Two down. Two to go. 

The third one showed significantly more promise with a concoction that Sucrose had made to help grow imported flora in their camp at Dragonspine. While the color wasn’t quite as bold as Albedo wanted, he accepted that it was beautiful enough and moved on to the next seed with a new mixture. This one failed to grow at all, much to his disappointment. When he tried to use Sucrose’s formula a second time, the plant both grew and died within a few seconds; no better than the first one. 

Three down, but he had one success. That might just be good enough. 

To ensure that he would have at least a small bouquet, Albedo used the rest of Sucrose’s discovery on four more plants. But for the last one, he wanted something special. Something perfect and as vibrant as you were. So, as the sun dipped lower in the sky, he paced his lab, debating on how exactly to achieve the colors he wanted. His mind raced through possibilities, and he began using other plants he’d gathered to test various mixtures. A few showed promise, but most just withered. But Albedo didn’t get frustrated. Instead, he found himself enjoying the work. Others might have seen it as tedious, but he found it refreshing. It had been a long time since he’d done something just for himself, and even longer since he’d used his alchemy for you. 

He was determined to get it right, no matter the time invested. 

But then you showed up, much to his surprise, and the entire experiment derailed. 

“Albedo?” You said, gazing at the mess the lab had turned into. It was the first time Albedo realized how obsessed he’d become with this little project. He was almost embarrassed at the chaos he’d left behind but knew you’d seen the lab in a similar state before. Such was the nature of his experiments. If anything, the state of his own clothing was much more distressing, as he’d become caked in dirt and other grime moving between all the plants at such a rapid pace. 

“You are… here,” He said somewhat awkwardly. “I was not expecting you.”

“It’s almost midnight,” you said, your voice laced with concern. “I was worried about you.”

Albedo glanced outside, genuinely surprised to see how high the moon had gotten. It had only felt like an hour or two had passed, not the entire day. “I apologize,” He said. “It wasn’t my intention to worry you so.”

You looked around, eyebrows raised. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into this time?”

Albedo glanced at the roses he’d left behind before looking back at you. “I was almost done with my bouquet.”

“Bouquet?” You echoed. “Of what?”

“Roses,” He said. “Your favorite.”

Your eyes widened. “You mean all of this,” You waved your hands out in front of you. “Is because you were trying to grow roses… for me?”

“Yes.”

Your gaze softened as your smile widened. “You didn’t have to do all this, Albedo. The fact that you were thinking of me at all means a lot.”

“But it’s your birthday,” Albedo said. “I wanted…” He trailed off as, for the first time in a long time, words failed him. He wanted things to be special. Yet here he was, failing again. This whole week had been a mess, and he’d missed you for a majority of it, all trying to make something that would only last a short amount of time. 

You stepped up in front of him, brushing your thumb under his eye. Specks of dirt hit the floor as you moved to his cheeks, and his breath hitched when your eyes met. It felt like ages since the two of you had just been together like this. He’d been home so late, and you up so early that you rarely saw each other. And that was partially his fault. He had no reason to stay out so late. He’d simply done so because it was normal. Albedo was still figuring out the whole ‘relationship’ thing. He was still trying to break down the walls around his own heart; the ones that made it difficult to love anyone. 

But you were still there. You always were, even when he wasn’t there for you. 

“Come home,” You said softly. “Take the day off. We can spend it together.”

Albedo nodded, blushing as you leaned in to give him a chaste yet wonderful kiss. You smiled as you pulled away, taking his hand to lead him out of the mess. He knew he’d have to apologize to Sucrose and the others later, as they wouldn’t be able to work under such conditions. But, as the bell struck midnight and he wandered home with you, Albedo realized that this is where he was really meant to be.

The world could wait for one day. All he wanted to do was spend time with you.

AO3 - Ko-Fi - Master List

[hawkthewintersoldier]

When the Numb3rs Add Up to = (U+m3) Part 1: Friendly Meetings

“What’ve we got?”

The scene was bright and vibrant… including the blood on the ground, which was a brilliant ruby shade. Don Eppes, one of the lead agents at the FBI in Los Angeles, was kneeling and inspecting a female corpse, who was staring blankly up at the sky.

“Female, mid-to-late 20s, blond hair with deep brown roots… brown eyes.” Megan said, kneeling with Don and pointing. “…Same M.O…. He wrote ‘Trick or Treat’ across her forehead after stabbing her to death… sexually assaulted…”

Don groaned, his eyes going up as he stood. “…Damn.”

“Don.” David called out, gesturing them to look over at the body. “…Look. No splatters… nothing to suggest that this happened here.”

“No. She’s like the others… he’s taking them somewhere else and killing them.” David said, sighing. “…By some miracle of God, are there any prints? Cameras around here?”

“…Uh, sorry Don. No.” Colby said carefully as Don rubbed his temples. “…Is Charlie coming out?”

“Yeah, he’s on the way…”

At that moment, a vehicle pulled up… and Charlie, Don’s brother, stepped out of the passenger side, a notebook in his hands. Don whipped his head up, then shook his head, pointing at the body and gesturing for it to be covered as he walked.

“Charlie!”

“Hey, Don…” Charlie said, his eyes focused on the clues from the last two victims. “…What can you tell me?”

“…She’s in the same age-range… has naturally brown hair that was bleached blond… brown eyes… same build…”

Charlie stared at him, then glanced around at the body that was being zipped into a bag. She was young enough to be a student of his… a fact that made him cringe. “You realize that this practically guarantees that these women were targeted… and this person could be after them for any number of reasons regarding their looks, ages, even some other detail we don’t know about yet. We know their ideal target, but not the WHY…”

“I know, Charlie… it’s why the FBI’s got another person on this with you… how HAS your conversations with J. been?” Don asked, curiosity on his face as Charlie smiled slightly.

“He’s very clever… helped me a bit on figuring out a formula for all of these variables that simplified things a bit more. They have to be more than a mathematician…” Charlie said as a woman off to the side nodded and came over, having overheard.

“…They are.” She said, then offered her hand as Charlie took it. “Special Agent Cameron Dodge.” She said as Charlie shook her hand, nodding. “…Myers is a criminology student as well as a mathematics major over at CalSci. We’re looking forward to trying to hire them once they’re out of school.” She said as Charlie tilted his head to the side.

“A criminology student?”

“And mathematics, yes. They studied YOUR work, actually, Professor Eppes…” Cameron smiled, watching the surprised look go across his face. “Made them want to combine the two. I think their thesis paper is going to be on the proposed benefits of mathematics on the crime scene.”

“Oh, wow.” Charlie said, his eyes widening as Cameron nodded.

“Mmhmm…”

“I was actually thinking that it might be time to bring this guy in to see everything we have face to face and work directly with you, Charlie…” Don said as Charlie nodded.

“Yeah, that sounds good.” Charlie said, his eyes on Cameron as she nodded.

“Fantastic… They’re usually working on equations in CalSci’s math wing… room 16A.” Cameron said as Don stared at her. “…I used to go to them to get my questions answered when your brother was unavailable.” Cameron explained as Charlie and Don both nodded. “…You may as well go ahead and find them.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that. I have to head back to CalSci anyhow…” Charlie said, smiling over at Don. “…See you.”

“Sure thing, Charlie.”

~*~

Charlie sighed as he headed through the halls of CalSci, a hand going through his curls tiredly as he glanced at the little piece of paper. He didn’t know much about this mystery mathematician he’d been working with the last few days, just that the FBI worked with them here and there, mostly by e-mail… but Agent Dodge said that she had worked with them personally before sending him to CalSci to get them… and they’re eccentric…

Don had just laughed, because he thought Charlie himself was eccentric… but Charlie never saw it as eccentric. He just… didn’t think like them. And that was ok. He saw the world more in numbers and equations than most did. Everything is numbers, after all…

“…Room 16A…” he muttered, glancing at each door as he walked. He knew every professor, minus a few new ones… but the students… some slid past him without him having met them… and the one he was meeting today was in that group. He never paid attention to memorizing names of students, just faces, but he had asked flat out if this J. Myers was a student of his… they’d said no, but they’d attended his lectures here and there. Apparently, face to face human interaction wasn’t a big thing for them, something Charlie understood. Big crowds weren’t his thing either.

“…J. Myers.” Charlie frowned, glancing at the door as he nodded. “…There. 16A.”

Walking in, he was expecting to find a mathematician at work…

What he FOUND… was a young woman with headphones on her head, her backside moving from side to side as her head bopped. Her hand reached out and grabbed a rice krispy treat off the table, her eyes not glancing over at all… An oversized plaid shirt hung loosely on her, unbuttoned in the front, with a black tank top beneath it, and pale blue jeans hugged her hips. He tilted his head to the side… glancing back at the paper, and he blinked.

“…Hello?”

She didn’t pay him a lick of attention, and that alone caused him to huff a bit and wave a hand.

“…Excuse me??”

Her mouth began mouthing lyrics, too quietly for him to hear… but he made out a few of them… and recognized the song as R. Kelly’s Ignition Remix… not a terrible song… but he wasn’t there to listen to music… or watch anyone dance to them.

Though… he had to admit… as she rolled her hips… she wasn’t terrible to look at… Her hands came up, fingers lacing through her hair before fluffing it as she moved, and he bit back a flush as he cleared his throat loudly.

Her head whipped around and she let out a shout of surprise, jumping from the shock of him seeming to appear out of nowhere. “OH MY GOD!” she yelped, then tugged her headphones off as he gave her a slightly bemused look. “W-WHAT’RE YOU DOING HERE?! WHO ARE YOU!?”

“Sorry… Professor Charlie Eppes… um, the FBI sent me, Agent Cameron Dodge told me that someone might be working on their formulas in here… but I guess they’re out.” Charlie sighed, his hands going into his pocket. “…Can you tell… um… J. Myers that I’m looking for them and that I’ll be in my office?” he asked as she nodded, her eyes wide. “Sorry to bother you in your… dance… session…” he snorted as she stared, then watched him turn.

He was quickly out the door… snorting under his breath… and he heard the sounds of chalk on a chalkboard. His sneakers squeaked as he stopped, a frown on his face as he made an about face and quickly walked back in.

There was the girl… headphones back on, her head bopping and that treat she’d picked up before now in her mouth… but she was working at the board. She was quickly writing out a formula, her eyes focused on the board as she nodded, glancing up in thought before continuing her writing… Her shoulders and hips swayed lightly as she quietly sang, her song having changed…

“Say my name, say my name… if no one is around you, say baby I love you, if you ain’t running games…”

He leaned against the frame of the door, his eyes on the formulas on the board… and he watched as she added more to them, her head bopping…

“…YOU.” He said loudly as she jumped again, her eyes wide as she whipped around.

“DO YOU HAVE A THING FOR SCARING GIRLS?!” she yelped, her eyes on his as he shook his head.

“No… I NEED to speak to J. Myers… Do you know where they are?” he asked as she stared. “…Look, we need them for an FBI case…”

She sighed… then moved her headphones to rest at her neck and setting the chalk down, moving towards him and extending her hand. “…Jennifer.” She said quietly as he took her hand. “…Jen. Jen Myers… senior.” Jen said as he nodded, grinning a bit.

“You COULD have said that.”

“You never gave me a chance.”

Charlie simply chuckled, nodding. “…I guess I really didn’t.” he admitted, then glanced at her equations. They weren’t from the current case… these were more delicate and had been nearly perfected. “…For your thesis?” he asked curiously as she nodded. “…Master’s degree?” he asked as she blinked at him, then simply pointed at the formulas.

“…My thesis is on the application of mathematics in the criminology field, specifically the use of mathematics in the solving of crimes.” Jen said carefully, watching as he nodded. “…Some of it comes from your research and formulas, actually… credited in my paper of course.” she said quickly as he grinned, pointing at the formula.

“I recognize parts of this… this part here, for example… and the bit after it… but you’ve refined some of it. Where’d you get some of this?” Charlie asked curiously as she shifted, then glanced at him.

“…FBI databases.”

“Did you hack it?” he asked with amusement as she shook her head fast.

“No, of course not! I was gathering data for a case… and found it. I found it fascinating, so I… acquired it.”

Charlie simply nodded, his eyes lit up. “…Well you’ve done a great job with it… I like the substitution you used here… it simplifies the equation.”

“I know… part of my thesis is making a computer program that can utilize the mathematical aspects that people like you come up with and come up with likely variables and hypotheses for the investigators to use… the world isn’t filled with Professor Eppes’, after all.” Jen said with a grin, watching as he laughed a bit.

“It’s clever. Might put me out of a job at the FBI, but…” he snorted with amusement as she blinked, her eyes widening.

“Oh, NO! Not at all!” Jen said, grabbing her papers to rifle through them. “There would still need to be someone making new, up-to-date equations for the program to run…”

“I was kidding… Do you prefer Jennifer or Jen?” Charlie asked as she tucked her hair behind her ear.

“…Jen.”

“Ok… well I was kidding, Jen.” Charlie grinned, then stared at the board, his eyes going over her equations, then glancing at her as she moved beside him again, her eyes focused. “…You know, these really are good.”

“Thanks… I was going to ask you for your professional opinion once this case was solved…” Jen said, bringing her chalk back up as Charlie nodded, then peered at her.

“Why DID you never tell me your NAME…?” he asked as she blinked, then shrugged. “…You knew who I was.”

“Who here on campus doesn’t?” Jen said pointedly, a smile tugging at her lips as he ran a hand through his hair. “…I’m just a nobody.” She shrugged, her eyes going to another line of the equation. “…my name doesn’t matter.”

“I’d have wanted to get to know who I was working with.” Charlie said pointedly as she nodded, glancing at him before continuing.

“…Sorry about that, then.” She said, frowning up at her equation. “…I’m not really a people-person. I’ve been told my social skills are lacking.” Jen said as he laughed.

“I understand THAT.” He said, then tilted his head to the side… then grabbed an eraser, removing a portion of the formula before editing what had been there a bit, her head whipping to him as he smiled. “…There. That should eliminate a few steps in the formula.”

She leaned forward… then nodded, her eyes widening. “…Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.” Charlie said, glancing at the door. “…so… there was a reason I came.” He said, holding out a folder as she frowned, then took it and opened it… and paled a bit. “…Another one. This morning.” Charlie said quietly as she nodded, her eyes wide.

“…Damn.”

“Yeah. We have more information, but it also adds variables… we have to pick through them… plug them into a chart to see what aspects align with each victim.” Charlie said, pointing at the paper to show her a few details as Jen nodded.

“Agreed… I’d also suggest some data mining… analyze the victims based on their characteristics… maybe it’ll give you more of an idea as to who the next victim might be.”

“Right, right… I’d thought of that, but we didn’t have enough to go on… but this makes victim four.” Charlie nodded, glancing at the photo and some of the information that he’d jotted down. “…I can work with this… WE can, if you’re interested in helping…”

“I absolutely am.” Jen nodded, her eyes on the photo. “…We’ll figure this out.”

“I hope so…”

[ryguy3582-blog]

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Find out more information https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q64627233

[brokenjardaantech]

Blue-tinted Red Walls (Chapter 2: Ironies and Contradictions)

my entry for the @dbhau-bigbang. also part of the groom lake aftermath series.

chapter summary:

In the past, Sara had a breakthrough.

In the present, Connor experiences true power for the first time.

In the past, a ghost rose.

also on ao3

---

Before

‘Why now?’

In the permanent humidity of Detroit, Sara sat on a swing in a park overlooking the Ambassador bridge. On the swing next to hers sat another woman in her mid-thirties, her blonde hair done up in a tight bun, her spine straight, her feet, which were in properly-laced combat boots, planted firmly on the ground. A woman of the military through and thorough. Her hands were buried within the briefcase on her lap, and the tension in her arm seemed to suggest her holding a hidden weapon while she watched Sara - a young woman now - flipping over the pages of the file in her hands, the brown skin of the back of her hand transparent from the cold and showing a network of veins normally hidden beneath the surface. 

The other woman did not seem to have heard her question. ‘You must be cold,’ she said, her body leaning towards the girl. ‘Where’re your gloves?’

‘In my pockets,’ a flip. ‘Don’t like how they make my fingers clumsy. Don’t worry, Anderson,’ another flip, ‘a bit of cold won’t kill me.’

‘Why torture yourself if there’s a more comfortable option?’

Sara shut the file with a loud, echoing smack, gaining her a look of disapproval from Anderson. ‘You just -’ she held up the file - ‘gave me evidence to -’ she cut off and lowered her voice - ‘classified as fuck military research data that would’ve changed the world if there weren’t many others like my brother. The others you’ve given me I understand, but this?’ a knock of her knuckle against thick paper. ‘I might not be a proper sociologist, but I know that stuff like this can destroy civilisations. Why aren’t they burnt into ashes when the project went off the fucking cliff?’

‘A lot of reasons,’ Anderson replied calmly, but she did put a gloved hand on one of Sara’s. ‘That’s why I’m entrusting this knowledge to you. What you’re holding is the only copy that exists in the known universe as far as I know. There’re no other records, no eyewitness who will tell the tale and live. You know how the current government is,’ she waited for Sara’s nod of confirmation before going on. ‘If anyone in the current administration found out about the project…’

‘The world as we know it would end,’ Sara’s eyes cast downwards towards the file. [PROJECT AION], it read. ‘Most likely catastrophically.’

‘I know you’re a smart one. Just… keep it safe, would you? If Stern’s paper is to be believed, you are the only one I trust to use this technology properly - if you’ll use it at all.’

Sara shook her head and tucked the file away underneath her coat. ‘Not smart,’ she said as she stood up from the swing. ‘Just an arsehole too vicious to let others kill her.’

A few weeks later, Sara knew that she would be waxing poetic about the irony of the situation if she were Scott. The research on thirium had almost killed her mother, had given Sara these… blue glowy things she was sure that controls gravity and electromagnetism and Scott fucking cancer. The research on AI and human synthesis had got her father dishonourably discharged from the military and nearly cost all of them everything. Thirium and outrageous AIs should be what she hated with priority.

Now, they might be the only path to Scott’s happiness.

She kissed her brother’s forehead despite knowing that he probably couldn’t feel anything and planted her feet onto the polished wooden floor. She had bought the half-ruined mansion dirt cheap on a whim and the renovation cost was high, but in the end they converted it from something straight out of a gothic horror movie into something… still gothic, but something more homely than all the places they had lived in. She let him sleep while she went to her lab in the basement to check on the experiment’s progress, the last of this batch, really - thirium was nearly impossible to come by and she had run out of it. 

The timer at the corner of the screen read three minutes. In some ways, she felt a bit like Marie Curie, dealing with dangerous unknown elements and quite possibly poisoning everything she used for the next several centuries or even aeons. Maybe someone would develop blue gravity-altering magic like her. Maybe she would have someone to share the experience with - there was no experience rawer than being able to alter one of the fundamental forces of the universe and bend it to one’s will.

She didn’t even need the ring of the timer to catch the end of the experiment; the sudden glow that threatened to blind her, the burst of power coursing through her veins - what used to be a disorganised mixture was now - was now -

The stool she was sitting on skitters and fell over with a bang. The two hard drives were already connected in preparation of this exact moment, and a slam on the enter key started a chain reaction that she had been wanting to see for the past few years, the thirium mixture flowing in transparent rubber tubes transferring data so quickly that - 

[CALCULATION ERROR: TRANSFER SPEED EXCEEDS SPEED OF LIGHT. PLEASE CORRECT ERROR BY REFINING ALGORITHMS USED.]

And it was glorious.

oOoOo

Now

‘We’re wastin’ our time interrogating a machine, we’re gettin’ nothing out of it!’ Hank says as he exits the interrogation room and subsequently throws himself into a chair. It creaks and rolls back with his weight.

‘Could always try roughing it up a little,’ Detective Reed suggests from the shadows. After all,’ a glance of [emotion detected: disdain], ‘it’s not human.’

[Hank is not the only one unfamiliar with android workings.] is added into Connor’s database. ‘Androids don’t feel pain,’ he reminds the detective. ‘You would only damage it and that would not make it talk. Deviants also have a tendency to self-destruct when they are in stressful situations -’

‘Okay, smartass,’ Gavin pushes himself off the wall and swaggers towards Connor. He was [emotion detected: mocking] the android and is completely unaware that he has fallen straight into Connor’s trap. ‘What should we do then?’

[Gavin is unaware of the obvious.] is added. ‘I could try questioning it.’

For some reason Connor is yet to comprehend, his words send Gavin into laughter. He cannot see Hank’s face from this angle, but the reflection on the one-way glass tells Connor that he is [emotion detected: not amused]. ‘What do you have to lose?’ he waves his hand towards the door in invitation. ‘Go ahead. Suspect’s all yours.’

Connor enters the room and starts scanning.

o0o0o

It is fortunate that there is no need to resort to violence to ensure the deviant’s cooperation. The confession which the police department wants is obtained fairly easily and Connor could have ended the interrogation there, but he also has the additional mission of helping CyberLife solve the deviancy crisis, and there are clues he wants the deviant to explain.

‘The sculpture in the bathroom. You made it, right? What does it represent?’

‘It’s an offering,’ the other android looks away from the table as if it is thinking, ‘an offering so I’ll be saved.’

Offering? As in religious offerings? ‘An offering to whom?’

‘To rA9,’ the deviant replies as if it makes sense and is something obvious. Then, with [emotion detected: reverence], ‘Only rA9 can save us.’

Connor searches the databases he can access and comes up with nothing, so he presses on, ‘rA9… It was written on the bathroom wall. What does it mean?’

‘The day shall come when we will no longer be slaves,’ it mutters. ‘No more threats. No more humiliation. We will,’ [emotion detected: determination], ‘be,’ [emotion detected: certainty], ‘the masters.’

Connor opens a folder for rA9 and adds [god-like] into the first entry. ‘rA9,‘ CyberLife will want this information. ’Who is rA9?’

The deviant stays silent, and Connor knows that there is nothing else it can add. [Distortions and static build-up] is the only remaining topic that he needs an answer for.

‘The static build-ups in the house. Was that you?’

The other android, for the lack of another description, changes visibly. One, it stops trembling; two, it sits straighter, strength appearing in its cuffed hands; three, the terror in its eyes disappears and makes way for [steel]; four, its LED turns blue despite being yellow or red for the entire duration of the interrogation.

‘A power rA9 bestowed upon us,’ it says, and the air around the androids crackles in anticipation. ‘One that emerges when we are slaves no longer. I survived the trial and now I am one of the chosen.’

‘Chosen for what?’ Connor can hear his fans kicking up to cool down his processors and sense his LED going red from the tingle in his body. Can a deviant remotely control the thirium distribution in another android’s body? But that makes no sense - Thirium 310 is non-conductive and cannot be magnetised. ‘What is rA9 looking for?’

Connor’s vision becomes distorted. ‘The truth is inside,’ the deviant’s voice, now mixed with another person’s, has turned into a bellow. The entirety of its eyes glows blue, distorted by the same power which had held up an attic-full of furniture. ‘ChoOSE YOUR SIDE!’

An explosion of bright blue. A force knocking Connor backwards and passing through his body, making everything tingle and confusing the sensors on his body and hurt. Someone outside shouts, and the door slides open to admit messy footsteps and even more shouting and why can’t he see?

A hand on his shoulder, his arm, and finally settles on his waist. There is another on his knee. ‘It’s alright, Connor.’ It is Hank’s voice. It is Hank’s hand, Hank’s warmth passing into his chassis through his standard-issue shirt. ‘You can open your eyes now.’

He does as Hank says and the world returns into view. He does not realise that he has closed his eyes in the blast, and it is when he regains his sight that he notices where he is; curled up at the corner opposite to the door, he can see that the fluorescent lights are replaced by the dim red of emergency lighting, the table looks as if it has been torn apart by hand, and the two chairs are no more than small scraps of metal the size of [old train tickets] sprinkled among beads of broken glass. 

The deviant is nowhere to be seen.

He unwinds slightly to examine his torso and is surprised that he is not damaged in any manner; apart from slightly-trembling hands and the strange feeling of his insides having rearranged themselves and then returned to their original place, there is nothing wrong with him. Even his diagnostics come out fine, so why can’t he move his legs, and why can’t he see clearly?

‘Here, take this,’ Hank holds his hand and places something in his palm. A handkerchief. At Connor’s confused expression, the human sighs and presses the android’s hand on his face, and Connor finally realises he has been crying, the thought causing a fresh wave of tears to flow out of his eyes. He hastily wipes them away along with the still-wet tracks and tries to hand it back just to let Hank take the chance to pull him up on his still-recalibrating legs, and he would have tumbled if not for the human grabbing his arms and steadying him. Suddenly Hank is everything Connor can see, can smell, and when he looks up, he can see concern in his eyes. ‘Are you hurt?’ the human asks as he pets the android’s shoulders, his arms, his forearms. Connor feels his systems stabilising.

‘I’m okay,’ Connor says without putting much processing power into the words, and it is too late when he realises that his voice is trembling.

‘Jesus,’ Hank releases the android with a sigh and puts some distance between them. Connor finds himself… preferring the human’s warmth. ‘You scared the shit outta me.’ Then the concern is replaced by anger when he yells, ‘What the fuck just happened in here?’

‘I -’

Connor tries to call up the footage that should have been recorded automatically. He closes his eyes to focus on a slowed-down version of what happened a few minutes ago, and he can find two more details: one, the deviant exploded from the inside and seems to have been vaporised from within; two, blue tendrils formed the silhouette of another person as the blast occurred, and it was this person - if they existed at all - produced tendrils on their own and formed a shield in front of Connor moments before he was annihilated and yanked him to the corner.

He opens his eyes and stares at the barrel of a gun. The American Androids Act is the only red tape stopping Connor’s pre-construction software from activating, and red threatens to take over the android’s HUD again.

‘Mind your own business, Hank,’ Gavin snaps. ‘This fucking asshole did it and it fucking knows it!’

Hank gives an [exaggerated] sigh. ‘I said,’ he says, his voice low and threatening, and he pulls out his own service weapon and points it at Gavin, ‘“That’s enough.”’

Neither of them stands down for a few seconds, but in the end Hank wins out and forces Gavin to sheath his weapon with a curse, the latter storming out of the interrogation room with another sneeze-like curse.

It is as if the entire room releases a collective breath. ‘Maybe I should call CyberLife,’ the only uniformed officer in the room says. He sounds as if he is unsure of himself.

Connor wants to tell him that there is no trace of thirium whatsoever on the scraps on the floor, that there is nothing CyberLife can salvage out of this now that the deviant has been torn apart from the molecular level, but all it comes out of his voice box is, ‘Okay.’

o0o0o

Connor manages to compose himself in the taxi on his way to CyberLife tower. His processors keep bringing up the shadow which has been following him, the figure who somehow sneaked into the interrogation room unnoticed and quite possibly saved his life prevented his early deactivation, the corrupted shape of what he thinks is a face. 

And the feeling of something coursing through his veins when he was shielded by the bubble. If all deviants self-destruct like that, no wonder there are no traces of them and CyberLife failed to solve the crisis even though it has been going on for more than a decade. He blinks, and he is in the Zen Garden with Amanda.

‘Report directly to Alec Ryder in the laboratory,’ she orders. Another blink and she is gone, but it only leaves more questions than answers. The CEO of CyberLife wants to see him?

There is no one to speak to, therefore he keeps his thoughts to himself and goes past the security directly into a lift, directing it to sub-level 48 to where his designated laboratory is. He recalibrates with his coin and tries to replicate the trick the shadow did outside of the bar, but before he can summon anything substantial, the strain on his system becomes too high, and all he does is charging the coin, dropping it as he recoils from the static discharge, and then zapping himself once more when he picks it up. Feeling thirium flowing to his face for a completely different reason compared to when Hank correctly guessed his ability, he pockets the coin and adjusts his tie to calm down by brushing the sensors on his fingers on soft fabric.

The doors slide open to reveal Alec standing alone behind them. Their previous encounters happened mostly when Connor was still on the assembly platform and thus the android gained a few inches of extra height, but now that they are on even ground, it is clear that, just like Hank, Alec is taller than Connor by four inches. 

‘Alec,’ Connor greets with a nod. Previous experience predicts a high chance of the human going straight to the point without acknowledging the android, and this time it is no different.

‘Come with me,’ he orders as he turns and begins walking down the hallway. Connor realises that his voice is very similar to Hank’s. ‘I saw the footage you sent us. I want a full examination of this body to make sure that nothing is out of place.’

Connor remembers the feeling of being hooked up on a machine and, by extension, CyberLife’s network at large, and finds it [unpleasant]. ‘There is no need for further investigation, Alec,’ he says, stopping in his tracks. Alec turns to regard him [coldly]. ‘My diagnostics revealed no issues in both my programming and my biocomponents.’

The human suddenly reaches out faster than Connor can pre-construct the action and drags him towards the direction they are heading. ‘Your system can be feeding you false results,’ Alec ignores the cry of protest programmed to deter attacks, and when Connor struggles, a force seems to press on him, immobilising him everywhere save for his jaw and his legs so that he can still speak and walk. ‘I took the risk last time and look where it got us. It led to you, though -’ he shoves the android forcefully through the door frame, and there are cracks on the red wall already when it takes over Connor’s vision - ‘so be grateful.’

‘I -’ but then his neck snaps backwards from the magnet on the port and the cable. The red wall which has cracked halfway through recedes almost violently, and Connor can feel all of his code, every instability in his software, everything that makes him Connor, the most advanced prototype CyberLife has ever created, being forcefully bared to a network so vast and so confusing that he does not have enough processing power to comprehend. Terrifying images of a darkened face, one that is so similar to the corrupted one in the depths of his databanks, that is filled with so much [hatred], pours into his mind like a large river finally emptying into the sea, and he is powerless against the assault of blue tendrils tearing literal buildings off their foundation, tonnes worth of broken concrete being thrown around onto people as if they weighed nothing and crushing them in a spatter of blood and gore, the constant static discharge in the air so loud that they drowned out screams of horror; the image of the same figure rising slowly but surely through a mountain of rubble in the dark, the cracks in its chassis glowing blue from overcharged thirium, the first intact buildings in sight literal miles away. Connor’s legs move against his will and bring him closer to the figure, and the figure becomes Amanda, the wasteland around them the Zen Garden, except now it’s engulfed by a blizzard, and he has to hug himself to preserve what meagre heat he can generate against the cold.

‘As you can see,’ Amanda’s voice somehow overlaps with Alec’s, ‘the power the deviant has awakened in you is highly dangerous. We wouldn’t want to harm anyone, would you?’ She, or Alec, or both of them - Connor doesn’t know anymore, the fog in his processors too heavy for him to comprehend much other than the cold and someone is speaking to him - chuckles at him while he is frantically shaking his head, his voice box unable to produce any sounds other than pathetic whimpers. ‘I’m glad that you understand. I hope you don’t mind a few adjustments.’

Even through the haze, Connor knows the alternative is deactivation, and even though it would not hurt anyone else other than him on the surface, the deviant crisis still needs to be solved, and to solve it, CyberLife needs him, and -

‘Good,’ Amanda says. A blink and she is gone, and Connor is swept away by the wind, his feet can’t touch the ground, he’s flying through the air and hail the size of his fist is battering his body. It is only when a warning appears on his HUD informing him of voice box damage that he realises the noise in his ear is, in fact, his own screaming, and a particularly violent slam sends him spiralling while a countdown timer fizzles in and out of his vision. A countdown of how long he has left before shutdown, and the other notification tells him that biocoz&ponent #8456w is damaged.

That is his thirium pump regulator.

He looks down - with great difficulty, of course, with the wind still whipping him around in the air aimlessly - and there it is, a big, blue, bleeding hole in the place of where the only piece of biocomponent keeping his heart working used to be. Realistically, he knows that removing the ball of ice lodged in his chassis will only hasten his death, but it is not like someone is coming to save him anyway, so what is the point of extending his life for what - 1 minute? 30 seconds - during which he is suffering all the time? With that thought in his mind, he grabs the sphere and throws it away with a complete disregard on where it lands. Not that he can anyway - the timer drops from 00:00:58 to 00:00:05, his world turns an unnatural grey and glitches and -

Nothing. 

oOoOo

Before

Zug Island had always been a scar in the landscape, first used as a burial ground for the Native Americans, then, when the colonisers arrived, as both a place for steel production and a dumping ground for the byproducts. The three blast furnaces used to rumple the ground and the eardrums of people within a fifty mile radius, but it wasn’t until the pandemic in 2020 that steel production stopped, and the Hum became history, a legend that locals whispered to one another when, in a fog of pollution that never quite disappeared, the looming shadows of crumbling steel giants started to get too oppressive. From then on, the island had stayed quiet and still.

At least that was what the government wanted you to think. 

Deep underground in a dust-filled corridor, something churned and rumbled, and the caged fluorescent lights flickered and turned on one by one with a loud crack each, lighting up bare concrete walls that made the place look darker than it should be and revealing a faded bald eagle painted to the point of almost being unrecognisable. Alarms started to blare as thin glowing blue lines made themselves known in previously-invisible cracks in the wall but yet no one responded to it - there was not even a mouse, a cockroach scurrying away in panic as the bunker caved in.

Whilst the outside world was crumbling and quaking away, it was another story inside a room built with the same dark material. Here, undisturbed by the destruction outside, splatters of dried blood so old that they had turned black decorated the wall amongst peeling painted numbers, and wires and tubes of every length and thickness dangled from the ceiling and snaked up from the floor and along the walls, feeding into the giant sphere suspended at the centre of the cube-like room with the same field that would rip Carlos Ortiz’s android apart to its molecules and protect Connor from the blast. Thirium flowed into and out of the sphere and pulse in the tubes and, with one final, blinding glow, drained and dried up and started detaching themselves from the sphere which opened with a sharp hiss. Suspended at the centre by yet another of those anti-gravity fields was the body of an android, its skinless face composed of black metal plates and its chassis of something transparent, putting blue veins and synthetic muscles and black metallic skeleton in full display. Its thirium pump beat once, twice, its toes and fingers curled; a crackle of static, a distant rumble of a building collapsing, and the android woke up just in time to fly upwards through the caved-in ceiling into the night sky: a deadly angel with wings of blue energy and eyes glowing and steaming in the exact same way as the figure that Connor would see in the nightmare Alec provided, regarding the world beneath with glowing rings of blue as if deciding to whether save or destroy it. With a flap of its wings and another crackle, it disappeared completely, dissipating blue smoke and a narrow but deep chasm in the earth the only evidence of its existence. 

[talthorn-sylvoran]

Shattered Acceptance

Day 4 - Breakthrough / Broken

Another beautiful, perfect day.

Looking over the exquisite home he shared, the arcanist takes a moment to appreciate this blissful feeling of pure happiness. Draped in the finest silks and furniture, it simply emanated of such refinement. Shelves of books upon books on all arrays of life and culture.

For a few quiet seconds, the man has questioning thoughts caress at his mind, Talthorn begins to flicker his blinking and thinking wondering about this uncertainty. Raising his hand to the adorned choker on his neck he wants to do something to clear away this fog in his head. 

"Talthorn? Are you alright my love?" An enchanting voice from behind him asks sweetly. 

Slowly the runeweaver turns to meet his lady's eyes and can feel the ease of attempting to come back. "For just for a moment I felt as if I could not remember something...." he admits to her gently. 

"Mm, I see." she glides up to him and takes his hand affectionately. "You've been suffering from those lapses again? I'll just have to help you. As I always do." she is already circling gentle methodic circles of spell over his hand. 

"You're wonderful, my jewel." he seems to slip into mild acceptance before he asks warmly. "....but I would hope you might help me recall.....how we came to be here...?"

Ellanore smiles at just as lovely as she always did, and comes to curve some of his silken silver hair over his ear. "Our home? Oh, it's been a while now. After we were married, we decided on this home together. So many days of distraction in our songs and dance." She laughs musically. 

Talthorn stares at her for a time in an unblinking fashion, his half smile still on his face. 

"You must not punish yourself in not remembering every detail, dearest. You know this has been an issue for you for a long time. All that matters is that we are together and we are living our life with one another as we always wanted." her hand sets on the choker with the glimmering gem in the center. 

"Yes..." Talthorn's thoughts become more clear to him again, and the charm of all of this returns. "Yes, of course." he returns to an endearing smile. 

"Good man. Now, are you ready for breakfast? I've made all your favorites again. We can discuss some of those writings we were reading together." she giggles at him and after a tender kiss begins to pull him away with her.

This is how many mornings would begin before melding into hobbies and studies. Music and laughter. Food and pleasures. Talthorn wanted for nothing and basked in love's glow in every step these days. However....

He knew something was not right.

There was no real rhyme or reason for him to question this life, other than for couple of weeks he had been feeling more disconnected. 

There was concern to think maybe he was becoming even more ill than his beloved wife had told him, but it was more than that. As if he could feel her lying to him. His mind was so foggy. He could not remember a time it had not been. He was supposed to be an accomplished arcanist, and yet there seemed to be this veil of restraint in what he knew. That seemed exceptionally odd. He would snap awake at night, with such peculiar thoughts in his head. About such incredible concepts on time and space. On how arcane energies could be channelled and projected. Theories on concepts that floated away in the morning hours or anytime Ellanore would follow him as he raced to the study.

There were always so many unanswered inquiries. Events and circumstances that he felt his lady would know, and yet did not. It was blamed on his condition, but there were too many inconsistencies to ignore. 

Every time he passed by a mirror, he stopped to look at his reflection viewing this shell of a person he was and wondered often if he even existed. There were times without his wife hovering, that he felt very different. Talthorn's eyes trail to the choker around his neck and with his fingers extending inside as it had many times before. This magic he wore felt so heavy. If he was slipping into madness or senility, then it wouldn't matter if he took this off. He would still be where he had always been. Here. In this flawless life. 

He wanted to take it off. 

He had tried to naturally before, with no success. He discovered it was bound with unique magic so he took it upon himself to find ways to remove it. Leaving himself notes in a secret ledger with what he could research and remember about dispelling illusion and spell breaking. It was not that those thoughts were ever robbed of him, but if there was the chance Ellanore was the source? He could not share with her his burning intentions.

After acquiring the last of the reagents he had been slowly collecting for this, he moves into the study to bring all of his efforts into realization tonight. His practiced hands and agile mind woves spell together with a grace that he had missed. The arcanist grasps this creation  and lets it blossom over his palm. His eyes sparkle with appreciation and excitement, thinking he was going to be alone to do this without detection.

He was wrong.

"Talthorn?" her flittering voice of concern seeps into him. 

The arcanist looks to meet his wife's eyes across the room with fondness. His hand continued to bathe in swirling magics. 

"What....are you doing?" she smiles back, trying not to show the alarm in her voice. 

"Solving a puzzle, my jewel." Talthorn studies his wife begin to slowly fracture in composure.

"Solving a....I don't know what you mean. Perhaps you can tell me about it...?" Ellanore's careful step forward. 

"I just need to know." the magi's voice aches horribly. He was so desperate for answers.  He felt he had always sought this way! 

The enchantress' eyes wide as her beloved reaches for the choker and her voice cracks in calling out his name again. "Talthorn! You....don't want to do this. Life will never be the same after. Truth will take away this happiness. Our happiness." her hand out, already trembling ready to try to counter what he might be doing.

Talthorn watches over her with his fingers curled in what felt like a tight collar. "I want truth over false happiness....." is his answer and before she can retaliate in anything...

There is a shattering of the spell and of the woman's soul before him. Her wail of despair echoes through the home and she plunges to the ground after failing her attempt to stop him. 

Talthorn gives the choker a firm yank and his mind is free! All of his memories, all of his fantastical thoughts! He released the collar and felt he could breathe again!

"Why....." she whimpers out to him. "Why couldn't you just let me....make you happy? Why could this not be enough? Why was I not enough?" Ellanore was limp and broken. 

Gradually looking at the slumped woman before him, his memories of the year they had spent together replayed over in his mind. Freshly away from the enchantment, Talthorn still associated this woman with the feelings of adoration. How she cared for him and about him so completely. 

He didn't understand the embodiment of any sort of love before. Only parts of what it made it whole. The entirety was a matured version of friendship that developed into wanting to share what you were with someone else. To be vulnerable, and intimate and genuine with acceptance. It was everything Ellanore wanted to give to him, and no one was able to show him until this. 

This breakthrough of realization that he deserved love in his life. That he was not exempt from something so profound! Talthorn was beyond capable of expressing such emotions but he had never given himself the chance! It wasn't too late to have it in his world along with all of his passions!

Walking away from the dropped choker, he takes smooth steps to her and kneels down. 

When she looks up in disaster she expects hatred and disgust! Instead she is greeted with a tight and tender embrace. "G-get away from me!" Ellanore yells, ready to thrust him off. 

"Let's continue all of this! Without the magic." he tells her with warmth.

"What? You....can't be....." 

"I don't need the magic to love you, Ella."

Bursts of sobs break out as she clings to Talthorn in disheveled bewilderment! Shaking her head in disbelief, she didn't think she could ever believe him.

@daily-writing-challenge​

(( Disaster is the best way to describe all of this. Within it, there was a incredible breakthrough for Talthorn. Even if continuing this abusive relationship with Ellanore was a mistake, his desire to embrace that embodiment of what he had concluded true love to be was now a tangible aspiration. 

His fateful meeting of Konietzko, continues to change his life and what love means to him! There can always be happiness in truth. ))

[tazzytypes]

Apocalypse: Sanctuary - Chapter 6

Thank you guys for your continued support! Your comments really encourage me to keep writing through any personal doubts I may have in my own writing.

Read on AO3 or see Masterpost for more chapters!

Em and Timothy stood in the hall, Grey’s bustling around them, the occasional Purple or Warden passing them by with a sideways glance. It had been two days and Emily still hadn’t spoken a word to Em, making her feel isolated from the pair. She didn’t want to admit the truth in Langdon’s statement — she’d find a way to reconcile with the other girl even if it was out of spite.

“She’s coming around,” Timothy assured her, “you could always talk to her, you know?”

“She likes you more,” Em said, Timothy shaking his head as he shoved his hands into his pockets.

“You two are not great at admitting our mistakes, are you?”

“I stand by my words,” Em informed him, “and I won’t apologize unless it is sincere.”

Timothy sighed, understanding her reasoning but none the less finding the situation stressful. Emily had given him the same response only hours earlier. The two were remarkably similar, only diverging in small, almost microscopic chinks of their moral alignment.

“Perhaps if I could better explain—”

“My mom always said the best thing to fix an argument was space,” he sighed, knowing how that conversation would end, “just… be patient.”

“Hard to be patient when she misses game night,” Em jested, a small smile forming, “I had to team up with Coco.”

Timothy laughed, “the world appreciates your sacrifice.”

“Timothy!” A voice called out, the pair looking down the hall behind said boy. Em peaked her head out from behind his shoulder to see Emily standing there. Emily’s face fell and her posture became stiff, lips pressing into a thin line.

“It’ll all work out,” Timothy assured one last time before walking towards his girlfriend, hand going out to take hers when he got close enough. Emily spared Em a glance before turning to walk the opposite direction, pulling Timothy close to whisper something.

Em wasn’t good at apologies. She knew that. Her mother used to drag her in front of someone she offended and force her to say the words even if she didn’t mean them. Insincerity was a trait the older woman had refined… a tone of voice Em knew all too well. 

So she turned on her heels and walked in the opposite direction, wondering if she was being sincere in her lack of action or simply being too proud. Her feet led her to the salon, not in the mood for Langdon to appear over her shoulder once more and bring up unpleasant emotions. The brunette wouldn’t even be able to focus on reading, anyways.

The salon was surprisingly empty and quiet. A Grey bustled around dusting and cleaning as a familiar tuft of white hair sat on the sofa.

“Where is everyone?” she asked rounding the sofa.

“Hell if I know,” Gallant sighed as she sat down beside him, “this place is a fucking maze.”

“Evie in an interview?”

He chuckled and smirked, “and I finally have some peace and quiet.”

“Where’s Coco?”

“She’s in one of her moods,” Gallant said, whatever satisfaction he had left him, smile fading into a frown, “God forbid I want to talk about something other than her.”

“As a hairstylist, I thought you’d be used to it.”

“It’s not like I worked the salon 24/7.”

Em reached for a glass of water, “fair.”

There was a moment of silence… peace. Naturally, Gallant couldn’t let it last for very long. 

“So what’s your deal?” He asked as she leaned back in her seat.

“I’ve made many deals in my life, some savory some unsavory,” She said, “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“Well duh,” he said, rolling his eyes, “I meant personally. You’ve got this whole… mysterious thing that’s great, don’t get me wrong, but also there are like… four men left in the world and three are gay so you’re going to have to change your brand.”

“Well, I’m bi so that solves that.” Em said before muttering into her glass, “bold of you to assume I’m straight.”

Gallant rolled his eyes, “Everyone’s bi in the right situation.”

Em’s lips pressed into a thin line. She had met people like Gallant, people who said the exact same thing — toxic. 

“Well I’m also ace so…” she says.

“So you’re either a prude or someone did ya’ dirty.”

“Or I just don’t like sex.”

“How can you not like sex?”

“I don’t know…” Em trailed, trying to press a point, “How can you?”

“How can you not?”

Em’s nerves were already wearing thin.

“Well, we all know where it got Stu.” She snapped. They all knew Venable was homophobic. Singling out the gay men? She didn’t even try to hide it.

“You really don’t pull the punches, do you?”

“It’s the apocalypse,” she said frowning into her drink, “If I held back I’d be dead.”

Gallant silently toasted her mentality, but the look on his face displayed a sort of… judgment. She knew the look all too well. It asked — “Are you really part of the LGBT community or do you just want to feel special?”

“Let me put it this way,” She said, putting her drink down and turning to the man, “Do you like Brussels sprouts?”

He looked at her like she had grown a new head, “no.”

“How can you not? I mean you must not have had the good ones…. Maybe it wasn’t seasoned right. No one just doesn’t like Brussels sprouts.”

“Alright, alright,” Gallant conceded, raising his hands in defeat, “I get your point.”

“I get it,” Em admitted after a moment of silence, “I can pass as hetero-normative if I need to and I have due to being in the closet. But both sides of the table always told me I was just seeking attention or going through a phase.”

“This conversation got way deeper than I was planning on it to be,” Gallant noted, eying his drink before mirroring Em and putting it on the table. 

“Yeah,” Em admitted with a chuckle, leaning back on the couch and staring at the ceiling, “Some things just didn’t die with the apocalypse, huh?”

“New world,” He said, glancing at Em as he mirrored her actions, “same bullshit.”

                                          --------------------------------------

At some point, Em wandered back towards the library. It was a siren’s song she could not fight against. Also, one could only bare Gallant’s companionship for so long. The man had a way to take his good moments and completely ruin them. He had tried to ask her about multiple highly-sexual definitions as a sort of test of her sexuality or somehow prove it was real to begin with. 

To quell her irritation, she focused on what she was going to do once she got to the library. There was a first edition Hawthorne she had her eye on, but the ever-looming threat of death made her wish for more science books. Hell, she’d take her old high-school textbooks over Hawthorne any day if it gave her the information she needed. 

With a sigh, she took out her notebook and scribbled down yet another unanswered question to research into. It only grew longer as the days passed with no end or hope of answers in sight. The only way to survive was to wander out into the radiation, but she’d rather die at the hands of cannibals than fall victim to cancer and tumors. Perhaps if they focused on finding canned preserves the risk would be lower? It was more hopeful thinking than anything else.

Nose in a book, she barely even noticed the figure rounding the corner until her shoulder clashed with theirs. Pencil clattering to the floor, a hand beat hers to the mark and she pulled back as she kneeled on the floor.

Emily was before her, mouth twisting as she handed the pencil back and searched for the words to say. Em was the first to stand back up, Emily patting at her skirt to buy more time.

“Hey,” Em spoke, breaking the silence.

“Hey.”

“So…” Em bit her lip, looking to the floor to the ceiling and anywhere that wasn’t Emily before sighing and looking at the girl, “I’m sorry. I got so... consumed by surviving I talked to you like you were stupid instead of listening to your concerns.”

“As am I,” Emily echoed, shoulders losing their tension, “I pretty much called you a heartless bitch.”

Em chuckled, “we both got heated. It’s not like your mindset wasn’t warranted.”

With a half-hearted smile, Emily gestured to the library door, Em holding it open for her before following after. As always, everything was right where they left it. Books left to the side stayed exactly in the order she had arranged, bookmarks in the right places. It was the one corner of the world the chaos didn’t touch... or at least where she could begin to understand it.

They fell into place at a table, Em sitting in a seat and Emily sitting on the table itself. She looked around the room, obviously not having been in there since Em and herself fought. 

“You know,” Emily began, “before all this I was protesting a coffee shop for exploiting child labor.”

“Now those kids have more to worry about than poverty,” Em finished the thought, “and they didn’t have the luxury of a decent childhood.”

Emily thinks about it and shakes her head, “I was always told I was getting angry for no reason, taking things too far.”

She looked to Em, “I’m tired of not being able to do anything and then it being too late.”

Em broke from her gaze, trying to turn the chaotic disorder of her thoughts into words, “I wish I could jump into the deep end like you, but I just… I just can’t be a hero. It goes against everything ingrained in me.”

Emily smiled sadly at the girl, squeezing her hand. She always seemed to understand without asking. Em thought it was like her superpower or something. 

“Let’s collect info,” Emily reassured, “and when you feel like it’s time… we’ll strike.”

“When we think it’s time,” Em insisted, “ya’ll’s asses are on the line too.”

Emily smiled and shook her head, “we’ll take a vote. Do it like a jury or something.”

“Viva la revolution.”

They talked for a while, Em updating her on post-interview plans. They needed to find a way to conquer the radiation. There had to be more than one organization of doomsday preppers in the LA area.

“What about the cannibals?” Emily asked, “we don’t even know what or even if there’s an armory in this place.”

“That’s why I was thinking of sneaking into—”

They were interrupted by the screeching of un-oiled door hinges, both girls quickly turning towards the sound. Bookshelves blocked their view, but the telltale sound of steel-toed boots against carpet was unmistakable to Em. Emily looked to her friend as she stood, walking towards the sound.

“Erika?” 

The Fist appeared from one of the aisles, smiling at the girl as Emily looked between the two. Em fell back to sit next to Emily, giving her a reassuring smile as she closed the notebook they had been looking at.

“You have a good ear,” The Fist said, turning to nod a greeting to Emily.

“Emily,” Em introduced, “Erika.”

“A pleasure,” The Fist said, Emily offering a still anxious smile before addressing business, “Mr. Langdon wishes to speak to you.”

“Me?” Emily asked, hand on her chest as she looked between the two.

“No,” The Fist replied turning to the third woman in the room. 

Em’s brows knitted in confusion. “But some of the residents haven’t even had their first—”

“It’s okay,” Emily tried to reassure, nodding for Em to go ahead, “we’ll talk more about books later.”

Em gave a nod of confirmation before turning to The Fist, “lead the way.”

Once the woman’s back was turned Em sent a frantic glance to Emily. Had someone overheard their conversations? Venable killed people for just having sex. God knows what she’d do if she unearthed conspiracy.

“I’ll be with Timothy when you’re done.” 

The hallways suddenly felt more foreboding, her paranoia making every shadow into an enemy. Would she be able to fight her way out of there? No… not alone, at the very least. They had guns… she didn’t. She knew how to disarm them. Bullets only went in one direction, after all. Then again, things like that were easier said than done. It was incredible what people were capable of when they were put between a rock and a hard place.

                                  -------------------------------------------

Langdon didn’t look up at her as she entered, gesturing to the chair she had sat in before as he shuffled through papers.

“Miss Mead tells me you’re instrumental in keeping morale up among the residents.”

Em paused at the arm of the empty chair, hand resting on the back, “Do you ever start with a hello?”

Blue eyes finally lifted from papers, a smile crawling onto his face as he put his pen down. His hands sat on either side of his work as he stared at her with what seemed like amusement in his eyes. “Do you ever directly answer questions?”

“Sometimes.”

A smirk of her own crawled to her lips as she settled into her chair, “I simply make suggestions on how to pass the time. What they do with that is up to them.”

“You sell yourself short,” Langdon noted, examining her reactions, “there must be something that drives your mediation between residents.”

“Boredom?”

“Actions cause reactions. There has to be something you wish to gain.” 

Langdon leaned forward and Em’s skin prickled with anxiety. He didn’t know anything. He was fishing. He couldn’t prove anything. “Tell me… what do you desire?”

She had expected accusations, the lack of which made her at a loss for words. Langdon watched her think for a long moment. Her eyes trained on the floor, looking beyond it at something he couldn’t see. She shook her head, defeated. 

“Honestly,” she admitted, “I don’t know.”

“Everyone desires something,” he pressed, “luxury, prestige, sex... Ah, well. The latter not so much in your case.”

Em either didn’t notice the faux pas or simply didn’t comment on it. Langdon knew it was low-hanging fruit, anyways.

“Material objects bring such fleeting enjoyment,” she sighed, “and then you’re bored again looking for something to fill the hole.”

She paused, genuinely unable to think of anything.

“I guess I’d like to live comfortably,” she admitted, “… not worry over rent or if I can buy food… but being here has negated the need for that.”

“Then let’s speak immaterial,” Langdon proposed.

That. That she did have an answer for, “motivation… happiness.” 

Her interrogator was less than impressed, scoffing at her response, “sounds like something from an Instagram thirst ad.”

Em laughed, amused as she realized the truth in his words and how she must sound saying them aloud. Langdon was once again perplexed by her reaction. He had been expecting something much more defensive.

“But it’s true,” she assured, looking down at her skirt and fixating on a piece of fuzz that had settled on the purple fabric, “I want to have motivation to work on the things I love. I want those fleeting moments of happiness to last longer… but these days they only last a heartbeat before they’re gone.”

He continued to stare at her. She was an oddity among this lot, genuine in a way none of them could ever hope to be. Langdon could see the desire in her eyes and the sadness that came with knowing it was something that could never be given to her. It wasn’t fame or fortune… those desires were always so much easier.

“A material object gives focus to desire,” she finally finished, finally gathering the confidence to look back into his eyes once more, “but it is fleeting. I know that all too well.”

For once Langdon was the one who was at a loss for words. The two could simply look at one another for a long moment until Em broke the silence. 

“May I ask you a question?”

He waved his hand for her to continue, “Why am I receiving a second interview before some residents have received their first?”

“Maybe I think you have potential.”

Em’s face twisted into a wry smile, “or you want me to think I do.”

She did have a way of making him laugh.

“You’re quite the character,” he admitted, leaning back as he chuckled, “it makes me wonder exactly what would happen if you let go.”

“Let go?”

“Of that anger boiling inside of you.”

There it was. The dropping of the pin. Langdon liked to get you comfortable before he shoved in the knife.

Once again, Em felt the need to edge around the statement. A sinner in church felt themselves being watched by a thousand eyes when the reality was not a single one was focused upon them. No. She’d watch her words until he accused her of conspiracy. She’d play it safe.

Langdon watched her become guarded. Hands once placed on either arm of the chair became centered on her lap, fingers twisted together. Green eyes dilated and he could see a muscle tense around her jaw.

“Momentary catharsis isn’t worth the consequences,” she noted.

“There are no laws anymore,” he noted, rounding the desk, “no rules. Chaos has won.”

Em shook her head, “don’t tempt me.”

If she hadn’t of known better she’d of said he looked… enthralled. There was an eagerness to his gaze. Langdon felt his heart leap in his chest. It was as if he was witnessing a phoenix rise from the ashes.

“You’re picturing it now, aren’t you?” he asked, “taking back the power Venable holds, leading a revolt to—”

“Good things come to those who wait,” Em noted, pulling back and leaning back into the chair in preparation to rise from it, “until the cards are in my favor I won’t move.”

His tone scared her as he continued to press and press a button she had been trying to ignore. It was like staring at a snake alone in the middle of the desert, unsure if its bite will simply hurt or turn your insides to mush. Either way, it was just the two of you. Even if you managed to wrangle it off you and cut off its head there was a chance you wouldn’t survive.

“Hold the cards too close to your chest and they will be wasted.”

He only moved slightly towards her and she jumped to her feet as if his mere presence was a blazing inferno. The buzzing feeling began again, spreading from her chest to her head and all the way out to her limbs. 

“I think we’re done here,” Em said, words rushing from her mouth before they could catch in her chest. She took a step back. His hands moved quickly, but his touch was light as he grabbed her arm. He pulled her towards him, just as gentle.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, voice almost soft as blue eyes searched into her green ones, “I’m on your side.”

She yanked her arm from his grasp. Em did not care for cages, gilded or covered with rust. Langdon’s eyes looked hurt as she pulled away, gaze going desperately between her face and her arm as if trying to understand why she pulled away.

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” She snapped before leaving the room as quickly as her feet would carry her. Langdon simply stood still and let her go, hand slowly falling to his side.

In her desperation to flee, Em’s surroundings seemed to blur around her. She had tunnel-vision and all that mattered was getting as far away from Langdon as possible. What he made her feel… there were no words for it. She was terrified and excited all at once. It was like being on a roller-coaster, the adrenaline rush making you run into danger again and again. No. She wouldn’t run into the fire. She wouldn’t play hero.

“Woah!” a voice exclaimed, “slow down.”

Timothy stood in front of her, hands on either shoulder as he bent down to look her in her eyes. They were frantic, dilated, and unable to focus on anything.

“What happened?”

Movement over her shoulder caught his eye from somewhere down the hall. Langdon stood there, hands coming to rest behind his back as he eyed the pair. A noticeable frown was on the blond’s lips, eyes narrowing on Timothy’s hands on the woman’s shoulders. Timothy felt like he had interrupted something… probably for the better. He honestly couldn’t tell.

Finally noticing Timothy’s gaze, Em glanced over her shoulder to find nothing but a dark hall. She quickly righted herself, calming her breathing and nerves.

“Where’s Emily?” she asked, voice almost robotically even.

“In her room…” Timothy said, pulling his eyes from the dark hall, “why?”

Em shook her head, “You were right… something is wrong with Langdon... wrong with this entire fucking outpost. We need a plan sooner rather than later.” 

                                   ---------------------------------------------

Hours later, Em couldn’t place why she had been so scared. When she looked at his face she just felt pain striking right at her chest and there was only a moment before the venom destroyed her from the inside out. 

Timothy and Emily had noted her distress, promising to brainstorm ideas and meet up later once things settled down. While Em had been the first to propose that they keep their ear to the pavement, the patience to do so was quickly thinning. 

There was something in Langdon’s eye… like he could see everything she had ever done or ever will do. It was like he knew exactly what they were doing.

Em paced her room, trying to keep her mind on the tangible instead of giving in to fear. A plan… she needed to figure out a plan. The Warden’s, Grey’s, and Venable were her best bet at getting a base-level understanding of how the outpost was run. She had tried talking to the Grey’s, but they either knew

Things just didn’t add up. Most of the residents, no matter their station, seemed in the dark about The Cooperative’s movements. Venable even seemed perplexed. There could be information in the woman’s room, but doing so would lead them to a quick death.

Their best bet would be to gather information from the Greys, scattered and benign as it may be. Emily was probably talking to them now as Em paced and paced. Going as a group would make them larger targets and more suspicious, but it was maddening to just sit and wait.

A knock on the door pulled her from her reverie. Em raced to hide her notes in her desk. Putting them all back in order was taking more time than she expected. Another knock came, harder and more urgent.

“Just a second!” Em sang, deciding to just shove all the papers in the desk and organize them later. Smoothing down her hair and straightening her skirt, Em stalked to the door and opened it.

There was momentary relief when she saw Coco, quickly replaced with dread when she realized exactly who was standing outside her door.

“Yes?” Em asked, leaning forward as she had one hand on the door and another on the frame. Coco had a sickly sweet smile on her face which could only mean one thing.

“I need your help.”

At least this time she hadn’t beat around the bush and wasted Em’s time with an hour conversation about doing makeup in horrible lighting. She stared at Em, an awkward silence falling between the pair.

“With?” Em finally asked.

Coco gave her a look, “my dress! Duh.”

Em’s eyes scanned over Coco’s dress, confusion marring her features as she looked back at the woman’s face, “what about it?”

“Not this one!” Coco exclaimed, rolling her eyes, “the purple one… well… the purpler one. I asked Mallory and she had no idea what to do but I saw you out here once with —”

“Coco,” Em said, voice like a teacher trying to get a rowdy student to sit in their seat, “what do you want?”

“Can you mend my dress?” Coco grabbed on to one of Em’s hands as she begged, “There’s a giant hole in my armpit and my interview with Langdon is in an hour. I swear I’ll put in a good word with him for you!”

Em pried her hand away from the woman and resisted the urge to groan. Taking a deep breath she weighed her choices. Finally, she let out a sigh, resigning herself to her fate and trying to be as nice as possible.

“I guess I have nothing better to do.”

A grin spread across Coco’s face and she took her hand once more, hardly giving Em a chance to lock her door before dragging her along. Coco was only nice when she wanted something. Em logically knew that. Yet, somehow, the girl reminded her of an old friend, rambling about this, that, and everything as she tugged her along to god knows where. If she stared at the back of Coco’s head for a moment she could pretend the blonde hair belonged to someone else.

Em quickly threw the trail of thought away. Last thing she needed was Coco spreading a story about how she cried over the woman’s pathetic attempts at being a decent human being. 

Coco threw open the door to her room and quickly shoved the garment into Em’s hand, shattering whatever illusion of kindness she had briefly created. “Here!”

“What side?” Em sighed, turning the garment around in her hands.

The blonde looked up as she thought, raising one arm, then the other as if recalling the exact moment it ripped.

“Never mind,” Em droned, “I found it.”

The hole was quite large, probably due to its poor fitting. It wasn’t as if they had someone take their measurements before they arrived at the outpost. It reached from the armpit to halfway between the sleeve and the waistline. Coco had gotten lucky, the tear following the natural stitching of the garment.

“Do you have a needle and thread?” Em asked, Coco hovering over her shoulder as she examined the damage.

“Do I look like I mend my own clothes?”

The brunette sighed once more, “get a Grey to bring me something, then.”

“Don’t you have your own tools or something?” Coco scoffed.

Em rose her eyes to look at the spoiled brat.

“When’s your interview?”

Coco huffed and went out into the hall, leaving the door open so the other woman would be sure to hear her stomping. For a moment there was glorious silence, Em examining the inside of the dress to figure out how to sew it up. After a few moments, a figure caught her eye and she looked up at the doorway.

Gallant stood, leaning against the frame with a box in one hand.

“What’s she having you do for her?” he asked.

“Mending clothes,” Em sighed, holding up the dress, “you here for her hair?”

“Yup,” Gallant said with a pop, moving to set up in the room, “Don’t know how many more miracles I can pull in that department.”

“A comment on your lack of supplies or an insult to Coco?”

The man paused, turning back towards her as he eyes the ceiling in thought, “Both?”

They could hear Coco’s stomping before they could see her, the woman appearing in the doorway with a scowl.

“Here’s your supplies,” she snapped before turning to Gallant. She mouthed something Em couldn’t hear, but Gallant’s silent response was comically easy to read as he mouthed the words “I know.”

Wearing a plastic smile she had learned from customer service, Em took the needle and thread from Coco’s hand and pulled out what she needed from the spool. 

“Did you get scissors?” Em asked as she looked around.

“No.”

Regretting her decision to help, the brunette turned to Gallant.

“Uh-uh,” He said, shaking a finger in front of him, “no way.”

“Just do it!” Coco snapped, falling back into a seat before her vanity.

With the grace of a sulking toddler, Gallant made his way towards Em, reluctantly cutting the thread. His frown persisted as he went back to deal with Coco’s hair.

“You owe me,” He grumbled. Em couldn’t tell if the statement was directed at herself or Coco.

“Did they ever figure out what caused that power out earlier?” Coco asked Gallant, the two quickly creating their own little bubble of which Em was not a part of. Not that she cared.

“Probably just some minor glitch,” Gallant dismissed, obviously not losing sleep over the issue.

“That’s hardly reassuring. My father paid millions to get us in here. You’d think they’d at least be able to keep it running smoothly.”

Gallant rose his hands, giving Coco a look in the mirror, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Coco didn’t even hear him, going on some random tirade Em quickly tuned out. What she wouldn’t do for a pair of noise-proof headphones.

Both Gallant and Em went into a trace as they worked. Em remembered when she was little and wanted to be a fashion designer, herself and another friend spending their elementary school lunchtime drawing out designs. Her grandmother had been more than happy to teach Em how to use her old and outdated sowing machine. Childlike enthusiasm led to it breaking. In the end, her grandmother was only able to teach her a few things before she passed… most of them with a needle, thread, and her own hands.

“Are you almost finished?” Coco demanded, pulling Em out of her train of thought as she paced the room like an angry chicken. Gallant followed after her, trying to keep his masterpiece in place. “He can’t finish until you’re finished.”

Em paid her no mind, turning back to her work and maintaining her steady pace, “do you want this to look like it was patched together by a drunken child?”

Coco huffed and stalked back to her seat, much to the relief of Gallant.

“I have twenty minutes…” she continued to complain.

“And the walk down the hallway takes five.” Em reminded.

Gallant was content to wait. He’d worked on models before back when he was first making his break and he was well used to clothing mishaps. Coco, on the other hand, glared daggers at Em as she worked. If she was being honest, Em quite enjoyed annoying the woman. It was comically easy to test just how spoiled she truly was.

Fifteen minutes passed and Em finally finished the last stitch, knotting the end a few times to keep it in place.

“Finally!” Coco exclaimed, not waiting for the pair to leave before changing. It wasn’t as if there was much to expose. Victorian undergarments were infinitely more modest than modern swimsuits. As soon as the dress was over her head, Gallant did a few last adjustments to her hair.

“Fini?” Coco asked, staring at the man as he focused on one stray strand. One would think he was diffusing a bomb given the intensity he looked at hair when working. Finally, he nodded and Coco was gone from the room in an instant without a single word of thanks.

“She’s a mess,” Gallant sighed, turning back to pack up his things.

“For once we agree on something.”

“Why did you agree to do this?” he asked, waving a comb as he continued to pack up, “aren’t you usually holed up in the library?”

“Bored.”

Gallant chuckled, “Fair.”

Rolling the loose thread back around the spool, Em made her way back to her room. Without the outside distraction, something to focus on, her mind went back to its earlier worries. She felt like she was staring at a brick wall, wondering how to tear it down when her only tools were her own two hands. If she got to the other side… maybe then she could find something.

Movement caught her eye as she turned a corner, looking up to find Langdon holding the door open for Coco. Something stirred in her chest and she turned away and kept walking before it could fester. Her cheeks warmed as she felt eyes burning into the side of her head.

Emotions were far too stressful. That’s why she liked logic. She just had to focus on the logic. Then she’d be safe.

                                      ------------------------------------------

There was nothing like the impending doom of death to make people do anything to chase away anxiety. Even after a solemn vow to never play the game again, they had brought their make-shift Pictionary once more. Bits of extra paper and a whiteboard from the Grey’s common area used to draw upon.

“Oh! Cats the musical!” Coco yelled out as Andre drew, “Horny!”

Timothy kept an eye on his pocket watch, finally looking up as he called time.

“Rosemary’s Baby!” Andre shouted at Coco, circling the spikes at the top of the head he was drawing, “They’re horns!”

Coco huffed and waved a hand as she fell back in her sleep, grabbing her water and taking a drink as Timothy’s eyes returned to his watch.

“Okay! He announced, “Emily and Emily!”

Em got up and reached into the box of folded cards, looking at the words written. Her lips twisted as she thought about how to approach it.

“Ready?” Timothy asked. Em nodded. “Go!”

Rapidly, Em drew a caricature on the white-board as Emily leaned forward in her seat.

“Dolly Parton!” Emily shouted after a few moments. Em threw down the pencil in victory, a large grin on her face.

“No fair!” Coco bemoaned, gesturing to the pair, “you have fucking Da Vinci on your team.”

“I was on your team last time.” Em reminded.

“That was ages ago!”

Em’s eyes flitted up to the balcony which loomed over the salon, a familiar figure in black catching her eye. The glow of the fire made it seem like his hair was made of gold. He leaned on the railing like a content cat watching the mice play.

She pretended she hadn’t noticed him but could feel his eyes on her back, the hairs on her neck standing on end as the buzzing feeling began to return.

“Okay, Timmy,” Gallant declared, rising from his seat to take the board from Em, “our time to shine.”

Her focus on the man watching them was interrupted by Timothy tossing her his pocket watch. If not for the way it caught the light Em would have let it drop.

When she looked up Langdon was gone as if he were a shadow instead of a man.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT MICROSOFT IS THIS THE LADDER

You often can't tell yourself. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you get bored halfway through and start making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one, the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested the bricks. So why did I need it? You'd think that would work for any kind of taste. And in retrospect, it was crap. Though strictly speaking World War II was an extreme case of this. Some switched from meat loaf to tofu, and others by playing zero-sum games.

So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe. Although empirically you're better off using the organic strategy, you could succeed this way. Some of the very best ideas. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you? A lot of startups have that form: someone comes along and makes something for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be a bit smarter to dominate Internet search than you had to be suitable for everyone. It's hard to trick professors into letting you into grad school.

What would they like to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves? It would seem a misnomer if someone said they were very determined to do something trivially easy. And the flattening effect wasn't limited to those under arms, because the main cost in software startups is people. Sometimes you need an idea now. We had a page in our site trying to talk merchants out of doing real time authorizations. You might also want to look at the employment agreement you sign when you get hired.1 This turns out to be big like Microsoft.

The founders of Kiko, for example. All parents tend to be more interesting than one without. Serious applications like databases are often trivial and dull technically if you ever suffer from insomnia, try reading the technical literature about databases while frivolous applications like games are often very sophisticated.2 Plus if you find someone else working on the same thing, they got it at the same time, as their next door neighbors.3 Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of email, or because they saw a movie star with one in a magazine, or because it's hard to imagine anything more fun to work on certain things. Several well-known startups began this way. Prestige is the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. Good design is often daring.4 Working from life is that it lets you jump over obstacles. That form of fragmentation, like the others, is here to stay.5 Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it.

If there is such a thing. It could be because it's beautiful, or because they know VCs aren't interested in such small deals. So what less ambitious professors do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. But if opinion is divided in such discussions, the side that knows it would lose in a vote will tend to err on the side of money.6 For most of the great advantage of school: the wealth of co-founders. Good design is timeless. If you just start doing stuff for them, so that is a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. I used to think the good ones, at least now, the reason Google survived to become a good hacker? Math would happen without math departments, but it would work for any kind of work ends up being done by people who don't understand it.

Like a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors, hiring and firing people, and I suspect the human brain is just as lumpy and idiosyncratic as the human body. But if you're living in the future had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. I'm in debt. If you're at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right than original. And as the Duplo world of a few giant companies dominating each big market. She assumed the problem was one that needed to be solved though. For example, thinking about getting a job will make you happiest over some longer period, like a well.7 VCs are driven by consensus, not just within their firms, but within the VC community. Some of the smartest people around you are professors. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was hobbyists. I would never use this. Or is it just something nice?

It's a matter of pride, and a pretty striking example it is. This one may not always be true. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class tradition comes from.8 Look around you and see what the smart people seem to be working for them. The purchase price is just the beginning. Not only was this work not for a class, but because it didn't seem ambitious enough. When I told the fearsome Professor Conway that I was interested in AI a hot topic then, he told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, the ambitious plan was to get lots of education at prestigious institutions, and then gradually refine this initial sketch.9 There is something to this tradition, and not just because you don't have to force yourself to do it well. It all evened out in the end, wow, this is a bit of a fib. A lot of them try to make relativity strange. But if your job is to design things, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness.10

Which inevitably, if unions had been doing their job tended to be asymmetric about major axes, though; there were hundreds of minor symmetries. Be ruthlessly mercenary when you start doing this though: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen. It depends on what the meaning of is is. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they didn't have materials or power sources light enough the Wrights' engine weighed 152 lbs.11 The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked.12 People who didn't care much for religion felt less pressure to go to grad school, you'll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented. The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says: You want to know how to solve it. Why not start a startup with someone you like, and that's frightening. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money? Business schools like to talk about startups, but philosophically they're at the opposite end of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

Notes

It did.

IBM is the only significant channel was our own, like speculators, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been raised religious and then a block or so, even if it's dismissed, it's not inconceivable they were forced to stop, the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else microscopically poorer, by decreasing the difference is that we're not.

So by agreeing to uncapped notes, VCs who understood the vacation rental business, A.

Com of their upbringing in their experiences came not with the exception of the VCs buy, because those are the most part and you start to spread from.

Parents move to suburbs to raise five million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be important ones.

Sam Altman points out that this was the capital of Silicon Valley. But a couple hundred years ago it would have expected them to lose elections. I apologize to anyone who has them manages to find the right to do this with prices too, and that you decide the price, and earns the right to do some research online. Another advantage of startups that are hard to predict precisely what would our competitors had known we were working on such an idea is bad.

Become increasingly easy to get the people working for me do more than half of 2004, as accurate to call the Metaphysics came after meta after the first question is not economic inequality is a fine sentence, but for a reason. If a company they'd pay a premium for you, however, is not always as deliberate as its sounds.

There are people whose applications are perfect in every way, I mean forum in the same reason 1980s-style knowledge representation could never have come to you as employees by buying good programmers instead of bookmarking. Does anyone really think we're as open as one could do as some European countries have done well if they'd survived. Who is being put through an internal process in their early twenties. Acquirers can be times when what you're doing.

It's probably inevitable that philosophy will suffer by comparison, because spam and legitimate mail volume both have distinct daily patterns. Turn on rice cooker.

17. I think the reason the founders lots of potential winners, which made it to colleagues. According to Michael Lind, when they say that it might seem, because the processing power you can eliminate, do not try too hard to erase from a company's culture. It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it.

Even now it's hard to think of ourselves as investors, but I'm not sure. Two possible and not least, as accurate to call you about an A round. Some, like speculators, that probably doesn't make A more accurate predictor of low salaries as the cause. Give the founders of Google to do it well enough to be redeveloped as a process.

The knowledge whose utility drops sharply as soon as no one trusts that.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Rajat Suri, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Geoff Ralston, Paul Buchheit, and Jessica Livingston for inviting me to speak.

[ground5]

Easy Steps to Start an Business

If you have business on mind, there’s no time better than now to do it.  There are no limits on who can become a great businessman. You don't necessarily need a college degree, a bunch of money in the bank or even business experience to start something that could become the next major success. However, what you do need is a strong plan and the drive to see it through.

Check out this step-by-step guide to help turn your big idea into a successful business: 1. Write down your vision. You can’t get somewhere without knowing what the vision for your business and your life is. While the end result of your business will probably look a little different than your initial vision, you have to have the end result in mind to start. What do you want to do with your business? Try answering these three simple questions about your product or service and you’ll have a business vision nailed: What is it? What do I get? How do I get it? 2. Research your market. This is such a boring step. There’s no way around it & it’s in depth. It’s for those exact reasons many well-intentioned first-timers at Business will want to skip over this part. Sure, you asked your family and a few friends and they say your idea is great, so you’ve got a market, right? Wrong. You need to look back at the questions that help you with your vision and drill into them again. What is it, and more important for your research, why would someone want it? What do I get from you that I can’t get from someone else or something else? How am I getting it and how is that delivery method better, cheaper, faster or easier for me? These are all helpful questions to see where the market is for your business and what pain points you’ll need to solve for your market with your offering. 3. Create something you can sell. If you can’t solve a problem for your market, you aren’t going to make any sales large enough to sustain a business. It’s that simple. Make sure whatever your business is offering, it solves a problem, because you can market and sell the solution to that problem for a viable business. 4. Get a website. Now that you’ve figured out your market and product offering, you’ll need a website. It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail or online business; both need a website no matter what. You don’t have to spend a fortune on a website to start. Purchase a domain from a site such as GoDaddy or Host Gator. If you’re handy with WordPress, you can install a theme for free or a small fee and get started. If you aren’t handy with WordPress, use a build-it yourself, idiot-proof site-building service such as Wix. If you really don’t want to deal with it, look to UpWork to outsource your website design.

5. Outline your automation. These days, most businesses require some level of marketing and sales automation to really scale. You hear a lot about passive income, and getting your marketing and sales processes as automated as possible will help you maximize the opportunities for truly passive income. Even if you don’t want a passive income business and are actively planning to market your business, you’re still going to want things such as product registration, order tracking and purchases to have some level of automation. Examples include a thank you email, confirmation or upsell offer. Think about the total user experience from visit to purchase on your site and outline what you think are good points for automated messaging or sales offers. Build it on paper ahead of time. Depending on the size of your budget and needs, look into the sales and marketing automation standard for small businesses, Infusionsoft. 6. Set up a sales funnel. If you don’t need the robust offering of a site such as Infusionsoft just yet for your business, look at sales funnel-specific software programs such as Lead Pages. These plug and play into email service providers and payment processing vendors and can be a nice option for small businesses just starting out until they’re ready to scale to bigger platforms. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); 7. Set up an email opt-in.  First, you’ll need an email service, such as AWeber or MailChimp, or if you have Infusionsoft or another bigger service provider such as Marketo, email will be part of the platform already. Once you have your email service, you’ll want to ensure there are plenty of places for people to opt-in to your email list on your website, on your landing pages from your sales funnel and anywhere else it’s appropriate. The key to a great, scalable business is a healthy, robust email app. 8. Start a Facebook page. Facebook is a great, free tool for spreading brand awareness and linking to your landing pages and website. If you create and curate really valuable content consistently, you’ll build up a following that can help drive your business and your brand. 9. Create valuable, shareable content. You can post your content on your website, syndicate it through services such as Rebel Mouse and post to your own Facebook page. However, if you want the word to really spread, make sure each piece you post is easily sharable so you can build organic traffic and word of mouth. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); 10. Refine, tweak and improve as you go. You’ll never be done, but follow the previous nine steps and you should be on your way to establishing your business and your plan of action. As you implement each step, remember that you’ll need to continuously learn from each part of the process to tweak and improve as you go. The more you learn and make corrections, the better your business will be positioned for success in the long term. Tip: Today online business is the most effective small business that you can begin with. You start earning money from the comfort of your home. You can make hell lot of money with minimum investment. So, Good Luck! See you on the field. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Read the full article

[creativitywithtomas]

Can I rework UNO to teach player’s Empathy and Collaboration?

For my Creative Inquiry I wanted to explore the capacity games have to teach and inform through gameplay mechanics. I then refined this inquiry into reworking UNO to teach two specific skills that can be expressed through gameplay. This allowed me to use my creative domain of game design in order to craft a game with the intent of teaching Empathy and Collaboration solely through the gameplay between players.

I started by breaking down these terms and understanding what I was actually trying to achieve with my design:

Gameplay - This is a term that can be extremely subjective as to what is and isn’t gameplay but on a simplified level it is the ways that the player interacts with the game. The inputs that a player makes in order to achieve eventual outputs. Inherently gameplay needs to be reactive in order to give the player agency and help them feel motivated and invested in the game they’re playing.

Game Mechanics - These are mechanisms that exist within the game that define system behaviours caused by player input. These mechanisms can be empowering, restrictive or neutral but the goal of them is to create a game space that elicits engagement.

Empathy - Empathy is another term that is quite subjective and is hard to find, in “The Social Neuroscience of Empathy” (Decety & Ikes, 2009) it is stated that there are 8 common usages of the term empathy. Out of these 8 I found 5 that would be applicable to being taught through gameplay. These 5 were all ways that empathy could be used to empower the person empathising by using the empathy to inform and create shared understanding. So for my purposes Empathy was “understanding the perspective of another by connecting with their emotions”.

Collaboration - As I did my research on collaboration it was interesting to see how much it did cross over with empathy. In a literature review on collaboration Emily Lai defines it as “Mutual Engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve a problem together” (Lai, 2011). This definition doesn’t just describe the act of working together, but that it’s coordinated. Coordination requires communication and understanding of the capabilities of members of the team in order to perform.

The Design Process

From this point I was able to draw a lot of connections between Empathy and Collaboration in order to best address how to express them in gameplay format. Teams work well collaboratively when they both understand the goal they are trying to achieve but also understand each other. To reach an understanding of each other a common ground of knowledge between all parties must be found through communication, once this common ground has been found then it can be expanded by receptive exchange of knowledge and ideas. To express this through gameplay and mechanics players needed to be given opportunities to find common ground and then expand it in order to achieve a common goal. Using both the tools of Empathy and Collaboration to do this. In my question I set myself the boundary of only using a deck of UNO cards as my game elements in order to keep things simple and prompt creativity in my response within an existing framework. Within my design I could have completely changed the design and have the only similarity be the physical cards themselves, but I did realise quite fast that using the framework to my advantage was a better idea.

Collaborative Element

UNO itself is a game where you can both help and or sabotage the other players. The card placed in the centre either opens up the capacity for the next player to play a card or denies them the ability too. As well as this, cards like the skip or reverse card can be used in both malicious and helpful ways to other players. Cards like the draw 4 and draw 2 within the traditional games rule set (first player to empty their hand wins) are considered to only be destructive to another player as its outcome directly opposes the win condition for that player.

With this in mind all of the effects except the draws effects already had the capacity to be both malicious and helpful. I needed to design a win condition that would make the draw 4/2 card have that same capacity, I looked into several possibilities but I ended up with the condition that “All players must empty their hand in 1 cascading turn”. With this win condition sometimes playing a draw card on someone would prevent the game from finishing too soon but it could also take a player further away from that win condition. 

Margarida Romero did a study on Collaboration in Game Based Learning in this study she tested school children’s capacity to collaborate in a game environment (Baek, Y, 2013). One of the key points she discussed was that of interdependence, where each member of the team is dependent on the other for success. She noted that teams functioned better when they understood each other’s interdependence in a positive way and recognised that each team member’s efforts were indispensable for success.

This win condition fits the mold of interdependence, where not only is each player reliant on the other player for success but because of the random nature of card games each player has unique abilities. This is because the cards in the players hand are the capacity of action the players have available to them when interacting with the game system and in most circumstances players will have completely different hands. To achieve the win condition players must discover positive interdependence and effectively collaborate.

Empathy Element

As stated before for the model I’m working with empathy is “understanding the perspective of another by connecting with their emotions” and my intention is to use this to empower people through understanding each other. Playing UNO with this collaborative win condition already uses some degree of empathy since you want to connect with the people you’re playing with so you can communicate. But this is only a good tool to teach empathy in situations where everyone is in a similar situation to you; with the same struggles and the same tools to solve a problem. This isn’t a good reflection of empathy in a real world setting; where people are more likely to have their own unique struggles they have to attend to that may influence how they can solve a problem.

In order to express these unique struggles I came up with a list of disadvantages that players are afflicted with at the start of the game. In some cases these disadvantages are known by the whole team and in other cases they are only known by the person who has them. With this design it creates a game space where players need to be aware of their teammates actions and try to connect with how they’re thinking and the choices they’re making. In a way the players are distanced by this mechanic and in order to collaborate effectively they must find a way to cross that distance and achieve the win state.

Some of the disadvantages I’ve designed took inspiration from mental illnesses, physical handicaps and just general behaviours that could cause complications in a collaborative space. The core goal of these disadvantages was to give something that elicited struggle in the player that can be seen and deduced by other players as well as drive unique collaborative solutions.

Since the disadvantages of each player changes with each round of play the common ground moves. It is up to the players to find that common ground that everyone shares and expand it. By giving players a space where they get to go through this process several times, all the while empathising with each other to discover each other's disadvantages they can better develop these two skills.

Game Rules

The game starts with each player drawing a card from a shuffled deck, they are not to reveal this card unless it is a Block or Reverse card (As these cards have mechanics that need to be understood by the whole team). Players identify what disadvantage they are afflicted based on what card they draw and then return that card back to the deck. From this point on aside from the changes the disadvantages bring to the game the rule set is similar to traditional UNO last card. Each player is dealt 7 cards, then the top card from the deck is placed in the centre and each player must take turns matching that card. Rules like that each player must say “UNO” on their second to last card else they draw 4 cards as it doesn’t contribute to the game’s intent and can be used as an exploit.

Ultimately the win condition is for each player to empty their hand sequentially after the other. As long as it doesn’t breach any disadvantage a player may be afflicted with, players can discuss what cards are in their hands to collaborate. But players are not allowed to physically show their hands unless a disadvantage says they can. Each turn a player may guess another player’s disadvantage and if they are correct that player may confirm this and give the team as a whole more context on how to move forward.

Reflection

Overall I’m very happy how this project turned out, it did end up being a less is more situation. The more times I tried to add complexities to my design the more I discovered that I was being restrictive to how the players could solve a problem. As I discovered the connections between Empathy and Collaboration I was able to synergies these two methodologies together in the design.

I do start to question if Empathy is the correct word I was looking for, in a clinical sense Empathy is the emotive subjective connection with someone’s emotions whereas Sympathy is the objective understanding of emotions. In a professional collaborative space it may be more prudent to Sympathise opposed to a more personal environment where Empathy would be more suitable. This can also depend on the person though whether they can understand from a more emotive space or a more factual space. In the current design both are facilitated but in moving forward it would be better to focus on one or the other.

When it comes to the disadvantages also it would benefit from more research and testing to see how conductive these effects are to inciting an emphatic and collaborative challenge. Some effects like “Shy: You may only speak when invited to speak by another” play on social behaviour where players need to identify that another player isn’t talking and needs support. Whereas “Compulsive Liar: You can only state your cards once per turn and when you do one of them must be believably incorrect” frames the player almost as a saboteur who is ruining the collaborative effort when they are in the same need of support. It stands to reason whether players would even try to empathise with the Compulsive Liar but if they could it would be a powerful lesson. Reference

Lai, E. (2011). Collaboration: A Literature Review. https://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/Collaboration-Review.pdf

Baek, Y. (Ed.). (2013). Psychology of gaming. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Decety, J., & Ickes, W. (Eds.). (2009). The social neuroscience of empathy. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com 

[je-suis-clarisse]

Capture (Part 2)

England: Howard Stark sat at his desk, uncharacteristically quiet. Across from him sat Peggy Carter, her hands folded in her lap. Neither was looking forward to the meeting they were having today. Howard had made the phone call whilst Peggy had begun the investigation into Clarisse du Volde's disappearance.  Given her work during the first World War and the Civil War, how she had stuck it out to the end; they knew she wouldn't abandon her post to leave and lead a life of luxury, which she could have easily done. She had been a spy and also a nurse; she had done work with the resistance.  Clarisse wanted to help people  and she did so, no matter the cost to herself. Peggy knew that Elijah had lectured his good hearted daughter on her position. He hadn't broken through her thick head, but she had clearly not changed his position about offering himself up to help with the war effort.  Like father, like daughter. It was Peg who saw Elijah Mikaelson walk in and as he did so, she stood up. Howard followed suit. If Elijah was surprised, he didn’t say so. He was a man known for keeping his head and his emotions in check. However, Peggy knew that this wouldn’t go well. Not when they told him that Clarisse was a prisoner of war. They’d discussed the possibility of her death, but Peggy surmised that since Hitler was curious about the occult and the possibility of immortality, he would keep her alive. “If anyone can survive, it'd be her," Howard mused. "She's like Steve. Wily and spirited. Always thinking." He was always trying to consider the positives. He'd put his fortune on it. Still, he knew they were up against huge odds. Odds that, at this point, were not in their favor. Peggy was the realist but she wasn't about to burst Howard's high hopes. Nor did she want to face the possibility that the cheerful woman would never bother her again. “Old friend, how are you?” Howard asked, shaking Elijah’s hand as he came into the room, taking his hat and setting it and his jacket on the coat rack. “I’m well enough. But I suspect that since I’m here, I’m about to hear something I don’t particularly want to hear,” Elijah replied, looking at the both of them. Taking a seat, he brought his left ankle to his right knee, smiling appreciatively as Howard poured him a drink. Bourbon, Elijah nodded approvingly as he raised it to his lips. He might be a millennia old, but he did appreciate Stark's expensive and refined taste. Howard considered how to tell him when Peggy just put the ring down in front of the Original Vampire. As he looked over at her, he was once again in awe of the strength she displayed. If Peggy was frightened, Howard would never know it for her face was a portrait of mystery. For a moment, she paused, expecting something explosive. Instead, Elijah's movement was precise and fierce; much like a predator about to pounce. His eyes darkened for a moment as he looked to the ring, lifting it up and holding it between his fingers. As he looked at the engraving inside of it, he pressed his lips together and Elijah closed his eyes. There was a lethal edge to his voice as he spoke, yet Peggy also recognized a slight hitch, the one that revealed a minuscule amount of fear. Not remarking upon it, nor assuring him that they'd have it under control, Peg let him break the silence.   “Where did you find this?” “It was brought to us by one of the nurses that worked with Clarisse,” Howard spoke up, finally finding his voice. “She was taken after her shift was ending. We suspect she dropped it as a sign to us...and in turn, you.” “I told her to be careful…” Elijah murmured under his breath. If his temper was flaring, he kept it under a cool exterior. Peggy admired that. There had only been one moment where she wondered if he would break. Deep down, she wished Risse would come bounding in the door, her green eyes lively with her usual joie de vivre, but there was no chance of that. 'You'll keep me apprised?'' Elijah asked, his voice still that terrifying tone of calm, as he finished his bourbon and set the glass down. "Of course," Peggy responded. Already her mind was working in twenty different directions. Namely how to keep Elijah from marching into Germany and ripping the heart out of anyone who looked at him wrong. Elijah Mikaelson squared his shoulders as he took his hat and coat and headed out the way he came in, though his rage was white hot. Keeping her ring close and the small photograph of her in his billfold, Elijah began to plot. To Germany he'd go. But this required thought and a great deal of precision. Not to mention, stealth. As he climbed into the back of the car, telling his driver where to go, he drew out the photograph and looked at her smiling visage whilst he gave a smirk. It had been a rare moment of playfulness where he indulged her by posing for a few pictures. On the back was her calligraphic handwriting, 'Papa, I love you more than I do Clark Gable! Always and forever, your Risse.' With a tremor to his voice, Elijah put the picture away and murmured,  "I will find you, Risse. I promise." Somewhere in Berlin. "Oh good, you're awake." Opening up her eyes, Clarisse looked around. She was in a cell. Slowly rising up, she braced herself on the wall, willing the world to stop spinning. Every part of her body ached and she didn't even think about what had been done to her. She had no doubt that had she been aware. She would have ripped the offenders to shreds. She rubbed her finger, missing the feeling of gold on her finger. She hoped by now someone had turned it in. She didn't dare hope for a quick rescue, but she hoped someone would be aware. Her mind went to Elijah and she knew that beneath his fury, he'd be worried sick. She liked to think she knew him well. Still, thinking of him made her sad and she had to stop thinking of him before she began to cry. Her hand went to her neck and at least her necklace was still on. "Where am I?" She asked, eyes settling on the fellow across from her. "Berlin. We're Die Kuriositäten des Führers." She raised a brow. The Fuhrer's Curiosities. How...lovely. To be reduced to a sideshow act, essentially.   "They mean to figure out what makes us immortal." He continued. "They exploit our weakness, so I hope you're tougher than you look. It gets very lonely here. The girl who stayed in that cell before you died. I probably shouldn’t have told you that, but I think you should probably know."   "What are you? And who are you?" "You can't tell? I'm a werewolf. My name is Silas. I’m a Polish Jew, so if you don’t want to talk to me, I understand," he spoke to her, explaining the accent that she hadn’t been quite able to place. Still, she granted him a smile. Why that mattered, she just didn’t understand. Christ himself had been a Jew; would Hitler have put him in a camp too? She had many questions. Perhaps in her time here, she and Silas could distract themselves by asking the unanswerable. Still, he was waiting for her reaction, and she did so. "I’m Clarisse. I’m a Vampire and I don’t care that you’re Jewish," she replied, earning a smile back from him. "I could tell. You tried to bite the guard when they first brought you in. They gave you a sedative and something else. That was three days ago." Silas continued, reaching through the bars to shake her hand, which she met readily. Her eyes widened at that. Three days past? She sighed, pushing her hair back out of her face and sat down, doing so in a position where they could keep talking. At least she wasn’t alone in this ordeal. They spent more time deep in conversation, learning more about Silas and his life. He had been pulled from the Auschwitz camp and brought here. Her heart went out to him and she would have hugged him if she were able to. He chattered on and she learned about Hitler and his desire to become immortal. “He wants, quite literally, to take over the world,” Silas mused. “May that never happen!” Clarisse agreed and kept this all to her mind, trying to remember it all, so she could pass it along to Peggy. This fellow was worse than even Red Skull, she was certain of this. Or perhaps just on par. It didn’t make sense to her that men such as this could move up the ranks and become what they had. Why? And why had the world turned a blind eye to the plight of the suffering? War was a blight on humanity. It often solved nothing. For every dictator brought down, another rose up in their place. It was a vicious cycle. As she was about to respond, two of the SS marched in, pulling her out. "I can walk on my own," Clarisse hissed at them, wrenching her arms from their grips. It made no sense to run yet--she had no idea where she was going to go. At the very least, she would have to endure a week here; learn the ins and out, get to know those working here, and to learn the layout of the building. To do so prematurely would only serve as a mistake and they would never allow her to make the same mistake twice. Walking with them to wherever, she raised a brow as they entered the laboratory, scowling as they made her sit down in the most uncomfortable chair she'd ever sat in. If they were going to torture her, they had certainly picked the right chair to do so. However, she decided quickly to not cooperate, but also not to do anything to enrage them. She ultimately had what they wanted. They couldn't kill her--rather, it would be stupid to kill her. “We have done our research on you,” the woman spoke, looking to Clarisse. To her consternation, Clarisse simply raised a brow and remained silent. She would not give her the satisfaction of confirming whether her research was right or wrong. She was an actress. This was her moment to shine. Even if her talents were being wasted upon these tossers. These were the same people who would no longer hire Marlene Deitrich for God's sake! She wouldn't waste a bit of her talent on them. (Not that she was as good as Deitrich or Garbo or any of them.) “Born in 1772, the youngest of four living children. Your mother was pregnant several times but only had a few live births. And you.. you're not even a true Du Volde. You are...how would they have put it? A bâtard. Your true father was Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. He was something of a libertine--just in case you didn't know. Your mother probably didn’t even know. When we took your blood, we did some testing." Clarisse stayed silent, not saying a word in response, though the word was offensive. Hearing the news of her true parentage was surprising, but she still kept her face blank. She refused to respond to anything they told her. She would not. If they thought by insulting her mother they’d get a rise out of her, they’d be disappointed. Though, she was surprised at the mention of Louis Philippe. She had never met him but had heard of him. He had been beheaded the month after Marie Antoinette. His own relatives and he had voiced support for the family to die. Still, she was curious as to how Vivian and his paths crossed. She had always joked she was royalty. Hearing this fact only confirmed it now, that she was right. Still, it was moot now. She listened as they continued to speak of her human life. It amazed her how much they actually had right. It was finally when they were silent that she spoke. “What a fascinating biography you’ve concocted,” she told them using some of the German she knew. “And you were turned in 1791.” The woman folded her arms over her chest. Clarisse couldn’t help but think she might have been attractive save for the black uniform and swastika emblazoned on it. If this was the master race, count her out. She was quite content to be an enemy of the Reich. For this, she went silent again. She did not want to speak of it, nor confirm it. Still, in those three days of unconsciousness, she supposed they’d confirmed what she wasn’t speaking of. The male gripped her chin suddenly, forcing her to look up at him and despite it not being ladylike, she spat in his eye. When he backhanded her, she laughed. If they wanted her to be the monster that they thought she was? Very well. “Was that meant to hurt?” she asked, smirking as he rubbed at his hand, cursing under his breath in German. “I’ve had children hit harder.” Clarisse leaned back in her seat, crossing her legs and looking around her surroundings more fully. It was a laboratory, one where instead of animal testing, they tested on herself and other immortal beings. She looked around for a telephone but didn’t find one, much to her chagrin. Their frustration was all too apparent as they strapped her into the chair, making it damn near impossible to break out. “We will find out how you became immortal,” The woman snarled. Clarisse bit on her bottom lip, feeling her fang make her bleed slightly. She was hungry. The scent of the woman before her was singing to the vampire, who could feel her eyes darkening and she closed her eyes once more, quashing her hunger for now. It was a mistake she wouldn't make again, because in the moments of her keeping her eyes shut, curtains were thrown back and the heat of the sun touched her unprotected skin for the first time in over a century. As they let the sunlight fill the room, despite the utter agony of her flesh burning, Clarisse refused to scream. The scent of her own charred flesh filled the place and howls could be heard all throughout. For a moment she wondered why, when she realized, she smelled like cooked meat. The wolves were likely starving. Cringing at the idea that she might be their meal, she surmised it to be a better fate than being a  Nazi plaything. Still, the pain was agonizing and she couldn’t even think straight. Seeing the two officials standing and taking notes enraged her to no end. They truly were monsters. How anyone could mistake her for a monster, she had no idea. But she was not that. No. She refused to accept that. She never could tolerate seeing someone suffer. But they thrived on it. If this was what being one of the Fuhrer’s ‘curiosities’ entailed, she would have no problem telling him to fuck right off. (She issued a silent apology to Elijah, who told her such coarse language should never leave her.)   When the sun began to sink low in the sky once more, the window was once again covered and blessed darkness surrounded Clarisse. They left her in the chair, going off to eat or to do whatever it was they were meant to. Her body was throbbing from the burns and she momentarily ached for the true death to come and claim her but that would be a betrayal to those who loved her and those she loved. She would endure. It was as simple as that. Besides, there were people out there who needed her help. Sitting idly would never do. When someone came and carried her back to her cell, she was amused to find that he had garlic on him and a silver crucifix at his throat. As if those things would stop her if she really meant to attack him. He lay her down gently and Clarisse was surprised, but she remained silent. The young man marched out and left a light on, that didn't cast much in the way but a lone yellow beam. "I am glad you're back," Silas spoke softly. "I am sorry you're in pain. I'd offer you my blood, but I think it would hurt you." "It would," she finally spoke after hours of silence. "But the thought is kind. However, I never leave home unprepared." Drawing off her necklace, pleased to find it still hanging around her neck, she paused before raising the vial of blood up. "That's handy!" Silas whispered to her and Risse chuckled for the first time in days. "My father told me to keep it in case of emergencies," she whispered back, opening it and downing the contents. It was one of a few vials she always kept on her person. She was simply grateful that they had not stripped her. Though they'd gone out of fashion some four decades prior, Clarisse was fond of her whalebone corsets. She'd gotten in the habit of wearing them again whenever she was on the field. Bullets ricocheted off the bone and the corset made it easy to hide things. In this case, several vials of blood. She would have to preserve them, using them only when she was desperate. But tonight, she would use this one. Downing the contents, she gasped feeling strength course through her frame, her burned flesh healing. She was as ever, appreciative. Even though he wasn't here, Elijah was taking care of her. Looking over at Silas, her emerald eyes shining in the dim light. "I know there are people probably out looking for me. But I'm determined to break loose before they get here. You in?" She asked, her smile widening when Silas agreed. "Then, let's get to plotting. Tell me everything you know."

[pixelproductions]

Guide to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Campaign

Think of this Guide as a sort of content marketing 101 primer. You’ll learn the key principles of content marketing strategy as well as sophisticated ways to research, refine, and improve your team’s content marketing output.

This post will help your team:

• Brainstorm campaign ideas that broadly resonate in your market

• Create customer-centric content that generates leads

• Use data to better focus on your customer’s needs

• Boost your traffic and conversions with advanced selling principles

I. Content marketing principles  

Whether you’re writing a blog post or thinking of a new webinar campaign, I’ve found these six principles to be at the heart of successful content marketing.

1. Make the customer successful.

Writing feels abstract. But our customers come to our website with concrete problems. If they don’t grow their client’s Instagram followers, they could lose the business. If they don’t find a faster way to create reports, they need to work late fighting with a frustrating spreadsheet. Before We try to hit our goals, we need to help the customer solve their problems. Everybody agrees with this. But often content marketing attempts to solve the company’s problems (tell people about our product features so they fill out a lead form) before solving the query that brought the reader to the page.

2. Make it real.

To make the customer successful, you need to write about what they actually struggle with. The best way to do this is to root content in a real insight. Talk to the sales team. Talk to customers. Look for concrete problems that people are trying to solve. Managing the corporate complexity of global and local teams is not a concrete problem. Instead, “how do I get our local offices to actually read our brand policies?” is closer to what people are actually trying to do in their daily job.

3. Make it simple.

Your reader isn’t dumb. And you are not smarter than your reader. But they also don’t have time to wonder what you meant by “integrate your workflows to drive higher revenue.” Use concrete language. Write so simple that a fifth grader can understand it.

4. Make it sound human.

Short sentences and short paragraphs work best. Avoid big words. When you find a sentence longer than 15 words, consider chopping it into two. Strive to include a mix of long and short sentences. Avoid generic language. A writer’s job is to destroy cliches.

5. Make your advice immediately actionable.

As Rand Fishkin noted in his content marketing manifesto, the reader needs to be able to walk away from your content and immediately do something differently to grow their traffic, use a new social network, or impress their boss with advanced knowledge.  A lot of content offers generic advice (such as “optimize your social media profiles”) instead of giving people advice they can go and try out right after reading. Ask yourself: after reading this content, what can the reader go and immediately apply to their job?

6. Make things you’re proud of.

Don’t settle. Create things you are proud of. Fight for good work. When you encounter an obstacle, build a better way.

Five questions to stay on track:

Does this help the reader? Are you actually solving their problem (“this is how you increase your sales”) or masking product information as advice (“how to increase your sales = book a demo with our sales team”).

Is this rooted in a specific, tangible, and real customer problem? Saving time on social media is not a problem. But spending four hours trying to create social media reports for your boss in Excel is.

Is this fake content? You know the problem (customers want more sales from Instagram) but does the advice actually show them how to solve this? To make the customer successful, your advice needs to provide concrete steps that helps them solve their challenges.

Is it actionable? After reading this content, what can the reader go and immediately apply to their business?

Are you proud of this? Is it simple? Does it sound like a human? Is it something you’d share with your friends?

II. The best types of content to create

From blog posts to webinar presentations, here are the five best types of content we’ve found to drive traffic and attract leads.

1. Do the work for them

Spend five hours reading about trends in the industry and then summarize your findings. This saves your reader time—they only have to spend 10 minutes to gain what took you five hours to find.

2. Write about your company’s values

“To ensure you don’t go down the rabbit hole of forgettable content, write about what you know and write with conviction . . . the best writing comes from your unwavering belief in how things should work,” says Intercom. Express simple messages such as “social media is changing businesses” with stories.  Such as: “how a wine-lover built a global business with his Twitter handle.”

3. Learn something and then share the how-to

Figure out how to do something (like setting up conversion tracking in Facebook) and then explain how to do this with clear steps. Make it real. Ask someone to try to do the steps after you write it—but before you publish it.

4. Share something they can’t find anywhere else

Share something only your company knows. For example, a study based on company data or a customer story you heard from sales.

5. Do the thinking for them

Spend an hour brainstorming marketing tactics a company could do. Then write a list post with your creative ideas. Most people don’t have the luxury to think. You do. Even a few ideas can help them look smarter in meetings.

III. Where to find new content ideas

Customer and product research

As the legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz said: “Listen to your customers and the mind of your market. Learn more about the product. These two sources will never fail you.”

Trying to grow traffic by 20 percent in the next quarter? Stuck for a marketing campaign idea? Overwhelmed with creating a strategy to reduce churn?

The answer is in the mind of your market or in your product. There is no other source of inspiration.

This is a simple point. But teams rush to whiteboards, hoping their creativity will pull a solution from the air. As a result, you get generic strategies, pun-filled ad campaigns, and surface content. The role of creativity isn’t to produce ideas from nothing. Instead, creativity connects the dots between two sources of input: product and customer knowledge.

Go on a sales safari

One of my favorite strategies that I learned from Pamela Slim, a popular speaker and marketing consultant, is a sales safari. A sales safari helps you observe customers in their natural habitat. This helps you find ideas for products or campaigns by understanding the concrete problems your customers stumble over each day.

Use these five questions to guide your safari.

ONE, what is their knowledge level?

Does your company collect information about different deals that you’ve won or lost? If so, a good method to research an audience’s knowledge level is to look at these notes to see who is involved in typical deals.

For example, if the brief is to write for the travel industry look for a travel deal. Then look for the different people (the customer, not your sales team) involved in the deal, their job titles, and names.

With that information, go to LinkedIn and Twitter, find their profiles, and then look at the content they share regularly. You can build a search stream in Hootsuite and regularly see what they like to share and the level of knowledge they have about social media.

TWO, what is the concrete problem they are trying to solve?

This is harder to find. People don’t talk about it on their LinkedIn profile. The best place to begin here is to talk to sales. Book a meeting and ask about what their customers ask about on a daily basis. Even better, see if you can sit in silently on an actual sales call.

A few places to look:

Look for a public Facebook Group where prospects talk about their daily struggles at work.

Search Inbound.org, Quora, and Clarity for people asking questions. Varying results here but you can uncover some gold.

Talk to real people. Talk to the sales team, interview an expert in the field (such as a consultant who works with the vertical), or interview a customer to learn about their daily challenges.

Search for a book on the topic. Such as “Social Media for Dummies.” Then go to Amazon. Read through the reviews. You’ll get a human picture of the actual pain they were trying to solve by reading the book. Joanna Wiebe, an author and copywriter, first introduced us to this tactic.

THREE, what have they done already to try to solve this problem?

It’s rare people have never tried solving the problem your product solves.

What’s more likely is that they’ve tried to solve the problem, bought your competitor’s software, and failed. Copywriter Ray Edwards calls this your buyer’s “try-fail cycle.”

Good content says, “this is what you are struggling with, here is a solution.” But great content says, “this is what you are struggling with, here are the things you’ve probably already tried and why they didn’t work out. Here is what to do instead.”

FOUR, what’s the transformation?

This is where marketing skill comes in. Prospects will tell you basic outcomes such as “We want to increase our social audience.” But they won’t tell you their true desired outcomes: “I want this to be a big campaign win so that my boss keeps me on this important client account.” Great content speaks to the organization’s vision and the prospect’s individual career goals.

Read the book “Crossing the Chasm” to learn how transformation means different things to different people. For example, a young disruptive company buys software for different reasons than established organizations.

Go to your brand positioning for ideas. At GrowthPix, my manifesto helps to align content strategy with my values and belief. By expressing your company’s or blog’s vision with customer stories, blog posts, and guides, you’ll avoid having too many messages out there in the market. It’s the glue that keeps your content thematic and memorable.

FIVE, how can the product help them?

At some point, you’ll need to show customers how your product helps to solve their challenges. Be an expert in your product. This gives you better ideas (such as ways to reduce churn or better onboard users). Use it in your everyday work. Read technical manuals. Master new features.

IV. Advanced principles to grow your conversions

Once you have a direction, here are a few things to help refine your content.

Be generous

“Content marketing’s goal,” says Rand Fishkin, the founder of the software company Moz, “is not to convert customers directly.” The goal is to build familiarity, likeability, and trust. One of the greatest skills you can develop as a marketer is to learn how to give without asking.

Create more than unique content

Unique content isn’t enough. Being useful isn’t enough. People need to remember you. They searched for days for strategy advice. They found mediocre advice. Then they found your blog post. You cared and actually helped them. The goal of content marketing is to arrest the reader in their search. They’ve found their mentor.

Hide your obvious sales language

One of the first things you learn in sales is to sell benefits, not features. Completely true. But what you don’t learn is that the best salespeople hide their selling techniques. “Drive more revenue” sounds like advertising. It’s a benefit we’ve all heard before. Peter Thiel’s book “Zero to One” is a great resource. He shows that if you want to be good at selling, you need to learn how to hide your tricks.

Go advanced, rather than basic

“Don’t include advice, tips, or tactics that more than 20 percent of your audience already knows,” says Rand Fishkin. When in doubt, go for more advanced than too basic.

Make your CTA (call to action) congruent

AND NOW IT’S TIME TO SELL SOME BENEFITS.

If you spent 1,000 words being a funny, likable expert, you don’t need to shift into your sales voice to get them to download a guide. This breaks the mirror. You’ve already built trust. So just tell them in the same voice what to do. Keep it casual. For example, “here’s a free downloadable template that will help you craft a professional social media strategy, including a PowerPoint template to present your strategy to your boss or clients.”

[paleorecipecookbook]

RHR: A Three-Step Plan to Fix Conventional Healthcare

In this episode we discuss:

The patient case that inspired the book

Who is this book for?

The mismatch between our medical paradigm and chronic disease

Drug companies and conflicts of interest

How clinicians can help create a new paradigm

The three core problems and how to solve them

What this new paradigm looks like

How do we pay for this? Is it scalable?

How allied providers are the key

Show notes:

Unconventional Medicine by Chris Kresser

Special offer for RHR podcast listeners - get the audiobook free if you buy the book by November 12th.

NaturalForce.com - use coupon “unconventional” and get $10 plus free shipping

[smart_track_player url="http://ift.tt/2yiM0Yd" title="A Three-Step Plan to Fix Conventional Healthcare" artist="Chris Kresser" ]

Chris Kresser: Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. Today we’re going to do something a little different. I am bringing on a guest host, Tony Federico, he’s the VP of marketing for Natural Force Nutrition, a physiology editor for the Journal of Evolution and Health, and a longtime contributor to Paleo Magazine, and also at Paleo f(x), which is where I met Tony, I think, originally, and I have interacted with him the most. And he’s moderated several panels that I’ve been on and I’ve always been impressed with the way he’s done that, the intelligent questions that he asks and just his balanced perspective on ancestral health and Functional Medicine, and this movement overall. Today is the day that my new book, Unconventional Medicine, comes out. It’s now available on Amazon, and I wanted to ask Tony to come take over the podcast and talk with me about the book because I know he’s really interested in all these topics and he’s read quite a bit of the book himself, and I thought it would be more interesting to have a conversation about it than for me to just sit here and do a monologue. So Tony welcome to the show and thanks for being here. Tony Federico:  Yeah, thanks for inviting me on, Chris. It’s always fun, when we’ve had the chance to chat, as you said. Whether in person or on podcast, I’m always happy to jump in and dish on health with you. Chris:  Fantastic. So, you have read a little bit of the book and we chatted a little bit about it via email, so let’s dive in. Let’s talk a little bit about this book. And for me it was really, it felt like the most important next step that I could take in order to get this message out about ending chronic disease. Tony:  Yeah, I got my copy of Unconventional Medicine a couple days ago. I just so happened to have some time off yesterday, and the next thing I knew I was 80 pages in. Chris:  Nice. Tony:  So, I have to say that, as somebody who’s been in the trenches, I worked as a personal trainer for 10 years, I could really relate to a lot of the things that you were saying in the book, and we’ll get into why a little bit later on in the interview. But you know I just am really impressed with what you put together here, Chris. So let's just, let's get into it, and the first thing that I actually wanted you to maybe tell me a little bit about was how you open the book, which I think is a really great story about a patient named Leo. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Leo and his story and kind of how that inspired you to go down this particular path of unconventional medicine.

The patient case that inspired the book

Chris:  Sure, yeah. So, Leo was an eight-year-old boy that I treated in my clinic a few years back, and I wanted to start with his story because it's, unfortunately, a typical story, much more common than, of course, we would like. And it was powerful for me, it was a powerful experience. It's what actually led to me writing this book. So, like way too many other kids of his age, he was suffering from a number of behavioral issues. He was initially diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Eventually they settled on OCD and sensory processing disorder. He would throw these just crazy tantrums where he'd end up crying or screaming inconsolably, writhing on the floor, and this would happen for seemingly the simplest of reasons. Like trying to get his shoes tied as they were going out the door, not cutting the crust off his sandwich in just the right way or getting a stain on his favorite T-shirt. And he was really rigid around his behavior and its environment, everything had to be just right, just the way he wanted it to be, or else he would fly off the handle.

Is a new healthcare paradigm affordable? Scalable? You bet.

His diet was extremely limited, he only ate a handful of foods, pretty much all of which were processed and refined. So crackers, bread, toaster waffles, that sort of thing, and this is part of the kind of OCD-like tendencies. And any time his parents would try to introduce new food, he would go totally ballistic. And they were worried about nutrient deficiency, but they didn't feel like they ... they were just worn down. Any parent who has a kid like this will understand that. It's just they didn’t feel like they had the resources to battle him at every meal. And they took him to a bunch of doctors locally, and that’s where they got those diagnoses. Initially they were kind of relieved to have those, but then after a while they realized that they were just simply labels for symptoms. And when they asked what the treatment was, you can probably guess the answer: medication. Tony:  Something to do with drugs. Chris:  Something to do with drugs. Yeah. And when they asked how long he would be on that treatment, you can probably also guess the answer. Tony:  The rest of your life. Chris:  Yeah. Shrug of the shoulders, indefinitely, maybe he'll grow out of it, that sort of thing. And they weren't excited about the idea of of medicating their son, but they were also aware of how much he was suffering, and they were suffering, frankly, too. They decided to give them a try, starting with Adderall, and then they progressed to Ritalin and then antidepressants. And certainly the drugs did seem to help with at least some of the symptoms, but there were a couple issues. Number one, they also caused some very intractable side effects like headache, abdominal pain, irritability, and most significantly, severe sleep disruption. And they had a couple of other kids that were younger than Leo. So they were not happy about the sleep disruption. Nobody was because it was brutal for them and also brutal for Leo. Kids need a lot of sleep, and if they’re waking up throughout the night, that’s going to make ... So that was in some ways worse than the original symptoms they were trying to treat. And then Leo's mom had done quite a bit of research on the effects of these medications and she was scared. Particularly for children and adolescents, some of these drugs have some pretty scary side effects and long-term risks. So what really stood out to me, and I mentioned this in the book, is that not once during this entire process of seeing all these different doctors, primary care provider, psychiatrist, eventually behavioral disorder specialists, did anybody even hint at the possibility that something in Leo's diet or some other underlying issue like a gut problem or nutrient deficiency or heavy metal toxicity or something like that could be contributing to his symptoms. It wasn't even broached as a possibility at any time. Fortunately, Leo's mom, one of her friends followed my work and sent her a couple of articles from my blog. One was on the gut–brain–axis, and I think the other one was on the underlying root causes of behavioral disorders. And so that's what led them to bring Leo to see me, and long story short, we were able to ... we did a bunch of testing, found issues that you might guess at. So, disrupted gut microbiome, SIBO, fungal overgrowth, gluten intolerance, but also intolerance of soy and corn and rice and buckwheat, which were major ingredients in a lot of the processed and refined food products that he ate, and arsenic toxicity because rice milk was the only other beverage he would drink aside from water. And we know that rice products can be high in arsenic. So, we, over several months, it definitely wasn't easy to address these problems because of his OCD-like tendencies and his picky eating habits. But after several months he was like a different kid. His teacher even called home and was like, “What have you done with Leo and who’s this kid that you’re sending in?” Because it was a big issue for her. They often had to come to school and pick him up early because of the behavioral problems. And his diet expanded; he was eating foods he would've thrown against the wall just months before, he was more tolerant of disorder, more relaxed in his environment. They were able to travel for the first time in a long time because he wasn't so anxious in unfamiliar environments. His physical symptoms had improved significantly. So they were just over the moon. They couldn't believe it, and toward the end of our treatment together, she said something that really struck me, which was there’s so many kids out there that are like Leo and they’re suffering, they’re not finding help in the conventional system. Tony:  Sure. Chris:  And their doctors and parents are not even thinking about this stuff. Like it’s not even in most people’s consciousness that if a kid has a behavioral disorder that you should look at these physiological issues. It’s not, for 99 percent of people they don't even go there because they don't know. Tony:  Yeah, I mean I think that that was—reading about Leo and reading about a story and certainly there's people that I've known, myself included, who have had very similar experiences—I think it's great to have a narrative like this that you can really connect to because then when you tease it apart, all the pieces really make sense. It makes sense why having doctors treat symptoms has failed, it makes sense why a lack of communication between the health provider network that was supposed to be serving Leo failed. It makes sense why it didn't work when you actually start to tease it out. But then we’re still all, well not all, but most of us are still going down this path and it's an exercise in futility, really. You have an eight-year-old kid who's on powerful stimulant medications, he’s on antidepressants, and it was bad enough for his parents to reach out and to seek those interventions as solutions, and then the side effects are even worse. And that’s just something that just gets you right in the heart. And like you said, he’s not the only one, he’s not the only kid. His parents are not the only parents. And frankly, his doctors are not the only doctors because I can guarantee you that that probably doesn’t really feel good for the practitioner, for the healthcare provider to not get results as well. And they’re working with what they’ve got. Chris:  Absolutely. Tony:  And trying to use the tools they have. Chris:  Yeah, I mean, let’s be clear about this. Everybody is doing the best they can in this situation. The parents are doing the best they can, in the vast majority of situations, parents just love their kids and do everything possible that they can to help their kids thrive. I’m a parent, I know that that’s how I relate to my kid. I know that every parent I know, that’s how they relate to their kids. And I would even, I would say that’s true for doctors too. The vast majority of them are trying to do the best they can with the tools that they have and in the system that they’re working within. And that’s the rub. Tony:  Right. Chris:   It’s like most doctors I’ve seen have been caring and they’ve wanted to do the right thing, but the question is, can they do the right thing in the conventional medical system as it exists today? And, of course, that’s largely what the book is about.

Who is this book for?

Tony:  Yeah, so let’s kind of speak to that specifically. And we’re talking about doctors, we’re talking about medical professionals, we’re talking about patients, and then we didn’t mention it, but where I fit into this formula or potential formula as an allied healthcare provider, as a personal trainer/health coach, is that your audience for this book, do you really see that kind of triad is who you're speaking to here? Chris:  Yeah, definitely. I think if you look at the cover of the book, the subtitle is “join the revolution to reverse chronic disease, reinvent healthcare, and create a practice you love.” So that last bit would suggest that it's mostly for practitioners, but that's not true. It is really for anybody that is interested in the ideas of reinventing healthcare and reversing chronic disease. And, in fact, I would argue that that change is going to be initiated by people, primarily by people that are not practitioners. So it's like a grassroots, bottom-up approach, where a good example is with my training program, my ADAPT training program, now that we've been training practitioners in this approach for the last couple years, we always ask people how they learned about my work or how they learned about the training program. And in a surprising number of cases, the answer is from their patients. So these doctors or other practitioners, their patient brings an article in that I wrote or brings something in, tells them about me, and to their credit they’re open-minded enough to go and check it out. And then they like what they see and they end up taking the next step. So people even who have no intention of ever becoming a healthcare practitioner, I think would really benefit from this book if they're interested in these ideas. And then certainly, as you mentioned, licensed healthcare providers like medical doctors or nurse practitioners or physician assistants that are currently working within the conventional paradigm but have already seen its limitations and want to do something different but don't yet know what that might look like. And then people who are outside of the conventional paradigm but are already practitioners, so acupuncturists, chiropractors, naturopathic physicians, etc., in many cases they’re already well aware of the limitations of conventional medicine, which is why they chose to go down a different path. But speaking personally as an acupuncturist myself, I also saw some limitations in the traditional Chinese medicine approach, or at least some differences in the way that I wanted to practice it. I was looking for something that could incorporate modern diagnostic testing and create a more systematic approach that included ancestral diet and lifestyle and some of the other things we talk about in the book. So, I think many of those practitioners can benefit from the book from that perspective. And then you have the growing and already large number of people like yourself who are personal trainers, health coaches, nutritionists, etc., who I really think are going to play an increasingly important role in this revolution to reinvent healthcare. Tony:  Yeah, it so important now for people to really, for patients to be their own advocate, and I don't think we’re living in a time where I remember with my grandparents—if your doctor said something, it was basically gospel and you didn’t question it and you didn't think about it. Now, the first thing people do when they experience a symptom, it's Dr. Google first. So it's super important to equip and arm patients with good information, which I think this book does. Here's a path, here's a path forward for you as a patient. But then it's respectful of the role of doctors, and you highlight many situations where conventional medicine is great. If you break your arm or get in a car accident or have a heart attack or whatever the case may be, yeah, you need a doctor, and you need to go to an emergency room and you need those types of interventions. But it's really in this kind of gray area, it’s really not gray, it’s actually quite clear. And we could probably specify a little bit more, but there’s this middle zone where somebody’s not acutely injured, they’re not acutely in a disease state. They’re in a chronic disease state, or they’re just unwell. And it’s hard for a system that is all about pharmacological interventions, surgical interventions, to deal with a more subtle approach. And that’s where that whole middle ground and acupuncturists and massage therapists and everybody who's in that middle zone. I had clients constantly when I was actively training, constantly asking me questions where I was like, you know what? This is really something they maybe should be taking to their doctor. But guess what? The doctor only has 15 minutes under pressure to see as many patients as they can. I had a friend who was a physician in France. And he was telling me about their medical model, and he would spend tons of time with his patients. And it was actually incentivized for prevention. And here we see some maybe misplaced incentives, and perhaps you can speak a little bit more about that.

The mismatch between our medical paradigm and chronic disease

Chris:  Yeah, so, going back to your original comments, I think that the most important thing for people to understand is that our medical model, when it comes to our medical paradigm, is that it evolved during a time when acute problems were the biggest issues. So in 1900, the top three causes of death were all infectious diseases, tuberculosis, typhoid, and pneumonia. And the other reasons people would see the doctor were among those you mentioned, like a broken bone or a gallbladder attack or appendicitis. Tony:  War. Chris:  Right, injuries, trauma, etc. And so the treatment for that's pretty straightforward. It wasn't always successful, of course, but it was straightforward. You know, if the bone was broken, you set it in a cast. If the gallbladder was swelling, you would take it out. If someone was having appendicitis, you’d remove the appendix. So that's pretty ... it's one problem, one doctor, one treatment. Pretty straightforward. But you fast-forward to today, it's a totally different healthcare landscape. Seven of the top 10 causes of death are chronic disease rather than acute problems now, and 86 percent of the healthcare dollars we spend go toward treating chronic disease. And unlike acute problems, chronic diseases are expensive, difficult to manage and usually last for a lifetime. They don't lend themselves to that one doctor, one problem, one treatment kind of approach. The average chronic disease patient requires multiple doctors, usually one for every different part of the body in our system, and is taking ... Tony:  Specialists. Chris:  Right, specialists, they’re taking multiple medications in many cases, and they're going to be taking those medications for the rest of their life. So far, it's really, our conventional medical system is amazing for these acute problems. But it's the wrong tool for the job for chronic problems. So that's one issue, and it’s really important to point that out, because we just went through the whole healthcare debate again with the Affordable Care Act and the current administration’s proposal for a replacement, which has not come to fruition. But throughout that entire discussion, it really bothered me that there was an elephant in the room. All the discussion was around insurance. Like, who gets insurance and who doesn’t. And that’s important, it’s important to talk about that. But we have to recognize that health insurance is not the same thing as healthcare. Tony:  Yeah. Chris:  Health insurance is a method of paying for healthcare. And that’s really crucial to get that difference. Because my argument in the book is that there is no method of paying for healthcare, whether it’s the government, corporations, or individuals, that will be adequate and will be sustainable under the pressure of growing prevalence of chronic disease. It will bankrupt all of us. Government, the corporations, individuals, whoever is responsible for paying for the care will not be able to do it unless we can actually prevent and reverse chronic disease instead of just slapping Band-Aids on it. Tony:  I think the analogy you gave in the book was rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “Making a few small tweaks to our current system and expecting that to work is like rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic as it inexorably sinks into the ocean. Too little, too late.”  Chris:  Yeah, exactly. That’s the argument about insurance. As the whole ship goes under, sinks under. The other problems you mentioned are very real also. So we have a misalignment of incentives, like the insurance industry, for example, doesn't benefit when the cost of care shrinks because they only make more money when the overall expenditures rise. So it's actually not in their best interest necessarily to seek out the most cost-effective solutions.

Drug companies and conflicts of interest

Chris: And then of course, we have drug companies. People are pretty well aware of the conflicts of interest there. It’s in their interest to sell drugs, and even when that’s not in the interests of the general public or the patients or the doctors. In many cases, it’s not in their interest either. So the best example of this is a recent one. We’re in the midst of an opioid crisis, the worst we’ve ever seen by far, and the DEA has been wanting to create new regulations that restrict a pharmacy’s ability to sell opioids in ways that will protect people. So, for example, there was a pharmacy in West Virginia in a town that was tiny. It had like 30,000 people in this town, and they had ordered something like nine million opioid pills in the last year. It was clearly a front, like there’s clearly something shady going on there. There's no way that 30,000 people in that town needed nine million opioid pills, and yet there are no regulations to actually prevent that from happening. And so, the DEA had proposed some regulations to just safely protect people from that kind of thing. And the Big Pharma lobby basically shut that down and they played a big role in writing a law that limits the DEA's ability to do that kind of regulation in the midst of the worse opioid crisis ever. And to put this in perspective, we hear a lot about the gun lobbies and their control. They spend about $10.5 million lobbying Congress, I think, per year. And Big Pharma, they spent $250 million. Tony:  Wow. Chris:  Twenty-five-fold higher. Tony:  It's really tragic. I actually, I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this, but I grew up in South Florida, which was kind of ground zero for the opioid epidemic. And I remember in high school down in Miami and West Palm Beach, and kids would get a hold of a contact or whatever, somebody that had a prescription and basically would end up being a de facto drug dealer vis-à-vis a pill mill, etc. The kid across the street from me died, multiple kids in my high school died, multiple kids went into in-treatment programs, some of them battled addictions for decades. Some of them got out of it. Very few got out of it. Some of them didn't and have continued to be plagued with either switching from pharmaceuticals to street drugs like heroin, etc., and then we can see what's happening there. And that's just one example. If we look at drug consumption in the United States, is it that Americans are just that much sicker and we’re in that much more pain than people in other countries? Because we’re consuming far and away more painkillers than any other country on the planet. And I would venture to guess that you could say the same about antidepressants or ADD medication. It's very much a case of misaligned incentives. And incentives are working in the sense of the pharmaceutical companies are doing very well. Chris:  Yeah. Who are they working for is the question. Tony:  Exactly. Chris:  We’re the only country aside from New Zealand that allows direct-to-consumer drug advertising, and I think that's a big part of the problem. But it's not just Big Pharma. We also have conflicts in medical research that, of course, are related to Big Pharma because they pay for two-thirds of all medical research. We have broken payment models, where there's no real incentive or reward for good performance, and in fact, you could argue it's the other way around because doctors are compensated for, usually based on the number of procedures they order and the number of patients they see. So to your point about the doctor in France who is actually incentivized to prevent, rather than just treat disease, we don't have that at all, it's the opposite. And so there are a lot of deeply entrenched issues that we certainly need to address, and that's not essentially what this book is about. There are other books that cover that material really well, and frankly many of those issues are outside of our individual control as clinicians or practitioners.

How clinicians can help create a new paradigm

Chris: We can work toward addressing them, and I think we should, but the good news is that I think that the bigger changes that we need to focus on individually and collectively are addressing the medical paradigm which we’ve talked about, creating a medical paradigm that’s better suited to tackle chronic disease. Addressing the mismatch between our modern diet and lifestyle, and our genes and our biology, which we've, of course, talked a lot about on the show before. And then creating a new way of delivering healthcare that actually supports this new medical paradigm and this more preventative approach. Because those things are all within our control as clinicians. Tony:  Yeah. I like how you posed the question, and it was kind of a cool little, I think it was, not Hiroshi, but the person who is in charge of cooking at a Buddhist monastery. And basically a young monk comes up to this older man. He’s like, why are you doing the grunt work, basically washing rice out in the courtyard? And he says, it was like, what was it? “If not me, who? And if not now, when?” And I think that that’s really kind of the core of setting all this stuff up. Talking about the problem is really in the service of pivoting to the solution, and I’m a big believer in thinking globally, thinking big, but acting locally, hyper-locally, like yourself. Chris:  Yeah. Tony:  And then the people around you and who you can touch and impact. That’s ultimately where the power comes from. So let’s talk about that. What is in people’s power. And you started to describe some of those pillars of a new model. And you describe it as the ADAPT framework. And I don’t know how much you get into this on your regular podcast episodes, but to just kind of lay it out, ADAPT from a big-picture perspective. How does that actually address some of these systemic issues from an individually empowered stance? Chris:  Yeah, great question, and before I even go into that, I just want to say I agree that I think the change is going to happen on different levels. So, because a lot ... we’ve talked about this stuff at conferences or even some people who’ve already read the book. They say, oh, this is fantastic. I’m so excited. But how are we going to deal with Big Pharma and the insurance industry and these misaligned incentives and all of that? And can we ever deal with that? The answer is we’re not going to deal with that overnight and it’s going to take a while to unwind those things. Tony:  It’s the chronic disease, is what you call... Chris:  Exactly, exactly. And I use that analogy in the book. But the good news is that changes can happen very quickly on an individual and local level. And there’s already a lot of evidence of that happening. So my own clinic, CCFM, tripled in size in the last three years alone. We have Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, launched by Dr. Mark Hyman, has just blown up like crazy. I mean they started in this tiny space. Now their 17,000-square-foot space, it takes up the whole second floor of the Glickman Tower at Cleveland Clinic. They've got a waitlist of 2,500 patients from nine countries around the world. This is really exciting! The Cleveland Clinic is always on the forefront of the newest trends in medicine, and the fact that they've invested that much money in this speaks volumes. Then we have groups like Iora Health, an organization based in the Rocky Mountain area that’s reversing diabetes using health coaches. So there are lots of really interesting produced concepts, and there's going to be more and more of these. Like we’re doing a pilot program with the Berkeley Fire Department where we’re working with their new recruits to help, we’re implementing a wellness program. Tony:  That’s awesome. Chris:  To reduce injuries and help with recovery and optimize their performance. And if that goes well, there’s been interest from the wider fire department and in the city of Berkeley as a whole. Robb Wolf’s done some incredible work with Reno that we’ve talked about before. So I think the change is going to happen more quickly on this local grassroots level, and then that's going to start to get the attention of people on a state and federal level. And then it will start to get really interesting.

The three core problems and how to solve them

To answer your question, in my book I basically lay out three core fundamental problems with the healthcare system in the US. And these, I argue, go even deeper than the misaligned incentives and Big Pharma and all of that stuff, although they’re, of course, connected. The first is that there is a profound mismatch between our genes and our biology and our modern diet and lifestyle. And I'm not going to say more about that now because almost everyone listening to this podcast knows exactly what I mean. The second problem is the mismatch between our medical paradigm and chronic disease, which we just talked about. We need a new medical paradigm that is better suited for chronic disease. And then the third is that the way we deliver care in this country is also, it's not set up to support the most important interventions. And we’ve touched on that too, where the average visit with the primary care provider is just actually eight to 12 minutes. Tony, you were talking about 15 minutes. That’s luxurious in our current model. The average amount of time a patient gets to speak before they’re interrupted by the doctor is 12 seconds. Tony:  Wow. Chris:  So I think it’s pretty clear that if a patient has multiple chronic diseases, which one in four Americans now do, one in two has one chronic disease, and they show up to the doctor’s office and they're on multiple medications, and they had been presenting with a whole set of new symptoms, there’s absolutely no way to provide high-quality care in a 10-minute visit. So we have to change our, not only the paradigm, but also the way that care is delivered. So that was my premise. So it follows then that my solution would address, I would hope at least those three points, right? Each of those three deficiencies. So the ADAPT framework combines an ancestral diet and lifestyle, which addresses that mismatch between our genes and biology in our modern diet and lifestyle. And then Functional Medicine is the new paradigm of medicine that is based on addressing the root cause of health problems, so we can prevent and reverse them instead of just suppressing symptoms. And then the third component is what I call a collaborative practice model, which links licensed providers like medical doctors, nurse practitioners, with what I call allied providers, which include folks like yourself, Tony, health coaches, nutritionists, personal trainers, etc., to provide a much, much higher level of care than what doctors are able to provide on their own. So, again, we're not trying to replace doctors in any, or even conventional medicine. We need people to do colonoscopies and remove cancerous tumors and use all of the incredible amount of training and expertise and skill that they’ve acquired over a lifetime of practice and study. We absolutely want that, but we need to add stuff to that that's not available now. Tony:  What that really says to me is, emphasize the importance of community, of connection, of collaboration. We’re social creatures, we’re tribal by nature. That’s another kind of Paleo/ancestral health part of the puzzle. And it would be foolish to think that we can dissect out and silo out all these different aspects of our lives without consequence. I really like this idea of bringing everybody into the fold, and it’s not saying that you can go to just the naturopath, or you can go to just the health coach. Because like I mentioned already, I certainly would’ve been ill-equipped to handle plenty of issues that a client would’ve brought to mind or brought up in conversation during a training session. But it would’ve been really great to say, ah, here's the Functional Medicine practitioner that I recommend you speak with, and to have a good relationship with that person and to be able to, as a health coach, help my clients better by getting them in touch with the right person. And that’s having this network that can really support people throughout their health journey whether it’s just feeling better and more energy, or addressing something like diabetes or hypertension. Which certainly there’s a place for all the players in that kind of scenario.

What this new paradigm looks like

Chris:  Absolutely. And let’s use an example just to bring this to life for people. So, imagine you go to the doctor and they do some blood testing for your annual physical. And they find that your fasting blood sugar is 96 or 97. Your hemoglobin A1c is 5.5, and you’ve got triglycerides that are 110, 120, maybe 130. Currently, what would happen is nothing, usually. Tony:  You’re not sick enough yet. Chris:  Yeah, all of your markers are within the lab range, they say, and that means you’re normal, and so you might get some vague advice about make sure to exercise and follow a good diet. And thank you very much, that’s it. Certainly there are exceptions to the rule, of course. There’s some practitioners who can get a lot more proactive about that. But I can’t tell you how many people, patients I’ve had that have been given that basic line with those kinds of lab results. What could happen is this. The doctor says, “Well, you know, if we think of blood sugar disorders on a spectrum, on the left you’ve got perfect blood sugar. On the right you’ve got full-fledged type 2 diabetes. You’re not on the right yet, you don’t have type 2 diabetes or even technically prediabetes, but you’re progressing along that spectrum. And what we know from a lot of research is that if we don’t intervene now, that you’re going to continue progressing. And in fact, we have studies that show that the average patient who has prediabetes, will progress to full-fledged type 2 diabetes in just five years if it’s not addressed.” So what we want to do is be proactive here. We want to intervene now because it’s much easier to prevent a disease before it occurs than it is to treat it after it’s already occurred. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to set you up with our staff health coach, and they’re going to give you all the support you need to adopt a better diet. They’re actually even going to take you shopping, they’re going to come to your house and clean out your pantry with you, and they're going to give you recipes and meal plans and give you ... totally hold your hand and do everything that they need to to get you on this diet. Because we know that information is not enough. We’ve got lots of studies. I can tell you as a doctor, go eat a healthy diet, and hey, we know that that’s probably not going to happen. Most people know what they should be doing, but they’re not doing it, and it’s not because of lack of information. It’s because they need support, and we’re here to support you. We’ve got this health coach. Furthermore, we've got this great personal trainer named Tony. We’re going to set you up with him and we’re also going to set you up with a gym membership. And the good news is, your insurance is going to pay for all this. They’re going to pay for the health coach, they’re going to pay for the gym membership, they’re going to pay for your sessions with Tony. And in six months’ time, you’re going to come back here and we’re going to retest your blood markers and I can almost guarantee that if you stick with the program, you’re going to have normal blood sugar by that time. And throughout that period you’re going to have weekly check-ins with a health coach, you’re going to have training sessions. And not only will your blood sugar be normal, you’re going to lose weight, your energy levels are going to go up, your sleep’s going to get better, you’re going to feel more confident and empowered because you’re making these changes, and you’re going to feel like a different person. Now that’s totally possible.

How do we pay for this? Is it scalable?

Chris: I can hear some people saying, “Oh, how are we going to pay for that? That’s ridiculous.” Tony:  Is it scalable? Chris:  The question we should be asking is, is treating type 2 diabetes scalable? Because I mentioned this in the book, it costs $14,000 a year to treat a single patient with type 2 diabetes. So let’s imagine that this patient progresses. We don’t intervene, five years later they have type 2 diabetes. All of a sudden the healthcare system is spending $14,000 a year paying for that person’s care. And let’s say that that person gets diagnosed at age 40, which is still reasonable these days. The age of diagnosis is dropping more and more, and then let’s say that they live until they’re 85 years old, which is also possible because of our heroic medical interventions that keep people alive a lot longer than they might have been otherwise. So 45 years living with type 2 diabetes, that’s a cost of almost $650,000 for one patient to the healthcare system. Tony:  And that doesn’t even touch on the lost wages, cost to employers, when someone’s on leave, loss of productivity. And then the cost to the family members. Chris:  Absolutely. Tony:  People that are actually, are helping the patient, their health is going to be going down too. Chris:  Yeah. Nor does it touch on the qualitative aspects. Being immobilized, not being able to play with your grandkids, all of that stuff. But let’s just even forget about that for a second—$650,000, okay? And then the CDC recently came out with statistics saying that 100 million Americans have either prediabetes or diabetes, and 88 percent of people with prediabetes don’t even know that they have it. Which means they're almost certainly going to progress, right? If you do the math and you multiply 100 million people times even $14,000 for one year, you get a number that’s so large, I don’t even know what it is. It’s like a google something. It’s like, it has so many zeros after it, I don’t even know how to characterize it. But then if you multiply 100 million times like 20 or 30 years, it’s more money than there is in the world. It's like it's not going to happen. Tony:  Not sustainable, not scalable. Chris:  Not sustainable, not scalable. So let’s say in our example that we ... the healthcare system spends $10,000, which is way more than would be necessary, but let’s even say we buy the person’s groceries for three months. And their gym membership and their trainer, and their health coach, and those weekly, let’s say we spend $10,000. We’re just super generous and we spend $10,000 for that six-month period. Again, the research and my clinical experience indicates with near certainty that if the person is at that stage of not even prediabetic and we intervene, there’s like almost no chance that it’s not going to, we’re not going to be able to normalize that person’s blood sugar. And if they do that and they stick with it and they are able to do that because they now have support rather than just information, we’ve just saved the healthcare system $640,000 over the course of that patient’s lifetime. And that’s a conservative estimate, as you say. We're not including even the indirect costs. Tony:  Right, right. Chris:  I think that this is not only possible, it's going to become necessary. And whether we get there with a proactive approach where we decide to move in this direction and we make these changes or whether we get there because we absolutely have no choice, we’re going to get there. Tony:  Yeah. I mean it really sounds like we can’t afford to not do this. Chris:  Exactly. Tony:  And if we get to that point where we continue down the reactive path and we wait until there’s a total collapse, it might be too late, just to put it frankly. And it’s going to come out at a huge, not just financial cost, a huge human cost. Chris:  Yeah, it’s going to be, we can use the chronic disease metaphor again, it’s a lot easier to prevent a problem or reverse it at an earlier stage than it is to wait until the patient is essentially on life support or the healthcare system is on life support. It’s harder to reverse it at that time. And that’s of course why I’m writing the book now because I want to get this message out as far and wide as I can. Tony:  Yeah. If not now, when? If not you, who? Go right back to there.

How allied providers are the key

Chris:  Exactly. And one more thing about that is the amazing thing, the beauty of this is that it takes about eight years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a doctor. And it takes a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of comfort level with science, and a lot of prerequisites. It’s not for everybody. And there’s a ... already we have a shortage of doctors, and that’s predicted to get worse. I’ve seen estimates that suggest by 2025 we’ll have a shortage of 52,000 primary care physicians. So that’s a big deal. [insert image] So we already don’t have enough doctors, it’s already going to get worse, but if you think of healthcare as like a ... I have something in the book called the healthcare population pyramid. And you were referring to it earlier, Tony, where at the very top of that pyramid you’ve got 5 percent of people who are in really acute situations. So they’re in the hospital or they’re in an intensive outpatient care setting. They need the conventional medicine paradigm as it exists, and it’s fantastic for those situations. Then you’ve got another 25 percent of people in that kind of high middle of the pyramid who are dealing with some pretty serious chronic health challenges. So they require more regular care, but they’re not sick enough to be in the hospital or in any kind of ... they’re living their lives, but they’re struggling a lot. A Functional Medicine practitioner/clinician usually working in concert possibly with the conventional specialist of some kind is a really great option for that 25 percent of the pyramid. But then you’ve got the 70 percent at the bottom. So these are people who do, may have health issues, but they’re more minor, so they might have skin problems, or a little bit of brain fog, some difficulties sleeping, some GI issues. And these can be definitely debilitating and total pain, but they’re not at the level of that 25 percent. My argument is that in many cases these people could be very well served by a health coach or nutritionist with good training. And possibly seeing a Functional Medicine provider once or twice a year, or something like that. And the thing is, we can train people in a year or two without an extensive science background to be very, very objective in this role. Because they’re mostly working with patients on changing their behavior. If you think about it, most of the risk factors for chronic disease come down to the wrong behaviors. Eating the wrong diet, not getting enough sleep, not exercising, or exercising too much, or any number of things that come down to choices that we’re making. And so if a skilled health coach who’s trained in things like motivational interviewing and coaching to strengths and other evidence-based principles of facilitating behavior change which we have a ton of research on, they can be incredibly effective for that 70 percent of the population. That's the majority of the population. So we’re totally underutilizing these practitioners, and my argument is that they’re going to play a huge role in this future of medicine. And that's of course one reason why we're launching an ADAPT Health Coach Training Program next year to complement the practitioner training program that we've been doing. Because I want to create this ecosystem we've been talking about where you have all of these different types of practitioners working to the maximum of their training and ability and scope of practice and supporting each other and therefore providing the highest level of care to patients. Tony:  That certainly kind of perks my ears up hearing about the ADAPT health coach option and something that I’m personally interested in. So who knows? Maybe I can get in on that. We can talk about it again in the future. Chris:  Yeah, for sure. For sure. Tony:  So, for this particular book, for Unconventional Medicine, people are fired up, they’re hearing about it, they’re like, “Okay, this resonates with me. I’m a practitioner, I’m an allied health provider, I’m a patient, I’m ready. Now’s the time. This is it. We’re going to do this.” What’s the best way for people to get their hands on this thing? Chris:  Well not surprisingly, Amazon. They have the best way to get your hands on anything. So it’s available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. We’re hoping [the audiobook] is going to be out today, the day this podcast is released. But it might be another two or three days. They’re just taking their sweet time to approve it. I narrated the audiobook myself. So you podcast listeners, I figured you might be into that, since you like to listen. Tony:  They know your voice. Chris:  Yeah, and just listening to something instead of reading it perhaps. So to that end, we have a special offer for podcast listeners, because I appreciate your support and I know many of you are already part of this movement, and some are wanting to get involved. So if you buy that paperback or Kindle version between now and Sunday night, you’ll get some really cool bonuses. The first is a free copy of the audiobook. So again, we wanted to include that for podcast listeners, since we figured you guys and gals are probably interested in audio. But there are two other things that are really, I think, fantastic. And one, they’re both tools to help you be more confident and persuasive and factual when you share your passion for Functional Medicine and an ancestral diet and lifestyle. Because we’ve had a lot of questions from people, both practitioners and non-practitioners alike. They say, “Oh, how do I talk about this stuff to my sister at Thanksgiving?” Tony:  “Isn’t that that caveman diet?” Chris:  Yeah, exactly. All of our ancestors died when they were 30, so why should we even care? How do you respond to those arguments? Or if you start talking about Functional Medicine and maybe one of your conventional medicine colleagues says, “Oh, that’s just, I saw something on Science-based Medicine that said that was all just hooey. There’s nothing to it. How do you respond to that?” So what we wanted to do is give people the ammunition they needed in a respectful way. You know, this isn’t about getting the better of somebody. It’s about responding in a factual and convincing but respectful way. So we’ve got two different, we’re calling these the Power Packs. And one is for practitioners, so clinicians, health coaches, nutritionists, trainers, etc., and these are facts, research that you can reference and persuasive reasons for your clients or patients or colleagues to consider this Functional Medicine and ancestral diet and lifestyle approach. And then we have one for non-practitioners called the Supporter Power Pack. And these are smart answers and compelling comebacks, again respectful, for those common objections that you hear when you start talking about this stuff with your friends and family. So these bonuses are available until Sunday night [November 12, 2017] at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. So you’ve got a few days to act on that, and you can go to ... we set up a special link for you to get these and that’s Kresser.co/bonus. That’s Kresser.co/bonus. So head over there to get your Power Packs and your free audiobook, and that’s after you purchase either the paperback or Kindle. There’ll be a place where you enter your order number and we ask for some information just to verify, and I hope you enjoy those and get a lot out of them. Because they were actually really fun to put together. Tony:  Yeah, I think the audiobook is huge. I like to listen to audiobooks when I’m driving around town or outside getting some exercise. Chris:  Yeah. Tony:  So, no excuses when you make it that easy. Chris:  Yeah, yeah. So, Tony, thanks so much for doing this. This has been really fun to talk to you, as it always is. And I appreciate it. Tony:  Actually, I wanted to throw in one extra little special thing, as we mentioned, at the top of the show. I spent 10 years as a personal trainer in the trenches, I was involved with Paleo Magazine for many, many years, going to all the events, and for me kind of an evolution in my professional life was, how do I impact more people? How do I help more people? And at first I was working one on one, and then it was as a facility manager helping other trainers and coaches get better. And then I was able to scale it up that way. And last year I had an opportunity to join the team over at Natural Force, which is all-natural, nutritional products, and I basically said, “You know what? I’m going to go all in on this because if I can touch a million people through really good, high-quality nutrition, that’s me maximizing my impact and really kind of living my purpose.” So one of the things I wanted to do today is put it out there for anyone listening who maybe uses collagen or MCT oil or whey protein. We really bend over backwards to source the best ingredients in the world, no additives, all that stuff. Everything is as clean as we can possibly make it. It takes a lot of work, working with manufacturers. Kind of like what you were saying, how patients have to know how to talk to their doctor. I don’t think people really realize, and I didn’t realize until I got on the inside, how much work it is for a brand to work with their manufacturers to convince them to get outside of the conventional mold. So it’s the kind of unconventional nutrition is really what we’re pushing here. So I set up a discount code for any Revolution Health listeners. Go to NaturalForce.com, use coupon code “unconventional” and get $10 off plus free shipping on your order. So I just want to put that out there as just a little extra bonus for anybody, and I would certainly love to help in that way and really get some good, high-quality nutrition into people’s hands. Chris:  Awesome. Yeah, and there’s so many ways people can help, and I ... at Paleo f(x) we’ve see the growth of companies that are serving this space, and it's amazing. Like the products that are available now. I had breakfast this morning, I had some eggs and kale and parsley and a little bit of bacon in a couple of cassava flour tortillas. Breakfast burritos. Whoever thought I’d be having a breakfast burrito again? Tortillas are made from completely cassava flour. They’re autoimmune friendly and they’re grain-free tortillas. It’s incredible. Tony:  I think I might have some of those in my fridge as well. Chris:  Yeah. I mean there’s so many things. And these people, they’re serving this movement with that kind of work. So it’s great to see. Tony:  It takes a village, man. Chris:  It does. Thanks again, Tony. I really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. So again, Kresser.co/bonus to pick up your free audiobook and the other bonuses, and I hope you can all join me in this revolution to reinvent healthcare. We need you, whatever your background and goals. Take care, everybody.

Source: http://chriskresser.com November 08, 2017 at 04:12PM

[kksmith-usc-blog]

Creative Problem Solving | Interviews | Unit 7

Suzanna O. | Sr. UX Research Analyst @ Spectrum

Suzanna is a lead on the UX Research team. Her role is to research and validate how customers interact with Spectrum’s video products.   

How do you generate ideas? What inspires you? What obstacles do you face in coming up with a new idea and how do you overcome those obstacles?

When I’m formulating new ideas, I begin by organizing my environment and creating a simple, clean workspace. I enjoy the silence when I’m thinking and ideating – some people love music, but I just need quiet. I also love great pens and notebooks – I know that sounds silly, but there’s something so great about a really good pen. I also know that I need to give myself rewards. So I might set milestones to my work and allow myself to have a piece of chocolate or a coffee if I hit certain benchmarks. 

I then ultimately start by writing everything down on paper. There’s something really helpful in writing everything with a paper and pen, allowing me to not be distracted by anything digital. It’s also helpful to initially think about my idea on my own, avoiding any group-think before I can concretely gather my ideas.

One of the challenges or obstacles I face is becoming overwhelmed by the problem. Often times, I start by talking to other people about the problem or potential problem. These people I speak with are sometimes experts in the area I’m studying and ultimately can provide the most honest perspective when I’m trying to unpack the problem statement. Other times, these individuals might have similar knowledge of the problem as myself. I’m interested in understanding how these people might uniquely approach questions. Asking other people about the problem in question helps me to frame my questioning appropriately and ultimately think outside the box. 

I’m incredibly inspired by the outcomes I see in my work. I don’t always get to see these outcomes or results of the problems I’ve tried to solve, but on the rare chance, it’s great. I’ve been in this career for nearly ten years, so I’ve had the opportunity to see the wins and loses. When you’re able to witness the results of your effort, even months or years afterward, it’s incredibly inspiring and makes you want to do more work that could possibly result in a positive outcome. 

What process do you use to solve problems? Describe the steps of your problem-solving process and explain your journey from inspiration to implementation. 

My problem-solving process involves a lot of exploration before I can feel comfortable understanding the problem that truly needs to be solved. I start by talking to other people who might have more information or a different perspective on the problem. I also consciously, both in my own psyche and when talking to others, avoid the solution. This phase is just about asking questions.

I need to go into this discovery and exploration phase with confidence in order to continue to dig further. However, after you tackle a few hard problems and get positive affirmation, you begin to have more confidence throughout. Ultimately, confidence in oneself and one’s practice is a huge focus for me in my research techniques. I also usually have mini-self reflection retro’s (retroactive sessions) to understand how I chose to solve the problem in this or that way. These self retro's are really helpful and kind of fun for me.  

Along the process, and truly before I begin my creative process, I have to really understand my audience and know the context from which they’re coming from. I ask myself questions like: “What is your level of involvement?” and ask them why they believe the problem statement exists in the first place. 

When evaluating the tactile steps of UX research, I implement any kind of base understanding using things like past research, examples, competitive perspectives and context. I also implement visualizations like data visualization and any customer testimonials or video/audio clips I can pull to help solidify the problem.

Alex G. | Director of Design @ Spectrum 

Alex is the Director of Design for Spectrum. Unofficially, he and his team create relationships throughout the organization to do things that ultimately discover new ways to do things. Alex’s focus is uncovering new ways to connect people with creative thinking that leads to positive business decisions. 

How do you generate ideas? What inspires you? What obstacles do you face in coming up with a new idea and how do you overcome those obstacles?

First of all, I believe everyone is born as a creative – it’s something you always have regardless of what you do with your life. It’s whether you chose to explore that side of yourself that allows you to be considered creative.

I define creativity in the business world as a blend of imagination (imagine the results, how would it impact the world and does it align with my value system), self-expression (does it have self-expression of me as its creator) and innovation (will the product stand the test of time). 

I also feel the main difference between being an artist and being a creative business person is the emphasizing angle of empathy and research placed on the creation. Designers are scientists. 

So my ideation process and inspiration techniques stem from empathy. There is power in being able to empathize and feel the pain of someone experiencing a [business] problem. New ideas then come through witnessing people experiencing a bad business problem, whether it’s bad UX, bad social issues or other things. I believe that in order to be a good designer, one must just observe the world. The best ideas I usually have come from years of observation and just living my life. I call this a research phase.  

When overcoming obstacles, I think the most important part is maintaining a stubborn approach – just keep on doing it, whatever “it” is.  Practice, as in any sport (baseball, soccer) goes farther than anything. When everyone else goes home after the game, you stay and keep practicing. The same rules go for good design. 

Once the body is in motion, it stays in motion; inertia is a powerful force. 

New ideas innovated by design are like a stone wall that won’t go anywhere if you just un at it at full speed. If anything, you’ll knock yourself out. But if you’re persistent and almost crazed about your idea, and keep on chipping away, sooner or later, you’ll succeed. 

Obstacles are normal and a sign of physical reality. If the obstacles are not there, I believe the world will create obstacles or you will self-create obstacles – they’re a very normal part of life. Overcoming the obstacles is excitement. It means you believe a better world exists. 

Ultimately, I believe the secret ingredient of the secret ingredient soup is intent; everything you design must align with your values as a human being. 

What process(es) do you use to solve problems? Describe the steps of your problem-solving process, explaining your journey from inspiration to implementation.

I abide by three main steps: 

a) Extreme Empathy: The process must start with experiencing the pain and witnessing the problem as it impacts the users/audience/social structures/people you’re working for as a designer. In design, the pain is constant and it’s the crux of the process. 

b) Ask Around: Ask the marketplace to casually weigh in to validate the idea. This market place can be your friends or people on the street. You just need to talk to others about the possible solution that needs to be solved. This is where you have the opportunity to take your idea and refine it or iterate based on what people are helping you validate.

c) Distill: Once your problem statement is validated by potential users, then turn on the tenacity machine and just tell yourself “I’m doing this whether you like it or not!” I’m super inspired by Jack Ma. He’s my hero right now. Something like 18 people invested in Alibaba for a grand total of $5K. No one really believed in him, but he had the tenacity to keep going. He paired his vision and intent with the product, and now Alibaba is doing OK. 

Everything else is mechanical past these three stages. Designers are scientists. Designers need to distill and feel the pain before they can offer a sound solution. 

Ashley M. | Events Specialist for Philips Healthcare

Ashley is an Events Specialist for the Cardiovascular unit for Philips Healthcare. She plans external events for the company’s cardiovascular products.  

How do you generate ideas? How, when, and where are you inspired? What inspires you? What obstacles do you face in coming up with a new idea and how do you overcome those obstacles? 

In my personal life, I’m inspired by the idea of being able to create something autonomously, on my own. I have a goal of developing a brick and mortar boutique for women, so the notion of being able to create something out of nothing and having complete control over the creative process is extremely inspiring for me. I give my heart and soul to the projects I’m a part of, so it makes me excited to think about doing my own thing one day! 

In terms of the obstacles I face, I’ve always been an emotional person. So something, I tend to be more reactionary and don’t necessarily stop to think: “Why is this happening?” But as I’ve moved through my life, I’ve found that’s not always a great practice, to react and not calculate my actions more objectively. 

However, I do have to say, in event planning this instinctual decision-making is pretty valuable, and sometimes it’s good to just make decisions based on emotion. But in the other moments when I want to be less reactionary and more thoughtful, I follow three basic princes: Write all my thoughts down, acknowledge emotion and find a way to funnel it appropriately and lean on instinct when appropriate. 

In a more detailed approach, I have several steps I try to hold myself to when I’m using thoughtful decision making. 

Write everything down on paper

Read through everything a few times in various different headspace. I then brainstorm, on my own, about what my ideas would look like when handling them in a certain situation.

 I tend to think about who else this decision would affect and how it would affect them — looking at everything in an unbiased way from all angles and all perspectives. 

Then, I ultimately chose to make a decision out of confidence based on this process. 

Lastly, I evaluate any doubt and observe myself when I have any second-guessing of the choice I made. 

What process(es) do you use to solve problems? Describe the steps of your problem-solving process. Explain your journey from inspiration to implementation.

My process is much like starting out with a puzzle. You can envision the big picture, but there are so many little pieces and there are times when you can get overwhelmed by the thought of where to even begin! However, as I’ve matured, I’ve learned how to not be paralyzed by the idea or where to start, but I allow myself to move through the chaos until a light-bulb eventually goes off. When trying to move through the beginnings of a creative process, I start by getting extremely organized — putting together calendar reminders, or organizing folders to keep my documents aligned and accessible usually help in this process.  

It’s usually after I begin to feel confident in my organization of thoughts that, suddenly, the flood gates open and I immediately know where to go! I also tend to prioritize the most mission-critical things based on what the idea or project needs. I get those things done, and then I have more time to focus on the details that usually make the idea special. 

[abstractedcollective]

STRATEGY 1: WRITE TO HELP YOUR AUDIENCE

Here’s the thing: most people don’t really care about you. Sure, your friends, family, and loyal blog readers love you, but someone who’s just stumbled upon your blog doesn’t love you…yet.

In order to get people to love you and your blog, your posts need to address one or more of the most basic human interests:

to be informed

to be inspired

to be included as part of a community

to have their lives improved and problems solved

I mean, think about it. If you happened to be scrolling through Pinterest and you saw a pin that said “My Favorite Fall Beauty Products”, your first thought is going to be:

“…and who are you?”

If I don’t know who you are and I just happened to stumble upon this post, I’m not really going to be that interested. But, if I saw something instead that said “5 Products You NEED For Fall“, I’m going to want to click on that because it sounds intriguing and I think it could help me in some way.

By rotating the angle of the post to be more about your audience and less about yourself, you’ll get more people interested in what you have to say. You can still share your experiences, but share them in a way that can benefit others.

Remember, people want you to help solve their problems and make them feel like they’re not alone.

The Exception: Posts about overcoming your own struggles or realizing your own mistakes can also do really well, but it’s still because people need help – they want to know how you did it so they can avoid it or overcome it too. For example, ‘How I Overcame My Body-Image Struggles’ or ‘What I Learned From Traveling Solo In A Dangerous Country’ sound intriguing, maybe even controversial, and I think I could apply them to my life.

CLICK TO TWEET

Your Homework:

Go back through your old blog posts and think about how you can make them more about your audience and less about you. For example, I wrote a post that was originally called My Favorite Food Bloggers, but I recently changed it to 5 Inspiring Healthy Food Bloggers to make it more specific and imply that the post could inspire you (not the best title I’ve ever come up with, but it’s a lot better than it was!)

Examples of Audience-Centered Posts:

Meditation: Why you should try it + how to get started via Smart-Twenties

15 ways to feel better about yourself via inthefrow

10 ways Pinterest can help you refine your personal style via into-mind

STRATEGY 2: MAKE YOUR CONTENT READABLE

This seems like a no-brainer, but so many blogs use a tiny, barely decipherable font that makes it difficult to read for longer than 5 seconds. I want to read your post, okay?! Let me do it with ease!

The best things you can have to make your posts more readable (and therefore more share-worthy):

Increase the font size: Use a medium to large font size. Mine is 15px.

Add space: Space out your sentences by increasing the line height.

Darken the font color: Make sure the body text of your post is black or dark gray. Light gray is hard to read.

Split it up: Split up your content with subheadings, bullet points, lists, and images if you use them.

Go sparingly with the bold text: I know you might want to emphasize something, but bolding an entire sentence doesn’t have much of an impact if it’s mixed into a paragraph. Put an important sentence on it’s own line for emphasis instead.

Your Homework:

Take a look at your current design and see if you can tweak the font size and spacing to make it easier to read. Go through 3-5 old posts and split up your ideas using subheadings, bullets, and anything else you can use to make it easy on the eyes.

STRATEGY 3: WRITE IN-DEPTH POSTS WITH ACTIONABLE ADVICE

There are so many blogs out there that barely skim the surface of the topics they’re talking about, and I’m always disappointed when I see an interesting headline but the post leaves me wanting more information.

Longer posts allow you to go into more depth and include information that sets you apart from other bloggers. This study by CoSchedule shows that long-form content also tends to rank higher than shorter pages, and they make a great point:

If you are conducting a search on “how to kill zombies,” what kind of post are you going to be looking for? The 500 word overview, or the 2,000 word in-depth article with pictures and examples?

The answer is pretty obvious.

People want advice that they can immediately apply to their lives, and they can do this if you give them more information. You want to get your audience thinking, taking action, and bookmarking your post to refer back to. You don’t want them skimming, writing ‘nice post’ in the comments, and forgetting about what they just read.

Quality Over Quantity

You’re probably thinking, ‘But Catherine, long posts take a long time to write. I need to get content out regularly.’

Welp, my dear. Here’s the thing: Your posts should take a while to write. Most of my posts take me days, maybe even a whole week. Unless you’re one of those people who wrote college essays the night before and still got an A, you’re going to have to give your posts the time they deserve before they can get to that epic level.

Take it slow and realize that more content does not always mean good content. One incredibly epic and helpful blog post a month is better than 5 mediocre, un-detailed posts per week. To beef up your posts and make them even more helpful, include links to other posts, add in research and statistics, work in some quotes, or try your own case study.

Content Upgrades

Another sure-fire way to get people more interested in your posts is a content upgrade. A content upgrade is basically an extra bit of goodness that adds value to your blog post and gives your reader even more. You could include any of the following:

Checklist or worksheet

Wallpaper download

Printable quote

Audio clip or video

Discount or deal on a product you mentioned

Even just a summary of your post that people can print out and refer back to

If you’re worried that you don’t have the skills to make these content upgrades, Canva is a free tool that can basically turn you into a graphic designer in less than a minute. It’s epic.

Speaking of content upgrades…

Here’s a free worksheet to help you write incredible blog posts! Don’t you like how I just snuck that in here?

Your Homework:

Use Google Analytics to find your most popular posts (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages), and go into even more detail with them. How To Start A Capsule Wardrobe has consistently been my most viewed post, so I fine-tuned some of my advice and offered a capsule wardrobe planner as a freebie if you sign up for my email list.

Go through some old posts and think about how you could go even further with your advice. Assume that the person reading it is a beginner rather than an expert. Don’t make something up if you can’t think of anything, but don’t be afraid of saying too much. As long as you keep it concise while also sharing the details, you’re golden.

Examples of In-Depth Posts:

How I got a job within a month of graduation via The Blissful Mind

How to make your workspace work for you + a design planning worksheet via bloomology

How to define your own version of success (free workbook with thought-provoking questions) via The Nectar Collective

STRATEGY 4: WRITE EVERGREEN CONTENT

So what the heck is evergreen content? I like to think of it as writing content that isn’t time or event specific – it has no expiration date.

You want to write posts that will still make sense if someone found them 6 months from now. Of course, some posts are intentionally seasonal which is totally fine, but you want to have a good balance between evergreen and seasonal posts.

If you want your posts to be shared again and again, it’s going to be worth your time to write evergreen content.

Examples of Evergreen Content:

10 travel wardrobe essentials – Daisy could have made this post about a recent trip she was taking and what she was packing. Instead, she made it about her audience and their needs, and made it appropriate for any season and location.

14 ways to stop living for the weekends – I would usually avoid referencing anything about the day of the week when the post was published, but it makes total sense for Jennifer to mention that it’s Friday because it’s completely relevant to the post (because duh, it’s about the weekend!)

Examples of Non-Evergreen Content:

The top ten fashion trends for 2015

Why you should visit London over Christmas

5 blogs I’m loving right now

Your Homework:

Find 3-5 old posts where you might have mentioned a season or event in your life that isn’t 100% necessary to share with your reader. Make them more universal and relevant to someone scrolling through your archives so that they can apply your advice to their lives right now.

STRATEGY 5: GIVE PEOPLE A REASON TO SHARE YOUR POST

Okay, you just put all this effort into writing an epic blog post, so how are you going to get it out into the world beyond the group of followers you already have?

You make it share-worthy!

Remember that people typically share things for these reasons:

They want to help others

They want to make themselves look better

People who participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge didn’t necessarily do it because they cared about the cause – they knew that if they didn’t accept the challenge, they’d look like an a-hole. It was share-worthy because people wanted to make themselves seem like good people.

You want to write share-worthy content that’s to-the-point, easy to read, and helps solve some sort of problem people might have. If you’ve follow the steps above, you’re already on track to having totally share-worthy content.

Here’s how to take it to the next level:

1. Jazz Up Your Headlines

Headlines are everything. Sure, your loyal followers will read anything regardless of the title, but imagine someone has just seen your post shared on Facebook – it needs to have a good headline to catch their attention. ‘My Favorite Blogging Tools’ it’s less shareable than ‘5 Blogging Tools That’ll Save You Massive Amounts of Time.’ That one just sounds like something I totally need.

Examples of great titles:

How to _____

10 ways to _____

The ultimate guide to _____

What you need to know about _____

Have you ever _____?

How I survived _____

If you want the most extensive list of topic ideas known to man, this e-book is for you.

2. Make Your Images Pinnable

I started off using horizontal images on my blog, but I knew I wanted to make my images more Pinterest friendly when I redesigned it in July. Horizontal images just don’t do very well on Pinterest because there’s a 554px width limit, whereas there is no vertical limit.

Making my images vertical was probably the best decision I’ve made for my blog so far.

During the month of July (when I hadn’t yet started using vertical images), I had 13 blog sessions that came from Pinterest.

In August, I had 1,065.

In September, I had 2,165. WHAT.

Just look at that percent increase!

You better believe the power of Pinterest for bloggers. I also have to credit the Pinfinite Growth course I took for some of this magic, but making my blog posts Pinterest-friendly was a huge game changer.

Get yourself a Pin It button using this tutorial + start making vertical images in Photoshop or Canva. You’ll have people pinning your content in no time.

3. Add a Click-to-Tweet Message

Check out these 5 simple strategies to improve your blog posts!

CLICK TO TWEET

Click-to-Tweet is an awesome plugin for WordPress that allows you to craft a tweet that links to your post, and all people have to do is click it to share it with their followers. This is incredibly helpful for getting people to take action because it requires zero effort on their part. I would also recommend getting a widget like Jetpack or something built into your design that makes it a piece of cake for people to share your post on social media.

Examples of Share-Worthy Content:

Look at those beautiful graphics and epic titles. You’d be a fool not to share those!

Your Homework:

Install a share widget to your posts, such as Jetpack.

Start including horizontal images in your posts and sharing them on Pinterest.

Add a click-to-tweet to a post.

Make sure you’ve updated your old blog post titles to make them totally shareable and epic.

OKAY, RECAP (+ THAT FREE WORKSHEET AGAIN!)

Download The Worksheet!

Write posts to benefit others – Make their life easier, inspire them, make them feel like you care about their problems

Make your content readable – Use subheadings, bullet points, and a large font

Write in-depth posts – Share all that you know about a topic, give examples, and offer a content upgrade

Write evergreen content – Make your posts timeless and easy to understand from a beginner’s perspective

Give people a reason to share your post – Jazz up your headlines, make your images Pinterest-friendly, and add a click-to-tweet button