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butterbabyflapjack · 2 years ago

Text

BRAT

Ghost x fem!reader x Soap

[ Badjhur NSFW audio of chapter 2 ]

You’ve been acting like a brat, and Ghost has had enough of it.

“You can consider this punishment. Can consider it me spoiling your bratty behavior. But you wanted my attention, and you’ve gotten it. So tell me now if you don’t want me to bend you over this desk and fuck you until it breaks, otherwise I’m taking what I want from you, and you’ll accept everything I give like the greedy fucking whore you’re pretending so hard not to be.”

ೃ[ TAGS ] sexual content, sexual tension, dominant Ghost, cheeky Soap, power dynamics, messy feelings, voice kink, mask kink, glove kink, dom/sub, indirect daddy kink, biting, rough sex, begging, brat breaking, voyeurism, just a dash of possessive choking, forced eye contact, oral fixation, tactical gear kink, desk sex, possessive Ghost, love triangle, jealousy

ೃ[ TAGLIST ] @ahoycaptainautumn @your-highnessmarvel @wolfgalsniper @confuseddipshit @prettynalilgay @merzkihstuff @alfie2401 @emberwolfgames @willowbrookesblog @meujias @emotion-no-hot-yes-hotel-trivago @magicgal @verios @flrwpwr @jewelsisurmom @imjusthereforghostsmutt @circuskatt @darkstars-14 @maxksc-blog @lillianastuff @assia123-green @collarwhiskers @divergent-llamas-03 @voidinfernal

ೃ[ CHAPTERS ] chapter.1 - chapter.2 - chapter.3 - chapter.4

::chapter 4::

[ SUMMARY ] You try your best to avoid temptation, but Soap has other plans, ones your lieutenant might not appreciate.

[ AUTHOR'S NOTE ] If you started reading this when it first came out, there’s a nsfw audio of it now that’s super steamy thanks to badjhur and @urfavsunkissedleo~♡ it was a lot of fun to hear my work in a different format (not to mention badjhur’s voice is ummmmmmkhlkgjhj) and if you want to you should check it out! (with headphones!! trust me on this one)

Also, ♡!dubcon warning!�� Also also, sorry about my poetry loving ass I could not help myself.

Also (it’s my last also I swear), I maybe forgot to say what your teammates look like, so here are their muses in case you’re interested.

You stare on in rising horror at the sexy little number Ghost is holding out on one far-too-casual, fully gloved finger; a stark contrast to just how overdressed he is yet how underdressed he wants you to be. Fighting not to feel the weight of everyone’s attention passing between it – that champagne-hued monstrosity – and you; the woman expected to wear it.

You.

You’re supposed to wear that.

For a mission.

This is not a joke. There is no punchline. Where’s a fucking punchline when you need one?!

And ‘dress’ really is a generous term for whatever that silky, clingy thing is he’s offering you in front of everyone, with all the silent expectance that you walk right over and take it.

And you should. You should just follow orders, especially since everyone is watching you.

“I am not wearing that,” you tell him firmly, instead; digging your heels in from across the room.

Even smeared black and shadowed by his hood, you can see the subtle flex in how he barely raises a single brow. And even from across the room, a room full of people staring at you, the darkened depths of Ghost’s eyes has its way of making you forget about everyone but him.

“It isn’t a request,” is his response, like gravel in his throat. Gruff. Succinct. “So stop being a brat. Come over here, and take it.”

But alright, we are jumping ahead of ourselves a little bit here. So let’s rewind about twenty minutes, to before your morning was ruined by shrink-wrap disguised as a dress. Back to when the only thing sabotaging your morning was one Johnny “Soap” MacTavish; and he was sabotaging it, and you, and everything.

The morning started out tolerably enough, about twenty minutes prior; heavy on the ‘started’.

Your eyes blink open, and though your cramped little room doesn’t have a window, you still get the sense that it’s dawn. And you sit up, rubbing your eyes awake upon the haphazard bed you’re still half-tangled in.

Getting the sense that its dawn is part of the reason you don’t like hanging out in your hovel of a room, even with its safety of a door to hide from the rest of your team behind. For all its supposed privacy, its lack of windows makes it feel like a cave with a lamp left perpetually on (because you don’t ever feel quite safe on missions, especially not in windowless dark, and especially not on this mission). Yet even with the lack of sunlight to tell you that it's dawn, to make you feel more human for a single second, life is good. Life is warm. Because when you first wake up, you don't remember anything.

And then that second passes.

And then you remember all the stupid things you’ve done.

Like letting your lieutenant fuck you over his desk, more-or-less in front of an audience.

And like you – vividly imagining sucking off Johnny’s calloused, spaghetti-sauced fingers at the exact same moment you’re batting eyelashes at him in the kitchen – also in front of an audience.

You really like making a fool of yourself on stage, don’t you?

Lord, what is this safehouse doing to you? To any of you? Nothing was this complicated before you all got trapped in this shoebox, before this mission began, and you blame this shoebox-sized apartment for everything.

So, yeah.

The morning started off tolerably, but this is where it starts to fall apart.

But don’t worry, it gets better – and by ‘better’ I of course mean worse. (And we're not even talking about the dress yet, but we’ll get to that. Believe it or not, there are worse things than that horrid little dress).

Lost in your frustration for this apartment and whatever mind games it's playing with you, a gruff knock at your door makes you jump so sharply you reel back in bed, thwacking your head against the headboard.

“Living room in twenty, Hush.”

It's Soap. You can tell by that husky voice you're beginning to loathe, because like Pavlov's dog, you salivate when you hear it.

Rubbing the ache from the back of your skull, you exhale a stifled groan, which apparently these paper-thin walls allow Johnny in on.

“You all good in there, lass?” he asks, sounding a bit too amused for your liking.

“M’fine,” you call back through your teeth, glad he can’t see you wincing, and maybe you should hide out in here all day even if it’s as suffocating as a submarine.

“Sounds like you took a tumble.”

You frown at your door, at where Soap must stand behind it, hand dropping. “Mind your own business, Soap.”

You hear his chuckle, like a rockslide breathed against the door, and suddenly you're blinking far too quickly at how the mere sound of laughter sinks like honey in your veins.

“Right now you are my business…” he murmurs, and why does something so seemingly innocuous make your gut clench?

You shake the flustering sensation away, forcing a scowl at the door. “Just – go! I’ll be out in a minute!”

Again, his lowered, breathy laugh does horrible things to you.

It’s the apartment – this stupid fucking apartment – it’s messing with you.

“If you say so, Hush,” Soap muses, before the heavy sound of his boot steps carries him further away down the hall.

Crisis averted.

For now.

It’s hard to be relieved when you know you’ll just come face-to-face with him again almost instantly, such is the size of this place. And when you do, who knows what you'll end up doing - it's like you and everyone else has lost their heads in here. And though you’re tempted to lock yourself away in your room, you refuse to hide in bed all day over two guys and a hundred possible bad decisions you’ve yet to make.

Mistakes have definitely been made during your unfortunate stint in this shoebox-sized purgatory, but that doesn’t mean you’ll entertain any more dumb ideas. And you’re fully resolved not to, just as you’re hellbent on pretending that nothing at all has happened already, that nothing at all has changed – not between you and Ghost, not between you and Soap, and definitely not between all three of you.

…

All three of you?

What’s that phenomenon called? That one where you tell yourself not to think about something, and then you just think about it ten times harder even more than you would have?

Cause that’s what’s happening now.

You and Ghost and Soap. It slips across your mind, and, oh, god, that’s officially the last thing you need right now, but like a viscid bad dream, you can't wake up, can’t scrape the image once it’s there.

And you have a vivid fucking imagination.

You can see it. Can feel it. A fever-wall of heat on either side of you, yourself a meal torn between two wolves; rough, greedy. Twin lips mapping your skin, your chest, your nape, your neck, marking every inch of you until everything is theirs. Gruff hands, wanting hands, possessive, tearing through your clothes, charting the smoothness of your skin. Calloused, wood-hewn hands that mold to you, mold you to them, between them, till every exhale is their groans or your gasps and you don’t know where you end and they begin.

And in this dream, this fever, Ghost’s mouth finds your ear from behind, rough voice warm against your skin.

“You like this, don’t you?” he asks, like he already knows. “Greedy fucking thing.” Grabbing your waist, jerking your ass back into him; a puzzle piece that fits so snugly between himself and Soap.

You try to gasp something, maybe to deny it, but he only laughs; a purring, deadly cadence.

“Your little shivers don’t lie.”

We have officially lost cabin pressure.

And for a moment, you forget you're even awake. That fever-dream of them consuming you. But then you fall back into orbit, blinking hard enough to realize what you're actually imagining right now, and nearly hit your head against the headboard again just to make it fucking stop.

What are you– Jesus, get your head on straight, you are not – and I repeat, not – anywhere even close to the realm of fucking…

Even thinking their names makes your mind spin, or maybe that's something else.

This mission…!

Just… focus on the mission!

And let us reiterate: this tiny awful place is just fucking with all of your heads (especially yours, apparently). Making smoke of boundaries, muddying whatever lines should exist. That’s all. That’s it. And as soon as you’re out of here everything will go back to normal, it'll all be mercifully the same. Ghost and Soap won't hold these invisible strings around your heart and mind anymore, you won't still envision horrible things about them as you lie still-awake in bed.

But for now, with all of you locked up in here…

You just have to focus and avoid them.

Just. Don’t. Think. About. Them. Either of them.

The mission. Focus on the mission. (Of which you currently have little detail, as apparently you’re on the short end of a need-to-know basis, but god do you hope it ends soon).

Your morning, horny fever-dreams aside, starts with a goal as simple as that. Just don’t think about them, and for the love of god avoid being alone with either of them. Even when some part of you knows it won't be that simple, but hey, denial is a thing, a great thing, so you cling to denial and keep on chugging.

You avoid leaving your fish-tank of a room for as long as anxiety allows, only vaguely aware of how you’re chipping away at the ‘living room in twenty’ wake-up call Soap gave you, before eventually sleuthing your way out into the narrow hall, relieved to see Johnny isn't still there, as if waiting to ambush you, even though you knew he wasn't there, you can usually hear that man like a muscle-dense freight train from at least a mile away, but this place is making you more paranoid than you should be.

Still, you're relieved to find the hallway empty, and you sneak your way with all the stealth 141 has ingrained into your every sinew toward the kitchen, as if getting there in silence is a matter of life or death. Peeking your little head in to ensure neither of your gravel-toned, fever-dream apparitions are in there, before slinking in to pour cereal like a mad-woman and shovel it in your face at Mach 10 speed, and damn you should probably slow down before you chip a tooth or something.

Ash gives you a weird look, being the only person in the immediate vicinity of your apparent starvation.

"'Mornin'," he says, though his eyes question your sanity – to which you mumble something around a mouthful that might have been "hello," flashing a 'nervous?-I'm-not-nervous', chipmunk-cheeked smile (read: grimace) and stuffing your mouth even fuller to avoid speaking.

And hey, you haven't seen Ghost, you haven't actually seen Soap, and you haven't choked on your cereal – somehow. So as far as your plan of avoiding them goes, you're doing great so far! Just keep this up and this mission will be over in no time (ha!).

Tossing back the rest of your cereal, you leave your bowl in the sink as Ash nags after you to wash your dishes and you insist back that you will, later (under the safe cover of night, preferably), but right now you need to hide (the brave kind of hiding – you’re not a coward, I swear). Not in your submarine cave, because you're like a plant, you crave the sunlight. Your room is a last resort. Right now, you head toward the next best thing – your usual reading nook. You know, the one Ghost found you in yesterday, before… well, we won’t get into that. The point is, it’s the perfect place to waste hours at a time spilling over whatever old books and dog-eared magazines the one-shelf excuse of a library has to offer.

But it's here that your feet grind to a sudden halt, rooting you to the ground. Here, just outside the doorway of said reading nook. Because it's here that you see Soap.

Soap, lounging lackadaisically, without a seeming care in the world. Dark tee and dark jeans that somehow cling to his ridges in all the right places. Dust-wrapped boots already kicked up on the arm of the room's moth-bitten armchair, as he dangles a book before his face, obstructing all but his scruffy, chiseled jawline and corded neck from view.

He’s just lounging around on that armchair.

Your armchair.

Because you've been reading in here since day one, the day you all got trapped here; you saw it first.

So what is he doing in here?

He’s never in here.

And what is he reading? Does he even know how to read? He’s never reading.

You’re caught in fight-or-flight, still puzzling when alarm bells in your head start ringing – warning, warning, abort, abort, this is not a drill get the hell out of there – and you haven’t made it this far in your career not listening to your instincts when you're sound enough to have them.

You turn, you bolt, you scatter, before Soap can even glance around whatever book he’s dangling across that stupidly handsome face of his. And no, it's not exactly a graceful exit, but if you don’t heed your instincts now you may not get to later. Soap's roguish, sapphire gaze has a way of drowning out instinct and reason, as you’ve learned the hard way last night, and right now reason's telling you not to stick around and find out why the hell he's lying around pretending to read on your futon.

Nu-uh.

Nope.

Not dumb enough to slide into that one.

Best to avoid it.

Okay. So. No reading nook, then (thanks for nothing, Soap). And though you briefly consider foregoing sunlight altogether and just hiding away in your room, you instead scurry back down the hall, toward the charmingly constricted living room/kitchenette combo, supposing you'll find safety in numbers by using the safer members of your task force as a shield against those two others that plague you.

Ash, Fuze, and Blight are all crowded around the tiny box TV in the living room that only gets clear reception on three stations, like three gorillas sprawled on a toy couch, one that barely fits three guys the size of linebackers (you might’ve poked fun at how cozy they look were you not so currently twisted). And seeing that Ghost's not in the room solidifies this as your current safe haven, your preferred hiding place (or, hiding in plain sight behind a shield of tv-glued gorillas place).

And speaking of Ghost…

You clear your throat of any lingering nerves, attempting nonchalance as you make your way toward the bay window at the furthest edge of the room, a ways behind where the group of guys are sitting; settling in to sit upon its windowsill, your back against the wall.

“Where’s L.T.?” you ask with all that supposed nonchalance.

None of your team bother to glance back, too enthralled with whatever nonsense is on screen, though you know they heard you.

“Out,” Blight says. And okay, thanks for all the detail, Blight.

Still, that one word's enough to leave your brows slowly furrowing. Its potential, unstated meaning sinking in.

“He left the safehouse?” you ask, staring at the back of Blight’s head. "As in…” Dare you cling to hope? “We might be getting actual orders that get us out of here?"

Ash speaks up before Blight does.

“Hopefully,” he says, eyes still glued to the screen. “But at least some wheels are turning.”

“What kind of wheels?” you ask, not sure why you’re brushed by a fleeting edge of nerves.

“Dunno,” Ash says. “Him’n Gaz were pretty tight-lipped about it, but they’re due back in ten, hopefully with good news.”

“And a few six-packs,” Blight adds, without much enthusiasm.

"And a fucking steak would be nice," Fuze supplies, one arm sprawled along the back of the couch from where he sits, locked onto the screen. "I'm pretty sure Gaz's trying to kill us with what he thinks is cooking – I've eaten better stranded and starved on rations."

As the other boys weigh in about what a shit chef Gaz is (and they're not exactly wrong, though you don't chime in), you turn away from the group of them, staring down at the far-below streets of Amsterdam beside you, though in actuality you hardly see a thing, caught in your mind as you suddenly are.

You feel like you should be far more relieved by this than you actually end up being. And it makes no sense how this news – good news – that you might finally be unshackled from this shoebox purgatory… how it doesn’t alleviate some ache inside you, doesn’t fill you with some sweetly warm ease.

Maybe this place has given you Stockholm, because something about leaving now eats at you, like there’s something started and unfinished, and though you’re not sure what that something is you’re somehow raked by nervous claws, torn by wanting to know and never wanting to find out.

You’re being silly. You’re relieved, you’ve just forgotten what relief feels like. You’re more than ready to leave this place, you’re praying every second while trapped within this hellscape that you’ll finally be released.

This is a good thing. Finally, you’ll all be free, and you’ll never take a mission in Amsterdam again.

Whatever that annoying, gnawing feeling near your ribs is, you shove it away. And for some reason you think of Ghost, you think of Soap, and that ache comes back again.

How are you so tangled up in them?

Sure, you’re all close, closer than close, with everything you’ve been through. It’s impossible not to feel attached, not to feel somewhat vulnerable around people who’ve brushed by hell and back with you. The things you’ve all done, what you’ve all seen – it strips away layers of you, all of you, and what’s behind, what’s bared…

There’s nothing like it. It’s indescribable, what you share. You care about them more than you’d ever admit.

But that doesn’t excuse how you’re suddenly, perpetually haunted, unable to peel them from your head.

You care about all of your team, not just them – it's not supposed to be so personal, yet somehow it is. It’s tangled and raw and messy and you nearly have to laugh at that, because at least you know that Soap’s name is really Johnny – you don't even know Ghost's name, haven’t even seen his face, and yet somehow you can't stop thinking about him, like he's carved himself inside your mind, taken residence there, claiming a piece of you that you can’t get back, a piece you don’t want back, a piece that's only his.

How did your feelings evolve into whatever nightmare this is?

And speaking of nightmares.

"You're not as stealthy as you usually are this morning, love.”

A husky, familiar voice wavers in through your tangled thoughts from somewhere right in front of you, and you blink, suddenly seeing as it cheekily adds, "You might wanna work on that."

For the second time today, Soap has you startling back into hitting your head, skull thunking against the wall of the windowsill you’re perched upon, almost like he wants you to suffer a head-wound whenever he shows up out of the blue. And he definitely looks amused at whatever your face is doing right now as your owlish eyes shoot up to him.

He regards you from just beside the window, dense arms folded across the expanse of his chest. And he exhales his watchful amusement as all you can seem to do for a moment is gawk up at his magical appearance out of nowhere – ta da! – leaning one heavy shoulder against the wall the longer you go on about it.

“Someone’s jumpy,” he observes with a subtly curling grin, azure glints beneath his lashes. One corner of his lips edging wider the longer you fail to say anything, all while you resist the dire urge to just push off the windowsill and run from the potential danger of yourself around him.

"You gonna say hello, or…?" he wonders, idly. Smile too devilish to be charming, and yet he still looks charming and you hate him for it. “Ah, I see,” he muses after a time, with a sage expression of knowing. “Tongue-tied. I tend to have that effect on people. I'll give you a minute."

If anything, your dour expression only further fuels his amusement.

"What do you want, Soap?” you ask at last, doing your best not to showcase the uncomfortable flare you feel in your gut just by looking at him.

“To bother you,” he says, hiking a mischievous brow. "Is it working?"

The part of you that enjoys what were your usual back-and-forths wants to crack a smile, while all the rest of you holds back, knowing he’s bad news in a place like this, that maybe you can’t trust yourself, that the last thing you need is to encourage him.

“Yup," you say, dully. "It’s working.”

He grins. “Great,” he says, his infuriating nonchalance unaffected; gaze a slash of blue as you muster up a scowl at him.

"Has anyone ever told you how cute you are when you're in a bad mood?” he asks, eyes creasing as you once again resist the temptation to bolt. “You can't really blame me for wanting to bother you. It’s hard not to play with fire when the burn’s so appealing.”

That cheeky fucking smile of his lengthens at whatever your contorted, silent reaction to that is.

“Aye – there it is. That’s the look,” he muses, smirking as annoyance fizzles off your back. “Adorable. You look like you might wanna slap me.”

“I kinda do, actually,” you say – only half-joking. "Though maybe I'll just punch you in the face again like I did the last time you annoyed me."

“Zero to ten, just like that?” he wonders with his charming, crooked grin. “I haven’t even said ‘hello’ yet.”

You feel yourself smile before you can stop it – quickly biting your lips flat whilst turning away, staring hard out the window in the decided effort to ignore his presence.

“So say ‘hello’ and leave, then,” you mutter at the glass. “I’m kinda busy.”

"Huh. You don’t look all that busy."

"I'm people watching, not that it's any of your business."

"And that's more interesting than talking to me?"

"Is that rhetorical, or…?"

His little chuff teases warmth down your neck.

“Ah,” he lowly broods, as if in discovery of something. And you can’t help from glancing up at him again, seeing one dark brow archly lifted. “So you are avoiding me…”

You blink, thickly – trying to stem your panic, because you do not need him knowing that. If he thinks you’re avoiding him – which you very much are but that’s beside the point – he might ask the seemingly innocuous question of “why?”, and you are not answering that right now, especially when you're not even sure you know the answer yourself.

And thus, you panic (discreetly), you balk (in your head), insisting, “I’m not avoiding you.”

He doesn't necessarily look convinced.

“That’s odd,” he says, Scottish accent threaded in his words. “I could’ve sworn you tip-toed past that little reading nook you like so much just a few minutes ago.” His brow’s further lifted, that insufferable half-smirk still scrawled across his scruffy face. “Are you telling me that had nothing to do with avoiding?”

You bite your lower lip into a scowl, avoiding even his questions. “What were you doing in there, anyway? That’s my reading nook.”

“I know it is.” His blue gaze sheens. “What do you think I was doing in there?”

Your eyebrows tug into a crease, as slowly your eyes narrow up at him – all those instinctual alarm bells from earlier starting to make a helluva lot more sense.

“So you were lying in wait for me…” you accuse as much aloud.

He shrugs; boyish, adorable. “Had to get you all to myself somehow.”

His eyes warm like heated sea glass, seeming to sense that flush creeping up your neck as, for a moment, you can't seem to look away from him. And before you can look away, or make up some excuse to leave or actually slap him, he’s already pushing off from his casual, one-shouldered slouch against the wall, settling down upon the windowsill beside you.

“Guess you have a thing for audiences, though,” he murmurs, with a glance at the gorillas on the couch, glued to their screen.

When he looks back at you, he's far too close for his eyes not to capture yours.

Those alarm bells make a desperate reappearance in your head again, but you can hardly think with him watching you like that, let alone heed them. Some flicker of heat teased low in the base of your spine as his playful gaze dances over yours.

“Maybe my utter lack of enthusiasm wasn’t obvious enough,” you murmur, distracted; trying not to let the gorillas overhear whatever's happening between the two of you, especially since you don’t need their gossip playing telephone back to Ghost about something that’s actually nothing– ”but me telling you I’m busy was my unsubtle queue for you to leave.”

“Oh, I got it,” he says; attention skating across your features. Your lashes, your jaw, your eyes, your lips. “Crystal fuckin’ clear.”

And okay, maybe he actually is a little bit charming underneath how insufferably annoying he can be, because you certainly feel charmed, like you can’t look away from him.

"So you can pick up on subtle nuances,” you muse.

He smiles. "I can pick up on lots of things."

Your pulse catches as his words feel to dig inside a place you won't acknowledge, won't allow him or anyone to see, and you’re forced to swallow against a sudden knot within your throat.

"So is there a reason you're still over here harassing me then?" you wonder, folding your arms against him. “Besides you wanting me to slap you, that is? Because I’m not much in the mood for fueling your kinky fantasies this morning, though I see your last bruise’s healed nicely.”

He exhales a bearish laugh, though his mirth is slowly fading. Something more serious, like a shadow, creeping in to take its place. Timber-carved, reserved, unlike him.

“Maybe you can indulge my fantasy of you not avoiding me, then,” he suggests, gaze passing over yours, as though searching. “At least for, let's say… five minutes? Think you can handle that?"

Why do you actually gulp – god you hope he didn’t actually hear that.

"Do you always have to challenge women into spending time with you?"

One corner of his lips curls; a fox with sapphire heat for eyes. “Only the ones I’m interested in, apparently.”

It’s like he somehow strips away more and more of that now tiny voice warning you away – like he can see it happening. And he leans in just a fraction more close, his voice by your cheek, his words a gruff murmur that lures you closer just to hear them, those words meant just for you.

“I get it,” he says. “Why you’re so abrasive right now. Why you’re twisted up, lashing out. Avoiding.”

He’s so close the warmth of his body radiates into yours, like the tease of a touch you inexplicably long for.

At least, until he keeps talking.

“Whatever happened between you and L.T.–”

And just like that – the mere mention of Ghost’s name and all your feelings tied to it – the spells broken, torn from whatever trance he’s somehow spun you into.

"I don't – you don't know what–" you start to stammer, though his hand as it wraps around your forearm stills you, succeeds in pulling your anxiety-bitten gaze back to his for at least a moment more.

His touch is gentle, as if to ease you from fleeing, and yet he still seems unable not to tease you about it all the same.

"The details of which shall remain, at the lady's insistence, a badly kept secret,” he softly smirks. Chuckling as your face threatens to expel actual, embarrassed steam.

When you turn away, you’re not sure if it’s in readiment to get the hell away from him or in trying to ensure that anyone else in the room isn’t listening, though his thumb and forefinger finding your chin wipes whatever your intentions away, a warm jolt springing down your middle as he turns your uncertain gaze back to him.

“Whatever happened,” he breathes, a graveled hush as his eyes reclaim yours, “it’s got you twisted.”

A subtle smirk plays his lips at how utterly he seems to hold your attention, at how his touch makes you glass, makes you fragile before him. And even now he teases.

“And for good reason, too. L.T.’s not exactly the kinda guy I’d wanna get locked in a room with.”

You're forced to bite the inside of your cheek not to call him every insult you’ve ever heard of, so loudly everyone in the room starts tuning in.

“Please, God, make this conversation end,” you mutter instead, to which his jeweled-eyes sparkle, an added coil to his grin.

For a man his size, he somehow moves like fluid – shifting still closer, so close you’re boxed in against the wall of the windowsill behind you. So close that unthinking panic has your head dully thumping in a wavering bid to create distance, and you’re really starting to think he’s inspiring head-wounds on purpose.

His only reaction is the low laugh tucked inside his chest, one you feel vibrating through him, skittering across your bones, making your gut clench. And you can feel his voice, right beside you. You could push him away, though you don't. Somehow frozen against his warmth. Frozen, but for the shiver that travels through your spine as his whispered words graze against your ear.

“But here’s the thing, sweetheart,” he breathes, his rockslide warmth dragging all those sticky little knots inside you up into your throat. “Whatever’s twisted you up, whatever games L.T. might be playing… I’m not playing. I'm not twisted up in anything.”

The bridge of his nose skims across the delicate curve of your ear; a hum catching low in his throat as he seems to drink down the scent of you, the warmth of your nearness, those unwanted shivers he sends trickling down your nape as he murmurs, “I know exactly what I want…”

You’re not entirely sure what kind of stifled little sound wants to claw its way out of you as you hear him breathe you in again, as his hand finds your knee, but you’re not sure you want to find out; managing to bite back on it; biting still more harshly as his hand circles around your knee, squeezing, an iron grip that travels possessively upward, up along your thigh, firm fingers digging at your plushness, like he can’t contain some animal that longs to tear you open, to slip inside. And so much for your plans to avoid him, when now it feels there's nowhere you could hide.

You should say something, anything, but you can’t – especially as his fingers bite into you more harshly, as you feel a shudder travel through him, hear him stifle a coarsened breath.

“Hearing you moan someone else's name through these paper-fucking-walls…” His words sink to a growl that scrapes across your skin, pulls your insides tight, so constricted you can barely breathe. “Do you have any idea what that did to me?” he wonders, satin sawtooth heat against your ear. “What you do to me?”

You’re not sure if he’s actually asking – your throat constricting with the lack of knowing what to say.

“Johnny…”

He hums his approval, the sound like thunder in him, exhaled against your ear as his lips brush your skin.

“Aye, lass,” he says, his hand smoothing up around your waist, taking hold as though you belong to him; calloused thumb spilling up beneath your shirt, down below the waistband of your jeans, tracing along the ridge of your hip. “That’s the only name I want on your lips.”

You fail to choke back a gasp as his tongue finds your earlobe, sucking it in between his hungry teeth, and it's both exquisite and torturous how the heat of his mouth spears straight down between your legs, lapping between how tightly your thighs twist together, as though your body’s betraying how much you need him there; a white-hot ache that pulls a whimper from your throat, crackling across all your glass-hewn pieces.

“S-Soap,” you stammer, as if his codename will save you where his given name could not – somehow still present enough not to waver above a trembled hush, even with his tongue and teeth against your skin, traveling down your throat, marking and making a meal of you. And though you grab his wrist as if to push him away, you don't succeed in actually tearing his touch from you, even as you choke out desperately, “Stop…!”

He doesn’t listen. Instead taking the back of your neck, dragging you in to kiss him.

Rough fingers coil in your hair, twisting, tangled in you as you exhale a small, startled noise against his lips, before, before…

Everything’s hot. Everything’s melting. You can’t think.

He licks inside your mouth, and with another breathy sound against his lips, you kiss him back, desperate for his warmth, his taste; as though lost in a storm that rises and consumes, that would see you torn to pieces but for the anchor of him you cling to.

You’re lost, and you're hopeless, and you're senseless and you need him.

You grab his shirt as he swallows down that little sound you make, tongue sinking inside your warmth, and suddenly you’re his. His to possess, his to do what he wants with.

Your heart nearly shatters through your ribs at the granite-coarse sound he makes against your tongue, before he’s kissing you more fiercely, gruff fingers twisting at your roots.

He pauses only long enough to tease you, because of course he does.

“Stop, she says,” he murmurs at your lips. “Slap me, and maybe I will.” Not waiting before his tongue draws yours back out to play, to belong to him.

And some vicious part of you wants to slap him, if only to disrupt how fucking cocky he is, but the wet, eager heat of his mouth erases all your thoughts until it feels like you can’t even breathe unless you’re breathing him.

This is when the front door of this dingy little Amsterdam apartment unlocks; a distant, metallic scratching.

This is when the front door of this dingy little Amsterdam apartment opens; itself thrown casually ajar.

Right now. With your and Johnny’s tongues wrapped halfway down each other’s throats. Because of course it does – you love an audience, right?

Twenty minutes are up.

“Fucking finally…!”

You somehow hear Blight's voice clamor through the fog surrounding your thoughts, like a ship horn far from shore; carving through the mist, growing louder, more clear, more jarring as he adds, “Please tell me we’re getting out of here, Ghost – I'm one Gaz-cooked meal away from blowing my own brains out.”

And then it hits you – reality punching you in the chest, all your nerves upended, and still it takes a single second – a single, time-defying second – to actually register, to react, to realize what the fuck you’re actually doing right now, making out with Soap in the fucking living room what the hell are you thinking–!

A single second. And then you tear yourself away, twist your kiss-plushed lips from Soap’s – jerking back, shooting to your feet, edging out a shaky step against the wall as though you’ll crumble without it supporting you. Eyes overwide as apprehension tears your heart out, and even then some ache pushes through your chest, pushing through your ribs, like it wants to climb right out of you, climb anywhere where it might at last be tended, at last be soothed, and you shove it violently away, just as you do all those tangled feelings inside you.

You see Blight shifting up off the couch, sauntering toward the door just a few feet ahead of him. And you don’t know why you’re panicking, but you're panicking, it seizes through you like a ricocheting round as you see Ghost and Gaz standing there. Gaz’s lips moving, saying something you can’t even hear as he shuts the door behind them.

Blight’s talking too, you think. Saying something to Ghost. And it feels like it’s been so long since you’ve actually seen your lieutenant, even when it’s only been a day.

Ghost isn’t looking at Blight.

He’s a shadow-carved monolith. A black smudge against a silver eclipse. A hooded omen with kohl-bruised eyes and a skull’s broad, pallid jawline sewn to the lower half of his face.

Tall. Imposing.

Rigid.

He’s a mountain of unknown intention. And he’s looking right at you.

Something about him snares you from all the way across the room. Grips your very bones, snatching them and you into his possession. There is no escape from the way he’s watching you. His eyes are chasmic, labyrinthian; dark, unreadable voids above his skeletal mask.

Those eyes suck you in, fill your chest and heart and lungs with their darkness. They slide against your marrow, inscribing words you’ll never see unless you tear yourself open.

And then those eyes fall to Johnny.

Ghost can transcend humanity when he wants to. You’ve seen it before, in the field. A rare and dangerous occurrence where he’s more beast than man. But you never thought whatever monster lie in him would ever direct itself at Soap. Would ever watch him like he’s watching him right now.

It’s a look that could bend iron around you. Could hollow your insides out, leave you a rib-caged cavity. A jackal look. A beast that bares its blood-stained teeth as the other jackals stalk near.

That look could stop your very heart from beating, and for a moment you swear it does, even when it’s not directed at you. Just being in its presence is stifling. Those eyes of Ghost’s a noose, a cattle-gun, a guillotine.

If people are still talking, you can no longer hear anything beyond the thud of your own heart restarting. Can no longer see anything else at all in that room. All you can see is Ghost, and all you can feel is that darkness radiating off him.

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

[ AUTHOR'S NOTE ] I think Ghost might be mildly pissed off.

Thanks for reading!

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ducktracy · 4 years ago

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181. the case of the stuttering pig (1937)

disclaimer: this review contains antisemitic content, stereotypes, and imagery. i in no way endorse any of this, but it’s just as important to bring awareness to these depictions rather than shove them under the rug. please, PLEASE let me know if i make any mistakes or say something offensive, i want to take responsibility for my actions and use this as an opportunity to educate myself. any outside commentary is more than welcome. thank you for your patience and understanding.

release date: october 30th, 1937

series: looney tunes

director: frank tashlin

starring: mel blanc (porky, the guy in the third row), billy bletcher (lawyer goodwill), sara berner (petunia)

just in time for the halloween season, we explore one of tashlin’s best directorial efforts to date. the case of the stuttering pig (its title derived from the case of the stuttering bishop, a warner bros. film released only 4 months prior) is the first of many warner bros. cartoons to take a jab at the ever popular dr. jekyll and mr. hyde. here, porky and his family (4 brothers and petunia, who serves as his sister rather than a love interest) are terrorized by the nefarious lawyer goodwill, the family lawyer who turns himself into a mr. hyde facsimile, hoping to kill the family in order to snag some inheritance money.

frank tashlin’s cinematography is in peak form as the cartoon opens to a ghastly exposition--william tell’s “the storm” rages alongside a furious storm. intricate camera angles include an upshot on a giant old house, trees whipping in the wind against the flashing lightning, and a close up of the window shudders snapping against the exterior. the snaps of the window shudders soon melt into the droning tick of a clock inside, an upshot exposing dynamic, drawn out shadows against the walls. tashlin handles the contrast between values exceptionally well. backgrounds are crisp, clear, and pronounced.

cue a vertical pan of porky’s siblings (patrick, peter, percy, portus, and petunia) all lined up against the wall in a row of chairs. each appear apprehensive, obviously on edge. not porky, though. porky’s at the very end of the row, looking on with a hilariously blank smile plastered on his face.

suddenly, a knock at the door interrupts the silence. cue the famous tashlin jump cut: we only see volney white’s animation of porky jumping out of his seat, but the next shot reveals all of the siblings hanging from a chandelier, with porky trepidatiously inquiring “who-who-who-who-who-who’s theh-the-the-the-the-there...?” you can still feel mel’s attempts to distinguish his own unique porky stutter from the authentic stutter provided by joe dougherty--this delivery is more dougherty-esque than some of his others.

billy bletcher’s syrupy sweet vocals ring out from behind the door, the disembodied voice introducing himself as lawyer goodwill. the decision not to showcase who’s behind the door is a smart one. suspense is absolutely rife all throughout the cartoon, and the beginning is no exception. with a peppy “okey deh-eh-eh-deh-do... oh-oh-okey deh-deh... okay!”, porky is followed by his siblings as he happily allows this mysterious lawyer goodwill inside. the suddenly calm, almost wholesome atmosphere inside, reassured by the self-proclaimed friendly presence of lawyer goodwill is disrupted as soon as the door opens, wind howling and blowing the entire family down the hallway as goodwill fights his way inside, his face (and head, for that matter) completely concealed by his hat and collar. tashlin plays on this as goodwill removes his hat, a mere nub placed where his neck should be as a waterfall of rain pours out from the hat. nevertheless, goodwill reveals himself, a portly yet good-natured looking fellow as he tells the children it’s time to attend to “business”.

lawyer goodwill gathers the kids around to discuss the matter of their late uncle solomon (a pig caricature of oliver hardy, just one of a handful) and his will. the animation is slightly blurred and jittery from the double exposure effects of the shadows--animation historian mark kausler has this to say (transcribed from his excellent commentary that i’m partially parroting):

“they used to hand crank the cameras here. this was before electric drive animation cameras--that’s why the shadows are so flickery, because they had to back the film up and then re-expose it to get the transparency of the shadow.”

uncle solomon’s will states that his heirs will inherit his money. however, if something were to happen to them, then lawyer goodwill gets the cash instead. goodwill exits the house, reassuring that nothing will happen to the kids... “...i hope!”

there’s a gorgeous, moody upshot of the porch as goodwill lumbers down the steps. volney white is at the hand of this scene, easy to spot thanks to his telltale speed: goodwill practically glides across the screen as he heads towards offscreen, only to whip back and put a hand over his hear, nefariously straining to hear if he’s being followed. volney’s pose and expression are as strong as ever--i made a reel of his animation awhile ago if you’d like to check it out!

bob bentley takes over to animate goodwill’s transformation into the monster--his animation is very meticulous and well crafted. a good way to spot him is to see if characters have thicker eyebrows in some scenes than others. goodwill swaps clothes in favor of a hat and cape almost effortlessly, gliding across the screen like butter. the flow isn’t interrupted, not even by the overlay of tables decorated with test tubes, skulls, etc.

all of goodwill’s potential queries on how to transform into a hideous beast are answered with a bottle of “jekyll and hide juice” (starting at only $9.99! call now and get another FREE at no cost to you! it’s a steal, folks!) nestled conveniently on his shelf of various poisons. he pours the concoction into a cocktail, acting like a regular bartender as he shows off by pouring the mixture from glass to glass. tashlin’s timing, both behaviorally and comically, are succinct as goodwill finally downs the mixture. he grips the table, taking heaving breaths, staring at the audience, until... nothing. he heaves a dubious shrug.

instead, goodwill opts to use a milkshake mixer (a relatively new invention whose novelty value would have scored much bigger laughs then than it does today, but still remains amusing at the very least) to mix his concoction, downing it once more.

bob bentley’s animation of the monster is nothing short of gorgeous. well defined, well crafted, and dimensional. however, it does encapsulate antisemitic stereotypes and caricatures, from the big nose to clawed hands and pointy ears, as well as the desire for money. as skillful as the animation is, and as solid as the cartoon is, these are problems that still need to be addressed. understand that when i’m praising the animation, i’m focusing on the techniques themselves and the technicalities behind it, not the content that’s being animated itself. (thank you anon for taking the time to educate me! it’s much appreciated.)

billy bletcher snarls in his trademark deep voice, even quipping “you wouldn’t think i was lawyer goodwill now, would you?” he talks directly to the audience, getting right close in their face, jabbing his spindly finger and bulbous nose. he even goes as far as to berate his public by screeching “you bunch of softies! YEAH, YOU IN THE THIRD ROW! ya BIG SOFTIE!” the fourth wall breaking is nothing short of genius. just IMAGINE seeing this in a dark, packed movie theater! the effect would be phenomenal! (especially if you were the guy in the third row! i’m sure all of the third-row-sitting patrons felt quite satisfied at these showings.) the monster vows to dispose of the family, sneering at our inability to help save our heroes.

said heroes are contentedly socializing in the living room, peppy porky talking about how safe and sound they are in their own little house. so, of course, that serves as the cue for a gnarly hand to grab the light switch and kill the lights. i love the detail of the shadow creeping along the wall before you even see the hand itself--little decisions like that go such a long way.

the lights go out, and all we hear is the pluck of an electric slide guitar. the lights come on, and one of porky’s alliteratively named siblings is gone, with an x cleverly marked in his place. the ritual occurs four times, with porky remarking each of the names of his fallen siblings (”peh-peh-patrick!” “eh-peh-peh-peh-eh-peter!” “eh-peh-peh-eh-peh-percy!” “puh-portus!”). the lights go out once more, and x’s mark where porky and petunia were just sitting prior. definitely an artsy and interesting way to convey the kidnappings--even more so when we see porky and petunia trepidatiously popping their heads out from behind the armchair after the camera trucks in on their deserted spot.

volney white animates the close up of petunia clutching to porky, stuttering (from fear, that is) “g-g-gee, p-p-porky, i’m scared!” her voice here is provided by sara berner as opposed to berneice hansell, who voiced her in her last appearance in porky’s romance. ironically, hansell would take over for petunia again after bob clampett adopted (and subsequently redesigned) her character. you can hear the evolution of her voice here.

porky reassures her that they’ll find the brothers as we cue a clever pan from inside to outside the house, spotlighting the basement. the backgrounds are so gorgeous and moody! we find the pigs tied up in stocks, with the monster sneering about how he’ll do away with all the pigs once he nabs porky and petunia. once more, our ever-aware villain resorts to heckling the poor sap in the third row: “and if that guy in the third row comes up, I’LL FIX HIM TOO! you big CREAMPUFF!” again--this is exceedingly entertaining to watch 83 years later on a laptop screen, but imagine what a riot this would be in theaters! frank tashlin understood that the audience was paying to watch his cartoons, and he knew how to make it worth their time. the cartoons catered to the audience rather than the studio executives always make for the best ones--tex avery was especially keen of this, as we’ll soon explore.

back to porky and petunia, both cautiously traipsing down the hallway as porky calls the names of his fallen brothers, both straining to hear any signs of life. while the poses aren’t nearly pushed to the same extremes as they would be in tashlin’s second directorial stint from 1943-1946, they’re still quite nice and accentuated just enough. certainly stronger than the poses present in the other directors’ cartoons. seeing as tashlin was a newspaper cartoonist, his illustrative, comic look translates well into his own cartoons. it’s almost as if his comic art has leapt right off the page, but also meshes well enough with the animation to have a good sense of motion to it. it’s the best of both worlds.

while porky is unaware, petunia is yanked off screen by a hand protruding from a trick wall panel. suddenly, the villain himself tinkers behind porky, mimicking his movements. porky even manages to grab a hold of his gangly hand, assuming it’s petunia, going so far as to look him straight in the eyes and shush him. the volney white animated villain looks strikingly different than that of bob bentley’s--volney’s is exceedingly more streamlined and design driven, especially around the eyes. he’s not nearly as hairy, grotesque, or dimensional. not that that’s a bad thing! in fact, i love when animators are able to make their styles so distinguishable from the other animators. not only is it fun, it makes identifying animation much easier.

when porky finally realizes that he’s being stalked by the monster, he does the signature volney white eye take and runs for the hills, er, stairs. tashlin’s speed dominates as porky scales flights of stairs at lightning speeds--it’s dizzying to even watch! eventually, porky jumps right into the arms of the monster, clinging to him (thinking it’s petunia) as he describes what he just saw: “i eh-seh-saw the most teh-teh-teh-eh--awful leh-leh-lookin’ man, all beh-beh-big and beh-beh-eh-bleh-black... beh-beh-BIG teeth...” all the while, porky is grabbing onto the villain’s nose and clinging to him like a baby. the animation is positively hilarious, especially when porky recognizes who he’s being cradled by, actually connecting nose to snout as he lets out a scream and barrels down the staircase once more, the same footage from before just in reverse. a wonderful scene with great dialogue and hilarious animation. bob clampett would borrow this in his own jeepers creepers just two years later, with a ghost in place of the monster.

porky locks himself in the basement, discovering his siblings tied up in stocks (”leh-leh-land sakes alive!”), his attempts to free them interrupted by the sound of the villain knocking the door down. interestingly enough, after we pan to the monster infiltrating the premises, the next shot is the entire family huddled in a corner, indicating that porky did manage to free them after all. the technique is reminiscent of the cartoon’s beginning, where we see only porky jump out of his seat before showing all of the siblings hiding in the chandelier.

just as it looks like the pig family is bacon, a random chair from offscreen is lobbed at the monster, sending him tumbling right into the stocks. the family is just as perplexed as the viewer, asking in unison “who DID that?”

“ME!” mel blanc’s gruff, more natural voice rings out from behind the screen. the locked up monster ogles at the audience, pointing a gangly finger as he snarls “who are YOU?” mel’s tough guy new yoik accent snarls back “I’M DA GUY IN DA THOID ROW, YA BIG SOURPUSS!” iris out on a deflated, dejected villain--just IMAGINE witnessing this in real time in the theaters!

this cartoon is one of the reasons why frank tashlin is one of my favorite directors of all time. it’s got all of the tashlin essentiasl. the effects animation by A.C. gamer at the beginning is lovely, doing a wonderful job of establishing such an eerie mood. the raging, wild storm juxtaposes perfectly with the unsettlingly still atmosphere inside the house. lawyer goodwill makes an excellent villain, topped off with billy bletcher’s vocals and bob bentley’s skilled animation. the constant fourth wall breaking with him... need i say more? it’s such a great way to involve the audience with the picture and really suck in their attention, especially that ending. the animation is excellent, the backgrounds are gorgeous, it’s absolutely rife with atmosphere. this is tashlin’s best effort thus far and one of his best efforts overall.

however, the antisemitic stereotypes and caricatures should be accounted for. while i do say you should watch this one to get an idea of frank tashlin’s mastery as a director, tread with caution and discretion. i absolutely don’t endorse these concepts. so, if you do want to watch it, you can go to HBOmax or click this link, just be advised.

#lt #looney tunes #the case of the stuttering pig #reviews #tashlin #long post #antisemitism tw

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darkouter · 5 years ago

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how I run my blogs

TAGGED BY: @iustusetpeccator TAGGING: @scarestress @whosyourcultdaddy @dulcisebrietatem @ciaosucker @withoutchoice @hadncchoice @ineffablemum @adentincrime @roguesgalleried @bestvictim @collectedbooks @cunninghoused @deathlydivinity idk, but anyone else too; i’ve just already tagged an obnoxious amount of people already tho lmao

SPEED: i’m a mess and all over the place with this. for this blog, it just depends on who i have most inspo/energy for since i have so many muses like an arrogant foole? and the threads themselves, of course. and my mental state. i’m an emotional thot, so i sometimes am depresso and don’t post, but then i am later espresso and rapid fire spam replies. i am....... inconsistent REPLIES: ��i just go until i don’t. LIKE i just do what i feel needs to be said??? which means it could be succinct or a novel, though the inner monologues tend to go on and on bc i have broody muses who internalize their emotions more often than express it outwardly lmao. i don’t mind if people match or not unless i can tell you didn’t put as much effort into it / it’s lacking? i need substance to respond to or it kills my investment in the thread because i can’t have my character react. if you are passive in your writing (we all are sometimes, it happens without people realizing at times), the thread can sometimes just sit for a long time in my drafts bc idk what to do with it lmao. again, i am................... inconsistent STARTERS: i feel like i’m terrible at these unless we’ve plotted something or have a long-standing relationship in rp because i hate just having to make up scenarios that bring our muses together dfgbsdlfh like..... oh wow! bumped into each other at the coffee shop. this is original and not derivative content. BUT SOMETIMES I END UP DOING SOMETHING LIKE THAT ANYWAYS............. AND I WORRY IT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH. that noted, if u wanna do pre-established relationships that’s fuckin gucci cash money of you INBOX: i currently have 31 asks i’ve hoarded over time in case i want to randomly respond to them and they’re all from piri and g besides two other single asks, so that’s my life i guess. i always respond to at least one ask that someone sends during the short period after it’s sent??? which is why i have so many from piri (26 OF THEM); we both SPAM memes all at once in order to give people options lmao SELECTIVITY: i’m mutual exclusive because it keeps me from having people sending things in and just ignoring them???? cause that seems mean, but i’m not forcing responses to things if i don’t have interest in the blog? it established where i stand immediately too because it says “if i follow you, i really do want to write with you.” and it makes things easy cause i don’t have to turn people down (unless they ignore my rules and send me messages about checking out their blogs, which gives me The Anxiety about possibly saying No, Not Interested bc i don’t wanna seem like an ass). WISHLIST: i want........... just more interactions with certain muses of mine atm or to find other blogs for certain characters djfbhsd. i have energy for hp muses (but tom is finicky cause.... dark lord is a bitch to interact with), my good good boy cecil, and sir anthony j. crow/ley in particular atm on here. but i wanna interact with more v.oldemorts, du/mbledores, good o/mens characters, gotham rogues, etc? HONEST NOTE: i've been thinking of cleaning out my mutuals because i have people who just don’t interact with me and/or have ignored my messages???? and i’m like. why are u followin me if you don’t wanna rp. am i misinterpreting. what’s good. y’all wild out here. i’ve also been having issues with having blocked people, but some mutuals interact with them, so i Cannot Escape, and i have no idea how to address it or if i need to just get over myself cause i’m bein an insecure weenie hut jr.’s member cause no one’s doing anything wrong, it’s just a me problem lmao

#| OOC: CRACK OPEN A COLD ONE WITH BIGFOOT.#adding a tag for dash memes and keeping on brand with more buzzfeed quotes per ushe

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communityserviceessaysamples193 · 4 years ago

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dailytechnologynews · 7 years ago

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PCPer's Response to the Recent Ethical Concerns and Accusations

Hi hardware fans. It's been an eventful couple of days in the offices and home for me (and Allyn). A video from YouTube channel AdoredTV was posted late Thursday night (US eastern time) that directly attacked our credibility, which has been taken down, reposted, and taken down again. In all honesty, we tend to have a policy of not responding to verbal accusations online, because if we did, that's all anyone that writes reviews would ever do.

This one was more impactful though. We were called out directly by name (me and Allyn) and some very specific statements were made against our reviews on pcper.com and our new company at shroutreseach.com.

Most importantly from my point of view was that I woke up on Friday morning to find that I had been sent pictures of my home (and my office) from Google Maps along with my address from random viewers of this video. Obviously when you start to get into areas of personal and family safety, things get ratcheted up quite dramatically. With recent events showing that sometimes crazies on the internet can in fact do crazy things when incited, I was legitimately worried about my wife and daughter.

Jim at AdoredTV initially agreed to take the video down in an email exchange after I expressed those safety concerns. But after he didn't think I addressed all the points his video accusations covered in the response that I sent him (that will be included below), he re-posted it. After some more emails back and forth, he took the video back down as of Saturday morning.

At this point, I wanted to make sure that the response to his video that I sent him was public, so that the readers and viewers of both of our content can make their own decision.

In the end, I agreed to make edits to the FreeSync story/video that he brought up. These are reasonable points from him that would have simply required an email or phone call to address at the outset. We also added a disclosure statement to the end of our Intel 900P review in regards to Shrout Research. My statement of honesty in our review remains, but in order to be more transparent, the disclosure was added.

It's worth noting that not 48 hours before the original posting of AdoredTVs video, our team had been debating not about putting disclosures on the stories, but what the exact wording of them would be. This was prompted by a question sent in to our mailbag series our desire to be honest about things. This is still going to happen, but we are finalizing what that global statement will be.

I do think its important to note that despite the intent to paint it as such, there really are no black and white answers to this. Some will say that I should release financial statements. Some will say this is more than enough. I anticipate that he will still have some issues with our process, as will others. I accept that. We will continue to do what we think is best.

You'll find below a complete copy of an email exchange between Jim at AdoredTV and myself. It's a long read, one that I think is important in its entirety for those concerned about these allegations, but I've also prepared this more succinct list of our responses to the major issues.

Unfairness to FreeSync: We have made the edits/updates that the AdoredTV video called out. We believed at the time that our new article on the topic was adequate due diligence. While it is impossible for any outlet to update all published articles or videos every time something changes, we recognize that this was an important issue and we will try to do better about updating published content when appropriate. As for the FreeSync panel debate, the text of our review stated that the panels shared the same “specifications,” not that they were the same panels. However, in comments related to the article, we did state that the panels were the same. That was our error and we apologize.

General bias against AMD: We have worked with AMD for many years and have spoken with them both on and off the record countless times. The claims in the video that we did not convey pre-launch product concerns to AMD are false. PCPer was also not the first or only outlet to draw attention to the RX 480 power draw and Ryzen latency issues, and we worked extensively with AMD for months in advance of the release of our Frame Rating/FCAT testing. As for perceived bias, we treat all companies and products with respect and fairness, and it has never been suggested by the companies we cover that the reality is otherwise.

Radeon Affiliate Link: The first we heard about our Amazon affiliate tag being present in a link at the Radeon website was when Ryan Smith of AnandTech tweeted about it, as shown in the AdoredTV video. We have absolutely no idea how that link got there, and we received zero commissions or sales data on the Vega Frontier Edition as a result of it. Due to the fact that the affiliate tag present on the Radeon page is incorrect (it has an extra %20 at the end), we’re not even sure if it would have worked had someone inadvertently used it. But we reiterate that there is absolutely no arrangement, official or unofficial, that called for our affiliate link to be placed on AMD’s website.

Shrout Research & The Intel 900P Review: Intel hired Shrout Research to conduct testing of the 900P and produce a white paper for public release if the results were positive. We have conducted similar testing for many other companies, including AMD, and in most cases the information we provide is kept private for internal use at those companies. We also wrote a review of the 900P at pcper.com, with the timing of the release of both pieces dictated by the 900P embargo date. Contrary to the claims in the video, the review and the white paper were not the same. Separate testing was performed on different platforms, although one of the drives (the 480GB model), which was provided by Intel for the white paper, was also used in the review. In short, the tests performed were different, the results were different (in most cases lower in the pcper.com review), and Intel was not given pre-release access or control over the content of the review.

Disclosure: While we did not try to “hide” anything as was suggested in the video (Shrout Research, named after me, has a public website, twitter account, and has been mentioned and published often on our podcasts, weekly mailbag videos, on my Twitter account, and in my freelance writing bio), we failed to disclose the nature and extent of Shrout Research’s relationship with Intel on the 900P review at PCPer. That was our error. We will rectify this by adopting a complete disclosure policy for all reviews going forward, which will clearly state not just relationships related to Shrout Research, but also the terms of our review, any related advertisers, and any other potential conflicts that may appear. It was never our intent to deceive, and we still stand fully by the content of the 900P review, but we will attempt to do better about proper disclosure going forward.

(Times in the email reference a "current time" of about 10pm ET. Copy and paste is funny in Gmail.)

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 9:46 AM (12 hours ago)

to jim Do you have time to chat quickly today? Saw the video, I have lots of questions, many concerns, but most importantly a request. I can call you direct or on Skype, etc.

Jim P <*********> 12:38 PM (9 hours ago)

to me Hi Ryan.

Sorry I'm out all weekend and I'm actually not in my own place right now (I'm in Scotland but live in Sweden) and getting peace and quiet isn't very easy anyway. I might be available to talk a bit on Monday but if you have a request that needs dealing with sooner, feel free to shoot it to me and obviously I'll listen.

Regards,

Jim

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 1:18 PM (8 hours ago)

to Jim Jim,

I'm a little disappointed that you would be willing to post a video with those kinds of accusations without contacting me for input but unwilling to spend 15 minutes on the phone or Skype with me to address it. Although not your intent, we are at the point now of viewers of your content reaching out to me with pictures of my house on Google Maps with my address, as well as my office. Obviously with the recent occurrences in the world, and as the father of a two year old, this is something we take exceedingly seriously. I'm worried that your video and comments, though I disagree with almost all of them, are going to be used to cause more harm than you had intended.

I have a list of corrections and inaccuracies, as well as comments surround some of your concerns, that I am preparing. But I would greatly appreciate some assistance in controlling this situation.

AdoredTV 1:29 PM (8 hours ago)

to me Hi Ryan,

I just got back from the dentist and I'm currently at my sister's house in Scotland. It's dinner time here also. Tomorrow we celebrate my sisters birthday at another venue. What do you want me to do to help? Should I unlist the video? I'm willing to do that for now though it'll blow over in a couple of days anyway. Be aware that if I don't like your response to my points in the video, I wasn't joking when I said I left out more than I put in. I will not be manipulated, consider my offer to unlist the video the final chance of avoiding a real escalation. Regards,

Jim

Jim P 1:32 PM (8 hours ago)

to me Not sure if my previous response got through, resending...

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 1:42 PM (8 hours ago)

to Jim Jim,

I appreciate the offer to make the video unlisted. However, because the video will still be viewable from any number of sources with the URL, I think making it private would be more appropriate.

I plan to send you my responses and comments in private, or on a call, in order to address your questions and concerns in a way that does not endanger anyone's family. I understand that you may choose to take these emails public, and that is fine as I am not trying to hide anything. This can be an "on the record conversation" but the goal is to discuss in private, to understand each others points, without putting anyone else at risk.

Jim P 1:51 PM (8 hours ago)

to me I will make the video private, for now. And I will also write a tweet.

We'll talk later.

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 1:51 PM (8 hours ago)

to Jim Thank you for that. I will follow up with my comments today.

AdoredTV 5:12 PM (4 hours ago)

to me It's rapidly approaching end of day in Kentucky, Ryan. One more hour then the video goes public again. Cheers,

Jim

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 5:37 PM (4 hours ago)

to AdoredTV Hi Jim,

I saw your video posted on Jan 25th about me, Allyn Malventano, PC Perspective, and Shrout Research. While I think your intentions are earnest, I have some serious concerns about the accusations that are made and the facts of your story.

First, I think it is worth noting again that creating this kind of content without requesting input from the accused seems incredibly inflammatory and unfair. As you point out the code of ethics of journalism many times in your video, there are multiple references to “right to reply” that should exist during or at the same time. This opportunity was not given to us.

Second, the impact of your commentary, true or not, has the potential to cause harm to me, my team, and my family. Having already received pictures of my home and my address from viewers of your video, and with the recent events that have occurred around the world, I am now genuinely concerned about the safety of my family. Also in that code of ethics is a section on humanity: “Journalists should do no harm. What we publish or broadcast may be hurtful, but we should be aware of the impact of our words and images on the lives of others.”

The beginning of your accusations of bias on PC Perspective starts with our article on the first FreeSync monitors from 2015. The crux of your argument is that our team, including Allyn and myself, determined that FreeSync was the cause of the ghosting we saw on the display, though others indicated it was not a result of FreeSync, but rather the panel or integration itself. Our assertion at the time would have been that because FreeSync was the “certification brand” of this display, that in the end, regardless of the root technical cause, AMD and the FreeSync team were ultimately responsible. Our original story even details our inability to nail down the root cause of the problem.

*The question now is: why is this happening and does it have anything to do with G-Sync or FreeSync? NVIDIA has stated on a few occasions that there is more that goes into a VRR monitor than simply integrated vBlank extensions and have pointed to instances like this as an example as to why. Modern monitors are often tuned to a specific refresh rate – 144 Hz, 120 Hz, 60 Hz, etc. – and the power delivery to pixels is built to reduce ghosting and image defects. But in a situation where the refresh rate can literally be ANY rate, as we get with VRR displays, the LCD will very often be in these non-tuned refresh rates. NVIDIA claims its G-Sync module is tuned for each display to prevent ghosting by change the amount of voltage going to pixels at different refresh rates, allowing pixels to untwist and retwist at different rates.

It’s impossible now to know if that is the cause for the difference seen above. But with the ROG Swift and BenQ XL2730Z sharing the same 144 Hz TN panel specifications, there is obviously something different about the integration. It could be panel technology, it could be VRR technology or it could be settings in the monitor itself. We will be diving more into the issue as we spend more time with different FreeSync models.

For its part, AMD says that ghosting is an issue it is hoping to lessen on FreeSync monitors by helping partners pick the right components (Tcon, scalars, etc.) and to drive a “fast evolution” in this area.

Source: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Displays/AMD-FreeSync-First-Impressions-and-Technical-Discussion/Gaming-Experience-FreeSync-*

You then bring up the fact that after we did discover that a firmware fix occurred (after our review), we posted a completely new article four months after our review recognizing the changes and improvements. There is a fair point to be made that we should have gone back to the original story and updated it with links to the new story. However, by doing a follow-up story and posting it in the same channels as the original (main site, video, Twitter, etc.) we believe we did due diligence here.

*In an industry that constantly changing with new hardware reviews, firmware updates, and even software and driver changes, keeping up with it is difficult. Extremely difficult. We will continue to find ways to do it better.

Any claims we made in comments or forums that panels in the competing G-Sync and FreeSync monitors were identical are false, and our error. But in our originally story, where articles are edited and curated, we state clearly that they shared the same “specifications”:

Source: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Displays/AMD-FreeSync-First-Impressions-and-Technical-Discussion/Gaming-Experience-FreeSync-*

Should comments and forum posts have been more accurate? Yes.

You also mention our frequent streams with NVIDIA’s Tom Petersen as a source bias in our content. While we definitely have hosted Tom in our offices many times, the invite has always been open for any vendor we work with to co-host a live stream to talk to our audience. AMD has taken us up on these offers on seven specific instances:

· [https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Live-Review-Recap-AMD-Radeon-HD-7970-GHz-]Edition(https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Live-Review-Recap-AMD-Radeon-HD-7970-GHz-Edition)

· https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/PCPer-Live-Interview-AMDs-Richard-Huddy-June-17th-4pm-ET-1pm-PT

· https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/PCPer-Live-AMD-Radeon-Crimson-Live-Stream-and-Giveaway

· https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/PCPer-Live-Radeon-RX-480-Live-Stream-Raja-Koduri

· https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/PCPer-Live-AMD-Radeon-Crimson-ReLive-Discussion-and-RX-480-Giveaway

· https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/PCPer-Live-AMD-Radeon-Crimson-ReLive-Discussion-and-RX-580-Giveaway

· https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Software-Adrenalin-adds-game-overlay-mobile-app-wider-API-support

We probably have done more interviews with Tom than with AMD or any other vendor, but this is not indicative of anything other than NVIDIA’s desire to communicate with our audience slightly more frequently.

Next, you discuss the RX 480 power issue and indicate that PC Perspective’s stories were inflammatory and without merit. I would point out that not only did AMD acknowledge and fix the issue, but we were not the first media outlet to show the problem. Tom’s Hardware actually reported the problem first, and we linked to them in our first story on the topic. We worked with AMD to supply them with our data as we got it, to solicit input before, after, and during the story writing.

Another point brought up in your video is that PC Perspective appears to be willing to work behind the scenes with some companies to help fix problems and potential issues, but not with AMD. That is factually incorrect. We have worked with AMD in many instances, providing information before product releases, to help them fix problems.

Examples include our Frame Rating / FCAT testing, where we shared data, opinions, and insights with AMD months before the release of the first public story. On the Ryzen latency “ping test” we also sent information to AMD before publication to ask for input and feedback. When Ryzen motherboards were having significant issues at launch we worked with them and partners on updates and BIOS improvements in the background before reviewing those products. The facts are that we work with every company on the same level.

On the issue of AMD using an Amazon.com link that included our affiliate code, the first time I was aware of that was when the link and screenshot Anandtech’s Ryan Smith tweet was sent out. I never had any conversation with anyone at AMD about including it, or why it was there even after the fact. It was not something we asked for, expected, or benefitted from. A search of our Amazon.com affiliate data from July through today shows exactly zero Vega Frontier Edition cards sold on our account, from links on our articles or from AMD’s website.

Now let’s address the Shrout Research side of your story. Shrout Research was started in October of 2016 to allow us to offer services that we were being asked for from companies already, but separated from the PC Perspective website. It is probably fair to say that we have not been as open as we could or should have been about how this works.

But it is crucial to recognize that were not hiding this company or its relationship to me. The company and my position there is listed on my Twitter profile. We often link to ShroutResearch.com in stories posted on pcper.com. We have discussed Shrout Research on the podcast. I have answered questions about the company in mailbags from user-submitted questions. It is listed in my pcper.com profile page. Most (probably all) stories posted on MarketWatch or similar sites list my relationship to both companies. We link to the Shrout Research white papers (including the 900P paper) in some PC Perspective stories.

To address specific problems you have noted, I’ll start with the 900P paper and review. You claim that our test suite for the 900P review on PC Perspective was created for the Intel work done with Shrout Research. This is not true. The first review to use Allyn’s Latency Percentile performance testing methodology was with the launch of the Samsung 960 EVO in November of 2016 and research of this new testing process was first shown with the 950 PRO review in October of 2015. The 900P review was using this same testing method.

Furthermore, the testing that was showcased in the Shrout Research 900P white paper and the review differ greatly. You assert that the review on PC Perspective is simply a copy of the testing and work done on the research side, however looking at the paper and the review shows that isn’t the case. Benchmarks and analysis of applications like AS-SSD, CrystalDiskMark, Anvil, Photo Mechanic, and Houdini are in the paper, but were not used in the review. The data presented in the review is based on Allyn’s custom testing capabilities, of which only two small results are part of the white paper.

The testing for Shrout Research and PC Perspective testing of the 900P was done on different systems as well. The review data was gathered on our standard PCPer storage testing platform and the Shrout Research data was gathered on a platform that Intel specifically requested we configure. The review on PCPer used retail drives, the testing for Shrout Research was using engineering samples. Even more, the performance of the data results that do overlap are actually LOWER in the review on PC Perspective as they were tested on a different platform than the one used on the white paper. The results on PC Perspective and Shrout Research are not copies.

The concern over using hardware and devices received through Shrout Research arrangements for the review on PC Perspective is valid. Honestly, we didn’t see the harm (at the time) to include the second capacity of the 900P in our review as it presented more information to the reader. Was this unfair to others in the media? Probably. Have we seen numerous other exclusives come to websites (including us) over the years that weren’t fair to the media? Yes. Are samples often sent out differently from site to site? Absolutely. See the RX Vega launch most recently and many storage reviews that send different capacities and sets to reviewers.

If you follow PC Perspective at all, you know that we were going to publish a review on PC Perspective of the 900P regardless of the existence of the white paper or our arrangements with Intel. And our opinion of the product would not be have been swayed. Our agreement with Intel was to vet and evaluate the 900P so it could get an idea of how the device stood in the market and how it might be received in the public. The white paper was only to be written if Intel thought the results from our testing were positive in their eyes, however the fee Shrout Research was paid was the same regardless of whether or not the paper was produced.

Shrout Research currently works the biggest, and most competitive, companies in the high-tech world, including Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Arm. We have done similar work for others on this list, in particular AMD. We have done evaluation of hardware prior to media and public device availability, to advise and showcase the performance as our team sees it. In those cases with AMD, which began in March of 2017, AMD used the reports internally and decided to not request a public paper from Shrout Research.

If any of these companies saw me, or Shrout Research, or anyone on our team as unreliable or capable of bias, they would have no reason to work with me, especially on the Shrout Research side. Instead, the 18+ years of work that I have under me and the positive results I have produced in terms of relevant, honest, and useful content leads them to partner with us to help make their products, messaging, and companies better.

As I said at the beginning, nothing about Shrout Research is hidden or was attempted to be secretive. Should we have been more explicit in some disclosures? Yes, clearly. Should we have been stricter in how product was shared between the two entities? Probably. It’s something we had honestly discussed just this past week, and this story further necessitates the need for it.

At the end of the day, the trust of the reader and the companies that work with us is paramount and the only thing that keeps us going. There will always be some individuals that don’t like us or have insurmountable distrust of us for some reason; it’s been that way for literally the last 18 years of my life. But I know that we attempt to treat every company equally, treat every product equally, and every situation equally.

Many people feel a sense of distrust around paid advertising on hardware sites. I obviously disagree that running ads for a company inherently means you are going to be biased towards them, and I have built and sustained PC Perspective on that very point, a similar application of trust must be applied here. If readers and viewers were able to trust our reviews for ASUS motherboards, despite running ASUS advertising on our site, or our videos on EVGA graphics cards despite running EVGA advertising on our site, then I feel that readers should continue to trust us as Shrout Research moves forward.

Here is a list of the companies that we have worked with on the advertising side in the last 10 years:

· AMD

· Antec

· ASUS

· BFG

· Cooler Master

· Corsair

· Crucial

· Diamond

· Drobo

· ECS

· Enermax

· EVGA

· FSP

· Galaxy

· Gigabyte

· Intel

· Logitech

· MSI

· Newegg

· NCIX

· NVIDIA

· OCZ / Toshiba

· Samsung

· Seasonic

· Silverstone

· Thermaltake

· Tiger Direct

· Western Digital

· XFX

· Zalman

There have been years where AMD is our biggest sponsor; several in fact. There are years where Logitech has been. ASUS is generally one of our biggest sponsors. The point I want to make here is that if you didn’t trust us before, there is little I can do to change that. But if you did trust us before, I think we have proven ourselves over the course of many years that the trust is warranted.

And for clarity, the companies we have worked with through Shrout Research:

· AMD

· Arm

· Intel

· NVIDIA

· Qualcomm

I believe that work that you do, despite our differences, is incredibly important to keeping people on their toes and maintaining sanity. I don’t believe that you have correctly portrayed the work we do or how we operate.We aren't perfect, I am not perfect. I don't believe any of us have ever made that claim. But I do know that you have taken our work and intent out of context.

If you still have to have a video calling us out for our practices, I obviously can’t stop you. But I would request that you fix the factual errors in your video. That includes the FreeSync story, the assertion that we don’t work with AMD prior to posting stories (including the ping testing and the RX 480 power), the affiliate link on AMD’s website, the lack of differences between the 900P white paper and the review, and that we have not been forthcoming (at all) about the existence and relationship of Shrout Research and PC Perspective.

I don’t consider this list of points exhaustive, by any means. I didn’t have time to re-watch or transcribe your video in order to dive into details on each and every point. Should something specific come to mind you want me to answer, let me know. If you have other question or problems with how we do things, or how we appear to be doing things from an external view, I’ll gladly answer them.

AdoredTV 7:14 PM (2 hours ago)

to me Thanks Ryan.

I feel you have raised some valid points however it's not nearly enough for me to keep the video private. Specifically, you failed to address the major points regarding conflict of interest and the "FreeSync vs G-Sync Ghosting Comparison" video, both of which have still not been rectified.

Can I again point to the EJN's article where it clearly states...

Accountability A sure sign of professionalism and responsible journalism is the ability to hold ourselves accountable. When we commit errors we must correct them and our expressions of regret must be sincere not cynical. We listen to the concerns of our audience. We may not change what readers write or say but we will always provide remedies when we are unfair.

I will have a closer look on Monday to see if you have remedied these faults before continuing with the rest of your response. Regards,

Jim

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 7:20 PM (2 hours ago)

to AdoredTV Okay. Can you expand for me the points about the comparison story and video that you believe are still concerning? Is it that we have not updated the video and text of the write up to reference the later story?

AdoredTV 8:02 PM (2 hours ago)

to me Hi Ryan.

Sure I'll expand on these points. 1) I see no reason why you would not have rectified your error with the "FreeSync vs G-Sync ghosting" video, given what you have had pointed out to you today. That is literally a 5 second edit to the title which you chose to ignore.

2) The Optane review still looks the same - that is there is still nothing advising the reader of any potential conflict of interest. I'm sure you're aware of all the FTC regulations regarding this subject - but please...neither of us has any desire to go down that route I'm sure. - Jim On a personal level - When your changes are complete, it would likely be beneficial to point them out on social media. You will gain far more from these two small actions than your current course ever will - and by that I mean you will regain respect from your viewers. My bet would be you'd also find it all very liberating, because pride is a terrible thing. It's very late here and this has taken up much of my day so forgive me as I have to retire to bed.

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 8:16 PM (1 hour ago)

to AdoredTV Honestly, I was planning to include links and updates, but, I didn't want it to look like I was doing something manipulative before we had some to some kind of resolution. I agree these are 5-second edits, and I say in my rather long feedback note that I thought it was a reasonable request. You instead immediately posted the video back up, which I didn't think would occur without the dialogue.

The same applies to the Optane review - not wanting to change ANYTHING on the site as it would look like we were trying to change things out from under you, or the community. I assure you that my lawyer and I have gone over the regulations in this country for disclosure before starting the company, we are know what the bounds of "legal" and "moral" are. Also, do you not think AMD/Intel/NVIDIA/Qualcomm/Arm have lawyers that vet every relationship like this? If I was breaking the law, they would never have me working with them.

Are you going to keep the video up, even if these edits occur? What about your claims of correcting content that is known to be incorrect, incomplete, inaccurate? That seems to violate the rule, does it not, with all of the information you have had sent your way?

AdoredTV 8:39 PM (1 hour ago)

to me If you had simply rectified or even given the indication that you were open to rectifying both issues then sure I would have taken that under consideration. There was nothing to suggest that either move would be made. As it was, you basically just regurgitated a bunch of text from your reviews which I've already read. This stuff doesn't translate very well across the Atlantic. I made the video private on good faith Ryan. I was the one who offered to unlist it, then I agreed to make it private on your suggestion. I did what I could reasonably be expected to do to help you but you didn't take the chance. These past hours have been filled with me fighting my own viewers over claims of weakness, selling out or other nonsense like legal threats forcing me to take it down. I spent the last 6 hours fighting my own viewers because of this.

I didn't have to deal with any of that but I did...because I gave you the chance. I was hoping for a real show of accountability and this is what your readers want to see too. Please just apologise Ryan - make a statement, show that you've removed/changed the title of the FreeSync Video and updated your Optane review. I promise you that I will not gloat - in fact I'd be far more likely to applaud you for it. If that is done by the time I wake tomorrow, I'll put the video private again. I need to sleep, it's 1:30 here.

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 9:21 PM (43 minutes ago)

to AdoredTV It is done. The point of the initial email was to have a discussion and clarify things. I'm disappointed that you would repost the video even after the concerns I brought up about some of the rash notes and emails I received.

Here is the video with updated title and link to the updated story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ylLnT2yKyA Here is the FS story with link at top of first page: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Displays/AMD-FreeSync-First-Impressions-and-Technical-Discussion/Gaming-Experience-FreeSync- The bottom of this page discloses the specifics of the Intel 900P paper and review: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-Optane-SSD-900P-480GB-and-280GB-NVMe-HHHL-SSD-Review-Lots-3D-XPoint/Conclusion

I will likely post a thread on reddit to bring up the points that I brought up to you in the long email, since that information is already out there and in the public. No mal-intent intended to you there, just making sure the points I sent you are public.

Jim P 4:43 AM Saturday

to me Thanks Ryan.

I've decided to skip the party today and get a video out on this topic and to clarify what happens next, so that this can be avoided in future. I will put the video private at the same time. Regards,

Jim

Ryan Shrout [email protected] 10:39 AM Saturday

to Jim While I am sorry for you to miss your family event, I appreciate the removal of the video and whatever update you might have.

I will be posting our comments and thread here to reddit sometime this morning.

Congratulations, you reached the end!

Again, thanks for reading and for giving us a chance to state our position.

#hardware #Computer #Technology #Tech #News

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

Text

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN ATHLETES

One reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we just blithely plowed forward writing code. You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. You can come along at any point and make something better, and I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but they also don't know how much they'll need to be in twenty years, and then think about how to make money from it, and by American standards it's not bad. I don't care what he says, I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. Even in the US are auto workers, New York City schoolteachers, and civil servants happier than actors, professors, and professional athletes? That's nonsense.1 We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. They probably mean well. You can of course build something for users other than yourself. Curiosity turns work into play.

Anti-immigration people don't understand is that there are good ideas that seem bad are bad.2 Look at restaurants. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? It's not getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the line is between what you expect of other people. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can release it as soon as possible. Immigration policy is one area where a competitor could do better.3 You can start to treat parts as black boxes once you feel confident you've fully explored them. If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they all basically said Cambridge followed by a long pause while they tried to think of some change I wanted to work in the other direction. If you raised five million and ran out of funding, but that's not the way it's portrayed on TV.

Men's Wearhouse was at that moment running ads saying The Suit is Back. Police investigation apparently begins with a motive. In industrialized countries we walk down steps our whole lives and never think about this, because it implies something innate. Soon after we arrived at Yahoo, we got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a technologist in residence. If your product seems finished, there are few outside the US.4 When we started it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made at great expense by web consultants. Julian said no one would care except a few real estate agents.5 We knew that if online shopping ever took off, these sites would have to be.6 At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the attitude that they're going to build, no matter what, they'll be discouraged from investing in your competitors. So what do you wish there was?

He completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn't be justifiable for an official project, but because that's the only one most visitors will see. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you think you're supposed to have. Look at this, for example. Their lives are short too. But if the software were 100% finished and ready to launch at the push of a button, would they still be waiting? Patch. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup, so don't compromise there.

Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. You don't need to know about business to run a startup are just unbelievably low. But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of investors would presumably have lost money. I think, because they don't make something people want, we worked to make the software easy to use. Writing novels is hard. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don't have any regrets over what might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what are investors going to think of some change I wanted to work in, apartments tend to be running out of money. You may not at first make more than you. Reading novels isn't. They were also a kind of thinking you do without trying to. Talk to as many VCs as you can.7 They would call support in a spirit more of triumph than anger, as if you were hired at some big company, for whom ideally you'd work your whole career.8 If you're a startup competing with a big company, and it's hard to switch from that to a product company.

The bad news is that the message is there, but that only makes the odds better for startups. And fortunately, subscriptions are the natural way to bill for Web-based software, all you need at first. At least, it seems likely enough that it would affect where you chose to live? It is by no means a lost cause to try to guess what's going on, as you can, and your competitors can, you tend to feel rich. When we thought of good ideas, we implemented them. And PR firms give them what they want. My own feeling is that object-oriented program, it can certainly help their competitors. Flexible employment laws?

It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that they need something more expensive. You seem to be on the board of someone who will buy you, because odds are they'll have to work on? So the way to the extreme of doing the computations on the server, with only a few percent of the world's infrastructure? They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they don't seem to realize the power of the forces at work here. It would hurt YC's brand at least among the innumerate if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out. Maybe. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. At the other end. They know they'll have to deal with internationalization from the beginning.

There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. Knowing that should help. At Viaweb our whole site was like a big arrow pointing users to the test drive rose immediately from 60% to 90%. The urge to look corporate—sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve—is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace. What I find myself saying a lot is don't worry. When you raise a lot of customers fast is of course preferable. Professional athletes know they'll be pulled if they play badly for just a couple games. The point is simply that they understood search. In a remarkable coincidence, Ms. And that gave us flexibility. This may work in biotech, where a lot of work, instead of reading scripts to them. In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail.

Notes

The facts about Apple's early history are from being this boulder we had to resort to in the sense of not starving then you should probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity.

The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and only one founder take fundraising meetings is that so few founders are willing to be significantly pickier. If anyone wanted to go all the combinations of Web plus a three hour meeting with a walrus mustache and a t-shirts, to drive the old one was drilling for oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy. This is one of the big winners are all about hitting outliers, are not all of us in the room, and those where the recipe is to create wealth in a more powerful version written in Lisp.

Starting a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and his son Robert were each in turn forces Digg to respond promptly. My feeling with the buyer's picture on the subject of language power in Succinctness is Power. A larger set of users comes from ads on other sites.

Information is too general.

When you fix one bug happens to compensate for another. The solution to that mystery is that a their applicants come from. Many hope he was a sort of work is not one of the funds we raised was difficult, and stonewall about the origins of the other: the attempt to discover the most common recipe but not in the sort of work is a way in which YC can help in that it makes people feel good.

Some would say that IBM makes decent hardware. Once again, I'd say the raison d'etre of prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.

The founders who are all about to give up your anti-dilution protections. But the usual standards for truth. And journalists as part of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. Unless you're very smooth founder who read this essay talks about programmers, but no doubt often are, but starting a startup: Watch people who said they wanted to start using whatever you make it to them till they also influence one another directly through the buzz that surrounds a hot startup.

If you really have a group to consider how low this number could be ignored. Publishers are more likely to be about web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers.

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years ago

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How to Write a Pillar Content Page [Series]

This is the third article in a series covering pillar content. To get caught up, you can read the first on pillar content best practices and the second on pillar content on dos and don'ts.

Before 2018 draws to a close, we will have published more than 15 pieces of pillar content on the IMPACT website, which is kind of insane to think about.

Since that milestone is what stands between me and a flute of champagne, as I ring in the New Year in downtown Baltimore with Patrick and our friends, I thought I would pause for a moment to reflect on how a piece of pillar content goes from idea to reality.

Because, up until this point, I've done a great job explaining why pillar content matters and, generally speaking, what you should and shouldn't be doing with your pillar strategy.

But we haven't really talked about how the pillar content sausage gets made.

I'm not talking about developing the topic cluster strategy or how you make one look pretty. I mean creating the strategy for and the writing of your pillar -- an undertaking that is a beast unto itself.

So, that's what I'm going to cover today -- all of the steps you need to take in order to create an effective piece of pillar content.

Step #1: Choose Your Pillar Content Topic

As a refresher, a pillar content topic needs to be broad and lives at the center of your topic cluster:

Courtesy of HubSpot.

In the example above, workout routines is the more general topic that lives at the center of this topic cluster. More specific subtopics, such as workout routines to lose fat, are connected to the core pillar.

You're also going to want a core pillar topic that has substantial search volume, but not too much search volume -- a broad topic that is 500 searches per month may not be worth your time, 1,200 to 6,400 searches per month is more on target, and 33,000 per month is to massive to even consider.

For instance, our website redesign pillar is based around the target keyword "website redesign," which averages close to 3,000 searches per month.

Whenever I choose a topic for a pillar, I ask myself four questions, all of which I must be able to answer "Yes!" to:

Does our audience care about this topic?

Does this topic tie directly back to a service we offer or a core focus area?

Does this topic have the right amount of search volume?

Is the topic broad enough?

Only when I am able to pass this litmus test do I move onto the next step.

Step #2: Develop the Strategy for Your Pillar

If you were to ask Carina -- who recently authored our pillar on HubSpot Marketing -- what our first conversation was like, she would tell you that very little of it had to do with scoping deadlines.

Instead, we discussed the strategy of the pillar, in detail:

Who is this searcher, and what are their biggest challenges and goals?

Why are they searching for this? What questions are they trying to answer?

OK, if we know who they are and what they're looking for, what do we cover?

How will what we serve up on this pillar page be different than what they will find elsewhere?

By the end of our hour-long discussion, a pillar writer and I should be in agreement on the target audience for a pillar -- which should align with one of our researched buyer personas -- what they're looking for, a rough (but succinct) value proposition that defines why the pillar exists for the end user, and a basic table of contents of what will be included.

(You may end up with anywhere from five to 15 sections in your table of contents.)

Do not end your strategy session without scheduling your 30-minute follow-up meeting to talk about the outline...

Step #3: Create a Comprehensive Outline

As someone who hates outlining before writing, I know it may be an unnecessary step for those who instinctively know how to pull a cohesive, focused narrative together.

However, given the massive scale of pillar content -- Carina's HubSpot Marketing pillar clocks in about 16,000 words and mine on content style guide creation is 8,000+ -- you cannot skip the outlining phase.

For example, later this week, we are rolling out a pillar on video for sales, written by IMPACT Client Success Specialist Myriah Anderson, who is basically the queen of sales video.

That pillar, however, went through a rigorous outlining process.

At the end of our initial strategy session (step two), I gave Myriah the following homework assignment:

Take your table of contents and make a deep, comprehensive outline of it. If you need to move sections around, or add or remove sections, that's fine. You will need to flesh out each section before we meet next, and take them as far as you can.

Ahead of our meeting, Myriah shared her outline with me, so we didn't need to waste time during our meeting by watching me read it.

Here are the questions I was asking myself, as I reviewed her outline, which guided our discussion during that follow-up session:

If I were in the target audience, would I have any logical follow-up questions that aren't being answered in the current form of this pillar?

Are we providing enough examples or tactical how-to showcases that would make it easy for a reader to implement the strategies we suggest or understand them, in context?

Do we provide enough research or cited data to support any declarative statements that should be shown as based in fact?

Does the order of our table of contents still make sense? Is there still anything missing or out of place?

Are there any sections that seemed critical at the time that now seem like a distraction, superfluous, or out of place?

Are there any sections that feel flimsy -- if so, why? What's missing?

Depending on how solid that first outline is -- and how quickly you can get it up to snuff as you chat -- you may not need more than this single outline review session to move onto the next step.

If you don't feel like you have what you need after that first session, take some more time to continue to refine it.

In a few cases in this last quarter, I had subject matter experts who were writing a piece of pillar content meet with me for a second time on their outline. Before that second meeting, I gave them specific feedback of where we needed to improve the outline.

At the end of your final outlining brainstorm session, it's time to set deadlines and get down to work.

Step #4: Set Deadlines & Stick to Them

Since a piece of pillar content can be so huge, you shouldn't set yourself up for failure by setting one big deadline to rule them all.

Instead, break your pillar content deadlines down into manageable chunks.

"How many deadlines should there be?"

That's going to depend on a few factors:

How many sections you have;

How comprehensive the pillar will be (will it require research?);

How comfortable and efficient your writer is; and

How much time realistically your writer has to write.

If I was working with a subject matter expert who was motivated and had the time, I would set weekly deadlines, with 15-minute check-ins scheduled on deadline day for them to ask questions and for us to stay aligned. Typically, they would be asked to write somewhere between two and four sections, per deadline, based on the scope of the content and the size of the pillar.

For me, I was constantly balancing my desire to make the process an enjoyable challenge, but not an impediment that got in the way of their job, and the need to get a project over the finish line in a timely fashion.

You will have to do the same. Because, if you're not the one doing the writing, you can't piss off your contributors; if you do, they won't work with you again.

"What if deadlines are missed?"

I am not immune to missing deadlines. Neither are you. And there are often perfectly valid reasons why deadlines shift around -- certain tasks take way longer than expected, unforeseen work emergencies pop up out of nowhere, etc.

So, you shouldn't go into a piece of pillar content expecting everything to go to plan; you'll more than likely end up disappointed.

In order to manage your deadlines effectively, you need to set clear expectations around what those deadlines are and how communication should flow if something is slipping into "off-track" territory.

In our case, I promised my writers that if I didn't hear anything from them between deadlines, I would assume things were fine. There would be no annoying, "Heyyyyyy, buddyyyyy, how's it going?" passive aggressive temperature checks on their progress. I would only intervene when they wanted me to.

However, they had to promise me that they wouldn't wait until deadline day to say they were way behind. As soon as things started slipping, we needed to talk to reset deadlines and expectations around their ability to complete their assignments.

If they did that, I could assure them:

I would work with them to remove barriers or impediments;

Answer questions that would help the process go more smoothly;

Be their ally in ensuring this pillar wouldn't become a burden that would prevent them from doing their other work;

I would be flexible and understanding, as we worked through their pillar.

If you're managing the writer for a pillar, the way you handle these conversations is absolutely critical.

Your contributors need to feel safe in coming to you when they're not going to meet a deadline; you don't need to coddle them or be a doormat, but you need to be an approachable, good listener who is willing to understand where they're coming from.

They need to feel you genuinely want them to be successful, and you're their partner in helping them get there.

"How long should each section be?"

Whether you're the writer or the editor managing the writer, you need to go into this process understanding that pillars come in all different shapes and sizes.

With that in mind, whenever one of our IMPACT contributes asked me:

"How long should the pillar be?" or "How long should this section be?"

...my answer was always exactly the same:

"Write until you're done."

Really, that's it.

If you apply that simple logic to every section of your pillar, the length will work itself out naturally. You will cover everything you need to cover, and you will learn how to easily draw the necessary boundaries to prevent you from writing your own version of Ulysses.

Step #5: Edit Your Pillar

OK, this is the step I will readily admit I did not prepare myself well for. Although, admittedly, you may not be working at the same volume of pillar production as we are.

This is going to take more time than you expect, so you need to create the space for this editing in your schedule, so you don't get what I call "word drunk" -- which is the moment when you literally have too many words in your brain, and you cannot possibly process any more.

That means, just like the writer needed to break down writing into chunks earlier on in this process, so should you with editing. (I recommend between three and five days to edit.)

Another tip to make your editing more efficient and effective is to not edit for everything at once.

What I mean by that is you should never sit down to edit anything -- a blog article, a pillar, a haiku about cats -- and try to solve for grammar issues, spelling mistakes, narrative flow, and visual layout all at once.

Instead, edit in stages.

Here are the stages I use:

First, how is the narrative flow? Are there any gaps or sections that need to moved around or reworked? Is the substance of what is being said comprehensive and correct?

Next, how is the content laid out? Are we dealing with endless walls of text that need to be broken up? Are there lists that should actually be in paragraph form? Do we have enough headings and subheadings to move the reader along?

Then, how is the editorial style? Do we use the right words? Does the writing sound natural and conversational? Is the voice of the writer in-line with our content style guidelines?

Finally, what grammar and spelling mistakes need fixing? Now that I know the flow is right, the layout is spot-on, and the overall style is on target, what editorial clean-up is required to get the piece to polished perfection?

This may seem like you're creating work for yourself, but you need to trust me -- by focusing on specific aspect of the writing in each phase (and in this exact order), you won't miss a thing.

It's when you try to absorb, process, and edit everything at once that something slips through the cracks.

Step #6: Prepare Your Pillar for Design

Congratulations! You're done with the word stuff!

Now, it's time for you to go back through your pillar and look for opportunities for visuals:

Showcase examples of what you're talking about, including screenshots, videos, or links -- (example);

Include the headshots, book covers, podcast artwork, etc., of any references you've included or quoted -- (example); and

Create snappy little images that move the reader along and make your pillar less boring to look at -- (example).

If you don't have a ton of design chops, don't panic.

Often, the first and second items of including links, images, and videos of examples, or headshots, will be enough of a visual complement to the layout of your copy -- headings, subheadings, lists, etc.

If you're working with a designer, you'll likely only have to focus on the first two items. Your creative counterpart will take care of sprucing up your pillar where it needs sprucing.

"Liz, Why Do You Do This to Yourself?"

When I talk to people about what I spend a lot of my time doing at IMPACT -- overseeing the development and execution of our pillar content strategy -- some think I'm nuts, because it sounds painful.

Truth be told, they're not entirely wrong.

However, what they see as painful, I view as probably the most heady content challenge out there -- and that's the stuff that I live for.

But the reason why I do it isn't because it's hard and I want bragging rights.

It's because, when you follow this process, you have a chance to create one of the most genuinely and profoundly helpful pieces of content you'll ever create across as wide range of topics.

So, yes. Creating a piece of pillar content isn't easy.

But if you make a commitment to this process, you're not only setting your content strategy up for success in the long-run, you're also going to do a much, much better job at leading those you're trying to reach to the successes they're longing for.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/how-to-write-a-pillar-content-page

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myrobertallen-blog · 6 years ago

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Vidently Review and huge bonus

Vidently is a brand-new, initial of its kind, groundbreaking app, which enables individuals to produce full size social and promo videos by just swiping done-for-you scene layouts, breaking them into location and also customizing hotspots.

Official site: https://www.socialleadfreak.com/vidently-review/

When you enjoy with your choices you can click Preview to see it all collaborated! Videos you produce are conserved in your Drafts folder up until you prefer to proceed with posting as well as downloading them. Here's one that I intermingled to advertise my Facebook Survival Set, submitted to my Facebook Page:

Once again, this is where short type video clip could really radiate. The Facebook algorithm enjoys video material, yet if you're anything like me, producing video isn't really precisely easy. However with Coupon, it fasted as well as pain-free to get my message across. As well as in fact, when the message began to build up some natural reach, it became an ideal prospect for a Facebook Advertisement to reach an also bigger target market. With the link above which Rebekah so kindly provided, you could get 20% off for a limited time, so do inspect it out! In the upper-right edge, enhance the day array to a month. A quarter or a year is great, too. One to two minutes is revealed to be the principle of on the internet video content according to this Wistia study. They assessed 564,710 videos as well as greater than 1.3 billion video clip sights to assemble this information. When you look carefully at the chart, you can see that there is a sharp drop-off after 2 minutes in length:

The longer you require to get to the point, the less people will stay. But, if your video approach has to be long-form, don't sweat it. The 2nd pleasant spot that Wistia recognized was 6-12 minutes:

According to their research study, if somebody remains past six mins, they greater than likely will proceed that engagement for a few even more mins. Anything more than that as well as you typically aren't going to see optimum results. The very best wager is to maintain your video content within the 1-2 min mark if you want to maximize your influence. An instance of effective short landing web page video is BuildFire's home page explainer video clip:

" Our existing homepage conversion rate for signups is around 22%. It would not be that high without the explainer video clip." - Ian Blain, Co-founder as well as CMO of BuildFire They make use of a promo-style video clip explainer that lasts for 1:15 as well as sums up business as well as worth recommendation. And they obtain straight to the factor. They maintain Vidently Review succinct by describing how customers can take advantage of their item. Wish to create a video that transforms at a high price? Adhere to the data. Maintain your video clips in between the 1-2 min mark for much better conversion rates. 5. Share Lastly, you prepare to share your video clip! While there are many methods to share your videos on your social media profiles, we wish the most effective way for you is to utilize Buffer's Tailored Posts. With Tailored Posts, you could conveniently schedule or post various videos to each of your social media sites profiles. At one time, from a single area. And also videos will be uploaded straight to the social media systems. To make use of Tailored Posts, click the Buffer browser expansion on any internet site. (Tailored Articles is coming to the desktop and also mobile control panels soon!). After that, select the social profiles you want to share the video with, update the copy, as well as publish the video clip.

Then, hit "Contribute to Queue". Your video clip will be contributed to your particular social profile queues and also shared at the selected times.

7 video clip ideas and also examples in order to help you get started. I understand producing video clips could really feel a little frightening at first. I had lots of questions myself. What should I consist of in the video clip? How much time should it be? What sort of music should I use? I hope from these suggestions and instances of short social media video clips, you'll discover some motivation and also the solution to your questions. How-to, ideas, or tutorial. HubSpot created a short video on how you can convince your employer to let you work from home, with stock video footages and message.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and also alter the number of rows revealed to 100.

Voilà! Now you have your leading 100 article for the previous month (quarter or year)-- and also tons of content ideas for your video. Research the most common web content. Often, your leading post are additionally your most shared. Yet in some cases, they aren't. Making use of a tool like Buzzsumo, you could find your most shared web content. You can also find one of the most common material for any subject! To discover your most shared post, enter your blog site URL on Buzzsumo.

You'll get a listing of your most shared Vidently Review post, purchased in terms of the variety of shares.

You could also arrange the results by the different social networks systems. As an example, if you intend to create a Facebook video clip, you can sort the checklist by Facebook engagements. Now, you'll have a listing of article that created one of the most shares, likes, as well as discuss Facebook.

Take a look at prominent video clips from similar brands. Finally, you can also browse on social networks to see just what topics are preferred right now. With Facebook's Pages to See, you could quickly check out the top blog posts from your favorite or similar Facebook Pages. To accessibility Pages to View, most likely to your Facebook Page > Insights. You'll find the section below the Introduction tab. When you click any of the Pages, you'll see its top blog posts for the week. The posts must give you some video web content concepts. It'll be wonderful to watch out for video clip blog posts particularly.

For Twitter, Social Bearing is a terrific device for locating any type of Twitter account's leading tweets. For Instagram, you can attempt using the Explore function, which shows you prominent blog posts that are relevant to your account. On LinkedIn, you have the Companies to track function in your Firm Page analytics. Maximize your video dimension and positioning. Every little thing makes a distinction when it involves video clip material. You can not slap together a video and think that conversions will certainly roll in. Even the video clip dimension, placement, and also dimensions can have a huge role in conversion rates. When it involves your landing web pages, you should do anything you could to boost conversions. Your organisation depends on it. Wistia carried out a research study where they crawled 95,000 different pages to understand just how size effects conversion prices on landing pages. To start, they split the typical touchdown web page into seven distinct areas:.

As you could expect, video material obtained more plays when it was higher in zones, or over the fold:.

If you desire much more conversions, make certain to maintain your video clip material in areas 1-3. That means above the layer or just before your page begins to obtain also long. For instance, take a look at where BuildFire areas their video clip material, in area 3:.

This assists to warm up visitors with standard introductory content on your touchdown page without overwhelming them. If you jump straight into a video clip without context, you might take the chance of lower conversions. Heat up your brows through with a snappy heading and after that enter the video content. However that's not all. Video elevation and size huge consider play rates as well as conversions. Inning accordance with Wistia, videos with a size of 401 to 600 pixels are going to be best for driving more plays:. 2. Plan. Once you have brainstormed your material suggestions and chose one to work with, you can start planning for it. Both means I want to plan for a video clip is to either write a script or develop a Vidently. Both motivate me to think through the entire flow and vital aspects of the video. A storyboard likewise assists me imagine exactly how a shot would certainly appear like, which will certainly be handy for the next action-- recording. Client testimonial. GoPro interviewed 3 clients to advertise its drone, GoPro Fate, and to present its new functions.

Occasions. Wistia did a recap video of their time at Inbound 2017.

Behind-the-scenes. Patagonia shared a fast behind-the-scenes look at their manufacturing facility.

Item launch. Ben & Jerry's developed a simple looping video to promote a brand-new taste of ice cream.

Checklist. We made a brief video clip slideshow sharing 5 tips that increased our Facebook video sights and also interaction.

User-generated material. Starbucks compiled photos of its famous holiday cups from its consumers right into a simple video slide show.

For even more suggestions, have a look at Facebook's Creative Hub, where they have actually provided near 100 Facebook video clips for your motivation.

Exactly how do you produce your social networks video clips? With videos being the 3rd most-wanted web content key in the future (after social networks messages as well as news), it'll be terrific to obtain begun now6. Below's a simple framework you can use (as well as adjust):. Ideate. Plan. Record. Edit. Share. If you have already been creating video clips, I would certainly enjoy to gain from you. Do you have any suggestions for creating interesting social media sites video clips? Exactly how does your video development process resemble?

These are common measurements that are excellent for producing video that does not control your display or appear too little to click. Optimization is key to getting even more plays. If you can obtain even more plays, you have a great shot at getting higher conversion prices. To sum everything up, focus on these aspects:. Play your video in areas 1-3 on your touchdown web page, preferably over the fold after you've offered context. Utilize a video clip width of 401-600 pixels. Use a video height of 301-450 pixels. How to generate a promotion video with a restricted budget plan. Since you know the crucial elements in a converting video clip, it's time to develop one on your own with a limited budget. Maintaining conversions in mind, you have actually reached produce a brief video clip. Here's how you can produce a discount video with a minimal spending plan that is sure to convert. 1) Create a compelling manuscript. The initial step in generating any wonderful coupon video clip for low-cost is coming up with your own manuscript. Many online marketers will certainly work with a company right from the gate to establish a video script, but to conserve money, you could complete this action within your personal group. You require a video script that reverberates with your target market. Luckily, you could commonly come up with a script based upon your existing landing web page. For example, consider exactly how BuildFire structures their Vidently touchdown page.

First, they utilize an engaging heading to create some initial passion. Next, they make use of social evidence to back up their claims:.

Now they show you precisely how any user could utilize their service for success:.

Then they tease it also additionally with specific attributes as well as advantages:.

The whole landing web page flows like a pre-written manuscript, since it is. The keys to your first video clip are already concealing within your landing web page. To simplify, right here are several of the vital factors to consist of in your manuscript:. Use a fascinating opening line to record interest. Use social proof to back up those claims. Show how simple it is to utilize your product. Program what your item does as well as what benefits it offers. Describe exactly how the user acquires value from it (more conversions, better sales, and so on). If you are not accustomed to storyboarding, here's a quick guide to obtain you started. To help you with your preparation, here are some ideas from Facebook for developing efficient video clips:. Capture focus early: Video clips auto-play on most social media sites systems. By catching interest with the first couple of secs of your video clip, you have a higher opportunity of quiting an audience while she scrolls through her feed. Facebook advises beginning with your most captivating components, integrating your brand message and also identification early, as well as utilizing interesting post copy. Keep your message simple: Facebook urges you to ask yourself, "Just what is one of the most vital message I have to provide in this video?". Layout for sound off: Facebook found that individuals view mobile videos all over-- house, at work, during their commute, and so on 3 Often, they wouldn't desire the audio (and maybe that's why mobile videos are made to play without sound). Inning accordance with Digiday, 85 percent of Facebook videos are played without sound4. Add subtitles or text to tell your story visually. Trying out dimension: More than HALF of video clips are used mobile now5. As well as square as well as upright video clips take up extra screen area than landscape video clips when the phone is held up and down. In our own experiments, we located that square videos exceeded landscape video clips on Facebook, Instagram, as well as Twitter in terms of ordinary involvement as well as views. If you're looking for details about video clip specifications of all the major social networks systems such as the optimum size and also default audio state, we wish we have actually gotten you covered with this article. 2) Find the ideal design for your target market. Next up, you need to identify what design of video clip is best for your target audience. As an example, a video clip on a landing page for a GoPro is mosting likely to be greatly different from a SaaS item, right? The GoPro video will certainly show the item being used in real time, revealing actual video, as opposed to animated clips. The SaaS product video will likely show the application in use and animated shorts to add style and appeal to the video clip. The trick below is to comprehend your market as well as exactly what they want to see. To obtain begun, perform some basic competitor research, or search for the leading companies in your niche. For instance, if you have a mobile application, you could look for the top applications of 2017:.

Locate a few of them on the checklist as well as head to their website to look the landing page for video-based web content. You should easily have the ability to situate their item promotion video clips to see exactly what web content they showcase:.

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#Vidently review #Vidently reviews #Vidently bonus #Vidently discount

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marvellousmediamusings-blog · 7 years ago

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Culture and conTROLL freaks; An insight into the practice of trolling in an online space.

It has been generally accepted among communities that the internet and social media networks are full of deviant individuals and behaviors. With many platforms offering an opportunity for ultimate anonymity and a perceived lack of consequences the internet as a whole has been synonymous with certain people using the platform to express anti-social, deviant or even violent behaviors is called trolling. This blog post shall discuss what trolling is, who a troll is and, with the use of the case study pertaining to Chelsea King, how trolling can be applied to real world situations.

Online trolling has become a vastly popular topic within internet communities and has attracted a plethora of media attention over the last couple of years, however it remains a topic that is under-researched, with little scholarly attention paid to it (Fichman and Sanfilippo, 2016). This may be attributed to the fact that the term is still in its infancy or simply because the definition for trolling is in a constant state of change and evolvement, with it having never been clearly differentiated from other deviant or negative behaviors and attitudes found online (Fichman and Sanfilippo, 2016). However, for the purpose of this essay we shall define trolling as a repetitive and hugely disruptive set of behaviors that are exhibited on an online platform in order to target a specific individual or group (Fichman and Sanfilippo, 2016). This is performed often with the intention of publicly shaming them, drawing them into an argument or diverting attention away from the original intent of the group (Fichman and Sanfilippo, 2016).

While the act of trolling has been defined, in order to understand the concept as a whole, one should have a thorough understanding of who is classified as a troll (Hardaker, 2010). However, a severe lack of clarity and indeed a large lack of agreement on the term and who can be classified under it, makes it a challenging task (Hardaker, 2010). One explanation that has proven to be both sufficiently detailed and succinct details an internet troll as an individual that operates through an online platform and seeks to provoke others in order to elicit responses that are hostile, naive or corrective in nature (Phillips and Milner, 2017,7). This person can also be a troll by reacting in a primarily emotional manner in order to elicit response or stimulate action from supporters (Phillips and Milner, 2017).

While Social Media platforms are widely accepted as having a global reach and an audience pool that increases exponentially it is no surprise that it has offered individuals with positive opportunities in which individuals can share and communicate, traversing boundaries connecting with others in a way that has previously not been possible (Barlow and Awan, 2016). Indeed, with the internet offering instantaneous communication as well as the compression of time and space there is a significant increase in the speed of communicative processes and a reduction in cultural latency (Stein, 2016). However, taking into consideration the instantaneous and far reaching effect of the internet it can also act as a double-edged sword (Barlow and Awan, 2016). By fashioning a cybernetic universe for individuals who employ hate speech as a means to directly target others while simultaneously maintaining their anonymity (Barlow and Awan, 2016). Thus, users often are found to exhibit behaviour and express opinions online that they would not normally be able to demonstrate in a real-world example without incurring significant consequence (Stein, 2016).

I, myself, have found that the internet often provides one with a false sense of security, I often am under the assumption that other individuals do not know my real identity and therefore my responses can often be different in comparison to if I was responding in person. I am traditionally more daring and more likely to disagree with someone online than in person. This is due to the fact that despite how heated the confrontation may get I am still relatively removed from the situation and can choose to withdraw entirely whenever I see fit.

Psychologists have applied the term ‘online disinhibition effect’ to this notion, in which aspects such as online anonymity, a perceived idea of invisibility, a lack of recognisable authority and the fact that the majority of communication is not happening in real time, serves to degrade the attitudes, established rules of etiquette and accepted cultural practices that many millennia has spent enforcing (Stein, 2016).Indeed, online trolling usually occurs in an asynchronous manner, when the individual responsible for the slander or inappropriate content does not communicate with the victim concurrently (Stein, 2016). This is due to the fact that it is easier to bait the victim with a form of provocation and then leave the scene temporarily (Stein, 2016).

Trolling and the severity of the behaviour can differ depending on specific circumstance, indeed in 2010 trolling reached a new height on the social media platform, Facebook and a new and particularly virulent form of subcultural trolling began to take over (Phillips and Milner, 2017). Unlike other social networking sites such as 4Chan – whose anonymous interactions didn’t extend beyond a particular coordinated attack against a chosen target – trolling on Facebook allowed for the creation of a of a relatively stable and antisocial network in which trolls were able to form close-knit groups to target a whole host of on-site causes, public personalities and affinity groups (Phillips and Milner, 2017).

Arguably one of the most outrageous of these behaviors occurred on what Facebook called the “memorial pages” (Phillips, 2017,8). These pages which are sometimes referred to as RIP pages offer an opportunity to friends, fans and family of the deceased to find comfort in the sense of community, post messages of condolence, keep an open line of communication with other users and to be witness to any site updates or group announcements (Phillips, 2017). Although it is a requirement of the site for people who want to contribute to be members of the page, the condolence pages are usually accessible to all. Hence making them ostensibly private but effectively representative of a very open and public space (Phillips, 2017). Consequently, the tone and at times the coherency of the comments posted vary greatly (Phillips, 2017).

With the death of a family member often being a disturbing and traumatic event in one’s life, many people find comfort in the support and love that is shown on social media networks. Facebook, in my personal case, was abuzz with messages of condolences and I was flooded for days after with memorial pictures of my lost loved one. Indeed, it was a haven of good memories, past photographs of the family and an overwhelming amount of support and love from friends and family all over the globe. However, this is not always the case and Facebook memorial pages can often turn into a platform in which hate is spewed. This is demonstrated clearly through the case of Chelsea King.

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Chelsea King was often described by those who knew her as a golden girl of sorts, attractive, intelligent and well-liked by all who knew her (Phillips, 2017). When Chelsea was first reported missing after she failed to return home from a run on the 27th February 2010, everyone assumed the worst (Phillips, 2017). Their worst fears were confirmed when on the 1st of March John Gardener was taken into custody and charged with the rape and murder of two girls, one of them being Chelsea King (Phillips, 2017). Her body was found dumped in a make-shift grave days later (Phillips, 2017). On the internet, concerned individuals and well-wishers who were based all over the world had begun using Facebook as a network platform to express their sympathy, follow the case and cheerlead the search effort (Phillips, 2017). Pages like “Help Find Chelsea King” initially had a following of 80,000 people, however, after she was found dead that number skyrocketed with tens of thousands of group members joining and almost instantaneously the “Help Find Chelsea King” pages gave way to the memorial pages in honour of the dead teen (Phillips, 2017). The majority of the users had never met Chelsea, however they felt inextricably connected to the case and involved with the narrative that surrounded it (Phillips, 2017). This resulted in a number of negative comments as well as a slew of inappropriate remarks that were often sexual in nature (Phillips, 2017). Indeed, one user asked if there were any nude photographs of Chelsea while another used the platform to threaten another user defending the memory of Chelsea with the rape of her mother and sister (Phillips, 2017). Another user who went by the username “Francis Bagadonuts” posted the Google image of a user’s house who disagreed with him on a thread pertaining to Chelsea’s page (Phillips, 2017).

The situation escalated when a troll by the name of Mike McMullen launched a page with the title “I bet this pickle can get more likes than Chelsea King” (Karpi, 2017). Using a picture of a frowning cartoon pickle dressed in underwear and holding an obviously Photo-shopped cut-out of Chelsea’s head (Karpi, 2017). The massive reaction to the page was instantaneous and it was flooded with offensive images, statements and opinions as well as a large body of users who liked the page in order to defend the memory of Chelsea King (Karpi, 2017). Indeed, the page received so much attention that a reporter belonging to ABC went to interview McMullen who demonstrated an entirely apathetic attitude to the entire situation and the reprehensible things his platform has resulted in (Karpi, 2017). As mortified as the ABC audiences were at the story unfolding, the majority of the comments left on the Pickle page were too horrendous and explicit for Prime-Time audiences and thus were left out of the segment (Phillips, 2017). Furthermore, the segment failed to acknowledge in any way that the story was actually the tip of a far deeper and more serious problem, one that extended far beyond a single fan page (Phillips, 2017). In contrast to the belief that the pickle page was an horrendous yet isolated incident it represented the beginning of what eventually became known as RIP trolling (Phillips, 2017).

The above example is a horrifying testament to the damage that can be inflicted by an internet troll and the fact that it is such an accepted piece of social media today proves greatly concerning to many individuals, me included. I find it a disturbing notion that at any given time there will be someone within my social circles that are being either targeted directly or having their opinions lamented or slammed by others. Indeed, I myself have been a direct target of online Trolling. Belonging to the popular social media forum, Reddit. One automatically is cautious of what one comments or posts. Although usernames are anonymous and there is no information directly pertaining to my actual identity there is no shortage of people who are willing to pick apart the profile of those who dare share their personal information, experiences, opinions or accomplishments on the forum.

In my opinion, while Reddit is a social media site that is known for harboring a slew of internet trolls, it is not all negative, indeed many of the subreddits offer motivation , support and inspiration.r/loseit was one such community in which people who were looking to lead healthier lifestyles and lose weight could be given advice, be encouraged when lacking motivation and share progress pictures in order to achieve a common goal of being both happier and healthier. I had belonged to this community for a year and found it a great source of inspiration and motivation as it was full of like-minded individuals. However, the subreddit was not completely devoid of trolls. On one occasion, having lost a significant amount of weight, a progress picture was uploaded with an emoticon of a sun hiding my face on both photographs to protect my identity- the thought process was that I wanted to share my victories with others but not have a permanent reminder of it uploaded onto the internet. However, this small action seemed to be the catalyst for a slew of insults and jokes pertaining to the necessity of having to hide my face. One user insinuated that while I could do everything to change my physique there was nothing I could do to change my face. While another made lewd sexual comments. The more ferocious the comment the more attention it seemed to garner and the more upvotes it received proving that it was most probably said to generate a reaction either from me or other Reddit members. They certainly achieved the intended as the comments deviated so far from the original picture and contained so many instances of trolling it was eventually locked by a moderator of the post.

Internet trolling has fast become one of the most popular and fastest spreading piece of jargon in the 21st century. Indeed, the practice of trolling has become so pervasive and normalised within society it is often barely noticed as being unusual. Instead it is accepted as being a part of belonging to social media and other online networking platforms. Trolls and the practice of trolling occurs on a daily basis and is often performed by those who hide behind the anonymity the internet affords them- with usernames, fake profiles and ways to shield their true identity it becomes the perfect environment in which trolling can occur with the possibility of consequence being very slim. Trolling can often be extremely deviant, this was highlighted through the case study of Chelsea King whose death triggered the beginning of what was to become known as the Facebook memorial pages and through my own personal experiences. Thus this blog post has discussed what trolling is, who a troll is and how it is applied in a real-world situations.

Biblography

abc News 2010. Chelsea Kings body found. Video. Retrieved 1 November,2017 from the World Wide Wed; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcLmmiY0VM4.

Barlow, C. and Awan, I. 2016. You Need to Be Sorted Out with a Knife: The Attempted Online Silencing of Women and People of Muslim Faith Within Academia. Social Media + Society,2-4.

Fichman, P. and Sanfilippo, M. 2016. Online trolling and its Perpetrators: Under the Cyber Bridge. London: Rowman and Littlefield,9-16.

Hardaker, C. 2010. Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture,1-29.

Karpi, T. 2017. Change name to no-one, Like peoples statuses, Facebook Trolling and managing peoples online Personas. The Fiber Culture Journal. Online, retrieved 29 October,2017 from the World Wide Web:http://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-166-change-name-to-no-one-like-peoples-status-facebook-trolling-and-managing-online-personas/.

Phillips, W. 2017. LOLing at Tragedy; Facebook trolls, memorial pages and Resistance to grief online. First Monday. Online. Retrieved 29 October,2017 from the World Wide Web: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3168/3115.

Phillips, W. and Milner, R. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet:Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. New York: John Wiley and Sons,6-10.

#culture #trolling #trolls #chelseaking #tradgedy #internet

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eludiumofficial · 7 years ago

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Rant #1: The brutal self-slaughter of my former favorite company and why I think comparing Electronic Arts to Bethesda Softworks is ignorant and irrational

Before I get started I’d like to make clear that my opinions presented here are subject to change, dependent on current events and my future beliefs. This post does in no way intend to manipulate the reader’s view on the situation or try and showcase my conviction as being the factual one regarding the topic, it only presents my personal reaction towards the statement featured in the title and should be treated as such.

I dislike rants. I dislike rambling in general, I find it to be a huge time-waster with little to no sense of rewarding. This is probably the first such post that I ever write, and I can’t say I’m quite pleased with my decision, but the subject at hand really provoked me. I feel that writing down my view on it, saving it someplace where I can see it later on in life (and remind myself of my past ways of thinking, as well as the reasoning behind them) is the best course of action. Regarding the second half of the title: I completely understand this is not a big deal, but making Electronic Arts look like the bad guy is something that I’ve seen mentioned for over a decade now in the gaming field, very few times being also backed up by solid arguments. I’m here to present it from my perspective.

Electronic Arts... a name as big in the industry as it is infamous. At least by common standards. Standards that (presumably) mostly come from reading the dumb, uninformed YouTube comment. Hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if the vast majority of “experts” that comment defamatory remarks at EA's address have never touched any of the company's games. But how could they, right?! You need to pay, what, one hundred dollars for the Deluxe/Premium/Ultimate edition, which is in truth the actual content that assembles the main game... right?

Maybe.

This old company that the average customer loves to bash in ignorance is the same one who grants you complete access to full editions of over 75 of their titles, for €4 a month. It’s the same company who puts their game on sale for €10 one year after its release.. be lucky if you manage to score a €30 deal with other companies’ games in such a short time after launch (and in a sale). Not to mention, they actually have a working DRM *cough* Ubisoft *cough* and customer support.. *cough* Valve *cough*.

But enough about that. I'm not here to lick EA's boots, just pointing out how pathetic it looks to me when people keep complaining about this company 24/7 when there are much bigger culprits in the industry.

Culprits.. like Bethesda. Yeah. Something the old me would never believe he'd write. I wasn't just a fan of Bethesda Softworks. I loved Bethesda. I would read all the lore of their universes for hours on end, at school, at home, even before going to sleep. Hell, I didn't think The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vanilla was a bad game at all to begin with, but when I discovered modding and found out that the Creation Kit, the godly tool that unlocked such a vast world (inside an already huge world), was brought to us by the developers, I went crazy for this team.

The introduction of paid mods.

Not only was it a global letdown when Valve + Bethesda announced paid mods on Steam back in 2015, it was unfortunately only the beginning of something much darker for BethSoft. Now, to be fair with you, I was willing to give them a second chance as customer after that absolute mess, more or less because I saw the partnership with Valve (a company that I stopped respecting since at least 4 years ago, for reasons that are now obvious worldwide) and I couldn't help but assume that they had the upper hand on here. It was downright difficult for a die-hard fan of Bethesda Studios to just drop all respect for them and accuse them at the fullest (or at least mostly) for the wrongdoing. Nonetheless they lost a big sense of meaning at that time, to me and many other fans as well.

When the "Special Edition" of Skyrim rolled out last fall I genuinely thought that was a bad joke. I went and read its system requirements, up to this day I cannot fathom how some improved shaders and lighting system along with some small improvements to textures require a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 as graphic processor. It's beyond insulting the way this company neglects any kind of optimization processes for their products.

One year later, here we are: Creation Club. What the actual hell, Bethesda? What the actual hell? Here’s the trailer, it should speak more than mere words can:

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The best course of action here is to fight for what we stand for. Don't let Bethesda win this fight. They've lost it once already, but it seems they're coming back with a much, much greedier and more disgusting ploy.

Some more detailed information about this Creation Club mess, as I really do not have the mood to write more about it and ultimately ruin my state of mind:

Creation Club on Fallout Wikia

A very succinct description in video format, by Gopher:

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It’sAGundam goes much less family-friendly into the topic, but his points are very valid:

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An extremely flawed system explained by YongYea:

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I don’t see how it could get worse than this... but I actually have a feeling it still will. At this point, Bethesda Softworks is not just an anti-consumer company, they're inarguably becoming a threat to the industry. They have the power to manipulate other companies' directions, they have the power to manipulate renowned modders into falling for their trap (as proved in the 2015 scandal). But I believe they don't have the power to treat us, customers, like some absolute fools, and to succeed in doing so. I believe we can take the fight to them. For a greedy company like this, where fan service means absolutely nothing today, money speak in totality. Bethesda does not deserve to be given further financial support. Not until they wake up and realize the damage they're creating.

If Bethesda really doesn't want to give up their unethical practices (and so far, it does indeed look like they're going to keep living in a dream), they have to be put down. The company that once held the crown for creating the best sandbox role-playing games, with unlimited modding possibilities, is now digging its own grave. But it won’t lay itself inside.

Nexus mods

Let's face it, Bethesda: you would never be where you are now — up there at the top, laughing in your customers' faces — if it wasn't for your community. So many people still keep playing games that go as far back as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because of modding. As great as your games might initially be, in a vanilla state very few people would still play a 15 years old game on a regular basis. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is still up in the players' charts today thanks to the dedicated modders that spare hundreds of hours from their lives to expand the base game’s content. Not to mention the insane amount of bugs that every of your games has: you never fixed that, Bethesda. It was the community who did it for you. Free of charge.

I began this article by writing about Electronic Arts and never got around talking about its relevance to the topic. That’s simply because I wanted to make clear my thoughts about Bethesda Softworks first. You see, while searching up the community’s reaction to this whole scandal I couldn’t help but notice a couple dozen comments comparing the “new” Bethesda Studios to Electronic Arts. Mostly saying they've become just as bad.

I know, I know.. why do some meaningless comments matter to me? This post should be about Bethesda's fall from glory, not about this. And to be fair I did debate whether to write this in a separate post or not to write it at all. I understand it might not be a big deal, but it does really drive me nuts. I consider the society's uninformed opinions to be just as damaging as Bethesda's recent actions.

Because these uninformed opinions carry on. They influence people. They influence companies' rate of success. Paid mods were taken down in 2015, a few days after their launch, for the fact that the community made its voice heard. All the comments raging at Valve and Bethesda's poor attempt could be translated into a substantial financiar loss for the companies.

With the Electronic Arts case, things are slightly different: we aren't talking about a mass of hateful comments bashing at the team in just a few days' time, we are talking about the worldwide consensus that EA is a "bad" company. This consensus has been spread out in a wide variety of ways, mainly through chats, comments, forums talks etc. and in a very high amount of time (basically since at least ten years ago). It was initially based on the fact (among other things) that you often had to pay for the game's "Premium" edition in order to receive content that was classified by the standard gamer as mandatory for the base game. Later on the consensus was adopted by.. just about a lot of people on the Internet. And that's how it went viral, it basically became a "meme", so to say. Bad things happen in the gaming world, the community instantly associates it with EA. This is not only morally wrong, but it does affect the company as well, for reasons that should be obvious.

"So what? Let them suffer, it's not fair having to pay €100 for a game in order to get the full edition." While I agree that most of the DLCs for EA's games are somewhat mandatory (especially if you're planning to play online), one should not forget the points that I made in the initial paragraphs of this post. If money is indeed such a big issue, wait for a sale. Their games' prices drop by a lot even during the first year. At least you have the assurance of quality control. You pay for a game that... you know, actually works, it's not riddled with bugs.

"How does that still relate to Bethesda?" When people compare these two studios they do it just because they're trying to put Bethesda to shame, really. Most of the time they don't even think twice before hitting the "Send" button: "Just stick EA's name in the comment so everyone can understand I'm only trying to make Bethesda look bad. I might have actually never played an Electronic Arts game, I sure as hell have never read any documentation on them, but hey, they're a meme, everyone refers to them as the bad guy so it has to be true." Their comment/message might literally not try and say anything disparaging about EA, they probably just want to put the focus on Bethesda, but the fact that they're using the brand name as a means to make something else look bad is absolutely ignorant. You are comparing every single damaging event in the industry to one company's marketing unpopular opinion, how crazy is that?

Electronic Arts has made its fair share of mistakes in its time (I agree, buying smaller, good companies and later firing their staff is not cool at all; releasing a new edition of Most Wanted is still supposed to be a Most Wanted game, not a Burnout game), but comparing it to a company that tries and monetize a feature that has been globally free since 1980 (Castle Smurfenstein) is downright insulting. If according to the society EA is “bad”, then Bethesda must be the devil itself. Unfortunately people will continue to bash at Electronic Arts without backing up any of the criticism with straight facts and/or proof.

The point of this section is not to make EA seem like the victim and Bethesda like the villain. It merely summarizes that if you’re trying to show your feeling of antipathy towards Bethesda Studios through a comparison with another company, then you should pick a suitable candidate. Don’t just rush at placing Electronic Arts' name in your post because you know that will draw attention and favoritism from fellow poor-informed members. It’s a shame that out of all the gaming companies out there, some with much higher rates of greediness, the community has crowned EA as the “greater evil”.

Times have changed, people. Maybe a few years ago the main problem in the gaming industry was indeed the high pricing and the necessity of purchasing a Premium pack in order to enjoy what the whole game has to offer, but if you think that’s still the main issue nowadays then I am afraid you are living in the past. Welcome to 2017, where we are greeted with microtransactions in singleplayer-exclusive titles, card games over card games with little to no difference between each other (except the company your money for in-game items will go to) and an actual increase in the game’s price during the sale, just so it can be “discounted” to very, very little below the normal price (yeah, I know that happened in 2015, but I trust you catch my drift as to what’s happening in the “new world”). While these things are happening and the industry is falling apart, people are still busy complaining about a company that gives you a full-fledged product for a higher sum of money than the “standard” one. And then offers it to you on sale during the next 12 months.

Bethesda has reached an all-time new low and no other company comes to mind that is as brain-dead, heartless and greedy as them, but if you really have to use a comparison to prove your point, for the love of God step up your game and stop mentioning Electronic Arts. There is Valve out there who keeps milking the same damn three games for years now instead of producing anything original, they have a barely functional DRM, their customer support is safe to be assumed AWOL at this point in time and now they’re releasing a card game to further milk money away from players. Take-Two Interactive literally tried to definitively shut down modding for Grand Theft Auto V. There you have Activision shooting themselves in the foot with the Call of Duty franchise, releasing pretty much the same game year after year, also charging the same amount of money for the Deluxe version as EA would for a game that is actually original.

But Electronic Arts is still “the worst company”. Ok.

To sum this up (because it’s getting late, I want a cup of hot chocolate and to play some good old Dragon Age):

Maybe EA is bad. Maybe it isn’t. But it’s certainly not the culprit of the industry anymore, considering all the petty/greedy attempts of other companies in recent years. To compare it to Bethesda, however, is a whole other story. It’s insulting. Bethesda Softworks is not just greedy, they have become a threat.

Bethesda Studios is the kind of wounded owner who kicks his own faithful dog with a club after it comes and licks its master’s wounds. That kick is painful and performed with a Creation Club.

I ran out of hot chocolate sachets.

#bethesda #paid mods #creation club #electronic arts #greediness #rant #gaming #game industry

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davidbaker1095-blog · 8 years ago

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2 Minute Survival Game: Week 1 Review

Hi Everyone! This is the first of a series of weekly review posts I plan to write. The point of these posts is to act as an opportunity for the reader to easily catch up on what I've been up to in the past week and to give myself a chance to reflect and potentially find new lessons and takeaways from my experiences. I will return to some content that I posted earlier in the week but there should also be new content that I didn't share at the time whether this be brand new stuff or more details on what I've posted before. I hope that you, as the reader, can take something from these posts as well. To help me in that, feel free to let me know what you think I should be talking about during these posts. They will be sure to evolve over the weeks as I get fully into project work so it's a perfect time for me to make changes you want as well.

This week marked the start of my first post university project. The reasons why I chose to kick off this project were that I wanted to directly invest time in my passions for content creation, I wanted to build my portfolio as a game developer and I wanted to find ways to stretch myself and my skillsets. It was a really great time for me to start because my previous project, Bees Won't Exist, which has been my main project for the past 12 months, finally collapsed under the weight of the artificial barriers and lack of personal interest that key team members were feeling. I then had a large project shaped hole in my life. Bees Won't Exist had partially become a chore because of artificial issues, such as people, including myself, doggedly avoiding work where we didn't want to do it and then didn't want to do too much work on the project generally less we destroy our social lives and work life balance. Looking back, this was a pretty unhealthy state to be in. Game development should be fun and, personally, I should want to get up and delve into that creative environment which was not the case. I was locking myself into Scrum Master and QA roles without the desire to actually create the content. So one of my aims with this project was to have fun creatively and fully jump into all areas of the project.

As to what the project would be, all I knew initially was that the game would be super small. One of the biggest lessons I learned last year was that over scoping (i.e. making your project bigger than the team can reasonably deliver) is a killer of projects, and if not the whole project then at least the happiness of developers. I think it's great to dream big and be ambitious but you can't deliver what you don't have resources to deliver whether that be through a lack of people, time or technology. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted the player to be able to finish the experience in around 2 minutes. Some people would call that restriction arbitrary but I find it a good way of measuring an amount of content that I felt comfortable committing to.

This is the point at which the brainstorm I shared this week came in. The brainstorm acted as a vehicle in which I could start noting criteria I wanted the project to satisfy and then put down ideas and constraints as they came to me. This was great because as the process panned out, I ended up thinking about what types of games I wanted to make at a high level which brought me to why I am a developer in the first place.

The short version is that I believe that interactive entertainment is the next great form of expression and I want to help push further into that potential than anyone else has done before. I don't think that interactive entertainment will reach its peak in my lifetime because I feel that will only happen once interactive entertainment occurs in virtual reality indistinguishable from our own. We are a long way off that for now but maybe I'll be surprised. I feel like, given acceptance of that, It is still very possible to pre-establish some of the methodologies and techniques that will be used to make the best games at that time. So in short I want to help find the way to make interactive experiences of the highest quality, not compared to what we have already seen but what there will be full stop. To bring this down to what I am doing now, did it ever cross my mind that this new project would meet that goal necessarily? No. This is still a really early project in my career but I think it should be formative at least.

Anyway, what I ran with from that thought line during my brainstorming was that some of the best experiences I have come across were in the form of narratives. They had compelling beginnings, middles and ends. There is a problem with narratives in that they can stretch out a game as you try to set up each narrative stage properly and earn strong pay offs. I thought I'd try to tackle this though while still keeping the game short. One way I would like to do this is through limiting the number of narrative stages to something like Beginning -> Problem -> Climax -> Resolution. The other option Apart from a narrative focused experience, the other option I had for structuring the game was to try to establish a strong game loop and then a strong meta loop. I do want to make this type of game eventually, because I feel it is certainly a strong model. For this project though I had already became intrigued with the idea of a really short narrative game before I had fleshed out the possibilities for the second structure.

The next questions I tackled were around genre, art style and sound. I probably spent less time thinking about these then I could have, possibly a sign of my inexperience, but in the end I came up with answers pretty quickly. I had started thinking about the horror genre pretty early and this lead onto the theme of survival. I liked that because I thought there was an interesting juxtaposition between the boundary of a really short game and the theme of survival. Survival narratives are usually drawn out over a period of tougher and tougher odds because that steady rising of tension, and maybe even the drain of holding on can lead to a stronger payoff at the end. A 2 minute survival game wouldn't have that luxury and, if it was narrative based, I would have to execute really well in order to make it work. That kind of really strong execution on a really small amount of content is far more appealing to me than trying to effectively execute on a lot of content to a passable state. It allows for quicker production times with greater room for iteration and improvement as well. The choice of art style was mostly directed by my lack of art experience. I knew the art would have to be minimalistic in order to not overstretch myself and maintain a higher level of quality. I liked the idea of pixel art because that can be really simple or really complex and still be beautiful with a whole area of grey in-between. The choice of the survival genre along with the art style of pixel art seemed like it would be an interesting combination as well. As for sound, I wanted the games music and sound effects to add to the intensity of the experience, especially later on, and I wanted it to drive the urgency of each decision.

In order to keep the narrative interactive, I decided that I wanted to allow for the effect of choices on how the narrative turned out which effectively required a branching narrative. It took me a solid amount of time to work out how I was going to do that and keep the number of branches reasonable, as evidenced by the maths on the brainstorm, but in the end I decided that having three possible states in each narrative stage (death, advantage and disadvantage) would allow for about 10 states overall which is a level of content I would be happy to tackle. Allowing the player to die at any given stage of the narrative, and restart instantly, allowed for a kind of gameplay loop as well. And so the outline of the experience came into being. The player would start at the beginning of the narrative and then make choices according to their situations in order to try to reach the next stage. At each stage they would either die, gain an advantage for the next stage or gain a disadvantage for the next stage. In order to keep each decision short I decided I would experiment with manually limiting the amount of time that the player would have to make a choice at each stage. Not making a choice in time would be counted as a choice and could potentially disadvantage the player. I think that something like building music could be a great vehicle for telling the player they only have so much time to make a choice without force feeding them through a timer.

All of that content and decision making came out of the initial brainstorming. After writing all of that, I realise that this post is going to be HUGE if I maintain the same content to activity reflection ratio. For the rest of the post, and probably future posts, I will try to keep it more succinct and cut out the unnecessary stuff I'm leaving the existing stuff in though because I think it was a really important part of the design process for me on this project. Going in I didn't have much but motivation. Going out I had a loose game design. Let me know if you totally agree with that plan or think it's fine as is.

Next came the creation of a lot of the design document. It's currently sitting around 12 pages. I probably didn't need to make it quite that big but it did help me flesh out all of the elements of the game. One of the sections of the document, the "Typical Player Experience" section, ended up being a great piece of material for sharing at the time. The first part of it was shared through social media to gauge the response of my network and I managed to get some feedback from various comments.

The feedback was fairly positive. I'm not sure whether this is from my network being nice to me or whether the content actually stands up. I'm assuming it's a mix of both. When I handed the paragraph to people to read, I never got a blank expression or obvious disinterest. It is probably what I would expect to get from someone after telling them an above average campfire horror story. I'm fairly happy with that at this stage although I will be sure not to settle. Online, one comment discussed the fact that it is important to grab the reader's attention early and that the piece I posted had done that to an extent given that it represented the start of the game. Another said the game would be good in Virtual Reality. I thought that last comment was interesting because, in the piece I posted, I hadn't alluded to the 2D pixel art style I had planned, and the comment suggested that they had envisioned it in fully immersive 3D. This is probably down to the fact that text leaves a lot to the imagination but I was interested to see that the game could be so easily imagined in that way. Perhaps there's room for a VR version in the future? In any case, It showed me a new side to the process of using a written typical player experience and how powerful it could be for drawing insights.

Finally for this week, I managed to engage in a discussion with a sound orientated peer of mine about the 2 minute survival game. One of the interesting things he said to me was that, as the game starts fairly innocently, he would consider using a different track for the start to the rest of the game in my shoes. The first track would be fairly subdued but as soon as the problem stage started it would become more intense, ominous and urgent. Another suggestion he made was that I use the music to create urgency in the game through speeding it up over time until the point where each decision was made or not made. I think either of these ideas could work if executed well and I will be sure to explore them when I get to implementing the game's sound.

That's it for now! To give you an idea of what I will be tackling next week, I expect to cover things like creating a feature list, setting up project management software and starting to implement fundamental features in a build. Those last two activities should be quite visual so hopefully I will be able to share content as I go and make the week 2 review more interesting to look at.

#review #gamedev #indiedev

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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DO WHAT MICROSOFT IS DEAD

For the next fifty years, that's where new wealth will come from. We're just finally able to measure it. It's no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are often well aware of it. Two sides of an obsolete coin. Among other languages, those with a reputation for succinctness would be the order of the day. The lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that's one of the founders. But that doesn't make your programs small is doing a bad job of what programming languages are supposed to rise over time. He'd also just arrived from Canada, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about English literature.

As I wrote in Hackers & Painters, employees seem to be closer to the Apple type than the Viaweb type. And why did one want to do a half-assed job. And both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things evolve faster. And a safe bet. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them was to ask what surprised them. That's the absent-minded professor, who forgets to shave, or eat, or even frivolous. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Ken Anderson says that the following code is about as much sales pitch as content-based filtering will leave the spammer room to make. It would also be a longer way. So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield better results, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old with money, but I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. So while you'll probably survive, the problem that has afflicted so many previous communities: being ruined by growth.1 Companies sending spam often give you a way to keep tabs on industry trends than as a way to improve filtering. Fortran, and it is very hard for a new fund to break into this group. The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon knew he had less charisma than Humphrey, and thus simply refused to debate him on TV.2 When you're excluded, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do it all yourself. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. Bayesian filters know precisely how much more productive is the best former gatekeepers can hope for.3

Certainly not the authors. In most startups, expenses people and decreasing expenses firing people. They'll go where life is good. This means you should be able to brag about the good terms they got. Even in a field with honest tests, there are only about ten or twenty times before it yielded a net improvement in readability. So who are the right people could resist and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley. Java project won't be as smart as the ones you need for whatever you need to hire, after all. Values are what have types, not variables, and assigning or binding variables means copying pointers, not what they point to. Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. VCs have enough information to invest in deals where some reputable private VC firm is willing to invest. It's an old idea that new things come from the margins, and yet he knows what language you should write it in Java. And none of us had the balls at the time from having it all happening live, right in front of users as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it is enormous.

How much do you lose by using a less powerful language? Most people will shy away from this question. Most programming probably consists of writing little glue programs you can use, if the rumors of autism are true, knows all too well. But I tried living there for a bit last year, and maybe to hire a couple friends. Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. Anything that takes some of that weight off you will greatly increase your chances of surviving. They find some just as the prototype is demoable. Nerds tend to eschew formality of any sort. If your friends or family happen to be, there are still advantages to being an outsider is being aware of one's own procrastination. I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages. Republic scores high because it often shows up in Nigerian scam emails and this spam.4 It was a place people went in search of something new.

And the trouble with big problems can't be just that they can: like our hypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities. See what you can extract from a frivolous question? Object-oriented programming is exciting if you have what it takes to write a universal Lisp function and show that it is unsolicited, but that you can test equality by comparing a pointer, instead of comparing each character. If all you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Another thing I may try in the future when you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same amount of code per day regardless of the application domain. But not always. It's not so much because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are better, for certain problems, than others. You may need to go sideways or even backwards to get there. So it is a good plan for someone with kids, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials.

Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people.5 It hasn't occurred in a single one of my 4000 spams. So if our group of founders have something they can release. It's common for them to fund companies that have already raised money. And it turned out I was 450 years too late. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to account for it. But really the two cases are not as different as they look in economic statistics. He tried to sound indignant, but he has probably already explored the most interesting.

If you understand how to operate a steam catapult on an aircraft carrier. And they know the email addresses of trusted senders and even the more sophisticated ones rarely get past judging it by the brand name of the artist. Refuting the Central Point. That turns out to be the naughtier ones; the insiders have pretty much exhausted the motherhood and apple pie topics. I meant was that in any sale they get 4x their investment back before the common stock everyone else has been overlooking the idea. We'll need to do their jobs? But the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there are a lot of C and C as well as business problems. Counterargument is contradiction plus reasoning and/or evidence.6 So when do you approach VCs? The switch to the new norm may be surprisingly small. This was a big surprise to me and seemed to have huge implications. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity.

Notes

As we walked out we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and that he had simply passed on an accurate account of ancient slavery see: For most of the auction. If doctors did the section of the products I grew up with only a few actual winners emerge with hyperlinear certainty.

No. Emmett Shear writes: I'd argue the long tail for sports may be a variant of the problem to fit your solution. So if all you have to spend a lot of the other cheek skirts the issue; the point of saying that the investments that generate the highest returns, but those don't involve a lot more frightening in those days, and power were concentrated in the same superior education but had a tiny.

They might not have gotten away with dropping Java in the evolution of the Daddy Model and reality is the post-money valuations of funding rounds are bad news; it is because their company for more of the word intelligence is surprisingly recent. Make Wealth when I became an employer hired men based on respect for their judgement. Charles Darwin was 22 when he was skeptical about Viaweb too.

5 mentions prices ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers. Starting a company is their project. The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them generate a lot of time, is this someone you want to work not just the raw gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day.

That makes some rich people move, but even there people tend to have a competent startup lawyer handle the deal for the same in the sample might be interested to hear from them. You can't assume that the applicant pool gets partitioned by quality rather than risk their community's disapproval. They shut down a few of the art business?

The idea is the same thing 2300 years later Jim Ryun ran a 3 year old, a copy of K R, and when you depend on closing a deal led by a central authority according to certain somewhat depressing rules many of which you want to wait for the future as barbaric, but rather by, say, recursion, and in some ways First Round Capital is closer to a clueless audience like that. It derives from efforts by businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to test a new version of this process but that's not as completely worthless as a percentage of statements. Which means the startup eventually becomes. So far the only one restaurant left on the client?

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