#the source for these is me i just have a random document full of dynamics and ship things i enjoy because.....i dunno i like keeping track

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

What can I say? They're my favorite.

[maochira]

HOW WAS THE BLUE LOCK MOVIE???????

OKAY SO. HERE'S MY FULL REVIEW ON THE MOVIE

I love the movie very much!!! I watched it twice, first with two friends and then with my dad. Both times we watched the German dubs btw!

Even though I enjoyed every second of it, I do have some criticism.

I wish they would have focused a little less on the matches and a little more on the stuff that happens inbetween. Especially the dynamic between Reo and Zantetsu was so much fun to read in the Episode Nagi manga. In the movie it was just Nagi telling Zantetsu so turn his brain off and do what Reo instructs. They left out such a huge chunk of the conflict between Reo and Zantetsu.

I think the match against Barou's team should have been longer. I loved that part in the manga and it is important to Nagi's awakening. It was too short in the movie.

I get why the match against Team Z was so long and I didn't mind. I enjoyed seeing more from Nagi's POV!

I think the movie should have ended right at the beginning of second selection. They rushed through all the matches and showed nothing of the important developments that happend when Reo's and Nagi's teams are up against each other. It felt so very rushed just to get to the U-20 match in the post-credit scene.

I mean, I get it. They most likely didn't plan a second movie and the manga wasn't that far when the movie was announced over a year ago. But still... I think ending with Nagi's monologue at the start of second selection would have been a better ending.

Also, I understand they went that far to create hype for the second season of the anime. All in all, I understand the decisions that were made but would have prefered a different approach.

Now some thoughts on the German dub!!

The dub of the first season was good but there was a lot of space of improvement. I watched it over 10 times so the voices and ways of the characters talking are engrained in my mind.

For the movie (and possibly season 2) they changed some voice actors. Most important: Nagi

When I saw the trailer and heard his new VA I wasn't impressed and rather disappointed. But now that I've seen the movie? AMAZING!!! Marcel Mann did a great job as Nagi! His previous VA Jerome Weinert was good as well, but his acting made Nagi sound rather annoyed than lazy/tired. I hope Marcel Mann continues voicing Nagi for season 2 because he fits Nagi so well!

Reo's and Zantetsu's VAs remained the same. Ben Küch and Maik Rogge were once again great as them! I love the translations in the dub, especially Reo and Nagi sounded like regular teenagers talking. Stuff like "fuck" and "shit" and just random cursewords during matches, Nagi even said "sheesh" at some point LMFAO. A lot of parts of the dub were also translated better than season 1, for example Raichi actually said "sexy football" rather than "irresistible football" which was a confusing choice in season 1 (especially because they alternated between irresistible and sexy I think???)

Bachira was voiced by Julius Jellinek in the movie and at first I was sceptical because his previous VA Finn Posthumus has kind of grown on me, but Julius Jellinek still impressed me!! I think the voice isn't 100% fitting for Bachira, but the acting was amazing. My favourite part was when he said "My monster tells me no panic on the titanic!" that was hilarious

Barou is now voiced by Fabian Kluckert. Some of you might remember when I posted clips of season 1 German Barou that were.... uhm..... see for yourselves

There are no official sources to my knowledge, but my friend figured out who the German VA is. Sebastian Schneider has only had 2 voice acting roles so far, one of them being Barou (those are the only ones documented on Synchronkartei, at least). He's usually an actor for live-action stuff. Anyways, the switch to Fabian Kluckert was kinda... unimpressive. Forgettable. Fabian Kluckert is a great VA, you can check his other anime roles here. But going from Sebastian Schneider who had questionable acting, but sounded very funny and made German dub Barou sound a little less serious, casting Fabian Kluckert as Barou made him kind of bland in comparison. I hope they find another VA to do Barou for season 2. I wish German Barou to be able to convey a similar energy than his Japanese and English voice actors. So far we only got unserious and kinda bland Barou.

Gagamaru also had another VA and... meh. Christian Zeiger is way too high for Gagamaru. I really hope they get David Brizzi back for season 2 because he was a perfect German Gagamaru. Christian Zeiger is the German voice for Tom Holland and... yeah. Not the greatest casting on Gagamaru.

René Dawn-Claude as Nameoka??? AMAZING. Loved it. That was great. I hope René Dawn-Claude continues voicing in season 2, hopefully as Shidou! Shidou was previously voiced by Luca Kämmer, who didn't fit him too well. They put Luca Kämmer on Otoya in the movie's additional time which was great!! He definitely fits Otoya better than Shidou.

Carlos Fanselow as Karasu, Oliver Szerkus as Yukimiya and Linus Drews as Kurona were great too! They didn't talk much so I don't have a huge opinion on them, but I'd be fine with them continuing their roles in season 2. Linus Drews as Kurona was close to perfect by the way! I couldn't imagine what German VA he would have, but now that I heard Linus Drews on him, I love that.

If anyone wants to know more detailed thoughts on any German Blue Lock VAs or dub decisions, feel free to send me asks about it :]

[sunkissedpages]

We’re Only Kidding Ourselves- Part Eleven || Tom Holland x Reader

A/N: fucking finally lol hope y’all are ready

Prompt: Enemies to lovers au (from @marvelellie‘s 1k writing challenge!!)

Summary: You work as a production assistant for the Spider-Man: Far From Home crew, or rather as Tom Holland’s handler. The two of you don’t get along very well to say the least, but you won’t quit and he can’t fire you so you’re stuck with each other.

Warnings: swearing, angst :)

What I listened to while writing: the Bad Times at the El Royale soundtrack

Word Count: 3.1k

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten

“Speak of the devil,” Haz said as Tom jogged over to the two of you and you couldn’t help the ‘literally’ that slipped out of your mouth automatically. Force of habit.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” he asked you, still breathing heavily from the scene they’d just been shooting.

“Like you give a shit,” Haz scoffed and Tom shot him a look.

“What’s your problem, mate?” Harrison shrugged and pursed his lips, looking off at the water. “Harrison?”

“You don’t actually care one way or the other, mate, don’t pretend like you do. It’s tacky.”

You and Tom shot Harrison identical looks of shock. Sure, everyone knew you and Tom had a bit of a Road Runner/Wile E Coyote dynamic, and no one knew it better than Harrison, but you didn’t think you’d ever heard him snap at Tom before. Especially not in your defense.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Tom asked, having moved past shock and on to annoyance.

“God, you’ve always been kind of an asshole to y/n, and I never said anything, but you’re not even going to acknowledge how shitty it was of you to ditch her in her hotel room alone after you dropped her off last night?”

Tom shot an accusatory glance in your direction. “Who the fuck told you that?”

“No one had to tell me, Tom. You know you could’ve texted me before running off to fuck some random Italian girl that way at least somebody could have taken care of her.”

You watched as Tom’s gaze turned icy and his jaw clenched. “Why d’you assume that’s what I was doing?”

“Come on, it wouldn’t be the first time.” Haz sneered bitterly.

Wouldn’t be the first time? When the fuck had Tom lied about doing something when really he’d gone off to get laid? Had it been under your watch? Had he ever lied to your face and laughed about it behind your back with Harrison? A feeling of dread settled in your stomach at the implication. You shouldn’t care, but you did. Your mind told you that it was completely natural to be upset. Tom had possibly lied to you. But your heart told you that it was what he’d lied to you about that was making your stomach churn.

If either of the boys remembered you were still sitting there, they didn’t make an effort to include you in the conversation.

“Oh, fuck off, Osterfield.” Tom laughed angrily and ran a hand through his hair. “Give me a fucking break.”

“Well if you weren’t screwing some girl, what were you doing?”

As if he was suddenly reminded of your existence Tom looked over at you. You locked eyes with him and you could tell he was torn between lying to his best friend and telling Haz the truth, but you both knew what would happen if he came clean. You pleaded with your eyes for him not to. He needed to say something else. Anything else.

“Fine,” Tom spat. “I was with someone.” Anything but that.

Harrison looked equally surprised and furious. “You’re kidding.”

“What’s the big deal?”

“Are you that dense? Y/n was nearly blacked out and you left her alone!”

“I made sure she got to the hotel safe. That was all anyone asked me to do.”

“I can’t believe you.”

Tom didn’t respond, but he didn’t back down. He just stood in front of Harrison with his hands in his pockets, glaring at him. You wished you could disappear. Or be anywhere but here, but you were frozen to the spot. They weren’t just bickering, they were fighting, and they were fighting because of you and you suddenly wished you could take everything back.

“Who was she?” Harrison asked.

Tom shrugged nonchalantly. “I never got a name.”

“Bullshit.”

He smirked slightly. “Just because she was screaming my name doesn’t mean I returned the favor.” God he was good at this, too good. You’d heard enough.

“Always a class act, Tom,” Haz rolled his eyes.

“Harrison, it’s fine,” you interjected finally, something you clearly should have done ages ago. Harrison tore his eyes away from Tom, his anger softening only slightly when he looked at you. “I’m an adult I can take care of myself.”

“You were really sick, y/n. Something could’ve happened,” he reasoned, now ignoring Tom who was still standing in front of both of you with his arms crossed.

“I only had, what, four or five drinks? I’ve handled much worse, trust me.”

Harrison didn’t look convinced. “You weren’t blacked out?” You shook your head, hoping he’d just drop it. Tom was due back on set any minute and he’d wasted his entire break arguing with his best friend. “What was the last thing I said to you?”

Fuck. “Um,”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“Harrison, mate, drop it,” Tom sighed. “She’s still hungover can we talk about this later?”

All three of your pagers buzzed at the same time, meaning there wasn’t another choice anyway. Tom had to be back on set and you and Harrison had to get back to work.

“Yeah, whatever,” Haz muttered and watched Tom jog back off.

“What the fuck was that about?” you hissed lowly so that none of the other crew members could hear. “Tom’s your boss too, you know.”

“It’s fine,” Harrison brushed you off, not even looking at you now. “It’s not like he’s going to try to fire me.”

Ouch. You couldn’t even pretend that didn’t hurt. “Fuck you.” You stood and brushed off your shorts. “Come talk to me when you’ve decided to stop being an asshole.”

You couldn’t even focus on Tom’s schedule in front of you because you were still so put off by what had just happened. It had left a bitter taste in your mouth. The color coded highlighting jumbled together on the page and you couldn’t remember what any of the neon shades stood for.

The weirdest part of it all was that Tom was the one being nice to you? And Harrison was being a dick? You couldn’t make sense of it and your hangover wasn’t helping.

The remainder of the afternoon passed by in a blur. Somehow you were able to breeze through work without having to give anyone your full attention for the rest of the day. For probably the first time ever, Tom got where he needed to be when he needed to be there without you having to nag him. You half-wished someone had documented it.

You actually wore your headset for once, just to tune everyone out. You didn’t even have it switched to a channel.

The evening presented itself much more serenely than the morning had. You watched on from your spot with the other PAs by the canal as the sun sank below the stone buildings dramatically, painting the sky brilliant hues of orange and pink, eventually giving way to dusty shades of purple as dusk settled along the horizon.

“It’s time for more pills,” Tom leaned over and whispered, ignoring some of the glances from the rest of the table.The long day of filming had ended with a cast and crew dinner. There were only a few scheduled for the abroad legs of filming, but they were all mandatory, not that you could complain. You weren’t one to turn down free food, especially free food from Marvel.

“So you’re my drug dealer now?”

“Lower your voice,” Tom hissed and you couldn’t help but laugh. “Can’t have everyone knowing about my part-time gig.”

He passed two more ibuprofen over to you under the table which you fumbled, nearly dropping them, before actually bringing them to your mouth and swallowing with a sip of your lemonade.

“How are you keeping track of when I should take more painkillers better than I am?” You wondered aloud, looking at Tom intently.

He blinked like the question had caught him off-guard, but shrugged it off. “Easy. You’re hungover.”

You shrugged and let it go, but a little part of you wondered if that was really all. You couldn’t imagine Tom reminding you to tie your fucking shoes even just two days ago much less, remind you to take your medicine for a headache.

You noticed that Harrison had somehow managed to escape the mandatory dinner and you wondered where he could possibly be and how he’d charmed his way out of it. You were reminded, not for the first time, that you were surrounded by children disguised as adults. He couldn’t still be mad at Tom, could he? Was he mad at you? You wished he’d just grow up and get over it.

“So, I heard you had some fun last night, Tom,” Remy piped up from a few seats down with a smirk.

“Who told you that?” Jacob asked in confusion, looking over to Tom who apparently hadn’t told him yet.

“Not revealing my sources,” Remy insisted. “Journalistic integrity and all that.”

Tom chuckled and put his hands up defensively. “Alright, guilty.” He had all of the cast’s attention now. Everyone suddenly wanted to hear all about his night, about his conquest. You didn’t know if you could sit through it again.

“Think you’ll see her again?”

“Nah,” he said casually and stretched his arms out behind him.

You listened to Tom talk and watched as he settled into character. He spoke about sleeping with this woman he’d made up as if it was just another Tuesday night. Somehow it turned into a game of twenty questions and everyone wanted all the details. You wondered why they all cared so much, probably because he was acting like he didn’t. He was so perfect for the role, you weren’t sure why Hollywood kept casting him as these sweet, innocent, characters when he played fuckboy so well. Maybe because it hit a little too close to home. He appeared completely relaxed, and was joking around with the cast who were all eating out of the palm of his hand. The only thing that gave him away were the tips of his ears which you had noticed turned bright red as he talked.

You weren’t sure who asked, but someone at the table prodded Tom about what she was like. He didn’t hesitate to describe how gorgeous this mystery woman was and for a second you forgot it was all an act. If you hadn’t known better you’d say he was purposely going out of his way to describe someone who was everything you weren’t. It made you sink in your chair just a little.

“Sounds a lot like what happened in back in London,” Remy pointed out.

Tom froze for just a second, but long enough for you to catch it. “Yeah I guess so,” he said and kind of laughed it off, but rubbed his neck awkwardly.

Back in London. So Harrison was right, lying and then fucking a random girl was something Tom would totally do. It had been under your watch and apparently everyone knew, but you. Fantastic.

“Oh right, when was that?” you asked and you could swear every head at the table turned towards you. You realized you hadn’t contributed anything to the conversation yet and that most people probably hadn’t even known you were sitting there at all. But you figured the easiest way to get the truth was from someone who didn’t know you were the one who had been lied to.

“I think it was sometime around the filming of the bus scene, right?”

“Yeah,” Tom confirmed softly, with just a hint of edge in his voice.

“Right.” You nodded and pursed your lips tightly, afraid you might say something you didn’t mean if you didn’t.

Remy went on to tell the story, and everyone’s attention was back on him. If anyone noticed Tom’s eyes burning on you, they didn’t say anything. You could feel his gaze on you, but you ignored him, pretending to be wrapped up in Remy’s story, who was still blissfully ignorant to the tension at the table.

You remembered the day the bus scene was shot. They had put Tom and the rest of the cast on one of those double decker buses on one of the hottest days of the summer and then spent the entire day trying to figure out how to rig the camera so that it could swing smoothly between decks. There had been a two and a half hour break, mostly for safety since it was so warm out and they were still having technical difficulties.

Tom had made his way over to where and you Haz were sitting and interrupted your game of cards.

“I’m going to run to a quick PR meeting, kay?” It was more of a statement than a question and he ran a hand through his sweaty hair impatiently as he waited for you to pull up his schedule.

“You don’t have one today,” you said, squinting at your phone screen in the sunlight looking over the spreadsheet again just in case. “Press is months away.”

“It’s a last minute thing, only just got notified about it. They scheduled it because we have the break.”

“Okay,” you shrugged and put your sunglasses back on. “Just be back when we start again, and let security know.”

He ran off without a goodbye or thank you, but that was typical. You only spoke to each other when you had to. Haz dealt a new hand and you forgot about Tom for a while, until you realized Tom had gone and Harrison had stayed. One didn’t go somewhere without the other following closely behind, especially to meetings. That was Harrison’s thing, always had been, and you were glad he already had that down before you showed up because being trapped in a conference room with Tom talking numbers was your literal worst nightmare.

“Do you need to be at that meeting Tom’s at?” you asked as you drew from the deck. He looked up at you with confusion.

“Hm?”

“The PR meeting Tom’s at, shouldn’t you be there?”

“Oh, right. No, it’s confidential Marvel stuff I guess,” Haz explained simply before turning his attention back to the game. You were a little offended that Harrison had obviously known about the meeting beforehand and not bothered to say anything to you, making you look like an idiot, yet again, in front of Tom, but ultimately let is slide.

Tom had come back late, of course, out of costume, hair a mess, and cheeks pink. You couldn’t believe you hadn’t realized it then. That he’d lied to you, used you. You’d filled the hole in his online schedule so that no one would wonder where he was, when in reality, you had no clue where the fuck he had actually been.

Your cheeks burned with embarrassment now at the recollection of it all. How had you been so blind?

“You okay, y/n?” Zendaya asked, putting her hand on yours, pulling you out of the memory.

You looked up and realized food had been put in front of you, who knows how long ago, and you hadn’t even touched it.

“Yeah, sorry, still feeling the last of the hangover.” It wasn’t technically a lie.

Z nodded knowingly. “Eat. It’ll help.”

You forced a smile. “Thanks.”

The conversation at the table had moved past Tom’s one night stand some time ago and everyone was lost in their own smaller groups, passing bread around and trying each other’s drinks. At least you wouldn't have to pretend to be interested in who Tom was fucking anymore.

Everyone clapped when one of the producers, you couldn’t remember his name, ordered a round of champagne for all of you, collected the check for the night and slapped down Marvel’s credit card. It was tradition.

You didn’t hesitate to take a glass when it was offered to you. The bubbles felt good on your throat and the crystal felt cool in your hands.

Tom nudged your shoulder. “Hey, if you’re still not feeling well maybe you should...” his sentence died off as he watched you chug the rest in spite. “You’re gonna regret that.” You shrugged. “Are you not talking to me now?” Another shrug. He sighed and rubbed his mouth with his thumb. “For fucks sake, y/n. You’re impossible.”

Everyone was still mingling and hugging around you, chatting about how the scenes went today and how the party was last night. The room had grown warm and stuffy and you wished you could slip away without being noticed, but you had nowhere to slip off to. Venice was still unfamiliar to you and you had no idea how to get back to the hotel from here.

Eventually, after most of the cast had already gone back to the hotel or off to wherever, Tom asked if you were ready to go and you followed him out of the restaurant and into the cool evening air. The sky was speckled with stars now, and the sidewalk was empty. It felt a little like last night, except you weren’t talking.

Tom led the way through winding, narrow cobblestone alleyways and you trusted he knew where he was going because you were lost in your own thoughts about what Harrison had said about Tom and what had happened back in London. You were still trying to make sense of it all.

“I’m sorry for sleeping with that girl back in London,” Tom said, breaking the silence finally and you stopped in your tracks.

“That's...not what I’m upset about Tom. I don’t care who you’re sleeping with.”

“Sure you don’t,” he scoffed and shook his head in disbelief.

“I’m upset that you lied to me about it,” you continued, aware of how your voice was growing firmer.

“Why is that such a big deal?”

You looked at him, hard. “Fuck off.”

“No, I’m serious!”

“You could have just told me you were going to see someone, but you lied to me. You had Haz lie to me, you let me believe it for months!”

“Right, like you haven’t lied to me before. And how is London any different from what I’m doing here?”

“It’s not the same thing!” you cried.

“How so?”

“You’re lying to your friends. I am your handler. Something happens to you, it’s on me. Don’t you get that?!”

“Yeah, I am lying to my friends. My best friend. And I’m lying to him, to all of them for you, y/n. It’s your ass on the line, not mine.”

You took a step closer to him. “Are you fucking threatening me?”

Tom took a step forward in turn. “Should I be?”

You wanted to scream. “You’re unbelievable, Tom! God, I can’t believe I ever took this job, I can’t believe I haven’t fucking quit yet, I can’t believe I’m halfway around the fucking world with you of all people-” then suddenly, out of nowhere, Tom leaned forward and pressed his lips to yours, effectively cutting you off.

ok wow finally in part eleven they fucking kiss lol also remy stans wherever u are I added him in for y’all :) anyway lmk what u think, I always appreciate feedback!

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[trvepeak-blog]

[Grammy Special] Mix Analysis #6 “That’s What I Like” by Bruno Mars

FOREWORD

This is part one of my Grammy Special where I will do a mix analysis of track from a record awarded for „Best Engineered Album“. We will start in 2018, going back all the way to 2010. Here’s the full list:

2018 - “24k Magic” by Bruno Mars 2017 - “Blackstar” by David Bowie 2016 - “Sound & Color” by Alabama Shakes 2015 - “Morning Phase” by Beck 2014 - “Random Access Memories” by Daft Punk 2013 - “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile 2012 - “Paper Airplane” by Alison Krauss & Union Station 2011 - “Battle Studies” by John Mayer 2010 - “Ellipse” by Imogen Heap

Every now and then I will refer to “Recommendations for Hi-Resolution Music Production” by the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Grammys cause there are a few discrepancies between this document and the awarded recording. After all the name suggests that only flawless audio recordings can win in this category but in my personal opinion only one of ten records deserves this trophy.

I will also provide more information and pictures from now on, as I felt that previous articles were lacking depth and justing scratching the surface. Therefore you will also find specific information about release date, duration, a music video (if available), record label as well as more pictures.

In this article I will analyze the mix of Bruno Mars’ „That’s What I Like“ off of his album „24k Magic“. Among „Best Engineered Album“ it also won in the categories “Record Of The Year”, “Album Of The Year”, “Song Of The Year”, “Best R&B Performance”, “Best R&B Song” and “Best R&B Album”.

The difference between „Album Of The Year“ and „Record Of The Year“ wasn’t very clear to me to begin with but after a closer look I found out that the latter is about a single song. Then again, why is there a category called „Song Of The Year“? Different category, same content, right…? This won’t be last contradiction I discovered during my research.

HARD FACTS

Record Label: Atlantic Records

Year of Release: 2016

Duration: 03 m 27 s

PSR: ~ 11.0 (lowest) ~ 8.0 (highest)

Average Loudness: -9.1 LKFS

Inter-Sample Peaks: 1.3 dBTP (left) 0.8 dBTP (right)

Digital Peak: -0.0 dBFS (left) -0.0 dBFS (right)

Mixing Engineer:  Serban Ghenea at MixStar Studios

Mastering Engineer: Tom Coyne at Sterling Sound

For measuring the PLR, Average Loudness and Inter-Sample Peaks I used MasterCheck Pro by british company Nugen Audio. To keep it as neutral and simple as possible, I chose the „Optimal Master - Codec Only“ preset. For measuring the Digital Peak Level I used the 4U Meter, Fader & MS-Pan Plug-In by german company HOFA. The DAW used is Logic Pro X. The source material is 16 Bit and 44,1 kHz. If you want to now what all those fancy words mean, have a look at this article.

Furthermore I recommend reading and / or downloading the “Recommendations for Hi-Resolution Music Production” released in 2017 by the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Grammys. Which is not only a very helpful and well structured guideline for modern audio production but also a reference I will mention a few times.

As you can tell by the waveform, Sterling Sound pushed the loudness of the audio material quite a bit without sacrificing to much of the dynamic and transients. If you would zoom in you could see that actually a lot of it is still intact. It also has that certain „snap“ you can only hear when the signal is not completely squashed and over-compressed. Yet the average loudness is at -9.1 LKFS which I would consider a „hot“ master. If this would be played back through Spotify or YouTube the overall loudness would be lowered by -4.9 LU to match their peak at -14.0 LKFS, which is a shame cause this brilliant sounding mix / master doesn’t need to be this loud.

There are no Digital Peaks occurring but Inter-Sample Peaks reach up to 1.3 dbTP! And we’re talking about a record that was awarded „Best Engineered Album“ and mastered at one of the world’s most renowned Studios. It’s even more baffling considering the fact that page 24 of “Recommendations for Hi-Resolution Music Production” tells us how to avoid errors, clipping, and distortion during internal digital signal processing.

This raises the question if it’s really about a flawless, stellar sounding record from a technical point of view or actually about rewarding the most popular artist for being the most popular artist. Vice versa this would create a lot more attention for the Grammys, so both sides win, am I right?

Back to the hard facts: The bass frequencies are pushed pretty good but without sounding boomy, it’s more like a nice, warm blanket of bass covering your ear drums. There’s a small but very wide dip in the mid frequency range and the high end has been boosted very gentle. It doesn’t sound harsh or bright, more like silk. The compression makes everything sound very thick and in your face but therefore sacrificing some dynamic. The music in general is very percussive, even melodic instruments like the synthesizers are emphasizing the drums, which makes every song on „24k Magic“ danceable! The overall sound is very clean (not steril), clear, punchy and is just what you would expect from a Bruno Mars record.

PERSONAL IMPRESSION

If you didn’t grow up in the 90s (unlike me) or don’t like the music coming from that era, you’re probably not gonna like this record. If one of those two things apply to you, you’re in for a great 34 minute trip through nostalgia land! Clearly inspired by the sound of Michael Jackson’s „Dangerous“, Bruno Mars also pays tribute to his funk roots with his own impersonation of James Brown in „Perm“. The icing of the cake are the best sounds of 80s synthesizers and vocoders you can imagine.

Thematically „24k Magic“ is also using classic structures of this era: Starting with the uplifting party / happy songs, slowing down with some ballads worshipping women, gaining some tempo again with faster tracks and closing the whole thing with a ballad. This record is full of great harmonies and hook lines that’ll be stuck in your head for days! Besides „Best Engineered Album“, every other Grammy is well deserved in my opinion.

CONCLUSION

„24k Magic“ is a great album celebrating the sound of the 90s with huge influences coming from the 80s and adds a little funk of the 60s / 70s here and there. Regarding sound it’s more of a contemporary record, especially when it comes to unnecessary loudness and compression (which can be heard sometimes). Would be interesting to know if this was a conscious decision by Tom Coyne or if Atlantic Records and / or Bruno Mars pushed him to increase loudness.

[shguaguiafd]

Where can I find the FAQ (frequently asked questions) in my language? See the "Other languages:" box at the top of this page and select your language. If your language does not appear, it means the page has not yet been translated into that language. To set up a language fallback chain so Wikidata will automatically display content to you in an alternative when it is not available in your primary language, see Help:Navigating Wikidata/User Options. How can I change my language settings? Is it possible to edit data in more than one language? There are a few options for setting your language preferences on Wikidata but the Babel extension is the best option for multilingual users who will be contributing to Wikidata. The extension allows users to view and easily add information to item page fields (specifically, labels, descriptions, and aliases) in multiple languages. You can activate the Babel extension by adding the #babel template to your user page—please see Help:Navigating Wikidata/User Options for full details.

Terminology[edit] What's the difference between statements, properties, and qualifiers? Where can I find more information on Wikidata terminology? The Glossary is a good place to start. The Help pages also provide introductory content on the important concepts of Wikidata. What are data types? Which ones are currently supported in Wikidata? Data types refer to the types of data values which can be added to a property in a statement. The data type of a given property therefore restricts what can be added as its value. For example, only text can be added as a value for the property "color", only numbers can be added for the property "population," and only file formats can be added for the property "Commons media." For a list of data types currently supported by Wikidata, see Special:ListDatatypes. Other types are also in development and will be available soon. For more information, see Help:Properties. What is an "interwiki conflict"? What can I do about it? An interwiki conflict occurs when two or more items exist for one concept or that correspond to the same page on a Wikimedia site, for example, a Wikipedia article. Please submit a report at Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts. See also Help:Merge. Contributing[edit] I'm new here. What is there for me to do and how can I help? Welcome! We're very happy to have you here! There are many opportunities for contributing to Wikidata, from improving and translating documentation to planning and proposing new properties in support of data. If you're looking for ways to get involved, we recommend checking out Wikidata:Contribute for an overview of the different roles and activities available to users (in addition to editing data). What should I edit? If you know how to edit and want a small task to get you started, click here to improve a random item (this link is also always available from the left sidebar menu link "Random item"). User:Magnus Manske has also developed the Wikidata Game, a dynamic interface that allows users to improve Wikidata one statement at a time. You could also work on a specific item in order to get it to "showcase item" status. Showcase items are items that fully represent what Wikidata is capable of by displaying in full detail the data that can be stored on Wikidata. A showcase item should have at least 10 statements, as well as other attributes. For more information, see Wikidata:Showcase items. Where can I go for help? Your first stop should be the Help portal where you'll find all of the documentation related to using and editing Wikidata. If you're still stuck, post a message on Project Chat. What is a WikiProject? WikiProjects on Wikidata are groups of users who work together to improve the content and coverage for a specific topic area. This work varies and can include discussion and proposal of new properties to support the topic area, development of guidelines for the appropriate use of properties, outreach to related projects and linked datasets to be included in Wikidata, creation of resources for supporting data editors (e.g. reliable sources of information for the topic), and more. Any user can join a WikiProject or start their own. For a list of current WikiProjects, please see here. Editing[edit] I can't see a main "edit" button for item or property pages. Where is it? Why can't I view the wiki markup source for all pages? While Wikidata is built on the MediaWiki wiki package, it also uses the Wikibase software which allows for a special type of editing just for structured data. In Wikidata, the main namespace and property namespace are reserved for editing data. For pages in these namespaces, you can only edit the respective parts of an item or a property through the various edit links. It's also not possible to view the wiki markup for these pages. For more information on editing items and properties, see Help:Items and Help:Properties. How do I create a new page? How about a new item? Pages outside the main and property namespaces are created in the same way as they are on other Wikimedia sites. To create a new item, use the Special:NewItem page (you can also access it by clicking "Create a new item" in the left menu). For more detailed instructions on creating items, see Help:Items. For more information on editing a wiki, see Help:Navigating Wikidata. Properties can only be created by property creators and administrators. To propose a new property, see Wikidata:Property proposal. I prefer an edit summary over a talk page for explaining minor changes. Could you please activate edit summaries? Sorry, edit summaries are not available for edits on item and property pages by GUI. However, you can enter an edit summary when reverting or undoing an edit (whether it is your own work or someone else's). To undo an edit click on the "View History" tab, select the revision you would like to change, and click undo. I've accidentally created an item, and now I need it deleted. Where can I turn for help? Try Wikidata:Requests for deletions. There's also a gadget you can enable in your preferences called "RequestDeletion" that can help with this process. If another item exists for the one you've created and now want to delete, see also Help:Merge. How do I merge two items? See Help:Merge for detailed instructions. There's also a gadget you can enable in your preferences called "Merge" that can help with this process. How do I delete wrong sitelinks from an item? To delete a sitelink from an item, click the [edit] button, select the trash icon next to the sitelink and save the changes. After this is done, please add the deleted sitelink to the correct item or make a new item for it if one doesn't yet exist. There's also a gadget you can enable in your preferences called "Move" which that can help with this process. In cases where your changes are not obvious or straightforward, you can leave a note on the talk pages of the items. For more information, see Help:Merge and Help:Sitelinks. What are sources? How do I use them? In Wikidata, references are used to point to specific sources (i.e. sources of information) that back up the data provided in a statement. Examples of sources include books, scientific publications, and newspaper articles. To learn about adding references to statement, see Help:Sources. There is an item that already has a Wikipedia sitelink in language X. I want to add a second sitelink to the item for another Wikipedia article in language X that fits as well but it won't let me. What should I do? Wikidata allows only one sitelink per item per language. You will see an error message when attempting to add a new sitelink to a item page if that link has already been added to another item page. For more information, see Help:Sitelinks. I tried to add a sitelink to an item, but when I tried to save it I received an error message. What should I do? Wikidata allows one sitelink per item per language. If you receive an error message but believe the item you are editing is the most appropriate one for the sitelink, you may need to merge two items. Please consult Help:Merge or visit Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts to report a conflict. How do I add a sitelink to an item for a section within a larger page, e.g. en:Han Dynasty#Eastern Han on Wikipedia? Wikidata sitelinks do not support anchors (links to a specific section of a page). It is, however, possible to maintain sitelinks for anchors outside of Wikidata and locally on Wikimedia sites using inline links. For information, see Help:Sitelinks. If a redirect exists pointing to the anchor in question you use local links to point to the redirect page instead of the anchor in the target page. If no such redirect exists, if the item in question is common enough to warrant a redirect you may consider creating one for this purpose. How do I make two pages in language A link to one page in language B, e.g. en:Cirth and en:Tengwar to de:Tengwar und Certar? Wikidata can only link on a one-to-one basis so these situations should be handled in the same way as anchor links (see above question). If language A allows inline links, you can add a direct inline link for the translation to the language A pages. Even better, if language A allows local links, you can use redirects in language B to indirectly point to the desired target page. However, some languages have disabled interlinks; in such cases, it will not be possible to link to translations. How do I find properties available to use in Wikidata? How will I know what property to use while editing Wikidata? Please check Wikidata:List of properties for a community-maintained list of properties. When searching for properties with the site's main search bar, please prefix your search term(s) with "P:" to ensure you are looking in the property namespace. If you are unsure whether the property you are using is most appropriate for a statement, consult the property's discussion page or ask on Wikidata:Project chat. If you are fairly new to editing data, you might also want to check out some showcase items. Showcase items are items that fully represent what Wikidata is capable of by displaying in full detail the data that can be stored on Wikidata. They can serve as valuable examples of what properties to use on different types of items. Please see Wikidata:Showcase items for more information and examples. According to the history of an item I changed, the number of bytes went up or down significantly, even though I only made a minor change. Why did this happen? The history shows the number of bytes changed in the internal data structure for the item in the database. phab:T41189 has been filed for this. Navigating the site[edit] I don't understand the URL names. Q142? P1082? What do the letters and numbers mean? All pages in the main and property namespaces end with a unique identifier in either the format Q### or P###. These identifiers represent Wikidata items and properties, respectively—for example, Q142 is for the item on France and P1082 is for the population property. The numbers in identifiers are assigned in the order the items and properties were created in Wikidata. By using identifier codes, Wikidata is able to support multilingual data entry without favouring any one language. How do searches work? The two main search options are Special:Search and Special:ItemByTitle. The first is the widest possible search across languages and namespaces. The second searches the main namespace only for an item in Wikidata in a selected language whose title is exactly equal to value entered. Please try both options to ensure you find an existing item. For more information, see Help:Navigating Wikidata. What is Wikidata's main namespace for? The main namespace on Wikidata is reserved for items only. Pages in this namespace are known as item pages and are titled according to their unique identifiers (Q###). For more information on Wikidata namespaces, see Help:Namespaces. Other Wikimedia sites[edit] How can I use data from Wikidata in my Wikimedia project? If Wikidata has been integrated with your wiki, you can access its data by using a parser function or a Lua module. Templates can be built to ease the access to data for all contributors. See How to use data on Wikimedia projects. When will Wikidata be integrated with Old Wikisource/Wiktionary? There is currently no progress towards integration with most Wiktionaries, so no date can be offered. The challenges of Wiktionary integration have hit major snags, in part because the data structure of the Wiktionaries does not match that used by Wikidata. An introduction of existing sister project links into all local wikis is planned. The ticket for it is phabricator:T103102. There is no timeline for it yet. See our weekly summaries for status updates (they are also sent out to the Wikidata-l mailing list). Will Wikipedia featured articles, good articles and other quality pages be denoted somehow on Wikidata? Several badges are available, see Special:SetSiteLink. If you want to add a new badge not listed there, you can contact the development team. How can I link to Wikidata from Wikipedias or other Wikimedia sites? As per Meta-Wiki, add [[d:Q39715]] or [[d:Special:ItemByTitle/enwiki/Lighthouse]] to the wikitext of the Wikimedia site page. I have just added a sitelink to an item for a new page on another Wikimedia site. How long will it take to see the sitelinks appear there? Usually not more than a few minutes. You can see sitelinks immediately by purging the cache on the corresponding Wikimedia site page (you can do this by adding ?action=purge at the end of its URL). For more information on adding sitelinks, see Help:Sitelinks. Wikipedia and Wikidata[edit] How Wikidata integrates with Wikipedia, as the most high-profile project in the Wikimedia movement, brings up some common questions and concerns.

How is Wikidata being used on Wikipedia? Wikidata is used for a number of functions on Wikipedia already. Some of these are somewhat opaque to the user, and some are more readily seen. A more complete breakdown can be found at Wikidata:Wikidata in Wikimedia projects. Since 2013, all interlanguage links have been handled by Wikidata. The list of identifiers in the "Authority Control" box at the bottom of many articles in Wikipedia editions are also drawn from Wikidata. A number of Wikipedia language editions also now make extensive use of Wikidata-driven infoboxes. In 2017, Interlingua Wikipedia had 100% of its articles using infoboxes and none contained any local data, and Catalan Wikipedia reported that more than 300,000 of its 600,000 articles (or about 58%) of their articles used infoboxes derived from Wikidata. French Wikipedia also has tens of thousands of infoboxes created from Wikidata. However, interestingly, English Wikipedia has not adopted Wikidata-driven infoboxes in any large scale as the community debates how much to use them. How does Wikidata handle vandalism? Wikidata tends to have a much lower level of vandalism than Wikipedia, largely because it is relatively new and lower profile. However, since it is being used more in information boxes and authority control records, it may face more challenges. (More details on vandal fighting needed here.) Does Wikidata have a Biography of Living Persons policy (BLP)? Wikidata does not currently have a formal biography of living persons, though there have been many discussion and an RFC pertaining to this. See previous debate about verifiability and living persons for more context: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Verifiability and living persons.

[politicalfilth-blog]

WTH Did The Corporatocracy Hide From You Last Week?

We Are Change

Welcome back beautiful and amazing, spiritually inclined, in the know human beings. Welcome to the WeAreChange Sunday recap, where we give you all the important news that happened this week. News that you should know about but the full truth behind it is probably being denied to you in some way by the US mainstream media corporatocracy.

Today is October 8th, 2017 and in this video, we are going to be talking about how YouTube is destroying the dreams of hard-working, independent people in exchange for more corporatocracy. We discuss a major politically connected media mogul that violates people sexually and more news about the war machine. Sorry, excuse me, I meant US foreign policy in Syria and North Korea. We’re also going to get into the Catalan Independence Day, which is supposed to happen tomorrow.

Also available on video on DTube and YouTube.

Two days ago I made a video discussing YouTube’s changes they are doing to their algorithms. Changes that are designed to prevent people from watching videos about supposed conspiracy theories regarding the Las Vegas shooting.

I told you guys this algorithm change is not just going to affect the crazy fringe people who create theories out of nowhere but will affect everyone who refuses to bow down and give fellatio to the corporate overlords.

That is precisely what is happening as even Philip DeFranco one of the most prominent YouTubers tweeted “Dear YouTube, Your response is bullshit. It’s not true. People are tired of this. Be better.”

This tweet was in response to another YouTuber who made a video specifically to raise Adsense money for the victims of the shooting. His video was promptly demonetized by YouTube. YouTube responded saying “We love what you’re doing to help, but no matter the intent, our policy is not to run ads on videos about tragedies.” This is an outright lie as Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC conglomerate news organization has videos of him talking about the mass shooting in Las Vegas and it is still monetized. Even popular, toe the line YouTubers who are not part of the corporate conglomerate are being affected.

Everyone should understand unless you’re living under a rock that YouTube has now replaced the “You” with the Ministry of Truth. All brought to you by the mega-corporations. They’re going even further with their censorship by removing private playlists that people made. Entirely deleting them when they are a list of lost Vegas shooting videos that question the event. We’ve also been hit by this as the last four videos I did have all been demonetized. I know this sucks it needs to be called out so that will something change. You can expect more finagling of our independent media organization on this platform. This is why we have been moving to Bitchute and DTube.

We need to rely on you the viewer through https://wearechange.org/donateto keep us independently running either through PayPal, snail mail, or Bitcoin. Honestly, if it weren’t for random people being generous and deciding to give us five dollars a month this independent media organization would not exist. You guys are more critical than ever as we try to navigate and continue to do our job as best as we can through the minefield of censorship brought on by the mainstream media corporate overlords.

In other mass media big money shocking horrible corporate news, we are learning about Harvey Weinstein. He is a major media mogul who is well politically connected. He is putting the Obamas and Clintons in a tough spot. This week we learned that Harvey who is one of Hollywood’s most prominent producers and executives has sexually harassed abused and controlled women for the past three decades.

Due to his vast wealth and power, he was able to keep this a secret for over 30 years with non-disclosure agreements and contracts. He would pay off his victims. All to cover up the horrible things he did.

This was a person who not only lived next door to Hillary Clinton, but she used this man, his connections and even his house for private fundraisers. Fundraisers with A-list Hollywood celebrities.

This is a man that visited Obama in the White House over 13 times.

Michelle Obama publicly declared him as a wonderful human being and Obama’s daughter even personally worked for this monster.

Mr. Weinstein has hired a very powerful legal team to stop the New York Times from releasing this information to the public. This prompted the New York Times to ask for the release of the NDA’s, the legal binding document that prevents his victims from speaking out against him in a court of law. This man is so powerful we’re not even finding out the full extent of his criminal behavior.

There are however disturbing details coming out like the fact that he once trapped a woman in the hallway of a restaurant that was closed to the public. He masturbated in front of her until he ejaculated. Sadly a lot of the victims are fearful of the power that Weinstein wields in media and have remained silent. This guy is a monster. The case gets even worse as we’re finding out that he wrote up ads to protect other media figures who were sexual predators and also called for their release.

He has responded with a letter against these “accusations” in which this man proved he has no semblance of reality by plugging his movie. A movie that he’s going to be making against Donald Trump which was supposed to include Michael Moore. He is trying to shift the blame to the NRA saying that he’s going to give them his full attention. He says he will do his best to make sure that the head of the NRA will “enjoy his retirement party.” He went on to pretend to quote Jay-Z for some reason.

If there’s anything we could learn from this case, it would be understanding just how much these people can do without being arrested. All because of their connections and money. If we had a fair justice system, they would, of course, focus on the elite criminality in our society. The more powerful an individual becomes, the more likelihood there is for abuse.

Moving forward in more abuse of power news; we have US President Donald Trump who days ago along with the top brass of the US military behind him gave us these ominous comments:

Trump: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. We have the worlds great military people in this room.” … Reporter: “What storm Mr. President?” Trump: “You’ll find out.”

Donald Trump has been tight-lipped after making those comments. People are speculating it could be in regards to the Iran nuclear deal in which a decision is coming soon. Other people are thinking it’s a hint at war with North Korea. Donald Trump took to his Twitter yesterday and said “Sorry, but only one thing will work!” after talking about the failed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and North Korea.

When asked recently 1746 random Americans were polled and most can’t even find North Korea on the world map. 40% of Americans support the unilateral bombing of North Korea while 36% of Americans can’t find it. I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think additional entanglements overseas “will make America great again” or “put America first.” Let me know what you think in the comments.

This weeks news gets worse as we’re just finding out that a fourth US soldier was just killed in Africa, in the country of Niger after another deadly ambush on US troops. Which makes me ask the question, why the hell are US troops fighting in Niger? This is a serious question, “What is the “official” reason that they are in Niger?” If you would like a video about this with more in-depth research, let me know in the comments.

In other putting our troops into harm’s way for who knows what news; we found out four days ago that the U.S. is going to be sending more than 3,000 US troops to Afghanistan. Apparently to continue the same mission that was started by George W. Bush 16 years ago which has failed over and over and over again.

Even though we’ve had a significant military presence in Afghanistan somehow, they have managed to greatly expand the world’s production of opium while indebting this country and causing the loss of service men and women of this country.

I was telling you that more war was coming, that this was going to happen and I got flack for calling it out. Other people choose to believe “other alternative media” sources. They were siding with Trump believing that it’s a drawdown. In reality, it’s not.

This week in spread more democracy and freedom all over the world; the US State Department has just approved a fifteen billion dollar sale of advanced THAAD missile defense systems to Saudi Arabia.

The same country that just this week beheaded three more people. The same country that the United States sided with and failed to condemn when it comes to the death penalty for gay people.

What else do you need to know about U.S. foreign policy other than that we are selling the most advanced military technology to a despotic country? A country that also financed and supported the rise of al-Nusra, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic terrorist groups all over the world.

We also found out that a majority of ISIS are surrendering in mass right now in Iraq. Over a thousand fighters have turned themselves into the authorities, and they will face repercussions for their horrible actions.

In case you didn’t know they were supported by Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. Russia officially declared by accusing the United States of helping ISIS inside of Syria.

In other very shocking geopolitical news, we’re also discovering that Russia and Saudi Arabia have announced a billion dollar energy military deal. This deal will also grant Saudi Arabia Russia’s advanced military technology allowing them to buy the Russian S400 surface-to-air missile system.

This creates a new Middle East dynamic and appears to reverse Russia’s foreign policy entirely.

This is a major geopolitical shift on the world stage which I can only understand as a strategic move by Russia in trying to court Saudi Arabia. The purpose of which is to advance the de-dollarization against the U.S. Petrodollar. A fight that Russia and China have been having against the United States. It is an economic war that hinges on Saudi Arabia’s compliance with the United States. It relies on Saudi Arabia trading oil in US dollars.

That’s just my personal opinion as Russia has been supporting and backing many countries around the world who are making geopolitical, economic moves against the United States. I might be wrong but if I am let me know in the comments section.

In further confusing news around the world, we have an unusual situation developing in Barcelona. After the recent vote took place for independence by the Catalan people there was widespread violence from the Spanish police against voters. People are now asking the question what’s going to happen after they voted for independence. Four days ago Catalan leaders said that after the vote they would declare independence from Spain.

In the wake of the independence vote, the Spanish Constitutional Court ordered the suspension of the Catalan Parliament on Monday. The purpose of this is to prevent the declaration of independence.

European press agencies are saying that Spanish commandos have been deployed in Catalan and are ready to seize key infrastructure if Catalonia declares independence. As I report this, there are protests inside of Barcelona with people calling for Catalan to stay with Spain with some protest members openly performing the fascist salute. Ultimately the situation is still very muddled and tense. We will be following it closely right here.

That is the news for this week. Sorry, I wish I could be more optimistic, but that’s what’s what’s happening around the world. The truth is not always pleasant, but I would prefer to be awake than asleep. If you enjoyed this program, please share it with your friends and family members. Don’t forget to support us on https://wearechange.org/donate. If you don’t, no one else will. Thank you again so much. I love you guys.

The post WTH Did The Corporatocracy Hide From You Last Week? appeared first on We Are Change.

from We Are Change https://wearechange.org/wth-corporatocracy-hide-last-week/

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Unknowable Ray Johnson

Three of Ray Johnson’s signature bunny drawings bearing the names of modern artists, including Johnson himself (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

An enigma must protect its secrets.

So it was that, even to those who knew him, the artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was something of a cipher. When he killed himself in January 1995, at the age of 67, by jumping off a bridge in the small town of Sag Harbor, at the eastern end of Long Island, the air of mystery that had surrounded his personality, life, and art thickened.

As Andrew Moore and John Walter make clear in their 2002 documentary film about Johnson’s life and accomplishments, How to Draw a Bunny, most of his friends and associates were stunned by the news that he had committed suicide. Although it certainly shook them up, they also recognized that very few among them had ever managed to cross a certain, well-maintained borderline of intimacy with the simultaneously engaged and coolly detached art-maker.

Soon thereafter, as details from a police investigation and other sources emerged, they also began to suspect that the seemingly ubiquitous but still unknowable Johnson had carefully staged his death in a manner that appeared to have made it the culminating, cleverest, most quizzical episode in a long and hard-to-classify artistic career. If, while he was alive, Ray Johnson had perfected his performance of the role of “Ray Johnson,” then why couldn’t — or wouldn’t — he have painstakingly stage-managed the final act of his life’s what-you-see-is-not-necessarily-what-you-get spectacle?

Cover of Matthew Marks Gallery’s new book about Ray Johnson, containing an essay by Brad Gooch (photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery)

Lately, more than two decades since Johnson’s death, both the scholarship and the curatorial activity plumbing his vast, multifaceted oeuvre have gathered considerable momentum. Now, admirers of his innovative, mixed-media “paintings,” collages, and mail art (genres that, in his work, often overlapped) may find some recent Johnson-focused news especially exciting.

Matthew Marks Gallery, in New York’s Chelsea district, for example, just presented Ray Johnson, a summertime mini-retrospective of the artist’s career. To accompany it, the gallery published Ray Johnson, an illustrated volume that documented that presentation and also serves as a stand-alone, compact introduction to the artist’s creative trajectory, aesthetic outlook, and life story. It features an insightful essay by the poet and author Brad Gooch, who is well known for his 1993 biography of the American poet and curator Frank O’Hara.

In a recent telephone interview, Gooch, who is now working on a biography of the artist Keith Haring, observed, “There was nothing somber about Ray Johnson’s art. It was clever, playful — sort of deceptively conceptual. He was interested in the work of the artist Joseph Cornell, who, like him, also employed collage and assemblage techniques. Considering Ray’s use of language in his work and the idiosyncratic, unclassifiable nature of his art, it might make more sense to think about it relation to the spirit of the New York School of poetry.”

Gooch was referring to the group of American poets of the 1960s that included, among others, O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and the recently deceased John Ashbery. Collectively, their writings were influenced by surrealist and abstract-expressionist art, and other modernist tendencies. Gooch added, “In Ray’s works you find a mix of the queer-campy, the jokey, the knowledgeable; they’re not pretentious but they have a considerable aura. There’s an intimate quality to his work.”

Ray Johnson, “Calm Center” (circa 1949-51), oil on board in artist-made frame, 28 5/8 x 28 5/8 x 3/4 inches (photo courtesy of Ray Johnson Estate and David Zwirner)

Some of those characteristics of Johnson’s collage- and drawing-based art are in evidence in the selection of his works featured in Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray, the inaugural group exhibition now on view at David Zwirner’s latest New York venue — his third — which has just opened in an elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

It is being presented in cooperation with Adler Beatty, a new art advisory company founded by Frances Beatty and her son, Alexander Adler. Beatty, the longtime head of Ray Johnson’s estate, had also focused on the artist’s oeuvre for many years in her previous work for Richard L. Feigen & Co., the gallery that, until recently, had been housed in the new quarters shared by her firm and Zwirner’s just-opened outpost.

This 26-piece survey, along with archival photos and artists’ letters, examines works made by Josef Albers and Anni Albers, as well as those of the California-born, Japanese-American Ruth Asawa and of Johnson, a prodigiously talented only child who was born and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, where he began his formal artistic training at a local technical high school.

Ray Johnson working on an unidentified painting with his work “Calm Center” on the wall behind him, circa 1948-52 (photographer unknown, photo courtesy of Ray Johnson Estate and David Zwirner)

Then, in 1945, young Ray made his way to Black Mountain College, in western North Carolina, where the Alberses had joined the faculty in 1933; Asawa would arrive there in 1946. Zwirner’s uptown exhibition focuses on the creative and personal dialogues that developed between the Alberses, as artist-instructors, and their younger, student colleagues, Asawa and Johnson.

On display are works created by all four artists while at Black Mountain and in the years that followed. While there, Johnson fell in with such peers as the sculptor Richard Lippold (1915-2002) and the avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992), among others who would later earn places in American modernism’s canon.

In Johnson’s “Calm Center” (circa 1949-51, oil on board in an artist-made frame), checkerboard squares are filled with vertical, horizontal, or diagonal multicolored stripes, or with concentric rectangles, or with tiny, multicolored checkerboards themselves. The center square is black, making it, in comparison with its immediate neighbors, ostensibly empty — or immeasurably full in its own color-saturated, Zen-void-opposite way. The composition offers something of a peculiar nod to the rectilinear discipline of Josef Albers’ signature painting series, “Homage to the Square” (1950-1976).

Ray Johnson, “Untitled (Moticos with Red Ground)” (1958), collage on cardboard panel, 11 1/8 x 7 1/2 inches (photo courtesy of Ray Johnson Estate and David Zwirner)

So does Johnson’s “Untitled (Moticos with Red Ground)” (1958, collage on cardboard panel), a composition whose smooth, solid, blood-red top portion contrasts with its lower section, in which the artist has laid down horizontal strips of red-painted pages from newspapers or magazines to create a surface that is textured and dynamic. A square cut out of the center of the lower area exposes the collage’s white cardboard support and calls attention to its subtle, sculptural character.

(Johnson coined the word “moticos” in 1955 — it’s an anagram of “osmotic” — to refer to the small collage panels he produced from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s, or to texts he wrote during that period. His definition could be expansive, too. He once suggested, almost as if describing some kind of epiphany, that a view of a passing train might be seen as, or might reveal, a motico, and that, in effect, moticos could be found everywhere. He wrote, “I wish someone were here to point one out to me, because I know they exist.”)

Elsewhere in the Zwirner exhibition, in such vibrant collages (once owned by Ruth Asawa) as “Untitled (Motico, William D. Bayles),” “Untitled (Motico, Cowboy Two),” and “Untitled (Motico, Odiferous Wood)” (all dated 1955, all mixed-media works), Johnson’s wit and inventiveness find expression in simple, limited palettes; the animating play of geometric and random cut-paper forms against plain white grounds; and photographic elements that both stand out from and blend into the puzzle-like images.

Following his period at Black Mountain, where he had studied color and design with Josef Albers, painting with Robert Motherwell, and advertising art with Paul Rand, among other subjects, Johnson moved with Richard Lippold to New York in 1949. Their relationship, which would last several years, had become what Lippold, in How to Draw a Bunny, described as “intimate” and “loving.”

In time, Johnson would become friendly with Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, and other ground-breaking artists of the 1950s and 1960s; more recently, some curators and art historians have examined the apparent influence Johnson had on his colleagues, what with his pioneering use of showbiz-star photos and other pop-culture source material, including Lucky Strike cigarette logos, as well as everyday images or symbols. His imagination and influence are also manifest in his voracious remixing of just about any kind of paper or found object — dry cleaners’ shirt cardboards here, what looks like a wooden stool leg there, not to mention canceled postage stamps and a magazine photo of a serving of pollock filets (in honor of Jackson Pollock).

Ray Johnson, “14 Squares” (circa 1956), collage on cardboard panel, 20 1/4 x 15 inches (photo courtesy of Ray Johnson Estate and David Zwirner)

In retrospect, many of these exercises in borrowing and reassigning meaning to his repurposed materials — sometimes appearing as essays in ambiguity and often incorporating visual or verbal puns — may be seen as textbook examples of postmodernist appropriationist and recontextualizing gestures, long before similar self-conscious pomo “strategies” had a name.

Recently, I also learned that Johnson may be getting the monographic study his life and work have long deserved. Ellen Levy, the author of Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2011) and currently a visiting associate professor in Pratt Institute’s humanities and media studies department, is now working on a first-ever, critical biography of Johnson.

Last week Levy spoke with me about her research-in-progress. She observed, “In 1965, a New York Times writer dubbed Johnson ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist,’ and the sobriquet stuck. But Johnson’s paradoxical position vis-à-vis the art scene, at once inside, looking out, and outside, looking in, is not just a matter of biographical fact, but rather a central theme of his art itself.” That, she explained, is a facet of the artist’s work that fascinates her and is central to telling the story of his career. Levy added, “Johnson is, simply put, one of the great historians of the New York art world in its period of greatest growth and influence. A weird, antic, and corrosive sort of historian to be sure, one who feels himself being left behind by history even as he writes it.”

Frances Beatty, who oversees the late Ray Johnson’s estate, with one of the artist’s works incorporating a photo of his 1957 design for the cover of poet Arthur Rimbaud’s book, “Illuminations,” published by New Directions in the US (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Alexander Adler pointed out that, in 2014, Feigen’s gallery and Johnson’s estate worked with Karma, a New York gallery, to present an exhibition at the latter’s downtown-Manhattan venue of previously unseen works and to produce a lush, limited-edition book documenting them. Adler said that he has noticed a rising tide of attention from younger collectors and curators for Johnson’s unusual creations. “My mother and her team spent years sorting out and archiving Ray’s collages, mail art, and personal library. Now his work can be — and needs to be — recontextualized for new audiences. The resources exist for serious scholarship, and researchers are making serious inquiries.”

His mother, Fraces Beatty shared with me an anecdote she cites in How to Draw a Bunny, recalling, “When I was working with Feigen, for many years, we wanted to do a substantial Ray Johnson show, but Ray kept putting it off. It never happened.” Finally, she explained, “One day he called me and said, ‘I’m going to do something, and you’ll be able to have your show.’ He laughed a cheerful laugh.” A few days later, she received a call with the news of Johnson’s death — and, in subsequent years, indeed, Feigen’s gallery was able to mount the exhibitions that, given the artist’s reluctance to publicly present his work while he was alive, had been nearly impossible to produce.

“In many ways,” Beatty added, “Ray is still controlling the narratives about his life, his art, his legacy. Those of us who knew him, we can sense it.”

Just how enigmatic is that?

Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray continues at David Zwirner (34 East 69th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through October 28, 2017.

The post The Unknowable Ray Johnson appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2x4FWBf via IFTTT

[marie85marketing]

5 User Engagement Strategies for SaaS Product Marketers

Want to sustain growth?

It all starts with user engagement. SaaS businesses must aim to educate and entertain their users to boost satisfaction and retention.

For your team, that means building a marketing strategy that keeps users engaged. You want customers to feel compelled to login to your platform in the morning, during lunchtime, and even before bedtime. You want the stickiness factor.

“Once people start using your product, SaaS companies need to focus on making that product as sticky as possible. Your customers need to be using it in their day-to-day workflows,” says Paul Schmidt, a senior consultant at SmartBug Media.

Ready to engage more? Check out the following five user engagement strategies.

1. Send Triggered Messaging

Communication plays an integral role in customer relationships. You’re already emailing customers welcome messages, product updates, and the occasional thank you note.

Powered by data, it’s possible to send more relevant emails to your audience. Triggered messaging takes advantage of customer behavior to automatically deliver a personalized experience.

“Real-time triggered emails get good results because they respond to subscriber actions and are relevant to them, so they benefit from current high engagement. Whereas routine marketing emails can be more like interruptions and are sometimes rejected as irrelevant,” states Mike Austin, a technologist and email marketer.

Let’s imagine that new users who don’t take a significant action on your platform within 2 days of signing up are more likely to churn. You can set up a triggered message to nudge these users to login to their accounts.

Below is a triggered message I received from Buffer. Their system automatically emailed me when my social media post surpassed a specific audience reach.

Kissmetrics Campaigns can help you deliver behavior based, automated emails to keep customers engaged every step of the way. You also can build targeted segments and measure your campaign impact.

Keep the conversations going beyond the routine emails. Take advantage of customer behavior to send timely messages.

2. Engage with In-App Chat

Over the years as a marketer, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge about SaaS products. You understand how most platforms work, and you could probably navigate new software within a couple of hours.

The same can’t be said for your customers. They don’t eat and sleep SaaS technology. Therefore, users will need ongoing assistance to achieve their desired outcomes.

“Simply establishing the fact that you are available makes your customers feel better. It makes them not just view the product as some pixels on the screen, but as an extension of the people behind it’s creation: you,” writes Ryan Angilly, CEO of Ramen.

In-app chat is an effective tool to provide one-on-one help to your customers. You’ll learn what features users find difficult, and you can ask users specific questions about their engagement. Your conversations might look the following image from Pipz:

Image Source

Some in-app chat platforms offer the capability to segment users. You could identify key behaviors hindering customers from achieving full product adoption. Then, initiate an in-app chat to guide users through their particular roadblocks.

You also want to remind your team to respond to chat messages quickly. Most people don’t like waiting for answers for long periods of time. Another good tip is to be personable on chat support. Emojis help break the monotony.

3. Garner Attention with Video Tutorials

After a customer makes a purchase, it’s important to provide continuing education. An informed customer is more likely to find success with the product, as a result increasing your retention rates.

While well-intentioned customers want to learn, your SaaS product continues to compete for their attention. There are the everyday demands of work, family time, and several other random distractions vying for your customer’s time.

Blogs, eBooks, and guides are the most common forms of educational tools used by businesses. It’s cost-effective and gets the job done. However, text isn’t always an engaging content format.

Video tutorials are one way to compete for your customer’s attention. Videos are visually stimulating and convey your message faster.

Check out the example below from Wrike. The project management company created a video series of tutorials to walk users through their features and benefits.

Image Source

To produce captivating video tutorials, start with your customer in mind. What do they want to learn? Schedule time with your customer success team to match your content with users’ pain points.

Beyond the topic, the video should connect with your audience on an emotional level. Use storytelling tactics, like narrative patterns and conflicts, to draw people in and make the experience memorable.

4. Add User Incentives

The right incentive works as a catalyst to influence user behavior. Depending on your company’s goals, you want incentives to serve a real purpose for your customer.

Most companies fall into the trap of giving their customers superficial incentives. That might include a free key chain or the chance to enter a sweepstakes. While these incentives are useful, they might not correlate with growing your engagement.

So let’s skip the swag bags for now. Instead, concentrate on activities that will create product stickiness and transform dormant users into habitual advocates.

Some of those activities may involve offering beta test opportunities for users to try out new features or inviting users into an elite community, like Sprout Social’s All Stars Program.

Sometimes, it can be as simple as creating a Facebook group for users to share tips and ask questions. That’s exactly what CoSchedule did!

Incentives should be highly valued by your users. Practice strategies of exclusivity or surprise and delight to get users excited about receiving an incentive. A customer who isn’t expecting your incentive will be even more thrilled to receive it.

5. Employ Gamification

The concept of engaging customers with games isn’t anything new. For decades, businesses have seduced customers with seasonal contests.

What’s different now is the method of implementation. The Internet is making it practical to employ gamification principles on a larger scale and at the customer’s convenience.

SaaS businesses see this an opportunity to remedy low customer engagement rates. With the right games, your team can persuade customers to stay on your platform longer.

“Can we do something about our users’ shrinking attention span? No. Can we try to keep them engaged and learning despite the dire circumstances? Absolutely. Gamification and interactive content (e.g. quizzes) are only part of the new dynamic content trend that is emerging in training documentation,” says Noa Dror, content manager at Iridize.

Quuu Promote showcases a great example of how SaaS companies can influence product usage. Their team uses loyalty badges to encourage users to promote more content. The badges are earned when a user’s content attains a specific number of clicks or shares. And as a bonus, the user can earn free credits toward their next purchase.

Not ready to scale gamification to all your customers? Run a beta program on a segment of your user base. Then, monitor your predetermined success metrics, like usage frequency, to see whether your program produces positive outcomes.

Start Engaging Your Users

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. To retain your users, experiment with different engagement strategies to improve retention.

You can send triggered messaging to remind users to login to your platform. Work with your SaaS team to deliver customer solutions with an in-app chat tool. Lastly, consider how user behavior coupled with gamification can increase engagement.

Engage to retain.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

[samiam03x]

5 User Engagement Strategies for SaaS Product Marketers

Want to sustain growth?

It all starts with user engagement. SaaS businesses must aim to educate and entertain their users to boost satisfaction and retention.

For your team, that means building a marketing strategy that keeps users engaged. You want customers to feel compelled to login to your platform in the morning, during lunchtime, and even before bedtime. You want the stickiness factor.

“Once people start using your product, SaaS companies need to focus on making that product as sticky as possible. Your customers need to be using it in their day-to-day workflows,” says Paul Schmidt, a senior consultant at SmartBug Media.

Ready to engage more? Check out the following five user engagement strategies.

1. Send Triggered Messaging

Communication plays an integral role in customer relationships. You’re already emailing customers welcome messages, product updates, and the occasional thank you note.

Powered by data, it’s possible to send more relevant emails to your audience. Triggered messaging takes advantage of customer behavior to automatically deliver a personalized experience.

“Real-time triggered emails get good results because they respond to subscriber actions and are relevant to them, so they benefit from current high engagement. Whereas routine marketing emails can be more like interruptions and are sometimes rejected as irrelevant,” states Mike Austin, a technologist and email marketer.

Let’s imagine that new users who don’t take a significant action on your platform within 2 days of signing up are more likely to churn. You can set up a triggered message to nudge these users to login to their accounts.

Below is a triggered message I received from Buffer. Their system automatically emailed me when my social media post surpassed a specific audience reach.

Kissmetrics Campaigns can help you deliver behavior based, automated emails to keep customers engaged every step of the way. You also can build targeted segments and measure your campaign impact.

Keep the conversations going beyond the routine emails. Take advantage of customer behavior to send timely messages.

2. Engage with In-App Chat

Over the years as a marketer, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge about SaaS products. You understand how most platforms work, and you could probably navigate new software within a couple of hours.

The same can’t be said for your customers. They don’t eat and sleep SaaS technology. Therefore, users will need ongoing assistance to achieve their desired outcomes.

“Simply establishing the fact that you are available makes your customers feel better. It makes them not just view the product as some pixels on the screen, but as an extension of the people behind it’s creation: you,” writes Ryan Angilly, CEO of Ramen.

In-app chat is an effective tool to provide one-on-one help to your customers. You’ll learn what features users find difficult, and you can ask users specific questions about their engagement. Your conversations might look the following image from Pipz:

Image Source

Some in-app chat platforms offer the capability to segment users. You could identify key behaviors hindering customers from achieving full product adoption. Then, initiate an in-app chat to guide users through their particular roadblocks.

You also want to remind your team to respond to chat messages quickly. Most people don’t like waiting for answers for long periods of time. Another good tip is to be personable on chat support. Emojis help break the monotony.

3. Garner Attention with Video Tutorials

After a customer makes a purchase, it’s important to provide continuing education. An informed customer is more likely to find success with the product, as a result increasing your retention rates.

While well-intentioned customers want to learn, your SaaS product continues to compete for their attention. There are the everyday demands of work, family time, and several other random distractions vying for your customer’s time.

Blogs, eBooks, and guides are the most common forms of educational tools used by businesses. It’s cost-effective and gets the job done. However, text isn’t always an engaging content format.

Video tutorials are one way to compete for your customer’s attention. Videos are visually stimulating and convey your message faster.

Check out the example below from Wrike. The project management company created a video series of tutorials to walk users through their features and benefits.

Image Source

To produce captivating video tutorials, start with your customer in mind. What do they want to learn? Schedule time with your customer success team to match your content with users’ pain points.

Beyond the topic, the video should connect with your audience on an emotional level. Use storytelling tactics, like narrative patterns and conflicts, to draw people in and make the experience memorable.

4. Add User Incentives

The right incentive works as a catalyst to influence user behavior. Depending on your company’s goals, you want incentives to serve a real purpose for your customer.

Most companies fall into the trap of giving their customers superficial incentives. That might include a free key chain or the chance to enter a sweepstakes. While these incentives are useful, they might not correlate with growing your engagement.

So let’s skip the swag bags for now. Instead, concentrate on activities that will create product stickiness and transform dormant users into habitual advocates.

Some of those activities may involve offering beta test opportunities for users to try out new features or inviting users into an elite community, like Sprout Social’s All Stars Program.

Sometimes, it can be as simple as creating a Facebook group for users to share tips and ask questions. That’s exactly what CoSchedule did!

Incentives should be highly valued by your users. Practice strategies of exclusivity or surprise and delight to get users excited about receiving an incentive. A customer who isn’t expecting your incentive will be even more thrilled to receive it.

5. Employ Gamification

The concept of engaging customers with games isn’t anything new. For decades, businesses have seduced customers with seasonal contests.

What’s different now is the method of implementation. The Internet is making it practical to employ gamification principles on a larger scale and at the customer’s convenience.

SaaS businesses see this an opportunity to remedy low customer engagement rates. With the right games, your team can persuade customers to stay on your platform longer.

“Can we do something about our users’ shrinking attention span? No. Can we try to keep them engaged and learning despite the dire circumstances? Absolutely. Gamification and interactive content (e.g. quizzes) are only part of the new dynamic content trend that is emerging in training documentation,” says Noa Dror, content manager at Iridize.

Quuu Promote showcases a great example of how SaaS companies can influence product usage. Their team uses loyalty badges to encourage users to promote more content. The badges are earned when a user’s content attains a specific number of clicks or shares. And as a bonus, the user can earn free credits toward their next purchase.

Not ready to scale gamification to all your customers? Run a beta program on a segment of your user base. Then, monitor your predetermined success metrics, like usage frequency, to see whether your program produces positive outcomes.

Start Engaging Your Users

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. To retain your users, experiment with different engagement strategies to improve retention.

You can send triggered messaging to remind users to login to your platform. Work with your SaaS team to deliver customer solutions with an in-app chat tool. Lastly, consider how user behavior coupled with gamification can increase engagement.

Engage to retain.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

http://ift.tt/2rSDx9Y from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2sSNmcB via Youtube

[ericsburden-blog]

5 User Engagement Strategies for SaaS Product Marketers

Want to sustain growth?

It all starts with user engagement. SaaS businesses must aim to educate and entertain their users to boost satisfaction and retention.

For your team, that means building a marketing strategy that keeps users engaged. You want customers to feel compelled to login to your platform in the morning, during lunchtime, and even before bedtime. You want the stickiness factor.

“Once people start using your product, SaaS companies need to focus on making that product as sticky as possible. Your customers need to be using it in their day-to-day workflows,” says Paul Schmidt, a senior consultant at SmartBug Media.

Ready to engage more? Check out the following five user engagement strategies.

1. Send Triggered Messaging

Communication plays an integral role in customer relationships. You’re already emailing customers welcome messages, product updates, and the occasional thank you note.

Powered by data, it’s possible to send more relevant emails to your audience. Triggered messaging takes advantage of customer behavior to automatically deliver a personalized experience.

“Real-time triggered emails get good results because they respond to subscriber actions and are relevant to them, so they benefit from current high engagement. Whereas routine marketing emails can be more like interruptions and are sometimes rejected as irrelevant,” states Mike Austin, a technologist and email marketing expert.

Let’s imagine that new users who don’t take a significant action on your platform within 2 days of signing up are more likely to churn. You can set up a triggered message to nudge these users to login to their accounts.

Below is a triggered message I received from Buffer. Their system automatically emailed me when my social media post surpassed a specific audience reach.

Kissmetrics Campaigns can help you deliver behavior based, automated emails to keep customers engaged every step of the way. You also can build targeted segments and measure your campaign impact.

Keep the conversations going beyond the routine emails. Take advantage of customer behavior to send timely messages.

2. Engage with In-App Chat

Over the years as a marketer, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge about SaaS products. You understand how most platforms work, and you could probably navigate a new software within a couple of hours.

The same can’t be said for your customers. They don’t eat and sleep SaaS technology. Therefore, users will need ongoing assistance to achieve their desired outcomes.

“Simply establishing the fact that you are available makes your customers feel better. It makes them not just view the product as some pixels on the screen, but as an extension of the people behind it’s creation: you,” writes Ryan Angilly, CEO of Ramen.

In-app chat is an effective tool to provide one-on-one help to your customers. You’ll learn what features users find difficult, and you can ask users specific questions about their engagement. Your conversations might look the following image from Pipz:

Image Source

Some in-app chat platforms offer the capability to segment users. You could identify key behaviors hindering customers from achieving full product adoption. Then, initiate an in-app chat to guide users through their particular roadblocks.

You also want to remind your team to respond to chat messages quickly. Most people don’t like waiting for answers for long periods of time. Another good tip is to be personable on chat support. Emojis help break the monotony.

3. Garner Attention with Video Tutorials

After a customer makes a purchase, it’s important to provide continuing education. An informed customer is more likely to find success with the product, as a result increasing your retention rates.

While well-intentioned customers want to learn, your SaaS product continues to compete for their attention. There’s the everyday demands of work, family time, and several other random distractions vying for your customer’s time.

Blogs, ebooks, and guides are the most common forms of educational tools used by businesses. It’s cost-effective and gets the job done. However, text isn’t always an engaging content format.

Video tutorials are one way to compete for your customer’s attention. Videos are visually stimulating and convey your message faster.

Check out the example below from Wrike. The project management company created a video series of tutorials to walk users through their features and benefits.

Image Source

To produce captivating video tutorials, start with your customer in mind. What do they want to learn? Schedule time with your customer success team to match your content with users’ pain points.

Beyond the topic, the video should connect with your audience on an emotional level. Use storytelling tactics, like narrative patterns and conflicts, to draw people in and make the experience memorable.

4. Add User Incentives

The right incentive works as a catalyst to influence user behavior. Depending on your company’s goals, you want incentives to serve a real purpose for your customer.

Most companies fall into the trap of giving their customers superficial incentives. That might include a free key chain or the chance to enter a sweepstakes. While these incentives are useful, they might not correlate with growing your engagement.

So let’s skip the swag bags for now. Instead, concentrate on activities that will create product stickiness and transform dormant users into habitual advocates.

Some of those activities may involve offering beta test opportunities for users to try out new features or inviting users into an elite community, like Sprout Social’s All Stars Program.

Sometimes, it can be as simple as creating a Facebook group for users to share tips and ask questions. That’s exactly what CoSchedule did!

Incentives should be highly valued by your users. Practice strategies of exclusivity or surprise and delight to get users excited about receiving an incentive. A customer who isn’t expecting your incentive will be even more thrilled to receive it.

5. Employ Gamification

The concept of engaging customers with games isn’t anything new. For decades, businesses have seduced customers with seasonal contests.

What’s different now is the method of implementation. The Internet is making it practical to employ gamification principles on a larger scale and at the customer’s convenience.

SaaS businesses see this an opportunity to remedy low customer engagement rates. With the right games, your team can persuade customers to stay on your platform longer.

“Can we do something about our users’ shrinking attention span? No. Can we try to keep them engaged and learning despite the dire circumstances? Absolutely. Gamification and interactive content (e.g. quizzes) are only part of the new dynamic content trend that is emerging in training documentation,” says Noa Dror, content manager at Iridize.

Quuu Promote showcases a great example of how SaaS companies can influence product usage. Their team uses loyalty badges to encourage users to promote more content. The badges are earned when a user’s content attains a specific number of clicks or shares. And as a bonus, the user can earn free credits toward their next purchase.

Not ready to scale gamification to all your customers? Run a beta program on a segment of your user base. Then, monitor your predetermined success metrics, like usage frequency, to see whether your program produces positive outcomes.

Start Engaging Your Users

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. To retain your users, experiment with different engagement strategies to improve retention.

You can send triggered messaging to remind users to login to your platform. Work with your SaaS team to deliver customer solutions with an in-app chat tool. Lastly, consider how user behavior coupled with gamification can increase engagement.

Engage to retain.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

5 User Engagement Strategies for SaaS Product Marketers

[spinarec-blog]

sr023 - Dubcore / Andrey Popovskiy - Split

Запись Dubcore "tea-n-pepsi" была создана в результате длительной работой с тишиной, которая на сегодняшний день является наиболее привлекательной областью исследования для исполнителя. Однако, работа с одной узкой темой на протяжении нескольких лет однажды привела к совершенно противоположному результату - шести трекам, наполненным разнообразными, постоянно меняющимися звуками. Два из этих треков представлены на данном релизе совместно с записью Андрея Поповского, отлично дополняющей материал Dubcore. В этой записи представлены различные способы взаимодействия с окружающим пространством, - иногда это случайно возникающие шумы помещений, иногда - специально подготовленные и преобразованные фонограммы. Ещё одно поле исследования - попытка свести воедино фрагменты, записанные в разное время дня, в различных погодных условиях, но в одной и той же точке пространства. Громкость регулируется не только при помощи приборных ручек и сурдин, но и дверей, окон, перемещением звучащих объектов относительно микрофона. Воспроизведение с различных носителей - винил, плёнка, CD, mp3, на различных по размеру и техническим характеристикам динамиках. Сколько проплывающих мимо моего окна корабликов ты насчитал?

Dubcore "tea-n-pepsi" was created as reaction to long term fascination of silence, which as for now remains the most interesting field of exploration. However, exploring one extreme for few years one day of 2014 it just happened that the appetite for the opossite showed up, resulting in six multilayered tracks full of sounds and changes. Two of them are presented here, released with Andrey Popovskiy's recordings, which make an ideal fulfillment to Dubcore's material. The split as whole deals with musician's conviction that edges are the most crucial places. On Andrey's side it’s possible to witness different kinds of interaction with environmental sounds, sometimes you can hear contingently appearing sounds of spaces, sometimes it’s prearranged processed recordings. Another field of research is to try to bring together fragments recorded during different time of the day in different weather conditions but at the same space spot. Not only knobs and mutes of the instruments control the dynamics but also doors, windows, movements of sound objects against the mic do it as well. Playback from different media like vinyl, tape, CD, MP3 on speakers with different sizes and technical specifications. How many passing ships did you count? 

Edition of 25, released on February 4, 2016

Split by Dubcore / Andrey Popovskiy

Reviews:

“I started with Dubcore and Andrey Popovskiy. I have no idea who Dubcore is, but I read that these two pieces were "created as reaction to long term fascination of silence, which as for now remains the most interesting field of exploration. However, exploring one extreme for few years one day of 2014 it just happened that the appetite for the opposite showed up, resulting in six multi-layered tracks full of sounds and changes." There is no indication as to how the silence was explored before, or how this new material was generated, but my best guess would be that all of these sounds were stuck on a multi-track editor and mixed together in a fashion of randomness, which would make John Cage proud. In the process there are a few electronic sounds mixed along, which provide an occasional rhythm, or maybe these arrive from different sources providing the input. Sometimes there is a hint towards composition, but it doesn't seem to be the main objective. Every now and then it hits upon something that I enjoyed but some of it also left me untouched also.   On the other side we find a thirty-minute recording from June 4, 2015 by Andrey Popovskiy, whose solo CD 'Rotunda' I quite enjoyed (see Vital Weekly 946), even when it was all at quite a low level. The cover here lists a whole bunch of sound sources (violin, yunost turntable, e-bow, field recordings, sound system, cassette dictaphones, mini amps, CD player, mini loudspeakers, vega 104 turntable and pitchfork), yet Popovskiy knows how to maintain a low level when it comes to playing his music. Apparently, according to the information, this has something to do with playback from various media and those differ from each other. It seems as if things get gradually more and more quiet on this side. You really have to stay focussed on the events; otherwise it might be a release of very little music. I can imagine that some people would find this a tad too conceptual. I quite enjoyed these almost Zen meditations in sound.” (Frans De Waard, Vital Weekly)

“SR023 is a split betwixt Dubcore and Andrey Popovskiy. Dubcore sounds more like it ought to be the name of a label, or a genre, but here it’s an art project which experiments with found sounds and/or field recordings. They offer two pieces under the heading ‘Tea-N-Pepsi’, an endearing latterday cafe society proposal if ever there was. ‘Tuning In’ is a delicious jumble of sources, a fractured radio broadcast. Nothing spectacularly new in the approach of cutting up and random assemblage, but I happen to like the results on this occasion. The creators are genuinely capable of surprising the jaded listener with their juxtapositions and exciting cross cuts. A distinctly urban feel emerges; railway stations, media messages, street sounds, electronic noise, static, and beats. Everything is served up in aggressive micro-second slices, pandering to the minuscule attention spans of our atrophied brains. ‘Theyyam’ by Dubcore feels slightly less paranoid and tense, even admitting the possibility of some pastoral undercurrents, and quieter passages, to the overall mix of unpredictability. Here the listener is intrigued and puzzled. While not as subtle or inventive as the tapes we get from Staaltape and Rinus van Alebeek, Dubcore are operating in much the same area. “Six multilayered tracks full of sounds and changes,” is the description from the website, adding that Dubcore began life as something to do with exploring long tracts of silence. It so happens this tape is the exact opposite of that strategy, and has resulted in a glorious clutter of sonic detritus. A nice one.Andrey Popovskiy occupies Side B with his 30-minute epic ‘Kryukov’. If credit list rings true, Popovskiy is operating various chunks of hardware for playback of pre-recorded elements (turntable, cassette player, dictaphone, CD player, etc), plus a violin, and e-bow, and additional field recordings. Hard to detect much of this equipment on the finished product, though. It comes across rather like 30 mins of a fellow stumbling about the room not really knowing what to do next, like a lethargic musician trying out ideas, opening the window, or turning the TV on. The recording doesn’t present the music, but documents the event, so that we pick up a good deal of room tone, random sounds, TV or radio in the next room, and general atmosphere of life in a Saint Petersburg apartment. This description may make it all appear infuriating and trivial, but in fact ‘Kryukov’ is a compelling listen. “Different kinds of interaction with environmental sounds,” is how the website describes this episode; “sometimes you can hear contingently appearing sounds of spaces, sometimes it’s prearranged processed recordings.” A lot to explore and get lost inside, varying textures, stories, and effects.” (Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector)

[politicalfilth-blog]

Putin Builds Ties With The Saudis and Trump Warns Of A Storm

We Are Change

Welcome back beautiful and amazing spiritually inclined in the know human beings. Welcome to the WeAreChange Sunday recap where we give you all the important news that happened this week. News that you should know about but the full truth behind them is probably being denied to you in some way by the US mainstream media corporatocracy.

Today is October 8th, 2017 and in this video, we are going to be talking about how YouTube is destroying the dreams of hard-working, independent people in exchange for more corporatocracy. We discuss a major politically connected media mogul that violates people sexually and more news about the war machine. Sorry, excuse me, I meant US foreign policy in Syria and North Korea. We’re also going to get into the Catalan Independence Day which is supposed to happen tomorrow.

Two days ago I made a video discussing YouTube’s changes they are doing to their algorithms. Changes that are designed to prevent people from watching videos about supposed conspiracy theories regarding the Las Vegas shooting.

I told you guys this algorithm change is not just going to affect the crazy fringe people who create theories out of nowhere but will affect everyone who refuses to bow down and give fellatio to the corporate overlords.

That is precisely what is happening as even Philip DeFranco one of the most prominent YouTubers tweeted “Dear YouTube, Your response is bullshit. It’s not true. People are tired of this. Be better.”

This tweet was in response to another YouTuber who made a video specifically to raise Adsense money for the victims of the shooting. His video was promptly demonetized by YouTube. YouTube responded saying “We love what you’re doing to help, but no matter the intent, our policy is not to run ads on videos about tragedies.” This is an outright lie as Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC conglomerate news organization has videos of him talking about the mass shooting in Las Vegas and it is still monetized. Even popular, toe the line YouTubers who are not part of the corporate conglomerate are being affected.

Everyone should understand unless you’re living under a rock that YouTube has now replaced the “You” with the Ministry of Truth. All brought to you by the mega-corporations. They’re going even further with their censorship by removing private playlists that people made. Entirely deleting them when they are a list of lost Vegas shooting videos that question the event. We’ve also been hit by this as the last four videos I did have all been demonetized. I know this sucks it needs to be called out so that will something change. You can expect more finagling of our independent media organization on this platform. This is why we have been moving to Bitchute and  DTube.

We need to rely on you the viewer through  https://wearechange.org/donate to keep us independently running either through PayPal, snail mail, or Bitcoin. Honestly, if it weren’t for random people being generous and deciding to give us five dollars a month this independent media organization would not exist. You guys are more critical than ever as we try to navigate and continue to do our job as best as we can through the minefield of censorship brought on by the mainstream media corporate overlords.

In other mass media big money shocking horrible corporate news, we are learning about Harvey Weinstein. He is a major media mogul who is well politically connected. He is putting the Obamas and Clintons in a tough spot. This week we learned that Harvey who is one of Hollywood’s most prominent producers and executives has sexually harassed abused and controlled women for the past three decades.

Due to his vast wealth and power, he was able to keep this a secret for over 30 years with non-disclosure agreements and contracts. He would pay off his victims. All to cover up the horrible things he did.

This was a person who not only lived next door to Hillary Clinton, but she used this man, his connections and even his house for private fundraisers. Fundraisers with A-list Hollywood celebrities.

This is a man that visited Obama in the White House over 13 times.

Michelle Obama publicly declared him as a wonderful human being and Obama’s daughter even personally worked for this monster.

Mr. Weinstein has hired a very powerful legal team to stop the New York Times from releasing this information to the public. This prompted the New York Times to ask for the release of the NDA’s, the legal binding document that prevents his victims from speaking out against him in a court of law. This man is so powerful we’re not even finding out the full extent of his criminal behavior.

There are however disturbing details coming out like the fact that he once trapped a woman in the hallway of a restaurant that was closed to the public. He masturbated in front of her until he ejaculated. Sadly a lot of the victims are fearful of the power that Weinstein wields in media and have remained silent. This guy is a monster. The case gets even worse as we’re finding out that he wrote up ads to protect other media figures who were sexual predators and also called for their release.

He has responded with a letter against these “accusations” in which this man proved he has no semblance of reality by plugging his movie. A movie that he’s going to be making against Donald Trump which was supposed to include Michael Moore. He is trying to shift the blame to the NRA saying that he’s going to give them his full attention. He says he will do his best to make sure that the head of the NRA will “enjoy his retirement party.” He went on to pretend to quote Jay-Z for some reason.

If there’s anything we could learn from this case, it would be understanding just how much these people can do without being arrested. All because of their connections and money. If we had a fair justice system, they would, of course, focus on the elite criminality in our society. The more powerful an individual becomes, the more likelihood there is for abuse.

Moving forward in more abuse of power news; we have US President Donald Trump who days ago along with the top brass of the US military behind him gave us these ominous comments:

Trump: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. We have the worlds great military people in this room.” … Reporter: “What storm Mr. President?” Trump: “You’ll find out.”

Donald Trump has been tight-lipped after making those comments. People are speculating it could be in regards to the Iran nuclear deal in which a decision is coming soon. Other people are thinking it’s a hint at war with North Korea. Donald Trump took to his Twitter yesterday and said “Sorry, but only one thing will work!” after talking about the failed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and North Korea.

When asked recently 1746 random Americans were polled and most can’t even find North Korea on the world map. 40% of Americans support the unilateral bombing of North Korea while 36% of Americans can’t find it. I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think additional entanglements overseas “will make America great again” or “put America first.” Let me know what you think in the comments.

This weeks news gets worse as we’re just finding out that a fourth US soldier was just killed in Africa, in the country of Niger after another deadly ambush on US troops. Which makes me ask the question, why the hell are US troops fighting in Niger? This is a serious question, “What is the “official” reason that they are in Niger?” If you would like a video about this with more in-depth research, let me know in the comments.

In other putting our troops into harm’s way for who knows what news; we found out four days ago that the U.S. is going to be sending more than 3,000 US troops to Afghanistan. Apparently to continue the same mission that was started by George W. Bush 16 years ago which has failed over and over and over again.

Even though we’ve had a significant military presence in Afghanistan somehow, they have managed to greatly expand the world’s production of opium while indebting this country and causing the loss of service men and women of this country.

I was telling you that more war was coming, that this was going to happen and I got flack for calling it out. Other people choose to believe “other alternative media” sources. They were siding with Trump believing that it’s a drawdown. In reality, it’s not.

This week in spread more democracy and freedom all over the world; the US State Department has just approved a fifteen billion dollar sale of advanced THAAD missile defense systems to Saudi Arabia.

The same country that just this week beheaded three more people. The same country that the United States sided with and failed to condemn when it comes to the death penalty for gay people.

What else do you need to know about U.S. foreign policy other than that we are selling the most advanced military technology to a despotic country? A country that also financed and supported the rise of al-Nusra, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic terrorist groups all over the world.

We also found out that a majority of ISIS are surrendering in mass right now in Iraq. Over a thousand fighters have turned themselves into the authorities, and they will face repercussions for their horrible actions.

In case you didn’t know they were supported by Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. Russia officially declared by accusing the United States of helping ISIS inside of Syria.

In other very shocking geopolitical news, we’re also discovering that Russia and Saudi Arabia have announced a billion dollar energy military deal. This deal will also grant Saudi Arabia Russia’s advanced military technology allowing them to buy the Russian S400 surface-to-air missile system.

This creates a new Middle East dynamic and appears to reverse Russia’s foreign policy entirely.

This is a major geopolitical shift on the world stage which I can only understand as a strategic move by Russia in trying to court Saudi Arabia. The purpose of which is to advance the de-dollarization against the U.S. Petrodollar. A fight that Russia and China have been having against the United States. It is an economic war that hinges on Saudi Arabia’s compliance with the United States. It relies on Saudi Arabia trading oil in US dollars.

That’s just my personal opinion as Russia has been supporting and backing many countries around the world. In particular those who are making geopolitical, economic moves against the United States. I might be wrong but if I am let me know in the comments section.

In further confusing news around the world, we have an unusual situation developing in Barcelona. After the recent vote took place for independence by the Catalan people there was widespread violence from the Spanish police against voters. People are now asking the question what’s going to happen after they voted for independence. Four days ago Catalan leaders said that after the vote they would declare independence from Spain.

In the wake of the independence vote, the Spanish Constitutional Court ordered the suspension of the Catalan Parliament on Monday. The purpose of this is to prevent the declaration of independence.

European press agencies are saying that Spanish commandos have been deployed in Catalan. They are ready to seize key infrastructure if Catalonia declares independence. As I report this, there are protests inside of Barcelona. Protesters calling for Catalan to stay with Spain with some members openly performing the fascist salute. Ultimately the situation is still very muddled and tense. We will be following it closely right here.

That is the news for this week. Sorry, I wish I could be more optimistic, but that’s what’s what’s happening around the world. The truth is not always pleasant, but I would prefer to be awake than asleep. If you enjoyed this program, please share it with your friends and family members. Don’t forget to support us on  https://wearechange.org/donate. If you don’t, no one else will. Thank you again so much. I love you guys.

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The post Putin Builds Ties With The Saudis and Trump Warns Of A Storm appeared first on We Are Change.

from We Are Change https://wearechange.org/putin-builds-ties-saudis-trump-warns-storm/