#the trick is. for a minute. to make the reader/viewer BELIEVE it's the only way it could've gone. to make yourself believe it too!!

[bowenoke]

truly, the best creative advice I have ever gotten is to stop being precious. stop treating your work like you are uncovering the perfect version of it that it was always meant to be. You aren't. You're building your composition, your plot, your paneling from the ground up. There is no ideal. Just the version of it that exists, which is infinitely better and more important than the version of it you wanted to make but didn't, because you didn't know how to start.

[sturchling]

Alya challenges Aurore to go on this web show Blog-Off where. All the best bloggers judges which blog is best tears Alyas to pieces tell Alya off 4 her Lila worship her toxic bad friend pushy attitude that includes her own bf ex bestie and half her class (Nath Alix Julkea Sabrina Chloe) Aurore wins Lila exposed Alya defeated and devastated

Alya was feeling pretty confident about today. She was sure that she would win the contest today. Recently, she had been watching as Aurore’s blog grew in popularity and had even started to surpass Alya’s blog in viewership. It infuriated Alya and she was stewing in jealousy for weeks, wanting to do something to make Aurore’s blog less popular. She never even posted about Ladybug herself, she only talked about the akuma attacks themselves. Aurore’s blog was so boring, so Alya couldn’t understand how she had more readers than Alya’s exciting blog. But Alya was going to do something about it.

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

Alya had heard about an amazing new show where amateur bloggers could face off and have both of their blogs judged by professional journalists and bloggers to determine which of the two blogs is better. Alya was sure this would get her readers to come back. Not only would her blog be on national TV which is a great way to get her blog’s name out there, but it would also show the world that her blog is better than Aurore’s and she would get Aurore’s readers. Alya applied for the show and listed Aurore’s blog as the one she wanted to challenge. The TV network that ran the show was very interested since both blogs were about Paris’ heroes and the akumas, which would surely draw in viewers for that episode. They sent Alya an email inviting her to the show, if Aurore agreed.  

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

Alya went to school the next day with a fire in her eyes. She walked right up to Aurore and challenged her to the show. Aurore rolled her eyes, but agreed to the show. She knew how this would end, since Alya never fact checked anything and her blog was just full of lies. But Aurore knew this could be a good way to gain more readers and make connections with professional bloggers. Alya told the TV network that Aurore had agreed and it was decided that the episode would air live next Saturday. Mrs. Bustier’s class was excited and all agreed to meet at Nino’s house to watch the show, since they weren’t allowed to go to the studio with Alya. Marinette and her friends would also be watching from Marinette’s house to support Aurore. Soon, all anyone at the school could talk about was the show on Saturday.

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

Alya stood in shock on the TV stage, and couldn’t believe what she was hearing. First the blogger panel had praised Aurore’s boring blog. They said that is was well organized, well researched, and her writing was excellent. “This is a very informative blog, and I love the interactive map of akuma battle locations. Very interesting.” Then the bloggers on the show turned to Alya’s blog and began tearing her blog apart. “What is this garbage? All of these stories are obviously false. And there are no sources listed anywhere on here for your most recent stories about this Lila Rossi! This blog doesn’t even meet the basic requirements of journalism. This is shameful work Mrs. Cesaire!” Alya stuttered, trying to defend her blog. “W-what do you mean? I do have my sources listed. I got my information straight from the primary source, from Lila herself!” One of the other judges just scoffed. “Please. Putting aside the fact that a good blogger has multiple sources for each piece to corroborate the story, this girl’s stories are obvious fabrications. For example, her story about saving Jagged Stone’s cat. It is a well known fact that Jagged Stone’s only pet is a crocodile named Fang. And even if he did have a cat, how would that cat have ended up on an airport tarmac? And even more importantly, what self respecting airport would let their security be so weak that a teen girl was able to slip through and chase said cat. And being that close to a plane with no hearing protection wouldn’t just give a person tinnitus, it would make them deaf. And that is only one of the idiotic stories on this blog.”

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

This continued for several minutes, the bloggers tearing into Alya about her poor journalism skills and all Alya could do is stand in stunned silence. She had never realized how silly Lila’s stories were until it was pointed out to her, but now it was all Alya could think about. How could she have been so blind that she didn’t notice Lila lied to her? When the judges were done speaking to Alya, they didn’t even have to deliberate. They immediately declared Aurore the winner, naming her the superior blog. Everyone filtered off the stage, Alya still feeling numb to it all. She at least had the sense to congratulate and apologize to Aurore. Alya was completely devastated as she realized her blog, her pride and joy, was ruined. Sure she could fix the immediate problem. She could take down the stories Lila told her and post an apology, but in the long run she knew her blog’s reputation was ruined and there would be no recovery. It had just been torn apart on live TV, no one would ever read her blog again.

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

After everything had happened, Lila left the school, going back to Italy hoping to find a new class of suckers to trick and no one in Paris heard from her again. She didn’t want to leave, but she had just been exposed as a liar on national TV. The class had all gathered to watch the show too, and were furious when they realized that the judge was right and that Lila had been lying. She had raced from Nino’s house and convinced her mother that she was to frightened of the akumas to stay in Paris anymore. Her mother believed the fake breakdown and immediately sent her back to Italy, never learning about the trouble her daughter caused in Paris. 

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

Alya did take down the stories on her blog and post an apology, but the damage had been done. Some loyal readers stayed around, but Alya lost a lot of readers after the show and her blog wasn’t nearly as popular anymore. Alya decided that instead of chasing viewers, which is what got her in this mess in the first place, she was going to focus on her journalism and try to improve. She made amends with Aurore and Marinette for everything that she did because of Lila, and was even helping Aurore with her blog from time to time. And Aurore was helping Alya with her fact checking.  While Alya was sad about what happened, she was glad it happened. It taught her several important lessons about being a reporter and helped to improve her journalism. The lesson itself may have hurt and been embarrassing, but Alya needed it and wouldn’t change anything about what happened.

[squeeneyart]

Breathe in the Salt - Chapter 15

AO3

Beta reader as always is @thesnadger​!

Everyone has some questions.

It’s been a long week.

“No! No, this isn’t okay!” Martin paced a few feet from the others.

Saha frowned. “We thought saying something might mess with how things worked normally-”

“So that makes it okay to not tell me at all? I could’ve disappeared completely!” Martin turned and pointed at Tim. “And you tricked me into doing it with all the ‘oh, aren’t you supposed to clean’ talk!”

Tim took a step back. “I thought we could pull you back before anything happened. You were walking slowly, but it all just-”

“Oh, yes, that makes me feel much better!”

Tim winced. Out of the three, guilt was the most plain on his face. “I’m sorry.”

“It was my idea,” Sasha interjected. “I convinced them this was the best way to get results in the time crunch we have. And I still think it was, for what it’s worth.”

Martin looked away from her, crossing his arms. “Good to know where we stand, then. Glad I could be a data point for you.”

Back by the couch, Jon said, “This is to help you. We had no intention of letting harm come to you-”

“Who said it didn’t?!”

For a minute the others said nothing. Martin filled the silence with large, shuddering breaths. That was a thought, wasn’t it?

Eventually, Jon rubbed the back of his hand and asked, “Are you… do you feel any different?”

“How should I know? Apparently this has been going on every week for months.” The final break in his voice was horribly audible. Martin laughed, dragging a hand down his face.

Months. How much time was wiped from his memory? Where had he been going? Were there other places he would’ve disappeared to if they hadn’t stopped him midway? God, his skull was splitting itself in two.

“You should sit back down.” Jon placed a hand on top of the couch, his brows knit together. “You’re right. We should have told you beforehand.”

Martin saw Jon’s sorry face and faltered despite himself. Still, he glowered. “Yeah. You should have.” Glancing at the other two, he retook his place on the couch and threaded his fingers together.

Sasha sighed. “I just thought it would be our last shot at finding something and getting more time. You need this figured out more than any of us.”

“Very convenient for you, then,” Martin spat, leaning his elbows onto his knees. He looked down at the scuffs on his boots. “I get it. It’s not okay, but I get it. Now I know… something?”

“We know more, certainly, though I can’t say it’s all that much.” Jon leaned back against his arm of the couch. “One moment you were walking up the steps, but then instead of turning you walked straight into the wall. Ten minutes pass, you come out and continue up as if you hadn’t noticed anything.”

“Which I didn’t, because I have no memory of any of it.” Martin rested his chin on his fist. “God, ten minutes.”

“You’re telling us,” Tim said, taking the other couch arm. “Listen, don’t think we weren’t freaking out the whole time.”

Martin snorted disdainfully. “Great. Clearly I’m in safe hands.”

“Hey, we really did try, but the wall was solid just as you went through it.” Sasha shoved her hands into her coat pockets. “My idea just needed more time for workshopping, time we don’t have.”

“Well, if this doesn’t get your boss invested, he definitely has something else going on,” Martin said. “Impossible spaces with invisible entrances that lure people in for a weekly cleaning can’t be that common.”

“You’d be surprised at how mundane impossible rooms can feel.” Jon tapped his knee. “But the lack of intent or memory on your part is too much to ignore, even if we leave out the, ah, contractual obligations.”

Martin accepted this with a tired nod. “Okay, so, what next? Do I just… I’m not going to have to try and go back in, am I?”

“Oh no, absolutely not,” Tim said. “That’s for later, when we hopefully have more time and resources. Trying to mess with the… the normal processes of this place, that’s something we aren’t going to try yet. Observation first, then theorizing, etcetera.”

Sasha hummed in agreement. “But we did discuss Naomi’s message before we came in today, and we all agreed that with her testimony it would be less of a risk to try the panel. With everyone present of course.”

Martin perked up. “Wait, really? Tim, you’re okay with this?”

“Not quite the word, but I’m leaning much more toward the ‘trapped person’ theory than my mimic idea. At the very least, I think��” Tim seemed to struggle for words, then set his jaw. “I think Naomi needs the truth.”

--

“The plan is to minimize the time spent communing with it,” Jon said, gathering his notes. “The yes-or-no method was a good start. We’ll see if it retained the echoed words and work from there, using questions we prepared ahead of time.”

Sasha chimed in. “We think alternating speakers will keep any side effects from getting to one person too quickly. There are also a few words we might attempt to, well, feed it, if necessary for communication.”

They continued half-explaining, half-talking to themselves. Martin got the impression that they were attempting to keep him present, as if zoning out was even an option for him anymore.

Soon enough, Jon’s hand was on the panel. Tim stood nearby and alternated between crossing his arms and flipping a pencil between his fingers. Sasha sat waiting in a chair with an old handheld camera (“Can’t put it on mobile recordings. Only ancient techniques allowed for this stuff”). Through the viewer, Jon and Tim were just in frame with the panel in the center.

Martin didn’t know what to do with himself and chose to keep his hands in his pockets and stand by Sasha.

“Let’s hope they wake up faster this time.” Jon waited for Sasha’s nod, then twisted the dial. A moment passed in the silence, and then-

“HELP?” Martin’s voice boomed, the edges of it rough and distorted, morphing the question into an unbearable scream. No one answered, the overwhelming sound bouncing around them with such force as to make Martin’s eardrums want to burst.

Again, as the reverberations began to wane, “PLEASE?”

Just as Martin could feel another boom coming, Jon gripped the panel and shouted, “Can you hear us?!”

And with that, no other outburst came. Jon’s voice echoed in that strange, elongated way until there was nothing left but the breaths Martin refused to release.

In Martin’s more true-to-life tone came a simple, “Yes.”

“Much better,” Jon gasped out. He straightened, making a show of brushing himself off. “We can get on with things, then, if you don’t mind.”

Picking up his notepad, Jon began, “We are researchers investigating on behalf of the current lighthouse employee with whom you recently made contact with. We believe we know your identity, but we would like to confirm some personal information as a precaution. Is that amenable?”

As they waited, Tim and Sasha composed themselves. Between this and Jon’s calm demeanor, Martin suddenly felt very silly about how quickly his conversation had spiraled into panic and confusion.

Actually, no, being stuffy and professional at a possible ghost was silly. Incredibly so,  and the longer Martin watched the harder it became not to interrupt the process with snickering. Jon especially was making such a bold attempt to not only sound but look serious to a person who couldn’t see him.

“Yes.” Martin chose to believe the being was just as dumbfounded by how this was going so far.

“Excellent.” Jon then began to list numbers 0 to 9 in order, allowing each one to be fully absorbed by the lighthouse walls. “If you’ve got all that, can you please tell me the number of your mobile phone?”

Sure enough, Jon’s voice recited a series of numbers, familiar enough by now that Martin was convinced after only the second digit.

Tim slumped, though whether in relief or something else Martin couldn’t tell. “Well, sorry for making you wait, but you can’t judge us for being careful. We can’t talk for long periods of time for safety reasons, but we’ll try to get a lot out of this first go.”

Tim sifted through some of his notes as his echo faded. “Your vocabulary is limited, so for now we’ll stick to yes and no. First: are you in a location that can be described using words?”

“Yes. Quiet.”

“Okay.” Tim scratched the answer down. “So the place is quiet. Can you tell where we’re coming in from?”

There was a longer pause. “No. From? Up. Downstairs? Outside? Here.”

Sasha clicked her tongue. “Rules out a more physical location. Not surprising. As far as you can tell, do you have a physical body?”

“Half.” A moment, then quickly, “Now. Yes. From? This.”

Martin leaned back, his voice falling to a whisper. “He doesn’t mean like… this, does he?”

“If talking helps give him corporeality, it’s a good sign that he’s telling us up front,” Tim replied, his reassuring tone not quite matching the look on his face.

Martin spoke up, unable to stop himself. “Hi? Um, sorry for leaving you like that, but I’m not really a professional at this? Anyway, earlier today I learned that when I go upstairs for cleaning I unknowingly walk into a secret room? Do you know anything about that?”

“Yes. No. No. Me. Worry. Then?” After a few seconds, the thought continued, “No. Me. No. Me. Okay? NO. ME.”

From across the room, Tim dropped his pencil, letting it roll until it hit the wall. “He’s-”

“Yes, I understood,” Jon said, tapping his foot with a new energy. “You mean Naomi.”

“Yes. Naomi. Naomi. Okay? Worry?”

“Well, yeah, of course she’s worried!” Tim half-laughed out. “I mean, yes, she’s okay. We got a message from her yesterday. She’s the reason we ended up talking to you.”

“Okay.” The being who was almost certainly Evan Lukas paused. “Okay. Questions?”

The shift in mood caught Martin off-guard. Jon had started to pace. Sasha was scribbling something down with her free hand. Tim had changed gears entirely, scooping his pencil off the floor and flashing Martin a thumbs up.

It (probably, definitely) wasn’t a monster according to the professionals. This wasn’t part of the horror house that was his workplace. They were doing something.

Sasha remained seated, keeping the camera as steady as she could while flipping through her own notes. “Okay, so. Thank you for offering up extra confirmation. Back to a previous topic, the place on the stairs. Naomi mentioned experiencing the moment you went in. Did you ever attempt to go in with any sort of recording device?”

“No. Here. Before? Think. It.”

“Okay, safe to assume that’s all you know about that part. Would you say you ended up wherever you are by accident?”

“No.”

Martin squeezed his eyes shut. He had assumed as much, partially to take comfort in Evan’s fate not being a random happenstance of bizarre construction that could happen to him, but-

“Someone did this to you.” Sasha continued.

“Yes.”

Before responding, Sasha lowered the camera and switched it off. “Your family did this. I assume it was Peter.” The final word sank into the quiet.

“PETER.”

Everyone covered their ears as Sasha’s voice was thrown back, twisted and loud and furious. The table shook, papers scattering off its surface in the shockwave. Jon stumbled away from the panel and tripped backwards onto the floor. Shaking off the buzzing in his head, Martin hurried over to help him to his feet, Tim joining him a moment later.

Sasha walked to the panel and placed a hand on the dial. “Look, Evan? We will help you, but if you keep doing that we’re going to shut the channel off.”

“...From? Here?”

“Yes, that’s the plan. But you yelling is much louder for us and gets you nowhere. Save it for when you have someone worthwhile to scream at. Understand?”

“Soon. Please?” Martin’s voice implored, disjointed and quiet.

After being pulled to his feet, Jon legitimately brushed himself off and fixed his tie. “I’m not sure if time means much where you are, but yes. We will help you as soon as we can.”

“But,” Tim said, rubbing his temple. “We’ll probably need to break for now. Even without the shouting, something about this place messes with your head, and talking to you is no exception.”

As Tim spoke, Martin finally paid attention to the stabbing pain behind his eyes. “Ah, right, I forgot this was part of it.”

Predictably, Jon and Sasha just looked at the other two with concern. Jon cleared his throat. “Yes, perhaps now that we have a baseline of communication, it would be good for all of us to think about next steps.”

Tim nodded. “Evan? We’re going to turn the dial off for a while so the echoes don’t break our skulls open. Sit tight, and we’ll be back soon to cover what you remember, all right?”

“...Okay.”

And Tim turned the dial.

--

After all the excitement and goings-on, it was only ten in the morning by the time they made it downstairs.

For the sake of a complete observation, Martin finished his normal janitorial duties. The air was thick with tension as the others kept watch for changes in his demeanor or direction, but nothing happened. Before long he was stowing his supplies into the closet downstairs and collapsing onto his desk.

Tim leaned against the table. “If it makes you feel any better, we won’t tell if you slack off.”

“Yes, you’re all very good at not telling people things.”

“Hey, from now on it’s full disclosure. I promise, I’ll never let Sasha convince me of anything ever again.”

Sasha rolled her eyes and looked past Tim from the far end of the table. “I am sorry, whether or not you believe me. If something like that comes up again, we’ll find a way to handle it differently. But like you said, now you know.”

“Yeah. Now I know.”

Across from Tim, Jon sat at his laptop quietly typing away as the conversation unfolded around him. There was a twinge of irritation at the back of Martin’s mind, but his head was killing him and, well, there were more important things for all of them to be thinking about.

The numbers swam in front of Martin and he pushed the paperwork aside, folding his arms under his head. He probably wasn’t going to have his job much longer.

“So, once your day is about done and the headaches clear, we’ll check in with Evan and see if the sky is messed up. Two-for-one,” Tim said with little enthusiasm. “My bet is we’ll look out the window and see Simon Fairchild falling past us like a screaming ragdoll.”

At some point, Martin did just fall asleep at his desk. Every once in a while, he would wake up to see another hour had passed with the three researchers still seated at the table. He managed to stay up long enough to eat his lunch around noon, but after that he was out like a light. His cohorts may have been used to the sort of hours and excitement of the past week, but there never seemed to be enough sleep for him.

They were nice enough to leave him undisturbed.

--

“Sorry, let me see. You went to work that day. Peter was there, and at some point he took you upstairs for some reason?” Sasha said, writing something down.

“Yes. He. Needed. Something.” The mix of voices had an almost computer-like quality after a while now that they’d started getting proper sentences.

They’d been working for a bit, trying to fill in some word gaps while probing Evan’s memory. Martin and Tim sat on the couch, facing purposefully away from the windows. Sasha was back in her chair, while Jon stood nearby and kept an eye on the outside.

Martin’s shift had ended about ten minutes before. Apparently whatever it was the woman had alluded to, it was meant to be happening ‘later today’, but both up- and downstairs so far had been… nothing. The same gloomy sky down below, the same bright expanse up above. It was as normal as things could’ve been.

“And what was it he needed?”

“He. Needed. Me. Working. Upstairs? Something. Off. Smug. Bastard.”

“God, he is.” Martin chuckled. Did Evan count as a coworker? This felt like a coworker thing to talk about.

Sasha tapped her pen to paper. “Did he say anything else once you actually went upstairs? Anything about plans or reasoning?”

“Family? Disappointed. Normal. Stuff.”

“And then what happened? Were you pushed into something? Did you see anything before things changed?”

“No. Smug. Talking. Then. Here.”

“Were you facing the windows, or toward the panel?”

“Windows. Not. See. Panel.”

Martin would have to get home, soon. Should he have been running home the moment he had the chance to make sure his mother was all right? What if this thing happened while he was still at work? He should’ve called earlier that day, now that he was thinking about it, but now it was too late. He wasn’t about to walk downstairs alone for some privacy.

Would asking the others to come home with him after this be weird? Yes, that would be weird. He could text Tim if there was a problem. If it was big enough of an event, them being around wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway.

Would a timetable have been so terrible? A nice ‘Simon said look at the sky around noon-ish’?

As Tim and Sasha alternated with questions, Jon kept glancing out the window and clenching his jaw. Even if Martin was still miffed about that morning, the sight made his stomach twist in sympathy.

If Simon had some sort of plan, Martin wished he would get it over with already.

[zodiyack]

Siren Seduction

Alternate title: Not So Bad After All

Kind of requested?: captivatedbycillianmurphy said: I’m actually a professional mermaid, it would be cool if you wrote a story about Tommy finding me by accident “in tail !” LOL🤣🧜🏻‍♀️ Siren Seduction !

Pairing: Thomas Shelby x reader

Warnings: partial nudity mention, mermaids, swearing

Note: So there are two different “Siren Seduction” stories. I didn’t know if you meant that you wanted an actual mermaid or not, so this one is x reader where he finds his human lover in a fake tail but not on accident, and then the next one is where he finds his actual mermaid lover on accident. (I know you said accident but I forgot when I was writing, hope you like it!)

ALSO! I don’t know if any of you guys have a preferred tail color, so I just went with one. Feel free to send a request with a specific color or tell me a color before I write the second version!

Y/m/n = Your Mermaid Name

masterlist | Peaky Blinders Masterlist

alternate story

Tommy ran throughout his house. Charlie was on his hip, resting his head upon his father’s shoulder. They were on a mission to find Y/n. Earlier that day, Tommy asked why she was so secretive. Y/n told Tommy that she did some stuff he would find strange and that’s why she was worried how he’d feel. He tried to reassure her, telling her that nothing she does can be weird, let alone affect his love for her.

She didn’t believe him, but she nodded and walked away. And now that Charlie and him were trying to find her, it seemed like she impossible to find.

In all truth, Pol and Ada were the only ones Y/n told of her hobbies. She put on mermaid shows for kids down at the aquarium in the zoo. They cleaned out a special tank just for her, amazed with her ability to hold her breath for 5 minutes at a time. Her trick was to move around a bit so it only seemed natural that she went up to get air.

Charlie had seen his mum once, but he couldn’t remember since he didn’t realize it was her. Polly had taken Karl and Charlie, showing them the amazing, “y/m/n” and her wonderful tail. They were amazed to say the least. Polly and Ada also thought it looked fun, and they agreed with their opinion after Y/n got them to swim with her. 

Swim suits weren’t the most flattering looking with a mermaid tail, but Y/n refused to go topless, as she worked with kids and even if she didn’t, she wasn’t too keen on other people, who were definitely not her husband, seeing her chest. So instead, she wore her underwear.

The woman’s underwear was a white top (tank-top kind of top) with a connected bottom, and the bottoms were white shorts. There were a few different kinds, some lacy, some connected on the sides rather than the whole waist, and some even had cute little frills or bows. Y/n favored her frilly looking one, for it covered more skin and still was adorable.

Her tail, clothed in semi-visible sparkles and a gorgeous baby pink that faded into teal. It was designed by the three women, and boy were they proud of it. The man who owned the aquarium continued asking Y/n to do her shows after the first one. He didn’t expect it to become so popular, the woman submerged underwater, bathed in bright colors with her hair floating around her so elegantly.

Sadly, it was time her husband found out. And that wasn’t decided by any of the girls. It was decided by Tommy himself.

He pushed through the door to the room Pol was in, not giving two shits about the company that was over. “Pol. Where’s my wife?” His tone was slightly aggressive, making his question more of a demand.

“Working.” Poor Tommy didn’t know that Y/n begged his aunt and sister not to share anything, but he did know that one of them would give in at some point.

“Y/n doesn’t work. You and I both know that. The only work she does, is with me and the boys, and I don’t see us doing any jobs currently.”

“Thomas, I have guests. Your wife is working. And if I were you, I’d take Charlie elsewhere, he looks rather bored.”

Tommy grunted. He wouldn’t accept defeat. He did have to respect that his aunt was in a meeting, she did it for him too, so there was that. Charlie and him would just have to go see Ada. Hopefully she was an easier nut to crack.

The Shelby adjusted his son onto his back, earning a delighted giggle from the young boy. If he was going to find Ada, why not entertain the “rather bored” Charlie while he’s at it? He took off running slightly, arms securing Charlie to his back.

The fun was actually fun to Tommy. He made note do it more often. Not only was the playing fun, but it warmed his heart to hear his son giggle like that. He finally set him down, holding his hand and guiding him over to the couch Ada sat on. She looked very concentrated on a photo, but quickly flipped it over and smiled at her nephew.

“Ahem, Ada.”

“Yes, Tommy? Is this about Y/n? I could hear you and Pol.” Ada lifted Charlie onto her lap after she finished her sentence. She made funny faces at him while her brother spoke.

“Yes actually. I’d like to know where my wife is, or where she is ‘working’.”

Ada’s eyes never left Charlie when she spoke, too busy making more faces to get him to laugh. “I can’t tell you anything Tom, I’m sorry.”

“You can. She’s my fucking wife, and I demand to know where the fuck she is.”

“Tom. Language.”

“Ada. Where is she?”

“Thomas. I’m serio-” She was interrupted by Charlie snatching the photo from where she had set it. He didn’t recognize the mermaid, but he knew right away that it was something from the aquarium.

“Dad! Fishy!”

“What is it Charlie?”

His sister’s eyes widened. That was Tommy’s clue. He got her. She pulled the photo from her nephew’s hands before he could show his father. It earned a hurt look from the little boy, but she was more focused on protecting the secret of her sister-in-law.

“Fine! I won’t tell you what she does or anything, but I can tell you to go to the zoo. Ask for the special show.”

Special show? Zoo? There was nothing special about the zoo. Why would she work in a zoo? Were women even allowed to work there? Tommy didn’t know because originally, he didn’t give a fuck.

“Are you absolutely sure Ada? Not just fuckin’ with me?”

“I’m sure.” she lifted Charlie and handed him to Tommy, “Charlie here’ll know it when he sees it, isn’t that right love?”

“Right!”

. . .

Tommy walked into the zoo, Charlie on his shoulders. It was a bit odd, seeing the Peaky Blinders’ leader walking around with his son in London in the zoo of all places. It also went against Tommy’s safety rule, however just this once he’d allow it to happen, only because he accompanied his son. He didn’t care that it was a family place that had security, it only was okay with Tommy if he was there with Charlie.

When asking about what Ada had instructed him to, they were told to follow someone to the special show. The person was now walking in front of them, rambling on about how amazed they thought him and his son would be.

Charlie had to get off of Tommy’s shoulders, however he did remain in his fathers arms. Tommy’s hip just seemed to be Charlie’s favorite place. Lucky for him, it was one of Tommy’s favorite places for Charlie to be, that way he would never get lost or pulled away from him.

The lights when down, the spotlights pointed at the glass, Tommy took a seat, Charlie sat on his father’s lap. It confused Tommy slightly, how excited his son was. He was so giddy and fidgety. But why? For what reason? It was just a stupid zoo.

Music played, it sounded so soft and calming. A woman appeared on the other side of the glass. Tommy recognized her within the first glance. He caught her eyes and smiled genuinely. Her hair was floating around her, decorated with shells, beads, and other similar stuff. Her face was free of any makeup besides a few gems that were stuck onto her cheeks. Her tail, it looked so magnificent, it looked as if it were real.

How could someone be dressed kind of goofy, but still looks so god damn breathtaking?

She swam around the tank, waving at children and adults. She then swam back up, but fortunately for the crowd, she came back down and continued. How did his wife learn to do this? How did she do it behind his back all this time? Those questions left Tommy’s mind as quickly as they had entered them. He became entranced with his wife’s show.

Charlie whispered into his father’s ear, “Dad? Are you enjoying Miss Y/m/n’s show? I’ve only seen her once, but I can’t wait to tell mummy I’ve seen her again!”

Another smile found it’s way onto Tommy’s face, this one full of amusement for the mermaid and for his son being completely unaware. “Yes Charlie, Y/m/n is pretty good at what she does. I’m sure mummy would love to hear about her.”

Both males attention turned back to the mermaid. A child ran over and put their hand on the glass. Their parents tried to quietly yell at them to come back, but Y/n was quite the opposite. She placed her hand over where the child’s was, smiling when the little one giggled.

She spotted Charlie again and made a beckoning motion with her finger. Y/n swam up to the surface. It was unknown to the audience, but she had asked the man in charge for a favor. She swam back down, smiling sweetly at her viewers.

The lights flicked back on.

“Y/m/n has asked a favor of me! She’d like for all the children, and adults if they’d like, to come up to the front and greet her. She can’t talk to you, but she’d love to do it in her own special way. So, if you’d like to, feel free to walk up here. Just no pushing!” The man walked back out of the room after he had finished announcing what was needed to be announced. 

The kids rushed to the front. Charlie was one of the few who managed to get into Y/n’s line of sight, Tommy behind him. This was because Y/n asked specifically that they could see her and vice versa.

She waved at Charlie, pressing her hand onto the glass. He did the same, and Y/n pressed her other hand for Tommy. The man hesitated, but did as his son had.

After a while, people started to leave. Y/n was still in the tank, having what seemed like interesting conversations with some of the kids. She preformed tricks, spins, flips and others. At some point she had blown bubbles into the water for extra fun. It resulted in her needing to go up for air sooner, but her mind, it was totally worth it.

Finally, it was only Tommy and Charlie in the audience. Y/n pressed both of her hands against the glass, removing one and blowing a kiss to Tommy. Charlie’s eyes widened. Tommy pretended to catch the kiss and blow one back. The interaction only made Charlie’s eyes wider.

“Dad! You can’t kiss Y/m/n, she’s not mum!”

Y/n heard her son, a smile appearing on her face, a matching one on Tommy’s. It wasn’t the time for Charlie to find out that she wasn’t actually a mermaid, it wasn’t time for him to find out that it was actually his mother. They both agreed, words unnecessary, that they’d tell him when he was older. No one was going to spoil his imagination while they were still there.

The manager announced that the show was over and it was time to send Y/m/n back to her home. She nodded and waved to her boys, swimming to the back of the tank, where she would be out of sight, and climbing out.

Tommy and Charlie walked out of the zoo. Tommy felt happy, his heart felt warmer and the smile he was fighting felt bigger than ever. He bought ice cream for him and Charlie, the reasoning being how good of a mood he was in.

Maybe the zoo isn’t so bad after all.

[unwiltingblossom]

Dear SPN fandom

do not fall for the ‘THIS WAS ALL FORESHADOWED’ fluffing circlejerk that fandom loves to do with BS plot twists all the time (not just SPN, most long running or nerd fandoms do this) - NO. IT WAS NOT.

Supernatural was originally written to be a 5 season series by Kripke. The five seasons are pretty tightly written and everything works up into a tidy bow at the end. The Chuck from s5 is consistent from when you meet him until when he disappears at the end. The only change is the sequel hook at the end of Sam being back from the dead.

When Kripke left, Sera Gamble took charge for seasons 6 and 7, where she built up the Leviathan arc, which was widely (and rightfully) reviled. She got dropped and a new writer who had previously been involved in the writing was brought on for season 8.

season 8 - 11 had its writing struggles, but was headed by Jeremy Carver. Despite its issues, it was all fairly cohesive and led up to finding out that Chuck had an evil sister named Amara, who was all of the spitefulness, hatred, chaos and destruction that Chuck was not. This arc was originally going to result in Chuck sacrificing himself and dying to take out Amara, as one couldn’t live without the other, but then they decided at the last minute to let Chuck live and instead redeem Amara so the yin-yang could be restored harmoniously instead. This was another ‘ending’ to Supernatural.

Season 12 got new show runners, Andrew Dabb and Robert Singer. Their writing has been all over the place, with the terrible attempt to expand the Men of Letters, total waste of Mary Winchester, and their overall arc of growing the Winchester family by creating Jack to be their adoptive son. They had a few arcs they picked up and then dropped with extreme prejudice - most notably Sam becoming the next Bobby. Dean being Michael’s unwilling host, and “The world ends if you don’t seal yourself away, there are no exceptions to this future”. They also really struggle to stick to ANYTHING, as they’ll dabble in bringing back Gabriel just to immediately kill him, and try out new kings of hell just to immediately kill them, too, or play around with Mary and multiple different romances only to ship those all off on buses and give an apathetic shrug when they finally got sick of her and killed her off.

Why is this important to note?

Because Dabb and Singer are crap showrunners. They can’t stick to any of their plans, completely squander their characters and opportunities, and will hardcore railroad their stories (see: Jack’s soulless arc) to get to the ending they want. It’s impossible for them to have foreshadowed anything because they can’t make up their mind from half a season to the next, much less multiple seasons.

And this is compounded by the fact that apparently Jensen just said at the last minute “I’m done”, meaning they had no notice to prepare a final season, they just had to find a way to get from where they were (in the middle of an arc - remember how Castiel is supposed to be eaten by the Empty once he’s happy and content and forgotten his promise? Pretty hard to do that now, huh? Guess that’s another dropped plot) to a climactic ending FAST. No other epic conclusion for an arc has happened in the span of a season. The quickest arc was the Leviathan one, and it was only that fast because people hated it. Everything else was 3-5 seasons long, and they clearly didn’t want to use Jack as the villain.

Why is this doubly important to note?

Because Dabb and Singer weren’t the showrunners last time Chuck appeared. Why does it not make sense for Chuck to have sent Kevin to hell when he did? Because he didn’t. Because it didn’t match Chuck’s character - the benevolent, hands-off man with just a bit of a temper when he got riled up - to do that for literally no reason to his own prophet.

There is no foreshadowing. There’s nothing to see, because this was never the plan. Not even Singer and Dabb planned this, because the first hint we get that Chuck is anything like this comes from a psychotic angel musing about what he thinks Chuck does. Oh yes, Amara rants at Chuck about things in season 11, but the writing goes out of its way to show that Amara is bitter and feels betrayed, so her perception of events was warped. The writers now want you to believe that Amara was right all along and that Chuck was a terrible person all this time, but it doesn’t ring true and it isn’t ‘foreshadowing’, because it doesn’t fit in with the writing up to this point.

So don’t say this is ‘foreshadowing’, or that they’ve written a long and subtle character arc for Chuck. Dabb and Singer are tricking you, and relying on you, the viewer, to recognize patterns and subtleties that don’t exist so that they look like better writers than they actually are.

It’s a classic writing trick. Retroactively apply a few things you used in the past, pretend that it was planned all along, and watch as your readers and fans write out the complex plot twist and subtle foreshadowing of events for you.

[blogs-of-our-lives]

           I’m sorry to say this, but this may very well be the last of the Blogs of Our Lives post.

           :(

           I’ve had a lot of fun writing for this, but it’s just not what I want to do with my life. And as much as I enjoy it, it’s taking time away from other creative projects. For my tens of viewers, it’s not the end of a chapter, but the beginning of a new one. Thank you all for reading, and believing that I can make something wonderful and funny out of trash. I just want you all to know that deep down, from the bottom of my heart, no matter how much love I have for you all, I will never ever ever love you as much as I hate Brightburn.

             Brightburn suuuuuuuucks. It sucks sucks sucks. I couldn’t wait until later in the post to say that. I had to lead with how trash the movie was, and now I’m going to spend the next couple pages explaining why it’s trash. It’s so bad that I – shitty movie connoisseur, who is making himself watch Days of our Lives and write about it – hated the movie so much that I decided to write a whole paper about it just to prevent someone else from being tricked into seeing it.

           I will start with the only good thing about the movie. The concept. Brightburn is about a young kid (I’d estimate about sixth grade) who discovers he has super powers akin to that of a god. He has super strength, he has super speed, he can fly, he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and he’s almost indestructible. Essentially Superman. It’s not a particularly original idea, but I was intrigued with the fact that the kid seemed to almost immediately become evil. This isn’t particularly farfetched. In fact, psychopathic traits are fairly common amongst children. The brain isn’t done developing, and in some senses the child is a psychopath. Kids simply grow out of it. Luckily, kids are small, they’re weak, they can’t drive, they can’t vote, and they can’t even get a movie ticket to an R rated movie like Brightburn, which I refuse to grant the respect of italicization. The amount of damage a kid could do is extremely limited. So the idea of a middle-schooler with superpowers is kind of terrifying. Imagine a child without empathy who you can kick your ass. If you tell them to go to bed, they can throw you through a wall. And it’s not a one in a million chance the kid will be a psychopath. Plus, when I was a kid I used to think when it rained somewhere it rained everywhere. It blew my mind that it was raining in my hometown but not in my friend’s town. When my dad was a kid he was terrified of this movie called Killdozer. About a bulldozer that came to life and killed people. In his words, “What are you going to do, hide from it? It’ll just bulldoze everything.” Kids are idiots.

           Side note, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that I italicized Killdozer but not Brightburn. It’s intentional. I respect a movie about a killer bulldozer more than a $12 million movie.

           Anyway, that was the only good part of the movie. The concept. Now I’m going to tear it apart, starting with the pacing. Nobody really knows or cares about the pacing when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, the movies often feel like they stagnate or are rushed in parts. Brightburn is one of the worst examples I can think of. The buildup just drags on and on and on and on. By the time [SPOILER ALERT] Brendon (or whatever the fucking kid’s name is) turns evil, we had been sitting in that theater for a solid hour. Maybe more. That’s two thirds of the movie (including credits) that was spent just building up. So now, when we finally get the action payoff, it felt like the movie was rushing to the end. The kid destroys most of the house, kills four people, and then blows up a plane in like twenty minutes. It’s like trying to write on a piece of paper and running out of room so you have to make the letters smaller and smaller to fit on one page. But it’s a thousand times worse than that, because the paper had a set length. You could plan out where the letters needed to go and how big they can be. A movie isn’t made with a length in mind. So it’s like reading a sentence but the letters get smaller and smaller for no clear reason. It felt like they didn’t know how to end the movie so they just threw some crap together and tried to play it so fast we wouldn’t realize how trash it was.

           On to the acting. I have no real complaints. The mom and the dad did pretty good jobs. Even the kid did a decent job. At times it was pretty weak, but I think most of that was on the writing.

           Fuck the writing. The Chekov’s guns of the movie were stupid and obvious. In one of the first scenes, the mother whistles during a game of hide and seek in order to get him to whistle back, like an off-brand Marco Polo. My editor literally leaned over to me (like two minutes into the movie) and whispered “I bet that’s going to come back later.” It did. Later on in the movie, the dad comments to the mom that it was strange Braxton had never broken a bone or even got a cut. Like two scenes later, the kid finds his space ship and immediately cuts his hand on the metal. Sure enough, it comes back later in the film, in a way so stupid that I’m going to struggle to put it into words. The mother jumps to freedom from her house and somehow cuts her hand during the fall. She looks at the cut (which is shaped exactly like Bryson’s and positioned in the exact same place), looks at the barn where the spaceship is hidden, looks back at the cut, and says (I’m paraphrasing) “The spaceship! It’s the only thing that can hurt him.” The biggest sign of a bad writer is when the characters think about what they’re about to do, say what they’re about to do, and then do it. JUST DO IT. I remembered the garbage scene from earlier in the film that established the only thing that can hurt him. Who was that line for? Children who weren’t paying attention? The film was rated R. Maybe they assumed the only people they could trick into seeing this trash were too stupid to follow a plot. And yes, I’m one of the idiots they tricked into watching it. Jokes on them, now I’m tearing their movie apart on my blog with tens of readers.

           I’ve told you guys about I, Frankenstein. The movie was worse than that. At least the writing in I, Frankenstein, while bad, followed a formula. There was never a point in which I rolled my eyes, it just in generally wasn’t particularly good. Brightburn, on the other hand, was aggressively bad. It was like all the different facets of a movie (acting, special effects, writing, pacing, visuals) had a competition to be the worst part of this dumpster fire of a film. I’m being too hard on the special effects. They were just wildly unmemorable, not actually bad. But somehow, incredibly, Brightburn was even worse than the sum of its parts. At a certain point, I looked up and started watching the blinking light of the fire alarm. There wasn’t really a pattern to it. I was fascinated. At another point, during the resolution of the movie, a man sitting behind me got out his phone and made a phone call. And you know what, I don’t blame him. It wasn’t like he was taking away from the experience. I was glad he was having more fun than me.

           Something I didn’t realize until now, when I looked up Brightburn on Wikipedia to trash how much money went into making it ($6-12 million, so honestly they used the money pretty well), was that it’s called a “superhero horror film.” I took a class my last year in college about Horror as a genre, and the running theme of the class was the question what is horror? I’ll define horror as best as I can, and you are all free to agree or disagree as to whether or not it’s true. I personally do not consider Silence of the Lambs to be a horror film, though it is scary. It’s a crime film. Even if the film contained supernatural elements (like, say, if Hannibal Lecter was a ghost and rather than breaking out of prison he comes back to life), it would still be a crime film. On the other hand, I consider the movie Friday the 13th (the 1980 film with Kevin Bacon, not the trash remake) to be horror. Even if the film contained no supernatural elements, it would still be a horror film. Friday the 13th Part 1 doesn’t actually contain anything supernatural, but if I mentioned one that does (Parts 2-12) I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to remind everyone that a young Kevin Bacon not only dies in this movie, but also has a sex scene. It’s arguably his strongest performance.

           Returning to my point, a universal part of horror seems to be the haunting. It doesn’t need to be a ghost haunting, it could be a human haunting as well. I’m sure it exists, but a movie about a stalker could easily be classified as horror, depending on the tone of the movie. Hell, The Gift was a great horror movie, and nothing supernatural or even particularly out of the ordinary took place. Looking at IMDB’s top 10 horror movies of all time, it lists The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street (trash), Psycho, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Of these movies, I haven’t seen Psycho, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or The Exorcist (at least not all the way through). In every single one of the films I have seen, the characters are haunted by some kind of being. In some movies, they’re hunted by it, and in others (particularly the Exorcist), they’re tormented by it. But either way, a haunting is an essential part of every movie. In Silence of the Lambs (IMDB rated it as the 14th best horror movie, naturally), the killer never haunts the characters. He’s a menace, a killer, and a danger to everyone, but he doesn’t haunt them.

           Brando from Brightburn never haunts anyone, except for a ten second scene where he spies on his crush, which was honestly more cringey than creepy. So no, it’s not a superhero horror movie. It’s not a horror movie. If you want to call it anything, call it science fiction. The kid’s an alien, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t that like the number one test to see if you’re watching sci-fi? Right now, if you google “horror movies,” Brightburn is one of the first 10 images to appear. THIS IS UNNACEPTABLE.

           I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but horror has always been a trash genre. I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m the horror equivalent of a comic book nerd writing about how The Avengers ruined my childhood and it was all wrong because they got one detail wrong from the source material. [Side note: I really enjoyed Endgame, and at the time of writing this, it is the number one highest grossing film of all time, and honestly it deserves it more than the trash blue cat people movie. It was a really satisfying ending to one of the largest franchises of all time]. Even the golden years of horror, the Friday the 13ths and the Nightmare on Elm Streets and Halloween, are all just… pretty good. The writing was competent, the music and cinematography were original and not bad, but it’s not particularly scary, and it looks like every horror movie will eventually become that way, except for the ones that rely on cheap jump scares. That’s the nature of horror, I suppose. It preys on a current and relevant fear, and as that fear becomes irrelevant, so does the movie. So when I complain about modern horror, I complain about the cheap, shitty writing that goes into by uncreative and unoriginal people that disappoints everyone. Modern horror is an easy paycheck. It’s cheap and it’s surefire. The Brightburn garbage raised $30 million dollars on a budget of $6 million. Pet Semetary, Crawl, and Annabelle Comes Home raised a collective $366 million to a collective budget of $66 million. That is a fucking absurd return on investment. None of these movies (except for Crawl, kinda) did anything different. Pet Semetary was a remake. Annabelle Comes Home is a continuation of the Garbage Cinematic Uni-garbage-verse that spawned from The Conjuring. So horror has become a yearly money-maker for big production companies. Just put out some trash that will surprise (not scare) people, and watch the dollars roll in. Financially, this is the golden age of horror. They can make anything with a jump scare and make MILLIONS.

           I don’t know what the point of all this is. I’m not telling the genre to do better, because it’s doing pretty fine. Midsommar and Us both got pretty good reviews. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark looks pretty good. It’s not like all the talent dried up. There’s still plenty of creative and original people working on horror movies, and they’re making some really good stuff. I guess it boils down to me hating Brightburn on a deep, personal level, and I’m not really sure why. I watch tons of trash. As I type this, I’m looking at my collector’s edition DVD set of Under the Dome. It’s garbage. Truly truly terrible. But there are scenes I liked. Shots I liked. It was made by people who were bad at what they do, but they were still creative. There’s this one episode where the government tries to blow up the dome, and everyone inside thinks they’re going to die. All the characters, thinking they have minutes left on earth, all finally do something. The plot unravels into something much, much, much simpler, as all the characters stop lying or trying to hide their motives. Everything untangles for just a moment, and after they survive the blast unharmed, it leaves the question what next? Sure, the conflicts were childish and silly, and the character arcs were (to put it nicely) poorly handled. But they tried to do something well, and for just a moment they struck gold. There’s nothing like that in Brightburn. There’s not a single scene that I can look at in the movie and say you’re on to something there. Keep working. If I were given the script and a blank check and told to write a better one, I would strip it down to the foundation. I wouldn’t rewrite it, I would delete everything except the core premise and start over.

           It just really really hurts, having to type out that this movie was worse than Under the Dome.

           I know it’s too late to convince anyone not to see Brightburn. And that’s fine. Sometimes the world moves too fast for you to make a change. But I just want you to know deep down how much I hate that movie. I resent it for wasting my time, my energy, and my money. It’s worse than Days of our Lives.

           Fuck you, Brightburn.

           Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me.

[scifimagpie]

Game of ZZZs: How Long Stories Ruin Everything

I've been putting this one off because I was kind of busy writing an 18-part series deep-dive involving journalism and undercover work, but since Lindsay Ellis has released her video essay conclusion, I have finally put my thoughts in order.

So, today we're going to talk about something contentious. I have no issue with books being long, or shows being long, or movies being long - but at the same time, I do. And yes, I know some people adore epic scale stories for their own sake.  Not everything needs to be a thousand-page-long ten-book series with three spinoffs and prequels. Oh, sure, market forces and advertising play a role in this, but creators still participate in it.

But sometimes a story isn't long because it needs to be, it's long because the writer thinks it HAS to be. From my personal experience as a reader and writer, and especially as an editor, I've come to some conclusions about how stories are artificially extended. And in a world of global warming and climate change, shouldn't we be fighting waste everywhere, on every level?

Now, a certain show ended its eighth season not long ago; Big Bang Theory came to a whimper of a close after ten seasons, and Veep - which I only heard about towards its grand finale, alas - has also finished up a seven-season run. 

I'm not saying all of these shows participated in various errors. I'm saying pretty much every show, book, and movie series will partake in them eventually. So how do we do better than the bad ones, and how do we echo or even improve on the good ones? We can't fight what we don't know about, so let's get into it.

Spacing

Everything happens, but not right away. No, the important events are distanced from each other, to the point where there are long stretches of dead zones or deserts of nonsense in between them. I'm not talking about character interactions as nonsense here, but unfortunately, a lot of authors seem to think that they count, and that human drama isn't interesting enough to be a climax. Older fantasy works--cough, cough, Wheel of Time--can be particularly bad about this. The problem with spacing out events and using human drama between the big McGuffin/army-driven fights is that readers get frustrated by the human drama rather than finding it rewarding. Or worse, they find the army and McGuffiny-crap a distraction from the human stuff.

Padding

I know about this issue from the inside. Bad Things that Happen to Girls started off as a book called Foreverland, and then was untitled for a while before getting its current name. It went through two full rewrites before arriving at its current published form. When I wrote it at first, I thought it absolutely had to be a long novel, with lots of details about the girls' lives and a slow-burn breakdown, then an extended road trip in the middle and a bunch of scenes about their experiences in university.

I didn't realise I was padding it, but when I experimented with radically decreasing the timeline of events, I had a revelation. I didn't need years and paragraphs on paragraphs chronicling their lived experiences, full of pointless dialogue and meandering descriptions. All I had to do were give little samples and important moments, and that would get the idea across. Sometimes a flash reveals more than a long exposure shot, to put it in cinematic terms.

Cramming

EVERYTHING MUST HAPPEN AND IT MUST HAPPEN NOW AND HERE ARE TEN NEW CHARACTERS AND A NEW SUBPLOT AND HOLY CRAP WE MUST MAKE UP FOR WRAPPING UP TOO MANY THREADS AT THE END OF THE LAST SEASON OOPS.

The caps lock here was entirely necessary and appropriate, because with cramming, the story often feels like it's shouting at you. (Probably in German.)

The biggest problem with cramming, too, is that it requires glossing over things. If readers get interested by a small detail, they might end up screaming, "wait, go back!" long after the author's moved to another topic, or three other topics. Finding the balance between this and padding can be tricky, but the best solution I can offer is "external perspective." Get someone to read over your work, and when they lose attention, that's time to cut. It's a trick I often use with editing manuscripts - the minute my attention wavers, I mark it, just in case.

Crashing

this tends to happen to shows that have lived past their expiry date. Supernatural is a fine example of this. This is where "shark-jumping" tends to come into play; characters do things that go against their nature and development for the sake of jump-starting a narrative or adding some excitement.

Oh, the shark-jump. That's worth a mini-section of its own. Honestly, most shows either end or jump the shark in order to keep going. There's no such thing as a perfect writer or a perfect story; mostly because these things are subjective, but partly because keeping all the balls in the air for a story is just plain hard. 

Endless escalation 

Science fiction authors are prone to this, and so are epic fantasy authors. In an effort to keep reader interest, stakes rise and rise and rise, and then lose sight of the human scale of things. The problem is that stories are made of people, and if you forget about the people, you don't have a story anymore.

As with Cramming, this can lead to glossing over interesting bits as well. The full impact of a big change or shift isn't always felt if we rush to the next big, shiny thing. In real life, though, long-reaching consequences of events can have ripples for decades or even centuries. The Magna Carta was a big deal when it was signed; the effects of the Spanish Inquisitions, the Crusades, the unification of China (which happened more than once), the Viking cultural expansions, and the colonization of North America (by which I mean the land-theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples) are all still talked about to this day. 

Bad things that happen to characters need room to resonate. PTSD and trauma are not only interesting, they're natural, and even when people mostly recover from them, they leave a lasting impact. Let your characters get wrecked by something. Have characters reference things that have happened. Let characters get fatigued, collapse, and have to fix themselves. It'll not only demonstrate the actual impact of your events, it'll keep you from having to throw together another big, shiny thing to make the story more exciting (looking at you, Avengers series and mainstream comics). 

So, what tends to actually cause these writing techniques behind the scenes? 

Burnout or boredom

One of the most difficult and important factors - one which arguably contributed to the absolute mess that was the GoT finale - is just getting tired of your own damn story. When this happens, authors and creators will end up trying to revamp something with weird new twists partly to keep themselves interested, might engineer an awkward left turn to justify a foreshadowed plot element, or might just do a half-hearted wrap-up of the previous plot elements.

Here's the thing - audiences don't always consume stories at the same rate as authors write them. Many times, readers or viewers will stumble on a work and binge it in a relatively short time, so what took years for the writer will take months, at most, for the consumer. This can make tonal clashes very jarring. 

In other cases, an author will abandon a series due to writer's block or life events - a sin of which I, cough, am guilty - and then try to pick it up later. This will still impact the story, often negatively. Maybe one has just gotten well and thoroughly tired of the subject matter, or it's been done to death in the popular sphere. It doesn't really matter - either way, authors are subject to the world around them, and sometimes, the only way to deal with burnout or boredom is rotating to another project. That's fine - the only issue comes when the first project is completely abandoned, and languishes, unfinished. 

Societal changes and personal development 

I'm combining these two because the world around us affects us, and sometimes, we even affect the world. If you'd told me that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were going to rise to power during my lifetime, I wouldn't've believed you. To many, it sounded like a bad dream. Well, here we are, and the long night has not yet come to an end. Using art to cope with dark times and critique them is a long-celebrated human trend, and there's no reason to stop now. Sure, we might fear our work aging poorly - but stories that try to be timeless always age anyhow, and an earnest time capsule often lasts longer, because it can tap into the problems of an era (which echo forward, as discussed in the section above).

If you'd told me that I'd be able to deal with my family issues in a more satisfactory way, I might have believed you - but realising the impact of that on my writing both as a Game Master and an author is another matter. However, the additional perspective and maturity of healing has, rather than distancing me from characters' struggles, provided additional objectivity and even empathy. Fixing ourselves and healing doesn't "take away our artistic magic" - far from it. If anything, getting over issues unlocks the ability to deal with them in fiction much more effectively. 

Disillusionment and insecurity

These are nasty brain demons, all right - perhaps one has taken a look at the broad span of one's work, compared it to one's goals, and feels they are just - well, left wanting. Every creator struggles with this at some point, whether crafting a story for a D&D party or for hundreds of readers or thousands of viewers. The only way to deal with it is with external perspective and turning to objective sources of both external critique and validation. 

After all, we tell ourselves things that may or may not be true all the time, and measuring them against the perceptions of the audience can drastically correct things. Your readers might just be happy to see the characters get married - never mind that it took you five years to write about them getting together. And even if they don't like something specific or complain about it or nitpick - hey, they're coming back. You compelled them. Even if the readers, say, abandon their fandom and proclaim it a trashfire - they're still paying for or giving your story attention and money. And ultimately, from a marketing perspective attention is always neutral or positive - even if that attention is controversial - because it increases profits. 

How do we even begin to fix all this? 

But.  All hope is not lost.

By acknowledging burnout, boredom, disillusionment, insecurity, personal development, and societal change - the factors which often lead to writing shortcuts detailed in the previous section - we can compensate for the natural creative struggles by accepting and anticipating them. 

Try to write books in a series in a continuous stretch when possible, making it harder to lose track of the tone or style or character journeys. Plot things out, and get yourself a hands-on editor and/or extremely trustworthy beta-readers. And forgive yourself for screwing up - then get back to writing. At least, that's what I'm doing! 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people's manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * 

* Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

[derekvolo-blog]

A Conspiracy That Isn’t - MK Ultra

“Coming up, the government’s bizarre experiments in mind-control using human guinea pigs”. ("MK ULTRA (History Channel Documentary)" 2017) The opening line hangs there, almost palpable, subtle yet dramatic music plays in the background leaving the viewer to ponder what they just heard. The over 40 minute “documentary” or presentation of evidence and accounts of the claim that follows in the History Channel's Documentary on MK Ultra feels more akin to something out of Hollywood. The information and plot presented is something that perhaps would happen in a Jason Bourne movie, but surely not in the real world, and surely not something the US government would perpetrate on its own citizenry. 

MK Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments - sometimes on unwitting U.S. Citizens. Its purpose was to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering, and psychological torture. Though Project MK Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975 during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the World. (History.com)

The information above and the subject of my rhetorical analysis was presented in the from of a documentary by the history channel. The documentary itself is a very well produced video presentation, filled with; historical information, first hand accounts, and evidence that documents the conspiracy by the US Government to explore and become the world leader in mind-control. The documentary also states that in an effort to reach these goals, and under the auspices of national security, the government experimented on unwitting US citizens throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. The video is rife with very subtle as well as not so subtle examples of all three of the major rhetorical proofs; ethos, pathos, and logos. These rhetorical proofs are used in a very effective way that can leave any viewer in shock about the information they were just given and in my opinion should make a believer out of everyone.  

(Chemical Structure of LSD above, compound was widely used in the project known as MK Ultra) 

Pathos - Emotional Argument

The rhetorical proof of pathos is defined as when an author “use(s) feelings, desires, or fears to influence readers” (Johnson-Sheehan & Paine 2019) It is in essence an appeal to a readers emotions. 

The opening composition of dialogue and dramatic music is perhaps one of the clearest uses of pathos used in this piece. There are two key words used that evoke this emotional response, they are; “bizarre” and “guinea-pigs”. These two words are, in my opinion, a blatant appeal to elicit an emotional connection and identity with the audience. The specific use of the term guinea pig implies to the audience that the government, in this instance, views the citizenry as less than, as expendable rodents, and as a means to an end. Tie this together with the word “bizarre experiments” and one can’t help but think that these actions  wouldn’t even be constitutional as a form of capital punishment, (reference the 8th amendment to the US Constitution) much less should it be allowed on unknowing innocent participants. These particular word choices immediately creates, or at least sets the stage for unified feelings of hostility and/or disdain towards any government or entity that could perpetrate such acts. 

Ethos - Appeal to Authority or Credibility

The rhetorical proof of ethos is when an author “use(s) the reputation, experience, and values of the author or an expert to support claims.” (Johnson-Sheehan & Paine 2019)

There are various uses of ethos that can be seen throughout the piece. Ethos and it’s extrinsic use are not used however to add credibility to the narrator but rather to a number of subjects who are interviewed and presenting material about the topic. When the piece begins to discuss the origins of mind-control experimentation as well as the legal implications, it clearly identifies one of the interviewees as a “Professor of Law, Santa Clara University” shown via a graphic in the lower third of the frame when he is speaking. This is a clear attempt by the piece to add credibility to the discussion surrounding these topics. Not only is this person a lawyer, but they are a professor of Law. This appeal to ethos is an attempt to persuade the audience that not only can they speak to the law but they are also qualified to educate individuals in the concepts and theory of law and therefore are qualified to weigh in on this particular subject.  

Furthermore it is this same lawyer who presents items relating to the congressional investigation into MK Ultra and the release of government documents that detailed some of the evidence of the existence of this program. Again the same banner of credentials appears again invoking an appeal to authority. 

Logos - Appeal to Logic and Reasoning

The final rhetorical proof, logos, is an appeal “to readers’ common sense, beliefs or values.” (Johnson-Sheehan & Paine 2019) And it is this to logic, or common sense, that I believe is the most commonly used and strongest appeal used in making the case for the conspiracy theory to be believed. One of the first such uses, is the presentation of accounts that the US’s various enemies on a state level were engaged in researching mind control. The argument being that since other countries are engaged in this type of research and warfare, the US would need to catch up and even surpass the knowledge and efficiency of other states in implementing these practices. After all National Security depends on us staying ahead of our enemies in the instruments and practices of warfare.

This particular appeal to logos in my opinion is an appeal to get the audience to by into not just the conspiracy itself, but to also buy into the motive that would allow the US Government to rationalize and create such a program. If you can convince people why the government would do something, convincing them that they followed through on the motive in my opinion becomes that much easier.

The strongest appeal to Logos in the presentation of the material are several examples of the US government acknowledging that this program existed. In essence other branches of the government, through investigations and official hearings, have shown that there is evidence that this program did exist. The piece cites a 1977 investigation and hearing by the US Senate Subcommittee on health and scientific research as well as the release of 16,000 declassified documents that allowed investigators to piece together details of the program. Subsequently one victim who died as a result of the program won a legal proceeding brought about by his family and was awarded $750,000 and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then CIA director William Colby (History.com)

Combining Appeals 

At one point in the film, as the history and circumstances of the time are laid out in an effort to inspect the possible motives for the creation of such a program, the piece ratchets up the appeal to the audience by invoking all 3 appeals almost seamlessly and simultaneously using multiple mediums. The clip plays out as follows around the 8:00 minute mark. A Dramatic soundtrack with long suspenseful tones plays as grainy black and white images images of bombs, guns, Nazi soldiers, and historical figures flash across the screen (pathos), the narrator reads a a quote from William Donovan “a World War I Military Hero” and director of a new intelligence office (ethos), of his need to obtain “every subtle device or underhanded trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese” (logos and ethos). 

At this point I will not delve into each individual appeal as that has been covered in the previous section. However what is very striking and very powerful is the ability of the piece to use all three of these appeals in a concert of influence. This combination of appeals is a very convincing and effective construct to have the audience buy into the creation and motivation for the genesis of this government program.

The overall use of ethos, pathos, and logos in this piece in my opinion are used in a very effective way to present the information as fact and further the belief or curiosity in this particular conspiracy theory. Furthermore the combination of using two or more types of appeals at the same time makes the piece that much more effective in identifying with the audience and possibly making skeptics out of what were once non-believers. 

So...Is it True? 

After reviewing the documentary as well as looking at other evidence I am convinced that this program did in fact exist. The tone and register of the piece were very professional and presented in such a way that gave not only the known details into the program but the history and events surrounding its creation. It was presented in a way that the audience did not need to have any prior knowledge or understanding of the program or surrounding histories to get the full story, this was a very good way of outlining the entire argument that MK Ultra did exist.  

It is worth noting to any readers that want to delve further into what the CIA has acknowledged and what has been released that through a FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) request there are hundreds of documents that can be read on the CIA’s own website regarding MK Utra  (CIA.gov)

What is not discussed in this piece is the entirety of success’s or failures achieved in an attempt to control the mind. The fact that this information and the accompanying records were destroyed before the investigation has spawned off a litany of what I call sub-conspiracies that run the gamut of tying this program to a host of other conspiracy theories which may or may not be true. 

The most important take away from this program in my opinion is the acknowledgement by the US government that it did in fact exist. And that had the applicable records been destroyed it is highly likely that its existence would never be acknowledged. It should serve as a cautionary tale that some conspiracies, no matter how outlandish could possibly be true and that no government should ever be thought of as altruistic. 

Full Documentary can be seen here; 

Works Cited

Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/MK-Ultra.

History.com, A&E Television Networks, www.history.com/topics/us-government/history-of-mk-ultra.

Johnson-Sheehan, Richard, and Charles Paine. Writing Today . 4e ed., Pearson Education, Inc., 2019. ISBN 13: 9780134808031

TRUTH TALK NEWS CHANNEL. “MK ULTRA (History Channel Documentary).” YouTube, YouTube, 22 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=64Z1hcn5UZE. 

[panda-noosh]

Action!{P4}{Lance x YouTuber!Reader}

    Words: 5709

   Summary: Being a YouTube guru is hard enough without the added stress of living with Lance McClain, the man who insists on bombarding into every YouTube video you try to film. His viewers love him, and so do you.

  Pairing: Lance McClain x Youtuber!Reader

   Notes: p1 - p2 - p3 - p5 - p6 - p7; EVEN MORE ANGST AND SHIRO YAY

  You wanted to be alone.

    It was strange. You had been sobbing over the fact that you were alone for the past four days straight, tucked up under the loose covers that Samuel had kindly laid out on his sofa for you to crash on, and yet you still didn't want to see anybody.

   It was like your brain was playing tricks on you. Cruel, lethal tricks that were making your anger and sadness turn into a gut-wrenching self hatred that left you clawing for something, anything, to whisk you away into a world where maybe, just maybe, this hadn't happened.

    Maybe not meeting Lance at all would have been the best option, but not even in your destroyed, bruised and fragile state could you lead yourself to believe that.

    After reading about the article online, you couldn't bring yourself to step foot back in the apartment you once shared with the man in question. Samuel and Austin had come and picked you up from the coffee shop, Austin basically having to haul you out of the petite place as your knees felt too weak to carry you anywhere, and since then, you had made shelter on their sofa, wearing the same pair of oversized pyjamas that you had slipped into whenever you stepped foot in their house on the first day.

   You were beginning to stink. Your hair was beginning to get heavy and even in your state, you wanted a shower and a good change of clothes. Wearing your friends oversized pyjamas was comfortable until around the third day hit – then they just became another reason for you to feel self conscious.

    And yet the idea of walking back into your apartment was enough to keep you still on the sofa, unmoving.

   Samuel sighed as he hauled himself up onto the sofa beside you, pulling his legs up out of his chair using his hands. You didn't even flick him a second glance, instead opting to keep your eyes tight on the screen in front of you which was playing old re-runs of A League of Their Own that you had bought from the Sky Box Set options.

    Samuel stayed silent for a few minutes, simply letting you bask in his presence, as if he was worried you would jump at the sound of his voice. The thing was, though, you were very aware of his presence. You had heard him sighing from the kitchen for the past four hours, shooting you worried glances every now and then, acting as if you were some kind of painting on display for him to look at.

    “I'm fine,” you grunt out, finally.

   Samuel barely moves, the sound of your groggy voice not taking him by surprise. What more could he have expected whenever you had done nothing but sit around for the past four days?

   “I can see that,” he replies, sarcastically. “But I think we need to talk about your living conditions, babe.”

   You raise a brow, flicking your eyes over to look at him.

   “That came out wrong,” he insists though there is no panic in his voice, no worry that he offended you. “You know you can stay here for as long as you like, but eventually you've got to pay rent on your own apartment, and maybe - I dunno – get yourself some of your own clothes? There's no way you can do that moping around here all day.”

    You turn back to the television. “That's honestly the last thing I want to hear.”

   Samuel groans, shoving your shoulder with his own. “Oh, come on, Y/N! You know I'd go and get your stuff for you, but I think you need the time out of the house, and I haven't exactly got the best stamina at the moment with surgery prep coming up. You need to forget about Lance. You're life is better off without him anyway.”

   You swallow thickly, not wanting to hear him say another thing about Lance but at the same time wanting nothing more than to talk about him, detail every feeling he had left for you the moment he decided to take that interview.

    It was another weird mix of feelings. Whilst you wanted to be alone, but not lonely, you also wanted to stay quiet, but scream all at the same time. Let your voice echo off the walls and let the pain in your chest out somehow.

    “Please, Y/N,” Samuel says. “For me and Emma. Just – Just let us know you're okay by going and getting your stuff – if you're serious about moving out, that is.”

   “I never said I was moving out,” you grumble. “I just don't want to be there right now. I wanna give Lance some time to move his stuff out before I go in.”

   “And have you and Lance actually spoke about him moving out or are you just assuming things again?”

   You pull your lips into a thin line, hands messing with the thin fabric of your blanket. You knew Samuel was right – he was a smart man, somebody you needed to trust with this kind of thing. You wanted to believe that you could work on your own emotions alone, but that was very clearly not the case. Judging by the stink coming off of you at the moment, you were actually very bad with dealing with this kind of thing.

   Hollowing out your cheeks, you decide to give in. It would take less than an hour. Just go inside of your apartment, grab your stuff and then leave – nothing else needs to go down, and if Lance is there, so what? It should be him too afraid to face you, not the other way around. He was the one who had caused the damage – you had nothing to be embarrassed of.

   “Fine,” you mumble, pulling yourself off of the sofa and heading towards the bathroom to shower.

    The anxiety burned.

   It had welled up in your chest almost as soon as you saw the front doors of your run-down apartment complex, but only grew worse and worse the closer you got to your actual apartment.

   You had walked up these steps thousands of times in the past. You had juggled with these keys thousands of times. You had opened the door to your apartment and stepped inside thousands of times, and yet this time felt like it was the first time all over again. The feeling of not knowing what to expect – it was as if you had never even been inside the place.

    You try to pry a smile on your face as you pass the lady at the front desk, who gives you a raised brow due to your lack of presence the last four days. You're half-tempted to ask her if Lance has been, but decide against it. Showing just how paranoid you were wasn't going to be the best idea – you wanted to make it out like you were the strong one in this mess. You wanted people to think that YouTube had toughened you up enough that this kind of thing came and went easily for you.

    “Oh, you're home!” Slav, the guy from next door, calls out to you as you finally reach the red door of your apartment room. You turn to him and smile slightly, giving him a small wave in affirmative. “Where have you been, neighbour?”

   “Staying with a friend, Slav,” you reply lazily. “Nothing to worry about.”

   “And do you plan on staying long?” he asks, stepping out of his own home fully. “I've just bought tea cakes and there's always too much for me. You can take a couple if you want?”

   You bite your lip, shaking your head. Just walk in, get my stuff and go.

   Slav frowns. “O-Oh. Okay. Well, if you need anything, don't hesitate to-”

   Slav's voice becomes background noise as your ears pick up on another voice. It's so faint – you should barely be able to hear it, especially not over Slav's babbling on about tea cakes, but you do. It's like your senses are drawn to it, zoning in on it almost immediately because it's what you want to hear.

   The voice comes from behind your apartment door – the voice of Lance McClain.

   Your chest tightens. Your palms become sweaty and you're half tempted to turn and sprint in the other direction, because that's the only thing you can do, right? You certainly can't face him. You certainly can't look him in the eye and pretend to be civil in this moment.

    But something keeps you rooted to the floor, and you find yourself waving for Slav to be quiet, pressing your ear to the red door in an attempt to hear better.

   “-shoes and clothes and make up everywhere. Dude, she clearly hasn't been home. I thought leaving the place to settle for a little while would eventually coax her back, but literally nothing has changed since I last came back. What if she's not alright?”

    Another voice springs into the mix – Takashi Shirogane, an old friend of yours who had befriended Lance through you.

   “Can you blame her? Christ, the shit she must be dealing with right now. Her YouTube comments and Twitter mentions are gonna be flooded. You kind of forgot that it isn't some normal, middle class girl you were dating, Lance. She's a YouTube star, and she has to clean up your mess.”

    “I haven't seen her active on Twitter since the night of the ceremony,” Lance grunts. “I'm worried, man. She's never been away from home for this long without giving me a reason.”

   “She doesn't owe you a reason,” Shiro scoffs. “You played her, whether you want to believe that or not. She probably doesn't wanna see you.”

   “Don't say that.”

   “It's the truth. She's a sensitive soul-”

   “Alright, you're no help,” Lance growls, and you swear you hear the noise of Shiro stumbling over something – perhaps Lance had pushed him.

     The mere thought makes you angry. Shiro was right – you didn't owe Lance anything. Not after what he did to you. Lance has no reason to be the angry one in this situation when it was him who caused it in the first place. He was the one who used you. He was the one who completely threw away everything you two had built together over the course of three years, so he should be the one to have to deal with it.

    You pull away from the door, ignoring your suddenly blurred vision that had fallen upon you due to the unshed tears balancing in your eyes in this moment. You ignore Slav as he calls your name, you instead turning on your heel and marching down the hallway.

    You didn't owe Lance anything. Not an explanation, a reason to stay. You would clear this all up eventually, prove to him that he had done nothing but make you stronger, wiser in your choice of friendships.

   You just had to get over the heartbreak first.

  Things had to go back to normal. If there was one thing you knew, it was that.

   You knew full well it wasn’t going to be easy. Migrating back into YouTube after drama had ensued was going to be nothing short of difficult, but there was no other option - you had to fight through it. You had to turn on the camera, show your face and pretend everything was okay, because this was your job, and these were your fans and you needed to be strong.

   The camera feels heavy in your hands as you attempt to set it up, ignoring the drumming in your ears or the way the make up suddenly feels caked on your features after not wearing it for so long. You done the best make-up look you could conjure up, filmed yourself doing it with a big smile on your face, laughing and grinning and enjoying life. That was what the fans wanted to see, you hoped. You happy.

   Perhaps the Lance drama wouldn’t even be that big of a deal at the end of the day. Perhaps people hadn’t even seen the interview. The tabloid it was written for was fairly small, clearly only just starting out and looking for any willing person to spill any information they could get for the reads they so desperately needed.

   Perhaps getting back in the swing of things wouldn’t be as difficult as you’d thought four days ago.

    You sigh as you finally finish up your intro, your cheeks hurting from the amount of smiling you had done in the past hour and a half. Despite still feeling utterly awful, the make up was helping you feel a little bit more confident in yourself. It was like returning to an old friend.

   A loyal old friend. Not somebody who was willing to spill details about your private life for some money that wouldn’t even-

    A knock sounds at the door, breaking you out of your half-angered trance that you were surely about to fall into if it hadn’t been for the distraction.

   Your eyes whip around, conjoining with Austin’s. You hadn’t realised he was home. Austin worked at the nearby diner down the road, having only recently been promoted to counter manager, which meant his schedule basically consisted of working none stop.

    “Oh, hey,” you say, turning in your seat and grinning at the dimpled boy who was peaking his head through the door of the store room Samuel had let you film in. “When did you get back?”

    “Couple of minutes ago,” he replies. “I heard about the apartment situation. I didn’t wanna bring it up, but-”

    You wave a hand through the air, dismissing the awkward tension that this conversation always brings up. There’s no point to it in your eyes. Absolutely no point.

    “It’s fine, Austin. Really. I’m fine. Look, I even filmed a video today!”

   Austin smiles, but it’s clearly forced. He can hear the strain in your voice as you attempt to pretend that you’re okay, when he can see right through you, knowing that you’re not.

    At least he’s kind enough not to bring up the tinge of fake in your voice. The subject of Lance drops in a matter of seconds, leaving the room feeling oddly spacious.

   “You should come down for dinner, then,” Austin finally says. “You haven’t been eating the best of foods and I let you off with it whenever you were moping around. Now that you’re back on your feet, you have to get back in shape, okay?”

    You roll your eyes. “Yes, mother.”

    He grins cheekily as he turns away from the door, giving you one last lopsided smile before he disappears into the hallway, leaving you to deflate against the hard-wood chair behind you.

    Pretending to be okay was exhausting, and you quite frankly didn’t see yourself as fit enough to do it.

    Walking around in the middle of the night was never your forte.

    The streets of California were dangerous whenever the sun wasn’t up to alert you of any suspicious behaviour, and most of the time you wouldn’t even dream of stepping out after dark. The risk was too high, the idea too scary.

    But you had stopped caring, and that was why you were currently patrolling through the streets of California, a hood shrugged on up over your head with your hands stuffed inside of the pockets of your oversized hoodie.

    The weird thing was, you were tired. You were downright exhausted. You wanted nothing more than to lay down and go to sleep, but at the same time, the idea of letting your head run adrift again was too much to bare. Today had been the start of it all - this healing process that you so desperately wanted to fling upon yourself. You had filmed a video, realised that life would be better without him. You would be better off without him in the long-run,and you needed to keep that positive attitude going for as long as you possibly could.

    It didn’t matter that it was forced. It would eventually all click into place with time.

    You knew that trying to fall asleep would only trigger the bad thoughts you had been pushing away all day, and the idea of doing such a thing was aching. So you ended up pulling on an oversized hoodie and your shoes and making your way out into the warm, night air of California.

    Anything to keep the thoughts at bay. The reminders. The memories.

    Shops were still open. Small kiosks still lit up with Halloween decorations, despite Halloween having passed two weeks ago. Some teenagers on skateboards were yelling up ahead, scraping their boards against the concrete. One of them fell over. You stared at him as you walked past, pulling your lip into a thin line.

    You remembered when those activities used to be you and Lance. Skateboarding even though you didn’t know how to. Him falling down steps and scraping his knee and you bursting out into laughter at the squealing noise he made on his way down. He often ended up hopping up and pulling you down on top of him - it was weird how you two were friends for three years and hadn’t seen each other as anything more for a long time afterwards.

    You shake your head. There the thoughts go again, plaguing your brain whenever you didn’t want them to. Maybe you should have brought headphones. Perhaps that would have been better than simply listening to the thumping in the back of your head or the whizz of the cars as they sped past you.

    It must be around 10:00pm whenever you finally arrive at the park that was your unplanned final destination. You had planned to just walk. Walk and walk until every part of you was numb, but you had thought about the park and decided that was where you wanted to go. It was the place everybody went - kids in the day time, drug dealers at night, heartbroken girls who were trying to forget about assholes in the most unsafe way possible.

    You push open the gate and immediately head for the swing set on the far side of the park. It’s cramped between the oversized see-saw and the rusted slide, but it’s the perfect little cubby hole for you to wollow within without people seeing you. The shadows were much to dark at this time of night - even the street lamps wouldn’t illuminate the tears that were already trekking down your face by the time you finally sit down on the swing.

    They fall fast and without meaning. Fat tears which don’t make themselves subtle accompanied by the racking sobs in your chest that you try to muffle with the sleeve of your hoodie, but they escape through the confines of the fabric and get whisked away in the darkness that surrounds you. The darkness of the night, the darkness of life in general. Everything seems so - dark. Like Lance had turned the lights off on his way out of your life and left you stranded to deal with it all on your own.

    And you knew it was dumb of you to be crying now. You had done so well all day. You had told yourself that you were okay, that you were going to be okay, and you had maybe even believed it for a little bit, but being on your own now was strange and it gripped at your lungs and made you wheeze and double over and memories of Lance were flooding back to you and before you can stop yourself, you’ve tugged your phone out of your back pocket and pulled up the infamous interview that you had avoided reading all them days ago.

    It’s like you want to feel pain.

   You reread the headline and feel the tears build even more, blurring your vision but not enough that you can’t continue reading. You let your eyes fall onto the unbolded lettering - the beginning of it all.

   So, Lance, tell us about what it is like to live with YouTube personality, Y/N L/N?

    It’s easy enough. I’m not really home often due to my hectic job schedule, but whenever I am home, she tends to be alright. She doesn’t do anything to break the rules, she pays her half of the rent and she makes her videos. Nothing over the top.

    Is it true that she once had a mental breakdown because she had to edit a video in the space of an hour? We got this information off of some YouTube drama channels who all seem pretty legit.

   Haha! She does that most weeks!

    If there was one thing you had to change about living with her, what would it be and why?

    Probably the mood swings. I understand that editing and stuff is stressful, but her job is hardly anything over-the-top. She can get up in the middle of the day if she liked and pay no consequences, so sometimes it’s difficult for me to understand why she would ever complain, but I guess I don’t fully understand the whole YouTube stress like she does.

    What do you think about her recent confession at the Video Star event in LA?

    I saw it on the live-

    Your reading is cut off whenever the phone is yanked from between your fingers. For a moment, you’re almost positive you’re getting robbed, and fear brews in the pit of your stomach. You don’t know whether to fight back or let them have it - maybe letting them have it would save your emotions a little bit.

    Your eyes snap up at the last minute, tears slipping from your water line at the sudden jolt of your irises. You get ready to yell, but your words fall flat whenever your eyes meet with a familiar pair of brown, upturned eyes.

    “Shiro?”

    The tall, muscled man smiles down at you, chuckling as he hands you your phone back. You silently thank God that he didn’t look down to see what you were reading. You must have looked pityful enough with tears dripping down your face, rocking back and forth alone in a childrens park at 10:00pm.

    “What are you doing here?” you ask, wiping your tears with your sleeve quickly.

     “I could ask you the same thing.” Shiro sighs as he sits down on the swing next to you, taking you by mild surprise. Although you and Shiro had always been friends, you never really spoke to each other that often. He had been in your high school class, and you two were always friendly but you never went out of your way to speak to one another whenever you didn’t need to.

    He was definitely much more Lance’s friend than yours. The two had bonded quickly after you had introduced the two of them at your house-warming party a few years back.

    “It’s late, Y/N,” Shiro says. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

   You shrug loosely. “I’m fine.”

    “Plus, it’s getting cold.” Shiro looks at you but you don’t look at him. He’ll see the tears full-on then, and after hearing him speak to Lance today, there’s no doubt in your mind that he knows exactly why you’re crying, and it’s embarrassing to admit it.

    So you don’t.

    “I can walk you home if you want,” he continues. “Wherever - Wherever home is for you nowadays.”

    You bite back a sob. “I’m good, Shiro. You don’t have to sit here with me.”

    “I want to. You’re my friend.”

    “I’m also extremely emotional right now, in case you couldn’t tell.” Your voice comes out harsher than you expected it to, and you have to take three deep breaths to get yourself to calm down. “Just get yourself home, Shiro. Before it starts to rain.”

    Shiro is silent for a moment, and you think you may have won him over. Maybe your hostility had made him decide to actually get up and leave, and you wouldn’t want a better outcome. You had come out here to be on your own, and on your own was what you wanted.

    But Shiro doesn’t move from the swing. He simply sighs, stretches his long legs out in front of him and gently rocks back and forth in the dark, inhaling deeply through his nose.

     “You know, I read the interview,” he says. Your heart pulls. You don’t say anything. “It was a real dick move what he did, and I understand completely why you’d be angry at him. Hell, I was angry at him. What kind of douchebag can do that to their own girlfriend?”

    “Ex-girlfriend,” you correct. “I’m - I’m his ex-girlfriend now.”

   Shiro nods slowly. “Right. But it was a bit of a stupid move, wasn’t it?”

    “You can say that again.”

    “But I’m sure he had his reasons behind it.”

    You raise a brow, ducking your head to the floor. “I don’t see how there’s any logical excuse as to why somebody would do what he did.”

    “Well, that’s because it’s Lance. Nothing he does is particularly logical to the normal human brain, but it makes all the sense in the world to him. You know how he gets - he gets so worked up that anything makes sense to him. Maybe that was what happened when he got offered the interview.”

    You don’t believe him. You can’t. Not even Lance was that dense when he was worked up.

    Shiro sighs. “I’m sorry. I’m making excuses for him when I know I shouldn’t. It’s just - He hasn’t been in the best of shape since you left and-”

    “I wasn’t the first one to leave,” you bark. “Lance was. He left me at his fucking licence ceremony and didn’t come home that night. I had to read the interview on my own in a god damn coffee shop the next day, all because he was too afraid to tell me about it himself!”

    You were suddenly fuming. Suddenly, the tears stinging your eyes weren’t from sadness or pain or self-consciousness. They were from pure, red hot anger.

    You tighten your fists on the ropes of the swing set, trying your hardest not to lose your temper at Shiro. He was a good guy. He just wanted to help you, help Lance. He wanted to work for both sides, and you had to give him props for trying to make things right.

    “God, it’s just so confusing to me,” you continue, keeping your voice low in an attempt to disguise your anger. “He meant the fucking world to me and he knew that. He used that to his advantage, didn’t he? He wanted me to care a lot about him so that the fall would hurt ten times worse.”

    Shiro’s shaking his head now, leaning forward in shock. “Y/N, I know what he did was wrong, but Lance isn’t like that-”

    “What other explanation could there be?” you nearly yell. “He clearly didn’t care for me like I cared for him! If he did, he wouldn’t have even begun to think about doing what he did. The offer would have been a big joke to him if he cared for me, but it wasn’t. He took into consideration. He chose money over our damn relationship! He used my name to get his own out there, and I -” You wheeze, doubling over as the sobs attack you all over again. “I fell right into his hands, didn’t I? I didn’t even see the signs, Shiro! He was so good at it all, playing me the way he did, and it hurts so fucking much.”

    You cry out, pressing a hand to your mouth as Shiro stumbles off of his swing and wraps his arms around your shoulders, pulling you into his chest so tightly and so compactly that, just for a moment, you feel safe. You feel the world slide back into place as the arms of an old friend finally wrap around your body, but it all goes to shit again whenever the thoughts come racing back, not leaving you alone for a second.

    Because it isn’t Lance hugging you right now. It’s not Lance, and it won’t be Lance, and it should have never have been Lance. It’s Shiro. It’s the man who you barely even spoke to nowadays comforting you over the man who promised to be by your side for the rest of your life, and that thought alone is enough to make the tears fall at a new-found speed, a new found strength and a new found pain to erupt in your chest that has you clenching at the material of Shiro’s coat, looking for anything to grab onto.

     Shiro rocks you back and forth against the swing you’re still sitting on, his arms wrapped around your shoulders. “It’s okay, Y/N. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

    And with everything in you you want to believe him. You want to nod and thank him and tell him he’s right for thinking such a thing, but nothing seems right in this moment, and nothing seems like it’s going to be okay ever again. This will be your permanent state, won’t it? You will forever have to live with the knowledge that your first love - whether you wanted to admit it or not - had chosen money and fame over you.

    You were one of the unlucky few who had had their heart broken and shattered even when everything seemed to be going smoothly.

    “I don’t trust you walking home on your home,” Shiro mumbles against your hair as your sobs finally descend into whimpers that disappear amongst the fabric of his coat. “You can stay at mine tonight.”

    You feel too weak to protest.

      The sunlight nearly blinds you as you are pulled from your long, hysterics-induced sleep that you had fallen hostage to the night before.

    You sadly remembered everything when your eyes opened. It hadn’t all been forgotten like you thought it would have been - you remembered the way you had clutched onto Shiro’s coat pathetically, sobbing into his shirt and grabbing onto him like he was the only thing keeping you grounded in your time of absolute crisis, it seemed.

    As soon as the memories flood back to you, a blush creeps upon your cheeks at the horror of it all. You had lost yourself completely last night, in a way that even shocked you. You were never the type to cry like that. It was a strange feeling.

    You slowly get out of bed, not bothering to check the time, knowing full well it will only make you feel worse. You instead opt for slipping on the jacket Shiro had left out for you and walking down the stairs to greet the man who had potentially saved you from dying of hypothermia the night before.

    Oddly, facing him doesn’t seem as challenging as you thought it would. You woddle into the kitchen, give him a light smile as he sits at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in his hands, petting his tabby cat with his other hand. Glasses are resting on the edge of his nose that he quickly shakes off of his head upon your arrival.

    “You’re awake,” he points out and you nod grimly, heading towards the coffee machine. “How are you feeling?”

    “Better than ever,” you grunt. You don’t mean to sound so salty. You want to thank him for last night, make him feel like his efforts meant something - which they did - but the groggy feeling in your head and the dryness of your throat stops you from sounding anything more than bitchy.

    Shiro nods at your reply. “Well, I hope that sarcasm will wear off the next time I ask, because me, you, Emma and Samuel have plans for the day.”

    You raise your brow, turning around to look at him in confusion. “What kind of plans?”

    “The kind of plans that we all knew you would forget,” he sighs. “Emma invited me to tag along with you guys to go and see her opening up for the art exhibit in LA.”

    You nearly gawk, your jaw falling open at the reminder. That was tomorrow night. You would have to be in LA by tomorrow night!

    “Don’t worry,” Shiro says. “We’re all heading out in the pick-up trucks in a few hours. We should be in LA by tonight.”

     You sigh, turning back to the coffee machine. “You really are a life saver.”

    “So Emma told me,” Shiro chuckles. “I texted her last night to tell her where you were and she said I could come along to the exhibit as well if I was interested. I, of course, said yes.”

    You nod your head slowly. You know what Emma is up to, because it had been Lance she had invited only a few weeks prior. She wanted Shiro to go in place of Lance, meaning she wanted Shiro to be your plus one.

    The thought makes a blush creep up your neck for all the wrong reasons - embarrassment mostly, that maybe Shiro would figure out the truth behind Emma’s invitation. You really didn’t fancy losing another friend.

    “She cares about you a lot, you know,” Shiro continues. “She made me send her a picture of you tucked up in bed so she could make sure you were actually with me and I wasn’t just lying to get some friend points. It was cute.”

    “She’s always been the protective type.”

    “They’re the best type,” Shiro chuckles. “We should probably start packing for LA, though. I’ll drive you to your apartment, pick up some of your stuff, and then we can all head out.”

[carruth00]

AIRPLANE MODE by George Iglesias & Twister Magic - A Review

Here's the Ad Copy for Airplane Mode:

George Iglesias does it again! A great not only trick but, a full powerful routine! Packed with lots of mentalism, comedy gags and entertainment! A total sold out at Blackpool Magic Convention 2020!

"A First Class Act" - David Copperfield

Design to amaze, Airplane Mode by George Iglesias is a new and great multi-phase mentalism routine involving real life props and a travel experience! A modern act that combines many mentalism plots that will fit perfect in your shows from small to big scenarios!

Do we write our own destiny or is it already written for us?

Effect:

A spectator is invited to participate in an amazing experience in which he will travel using his imagination. First of all, the magician mentions an item you find inside of an airplane that we always see, but we never read, and we should, we are talking about the emergency card. This is always located in front of our seats and we are too lazy to read it, but it can save our life in case of an emergency. This information is very important, therefore the magician hand out a real emergency card and invites the spectator to open it and actually read it, while the spectator does so, the magician addresses the audience to say that a destination will now be secretly chosen by the spectator. The magician now displays many boarding passes with different tourist destinations, boarding groups and seat numbers. The viewer selects one completely at random and the journey begins.

The announcement of the pilot ready to take off is heard, the spectator is asked to buckle up and enjoy the flight. The magician asks the spectator to close his eyes to, relax and get some sleep, but a second later he asks him to open them again (There is a baby in the back-seat crying) so to relax he now shows him a list of different drinks available at the flight, he will now choose one.

The magician now shows a tray with a bag and invites the spectator to say out loud the drink he has chosen (example: whiskey). When the magician lifts the paper bag, he has failed because there is only one orange box juice there. Now the magician continues and ask him to take the airplane magazine that has all the movies available inflight and to please secretly choose one. Now he asks him to focus on the film, the main actor, the soundtrack and other details, magically the magician begins to read the spectator's mind revealing one by one all the things he is thinking. Then the magician guesses the exact number of the airplane seat where he is on, his boarding group and finally the destination of the flight, city and country he is traveling to. At the end magician finishes with a question.

Do we write our own destiny or is it already written for us?

At the beginning the magician handed over an emergency card and asked the spectator to read it, but did the spectator really read it? Now when the emergency card is opened you can see in the drawings of the entire printed card everything that has just happened, all the "free choices" of the spectator are printed on the card and even better to be more sure, now the magician opens the card and it becomes a giant poster that reveals everything that just happened in the routine!

But wait, there is more, now the magician asks the spectator again which drink he had originally chosen, the spectator will say whiskey and now the magician to the spectator's great surprise, will lift the orange juice box that turns out to be just a giant shell to show that inside there was a whiskey glass since the beginning of the act.

Maybe our destiny is already written, don't you think?

Includes: 1 Special airplane emergency card 1 Special set of 30 boarding passes 1 Airplane movie magazine 1 Airplane drinks list 1 Orange juice box (for a kicker ending) 1 Instructional online video Easy to do! Pack very flat, plays very big!

My Thoughts:

Well.. I couldn't have asked for a more complete ad copy. Rarely does ad copy spell out the effect so meticulously. Almost everything you need to know.. aside from my opinion, is included.

I suppose what's on the mind of some of you is... how true is the ad copy? I can honestly say it is totally true. There isn't an iota of exaggeration.. almost. When they say it's "..easy to do", they say so in a physical sense. In a literal sense, this is easily a ten minute routine.. more if you are a conversationalist. Learning all the components IS easy. But, you still have to put it all together. That will take a little practice on your part. There is scripting involved, and timing, and getting everything to come together in a harmonious way. This isn't a problem.. as George spells out, carefully, everything you need to do and say. But, if you think you're going to perform ten minutes of strong magic 'on the fly'.. think again.

I'm not trying to scare anyone. I'm just saying you need to go over everything a number of times to get the flow of AIRPLANE MODE down pat. Please don't get in the middle of this very strong routine and lose your train of thought because you watched the video twice and think you know it all. This is true of ALL magic. But, because Airplane Mode is one continuous routine, you don't have the luxury of getting all jazzy. Just learn the steps in order, (easy enough) plan your patter, and slay your audience.     Video: The training video is online. It runs about 38 minutes of solid instructions. George has a very good mastery of English and you'll have NO problem understanding his instructions. Not only that.. but he's a downright likeable guy. The video itself is top quality and very easy on the eye. This is the first video I've reviewed from Twister Magic, and I'm already a fan.

Props: For seventy bucks, you expect first class props. That's precisely what you'll get. Everything is made to last.. and to be visually appealing to the audience. The booklets, boarding passes, movie guide and drink list are all heavy duty laminated plastic.. designed to look good during your performance and to travel well from show to show. Credit is due for their realism.

Methodology: George has taken some of the standards of magic and combined them into a routine that works. A couple of 'classic' methods you're most likely already familiar with are employed to do some of the heavy work. There's nothing to learn as far as sleights are concerned. There IS a little 'handling' involved.. positioning of this and that.. but simple, simple. Again, everything is explained in detail to enable even a total beginner to succeed.

Impact: Honestly, I was concerned when I first opened everything I was going to learn a very ABC effect with minimal impact. Not that Airplane Mode looked cheap.. it's just that it reminded me of other high dollar effects that were all glitter and no guts. My act depends on the power of the mind.. and not paranormal positioning. The ending of Airplane Mode surprised even me.. and fits perfectly with my style. Without giving too much away, after the spectator makes a number of choices he/she can be shown where ALL their choices were either predicted or influenced in advance. Fits me like a glove..  

Overall: I highly recommend AIRPLANE MODE to my friends and readers. If you are a seasoned mentalist, or new to mentalism, this is a great effect for your routine. I believe you are considerably better off investing in one strong effect than investing in several lesser effects. This is a multiple phase routine that plays like several effects.. but ties everything together in the end with a climatic reveal. Save your pennies and buy Airplane Mode. Everything you need is included.. aside from a paper bag and a drink glass with an appropriately colored beverage. (Generally, a half glass of iced tea will suffice.. as you only need something that can pass for whiskey). I cannot recommend Airplane Mode for Zoom performances. There may be a way to pull it off, but you're going to lose something in the process. Giving the spectator the airplane emergency card and having them both open it and read it is an integral part of the effect.. and it would be hard to achieve via Zoom. Now, if you send your Zoom attendee's a participation package.. you might have yourself one nice little performance. Because of the various props involved, you need a little table of some sort.. so performing it during walk-around or strolling is not feasible. This is the ideal effect for a parlor or home show. You could also perform Airplane Mode in a smaller theater sitting. You want your audience to be able to see the realistic props. It adds greatly to the overall effect.

Bottom Line:  Don't overthink it.. just Buy It... You're welcome!

$70.00    Thanks to Murphy's Magic for providing a review copy. Available from Murphy's Magic and there wide assortment of associated dealers. https://www.murphysmagic.com/product.aspx?id=68112

Reviewed by Rick Carruth for The Magic Roadshow...

[mentalismmagicvwof121-blog]

The 6-Minute Rule for Mind Magic Tricks

One way of maintaining yourself determined as well as engaged is establishing on your own challenges. What might have been if Derren Brown had made a decision to stop when he got his very first break as an illusionist? If he had just set his auto-pilot to 'cruise'? You need to establish on your own objectives and also challenges to inspire and delight you and keep points fascinating.

Finally, ensure you make use of the magic community! Places like the Conjuror Area Club are perfect for illusionists to motivate and also encourage each other to new elevations. So to evaluate; below's your step by action overview to discovering mentalism Action 1: Discover Mentalism Step 2: Method, Method, Technique Step 3: Get In Touch With Like Minded Magicians Tip 4: Spend In Your Success Action 5: A Formula For The Years Ahead Thanks for reading this guide on finding out to end up being a mind reader! We wish you found this guide valuable! If you still have any additional inquiries, really feel free to leave a remark, and we'll get back to you on it.

Experience mindreading, magic, and also funny, all in one show! The Sensation brings his self-invented personality of The Mentalist to the. Elected Best Magician in Las Vegas, this is not a program you wish to miss out on! A mentalist incorporated with investigator abilities he discovered from his papa, McCambridge astonishes audiences with his mindreading abilities.

The 8-Second Trick For Mind Reader

To see the finest in the art of mentalism, obtain your tickets to see The Mentalist now as well as witness magic like you have actually never ever seen it prior to! SEE REQUISITES & CONDITIONS ON THE BACK. ALL LATE ARRIVALS UNDERGO HAVE THEIR SEATING REASSIGNED. This ticket will certainly NOT be shipped to you.

Sale is non-refundable, and also customer must offer business with valid picture ID * for a ticket to the occasion acquired. All bookings are final. Should select up ticket at package workplace no less than one (1) hr prior to the show. * valid image identification acceptable to Firm is a vehicle driver's permit, state identification card, or armed forces recognition card.

Welcome to the modern mentalism and amusement show - Intuitions. In a span of simply 75 mins this program provides you enjoyable, surprise, enjoyment as well as excitement. The program is packed with comedy, thriller, hypnotic aspects, audience interaction, music and also ends with a thrilling climax. This continuous interactive program is completely created to captivate both household and business audience.

The 10-Minute Rule for Reading Human Mind

You may have seen mentalists at the workplace in shows and also tvs as well as admired the methods and also predictions they were able to do. Mentalism is a brand-new kind of magic that has created, and also several usually flaunt impressive techniques with their mind capacities. While ordinary magic techniques such as pulling a rabbit out of a hat have become old, mentalism is a type of magic that is typically carried out by utilizing certain telepathy capabilities as well as methods.

Nevertheless, there are particular secret techniques that such people harness as well as develop in order to thrill their spectators as well as generate the impression that they read minds. Mentalism as a whole is an understanding of human behavior and having the ability to predict results. It creates the illusion that a person is able to review the minds of others.

Below are some crucial secrets that every effective mentalist uses to be successful in their performances. A mind reader will certainly frequently tell a person in the target market to consider a thing or a word and also repeat it sometimes in their head. The mentalist will then speak about other things, but the individual will continue to consider that word or idea in their head consistently.

Mind Reading Magic Things To Know Before You Get This

The mentalist will certainly notice the indications by enjoying the lips of the viewer. Usually, the initial or the last letters of words mouthed gives them a trick as to what is being claimed or אמן אשליות ישראלי considered. An experienced mentalist is after that able to presume the word or suggestions correctly.

This is the art of misdirection which obtains the audience or the targeted individual to believe regarding that point or idea. This is finished with body language along with the choice of words. An experienced mentalist will certainly misdirect the viewers to a particular concept or idea and after that have the ability to anticipate it properly.

Afterwards if she or he recommends that individuals in the target market consider a device, many will assume of the watch they are using. This is a trick that the majority of successful mind readers use. It is the power of suggestion that functions for many people. People are extra susceptible to be affected by pointers than they would love to confess.

The Greatest Guide To Mentalism

Experienced Mentalists generally obtain details out of their viewers or their target audience in means that people do not even understand. Information is drawn out by talking regarding basic topics which commonly appear appropriate to individuals and also could appear as if the mentalist reads their mind. For circumstances, the mind reader could suggest that he or she is seeing a number.

This commonly makes people think in their brainpowers. As they begin relying on the mind reader, they come to be more available to the suggestions made and being even more gullible. The primary trait that is necessary to success in mentalism is having the ability to read individuals and to grab useful info about them.

Many http://edition.cnn.com/search/?text=mentalist & mind reader individuals offer verbal and non-verbal indicators that enable you to recognize their history, their frame of mind and other details. An knowledgeable mind reader is able to notice such information as well as forecast a person's frame of mind accurately. This enhances the convincing nature of the efficiencies and also results in better success in the mind reader's show.

Things about Mental Telepathy

Getting The Reading Human Mind To Work

The 6-Second Trick For Mind Reading Magic

As one of the hottest promising performers in the Denver location, Scotty Wiese is lots of points efficiency magician, company performer, master of ceremonies, as well as talented mentalist. Wait a min what's that last word? For starters, it's not a typo mentalism is an one-of-a-kind kind of efficiency magic that has a couple of crucial differences from "standard" illusionist acts.

Mentalism, in short, is a kind of magic that concentrates on the mind. Whereas numerous traditional magic tricks focus on phenomenon as well as sleight of hand, several mentalist techniques can be performed entirely vocally. If conventional magic asks the target market to believe that the performer can truly, amazingly, control the real world around them (as long as suspension of disbelief allows), mentalism asks the audience to think that the performer has supernatural or psychic powers.

While Scotty does not in fact have supernatural, mind-reading powers (or does he?), there are numerous little tricks in mentalism that enable for the performer to deduce what the target market participant may be thinking.p The Mind reader asks the based on believe of a number in their heads as well as leads them through some mental computations, ultimately asking them to connect the numbers to letters in the alphabet which are then made use of to obtain them to call a nation, pet, and shade.

The Mind Reading Magic Tricks Ideas

The mentalist asks the topic a series of random questions, and also at the end, he inquires to call a color and device. He provides an item of paper which thought their solution in advance, which is usually a red hammer. The mentalists asks the subject to create down a number on a folded up paper.

Remember the examples above are extremely easy, and also real mentalism efficiency acts will be far more awe-inspiring. For evident reasons, Scotty's ideal tricks can't be spoiled below! Yet if you're asking yourself just how the instances above work, there are a couple of different examples. In the first one, the number as well as letter combination invariably results in "D" and "E" regardless of what the beginning number is.

In the 2nd, the inquiries result in subconscious synapses that make it extremely likely for the individual to think "red" as well as "hammer" with each other. In the third, sleight of hand is used by the mind reader in a really specific manner in which permits them to obtain a peek of the number as they shred it up.

How Mind Reader can Save You Time, Stress, and Money.

Considering that we do not wish to ruin the fun as well as expose Scotty's mentalism techniques below, why not book him for your following celebration or company event to see him at work on your own? We understand that you'll be enchanted by Scotty's efficiency. Ready to book? Go here to get begun!.

Prior to we obtain better into the topic, we would love to resolve a couple of please notes. Gaming can be all fun as well as video games until you go too much down the bunny opening. Just beware exactly how you play! Second, we're not attempting to encourage you that you truly require a mentalist to tip up your casino video game! We just believe that this is an interesting topic that you might like, as well as we would only like to present realities that either validate or deny that this is possible.

Whether it is seeing right into the future or speaking to the dead, a whole lot of these experts are labelled as mind readers. So, exactly what is a mentalist? Not to be perplexed with magician these 2 are various arts that do not typically go together. Nonetheless, there are still some individuals that carry out the supposed psychological magic, which incorporate high instinct and magic tricks based on the power of illusion.

The 8-Minute Rule for Mind Reading Tricks

The ideas are based on the mentalist's instinct and also, commonly, on an individual's body movement. Everyone reacts in a different way to a specific word or activity, which acts as an indicator for the mind reader as well as aids him choose the ideal pointers in the scenario. Have you enjoyed 'The Mind reader'? If not, you should get hold of some snacks and go see it right now.

Lengthy story short, this is an American crime step-by-step TV series, where among the major characters, Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker), is the mind reader. He is an investigator/detective that resolves enigmas and also criminal offenses with his 'psychic' capabilities. One very legendary scene, which triggered our rate of interest as well as provided us the concept for this article, is when Patrick is in prison as well as participates in a casino poker video game alongside various other prisoners.

Did you see that? This led us to the huge question and the major topic of this blog article if this man was that efficient betting himself, would certainly a person like him be able to help you win at online poker? A lot more significantly can a mentalist aid you win while playing at a real-time gambling enterprise site? Apparently, individuals hire or speak with a mind reader to boost their real-time dealer games.

The Single Strategy To Use For Mind Reader

There are methods for people to forecast the steps and also the upcoming cards from the deck just by looking at the screen. A great deal of large discussion forums like 2 Plus Two as well as The Magic Caf share some trick on just how you could do it for on your own. There is even an e-book by Ben Harris, ' PSY-Poker', which, from what we have actually checked out, clarifies the magic of psi-poker and how you can use very easy hoax to.

Nevertheless, we would not wish to bother you better with way too much info. Some bettors are convinced that a mentalist can help you win at a live poker video game. They assert that the screen of the computer system or the phone can not interrupt the individual's 'powers' as well as he/she could quickly make suggestions, based upon the motions of the dealer.

In either instance, you'll most likely have to prepare your wallet the expense to winning a video game isn't that small! A lot of players believe that a mind reader could help you obtain some additional smackers, while others think that it is far better to buy an online poker trainer or individual training.

Everything about Mentalism Magic

Counting cards is likewise not a great suggestion, because you can make a mistake, plus, it is not allowed land-based gambling establishments. You can attempt while playing on your computer system, however we think it would be harder for you. So, what do we think? Overall, We make certain that there is a method for mentalism and betting to co-exist; nonetheless, we're not totally persuaded to validate anything.

[youimaginetube]

Hey! I just recently found ur blog and I absolutely love your work! Do you think you could do an imagine ((with extra fluff;) ) where the reader is a drummer and singer in a band and they're dating Ethan and him and teamiplier goes to one of the reader's concerts and they're all awed,shocked and amazed and Ethan is just so proud of his little drummer girl

o K this is so cute and i can’t and it’s nearly midnight when i’m starting this and i have classes tomorrow but this is really really really cute and i can’t

I Favor The Drummer

When you were eight years old, you got your first drum set and immediately fell head over heels for the idea of creating unique beats. It turned into your favorite thing to do, and you drove your parents absolutely insane. It was sort of hilarious; especially because you were never bad at it, you just were really loud. You were told by a teacher that you have the habit of hitting drums pretty hard, but the drumsticks you have are super durable. You’ve broken pairs before, but the practically endless supply has been replenished time and time again by your ridiculously supportive parents.

Honestly, you just loved the damn instrument. You loved music, playing it in front of crowds with your hair down and your makeup done, looking absolutely badass while people are cheering. It’s been your dream for the longest of times. But you’re beginning to live it, one show at a time.

At the beginning of a west-coast tour in your hometown of Los Angeles, you were out shopping for some thrift store tanktops to rip up and cut up. It wasn’t until you were out of the store that you met Ethan.

He was ridiculously sweet to you, because you forgot your bus card, he let you use his. On the way back to your stop, he talked with you, and you asked him if he liked music.

“I mean, who doesn’t? I’m not sure if I have anything specific I like, but music is still the shit.”

“I’m a drummer,” you smile, “that’s why I asked, is all.”

Your meetings at the bus stop turned a lot more natural, because you’d walk there to go to band practice and he’d walk there to go to his office.

“I actually do YouTube,” he sounds prideful, “my viewers are the best people I’ve ever met. They’re fantastic and I can’t believe how much support I get from them. Especially now, when I’m working as an editor and also a content creator.”

“That’s so admirable. It’s kinda like how I feel with my band, y'know, like anybody who’s ever listened to us are just the best people, no matter what they have on their minds. They’re there then, and now.”

“I’d love to see your band sometime,” he smiles to you. You laugh a little, brushing your hair behind your ear.

“That’d be awesome, thanks. I’ll subscribe, and find some time to watch you.”

As you and Ethan talked more and more, you understood each other more. Your professions actually weren’t too far off from being the same. It’s hard to make it both ways, and it’s really fun both ways. He always talks about the people who watch him in the best possible light, and you talk about the people who listen to you in the best possible light.

You’re still surprised when he asks you to coffee one morning.

“Like… now?” You ask, worried that you’ll be blowing off the girls. It’s always been a habit of yours to come to practice, rain or shine, sick or healthy.

“If it’s fine by you,” he smiles. “I don’t have much work today, I did a lot of it in advance so we could have the morning.”

“I guess I do need some coffee,” you grin, and walk with him to the little shop down the street.

He buys you your drink and you sit and talk for a little over an hour. You don’t even feel the time passing, because his stories and his voice is timeless. You’re so amazed that he’s so persistent and constant in his job, and you think that he thinks the same of you. It’s really the greatest.

For a while, you sit and talk with empty cups about everything and nothing. Favorite things, horrible first dates, high school. It’s casual and you switch topics so smoothly. It makes you happy to see him smiling at you across the table. Especially because of how he looks at you, with the same pride that one would with a fond friend.

It only takes you another couple months of small coffee rendezvous for him to ask you on a proper date. You end up spending a day together at the coast, chilling and building sand castles. He makes you laugh and you tell him that you want to go out with him again, and he beams with happiness when you guys step your feet into the water. It’s really, really cold.

One day, at the coffee shop (you managed to reschedule practice to a couple hours later than it used to be), you’re both sitting together hand-in-hand.

“I have a show this weekend,” you sort of mumble. “I was wondering if you wanted to go, ‘cause you still haven’t seen me play.”

“I’m totally going,” he announces. “And I’ll even bring my friends. I’m sure you’re going to be amazing, okay?”

You hide a shy smile, because he’s the one person you don’t want to mess up for.

–

The weekend rolls around faster than you thought it would. You’re waiting backstage at a small venue, knowing that Ethan’s in the audience for you. You keep twirling your drumsticks between your fingers, doing some light vocal warm-ups because you always sing the stripped-down songs. Your T-shirt is one he bought you; “I Favor The Drummer”, only you cut off the sleeves and added some other little holes because drumming gets really warm really fast.

The moment you get out on stage, you can hear people yelling for you. You turn your head to see Ethan and a group of people, all in the shirts, smiling with such pride. And Ethan’s is the biggest.

Your set is probably the best you’ve ever played. You throw in some cool drumstick tricks, and as always, end up getting up to the microphone once to sing. There’s something sweet about feeling like you’re singing to someone. You can’t mask it in your smile, in your stare to Ethan, in the way he nearly makes you giggle on stage by smiling right back.

In fact, the minute you’re off stage, Ethan comes over and gives you the biggest hug. And for a second, you wonder if it’s the right time to kiss him, because you could. You’d love to, in fact.

So you do, in a crowd of people who just listened to you play the most amazing show you ever had. And Ethan, of course, caused all of it.

Even though you’re sweaty and tired and you’re pretty sure you’re gross, he picks you up and spins you around and smiles like you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

[largiloquent]

A terrible issue faced by we artists is conveying motion and energy in a static image. Even if a character is standing still, there's methods at our disposal to make them feel more alive. Can you drop a few bars on techniques to enhance action and add energy to a scene?

Oooh, you’re talking about animating a picture! Not animating as in, giving it actual movement, but giving the illusion of life. Which is admittedly quite difficult given that motion needs time, and time is not something we have in a single 2D image. We are essentially attempting to trick our viewers into believe that time is passing in a single instance of time. Hard stuff!

But the principles of animation can actually help us there! And this is going to get very long, so I’m gonna put it under a read more. I’m gonna take some stuff directly from the wikipedia article, but frame it in regards to 2D illustration.

1. Squash and stretch

If you’re interested in animation at all, this one is the one most people can name. It’s the illusion of compression and pulling of mass within an organic object. 

In still images, you can use squash and stretch to your advantage, to add a little more vitality to an expression or gesture. For example, look at Pinocchio here. 

His smile in the middle there is given a little more oomph by the compression of his face, while his look of surprise on the left there is emphasized by the elongation of his face. In your own face, you an see squash and stretch at work when you make an exaggerated angry face and all of your features squish toward the middle of your face, or when you open your mouth wide and everything pulls a little. 

2. Antici... pation

Essentially this is preparation for a movement. For example, if you’re drawing a punch, the movement is the punch itself. But there’s an anticipatory movement of the arm drawing back and body twisting, to prepare for the primary movement of the punch itself. We can see this in the first panel of this baseball player getting ready to throw the ball.

This one is a little more nuanced to use in 2D illustration, but can definitely be used to great effect. It can give a sense of potential energy within an image, of being on edge for something to happen. 

In a single image, you can also draw both the anticipatory action and primary action together, and this can also create the illusion of time, and thus, motion, happening.

3. Staging

This one can be a very subtle means of conveying animation and life in a 2D image. If you’ve ever worked theater, you know that during a scene, where you place your characters is very important. Where you place them is going to help direct the audience’s eye toward where drama is happening, or away from places you don’t want them seeing. Viewing at certain angles is going to not only look better, but allow the audience to better read the expressions on the actors. This can be done in simple things like how you position characters when they’re talking to each other, by turning them outward, slightly, rather than having them speak head-on. It’s not technically realistic, but your audience isn’t really going to pay attention, and it’s going to look better. #aesthetic.

You can implement this in a single character by themselves, and their silhouette.

And you can do this in the composition itself, to lead the viewer’s eye toward where you want the action to be focused.

4. Straight Ahead Action vs. Pose to Pose

This one, admittedly, is a little harder to apply to 2D illustration. But it can be, if you tweak it a bit. In animation, this is referring to two different approaches to drawing a scene. Straight ahead means you go from frame 1 to frame 10, in that order. Pose to pose means you draw out the key frames, like frame 1, 3, and 7, and then draw the interval frame. 

In 2D illustration, I would hearken this to drawing with guidelines, and drawing straight ahead. Drawing with guidelines, drawing the important parts first then filling in the rest, will give you consistency and help you stay on-topic for what you’re trying to do. Drawing straight ahead, such as drawing the head, then the neck, then torso, etc., is going to give the drawing a little more exaggeration and life, but it’s very easy to go off-model or make mistakes.

5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action (and mirroring)

This principle relates to giving and object the sense of obeying the laws of motion. Follow-through relates to looser parts of a character or object’s mass, that continue to move though the person or object has stopped. For example, hair, loose clothing, loose skin, will stop a little bit later than the rest of the body. A basset hound might run into the wall, and then a second later, its ears slap the wall. Follow-through is one of the BEST principles for giving a 2D image the illusion of movement. The loose elements of a character can show exactly where they just were. Even if the character isn’t moving, drawing their hair or a scarf moving around is going to very easily fool the audience into thinking the character is moving.

Overlapping action is the idea that different parts of the body have different timing. If your head is bouncing, that’ll probably have a different timing than the walk cycle. This would be starting another movement, before the first movement has terminated, continuing after it has. So, say you show a character jumping, the legs might stop, but the arms and torso continue moving for another couple of frames. So, in 2D illustration, if I’m drawing a character stopping their twirl, I can show the hair still moving and starting to slow down. Or, say I were drawing a character landing, crouching and ready to attack, I can show the hair coming down, their body station, and then their hand grabbing a dagger, ready to attack--which helps build anticipation.

And related to these two is the concept of avoiding mirroring. Symmetry in movement. For example, take a look at Pacha here:

His hands are doing related actions, but not mirrored. This helps create a sense of organic life. Even if the limbs are doing the same thing, you can show minute differences, such as if you have a flying character, you can show the wings fluttering slightly differently. In expressions, you can avoid mirroring by having an expression slightly tilted or squished to one side. 

(In a subversion though, mirroring can often show power in a character. Solidity, sturdiness. Inorganic-ness.)

6. Slow In and Slow Out

Again, this one’s kinda more for animation and less for 2D illustration. But can be tremendously useful in sequential art, like comics and panelling. The premise though, in animation, is devoting more time to the beginning and termination of an action, rather than the middle. There are more frames at the beginning and end of a punch, than during the middle. We can take this as emphasizing the beginning and ends of an action, rather than using the middle. Show a punch either at the beginning, or the end--rather than in the middle of the swing.

7. Arcs

Funfact: organic motion tends to move in arcs--not in straight lines! The bounce of a walk cycle follows an arc. The swing of your hand follows an arc. 

Even implementing arcs in your gestures and guidelines can help create the illusion of movement!

8. Secondary Action

Honestly I’d probably lump this one in with overlapping action, but try to have a secondary movement, when drawing a character. For example, having a character swinging their arms when they walk, swinging their hair, swinging a yoyo, things like that. So long as it is emphasizing the primary movement, and not drawing attention away from it. 

9. Timing

Related to staging, in 2D art, how you compose an image can create a sense of time. In Western media, we read left to right. Knowing this, we can place things in certain ways in the image, so that the reader’s eyes follow a natural line that gives a sense of motion. Placing the person about to throw a baseball on the left, and then the batter on the right, then a panel following with the pitcher throwing the ball, creates the illusion of stalling. Of the camera lingering, before the pitcher throws the ball. Whereas you place the batter on the left, and the pitcher on the right, followed by a panel of the pitcher throwing the ball, this will create a different feeling of time. The first is Pitcher........ batter, throw, whereas the second is Batter.......... pitcher, throw. 

You see what I mean?

10. Exaggeration

This one has a lot of subjectivity to it. Exaggeration can really help give a scene a lot of energy, Push a character from slightly falling over to heavily falling over creates a lot of dynamicism, but at the same time, can sometimes take away from a more serious tone wanted for the scene. And, of course, this can depend on the level of realism one employs in the first place. But even when drawing more realistically, don’t be afraid to push things, just a little. Sometimes knowing when and how to do that can really make things pop and grab the reader’s attention.

Personally, I try to go by Van Gogh’s philosophy: Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague.

11. Solid Drawing

This is your basic know how to draw shape and form. In order to know how to animate, to bring life to an illustration, you have to be a good draughtsperson. Someone who understands the principles of drawing, of art, and how to translate 3D forms into 2D shapes. Which means doing realism studies. Sorry, no gettin’ out of that one.

12. Appeal

This is just knowing how to employee Golden Means, how to compose things in a way that is pleasing to the eye and draws the reader in. Giving characters charisma, as it were. Likability, even if they are not sympathetic. This helps engage the viewers, and get them to care about what is in the image, rather than having them skim over the image and move on. This one takes a little time to really get, but will become second nature as you go through art.

There you have it! I’d really recommend looking up various sources on the 12 Principles of Animation, as it is one of the best tools I’ve ever found for helping to give the illusion of life in a static image. c: Hope this all helped!

[bentonpena]

How to Shoot a Self Portrait to Support your Brand Identity

How to Shoot a Self Portrait to Support your Brand Identity http://bit.ly/2Lah0Cw

The post How to Shoot a Self Portrait to Support your Brand Identity appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Charlie Moss.

Personal branding has become more and more important over the last few years. As photographers, we often carefully curate the image that we present to the world, even as amateurs. Our brand and image are usually closely linked to the kind of photographs we shoot.

Photographers will often carefully curate the look of their website. They’ll spend hours contemplating the images and text that they use to express their photographic hopes and dreams. They want their websites and online portfolios to give people an insight into their creative working process and the kind of photos that they intend to take.

I often start with natural light when shooting self-portraits. It’s how I prefer to shoot most of the time!

And yet, I often look at the ‘about me’ page on a photographers website, portfolio page, or social media, and front and center is a photograph of them taken by someone else. The image on your “about me” page, or your portfolio profile picture, is a great piece of marketing real estate. You can use this space to express yourself and tell a story. So why let someone else take that photo?

So what’s the solution? Shoot a self portrait! Put your own work in that valuable space, and express yourself and your photographic style clearly and coherently – even on your “about me” page.

What is a brand identity?

Now more than ever, photographers are the face of their brand. Almost everywhere you go on the internet, you’ll have the option to upload an ‘avatar’ image that represents you in digital format. This avatar image is a space to tell the world something about you and your photography.

A brand identity is the way you present your work to the world. It’s the visual and textual elements that differentiate you from other people in the minds of your audience. Since photographers are usually the main (and often only) person in the creative process when it comes to image-making, they are often the embodiment of their brand.

A single large beauty dish for this portrait reflects one of my usual lighting styles.

Generally, for a photographer, their brand identity will be heavily tied up with their style in which they usually work. A photographer who creates beautiful fine art portraits inspired by the Old Masters may have a brand identity that embodies timelessness, heritage, and classical values. On the other hand, someone creating cutting edge contemporary portraits may embody qualities such as innovation, diversity, and courage.

The key is to get your values into the images you’re shooting. You’ll probably find it happens naturally once you’ve been shooting a while and have developed a style. However, creating a self-portrait for your “about me” page and avatars is a good time to brainstorm what your work is about. The challenge is to see if you can capture these ideas in a single shot.

Got a fear of shooting self-portraits?

Self-portraits are hard. They’re hard technically, creatively, and emotionally. It’s no surprise really that photographers often shy away from self-portraiture. Portraits can be hard enough to get right when you’re shooting other people, let alone when you’re photographing yourself!

Experimental tricks like this shallow depth of field combined with fairy lights can add an artistic side to a self-portrait while covering up any perceived flaws in the way we look.

That aside, a self-portrait or two is also a great way to improve your skills, try new things, and make sure that the entirety of your personal branding works together coherently. You are likely to be your most patient subject, and if you set aside a day to create your self-portrait then you have time to get it exactly right – even if you’re trying something new.

Go light on the retouching. When you’re working on a self-portrait in post-processing, it’s easy to be super-critical of everything you don’t like about yourself. Stick to your usual workflow and only retouch as much as you normally would.

Start simple

If all else fails, start like you would any other portrait. If you’d usually start with a simple two-light headshot in your studio, then give that a go first. Review your images and then make adjustments. Once you’ve found a shot that works then try something a bit different. You might find a completely new direction for your work!

This self-portrait was shot with natural light against a grey paper background. Often simple pictures can be really effective!

It’s easy to think about self-portraits in the context of a studio, but don’t limit yourself! Take your camera outside into natural light if that’s a place you enjoy taking portraits usually. You can even buy stands to hold reflectors so that you can take advantage of all the usual light modifiers that you’d use.

But if you’re going out on location to shoot self-portraits, consider taking someone with you. It’s easy to get distracted while shooting self-portraits out and about. Having an extra pair of eyes can help protect you and your equipment. You can also get your assistant to hold the reflector or a flashgun too!

And if you want to really show off what you do, consider an environmental portrait in your own studio and surrounded by your tools of the photographic trade.

Think about the context

Where is your self-portrait going to be placed? Will it be on your own website or will it be on social media?

In traditional media, you usually want to have the subject facing the viewer or looking towards the center of the book or magazine. There’s a reason for this. It helps direct the readers focus back to the content rather than off the edge of the page into the wider world. It’s a simple trick to help keep the readers’ attention where you want it.

The “about me” page on my portfolio website showing my self-portrait in relation to the text block.

You can apply this to your website too. Think about the placement of your self-portrait on the page of your website. Does it fit better on the left or the right of the “about me” text? When you’re working out your poses, keep this in mind and make sure you’re either looking straight ahead or towards the text block.

It’s possible to break the rules, of course, but make sure you shoot both options if you’re going to be adventurous!

What about the practicalities of self-portraits?

If your camera connects to a phone app that can assist with exposure and focusing, then make sure you take full advantage of that. Self-portraits used to be a lengthy process that involved sitting my mannequin on a chair in my studio to get the focus and lighting right.

Now I can see everything in real-time, including exposure and focus adjustments, using the Fujifilm Cam Remote app that connects to my camera.

Using the Fujifilm Cam Remote app to set up the lighting and exposure, and the resulting self-portrait a few minutes later. (Lighting was a single large beauty dish).

If you don’t have a camera that connects to your phone, get yourself a remote trigger and consider shooting tethered to a laptop so that you can see the images as you trigger the camera. You can look at software such as Lightroom or Capture One Pro for tethering. That way you can make small adjustments to your pose and settings as you go along to make sure that you really nail everything and create your best work.

Using a good tripod will also save you some frustration when you’re shooting portraits. Balancing the camera on a stack of books can work (believe me, I’ve done it before), but a tripod will help you compose a shot more effectively. Don’t forget to try unusual compositions too. Raising the camera up above your eye level can be very flattering while shooting from down low can create a powerful pose.

A profile self-portrait recalls the kinds of images that you often see historically on coins and medals. Don’t be afraid to experiment with unconventional poses when photographing yourself.

Keep your standards high

And lastly, be as thorough and rigorous with your standards as you would when shooting a portrait of anyone else.

Make the effort to do your hair, press your clothes, and get a great expression. Just because it’s a self-portrait it doesn’t mean it’s an excuse to be lazy and “fix it in post.”

I’d love to see how you get on with shooting your self-portrait to support your brand and expressing your values through them. Drop a comment below with the results, and don’t forget to update your avatar with your new portrait!

  The post How to Shoot a Self Portrait to Support your Brand Identity appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Charlie Moss.

Men via Digital Photography School http://bit.ly/2h5PnNN August 30, 2019 at 08:49AM

[fmservers]

Inside the pay-for-post ICO industry

In a world where nothing can be trusted and fake news abounds, ICO and crypto teams are further muddying the waters by trying – and often failing – to pay for posts. While bribes for blogs is nothing new, sadly the current crop of ICO creators and crypto projects are particularly interested in scaling fast and many ICO CEOs are far happier with scammy multi-level marketing tricks than real media relations.

The worst part of this spammy, scammy ecosystem is the service providers. A new group of media organizations are appearing where pay-to-post is the norm rather than the rare exception. I’ve been looking at these groups for a while now and recently found a few egregious examples.

But first some background.

Oh yeah, Mr. Smart Guy? How do I get press?

Say you’re trying to publicize a startup. You’ve emailed all the big names in the industry and the emails have gone unanswered. Your product is about to flounder on the market without users and you can’t get any because, in perfect chicken-or-egg fashion, you can’t get funding without users and you can’t get users without funding. So isn’t it a good idea to pay a few dollars for a little press?

No.

And isn’t most PR just pay-for-post anyway?

No.

PR people are consummate networkers and are paid to reach out to media on your behalf and their particular set of skills, honed over long careers, are dedicated to breaking down the forcefield between the journalist and the outside world. They are your surrogate hustlers, dedicated to getting you more exposure. A good PR person is worth their weight in gold. They can call up a popular journalist and make a simple pitch: “This cool new thing is happening. Can I put you in touch?”

If a journalist’s mission is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, a good PR person makes the comfortable look slightly afflicted in order to give the journalist a better story. Also, like velociraptors, they are tenacious and will follow up multiple times on your behalf.

A bad PR person, on the other hand, will cold-call hundreds of journalists and read a script that is half the length of Moby Dick. They produce little more than spam and their efforts begin and end with pressing the “Send” button. It’s also interesting to note that many bad PR people, of late, have found new life as ICO specialists.

Now meet the pay-for-post hucksters. As I wrote before, there is now a subset of the PR world that offers to get your press release or story on the top of various websites for the low, low price of between $500 and $13,000. For example, one set of hucksters created a small business selling posts on Harvard.edu by creating garbage WordPress blogs and posting press releases to increase SEO coverage. Further, I received a document that outlined the prices for placement in various blogs including this one. While it is impossible to buy a post on TechCrunch this way, it doesn’t stop many from trying.

What’s the difference between that price list and the job a PR person will do for you? The difference is trust. A pay-for-post huckster is dependent on convincing poorly paid freelance writers to add links and other dross to their posts in order to get a “placement.” I get requests like this almost every day and almost all the journalists I talked to reported the same.

Some entrepreneurs are savvy enough to avoid these scams. Even more aren’t.

“I’ve never paid since I think it’s almost always a waste of money but I’ve been offered this type of coverage many times,” said Rick Ramos, of HealthJoy.com. “The last offer was for Kathy Ireland’s Worldwide Business… A TV show that I’ve never heard of in my life. I’ve also been approached by niche publications like InsuranceOutlook and HealthCareTechOutlook that want $3,000 for a ‘reprint branding package.’ A quick Alexa.com search shows their rank as 1,725,207 and 1,054,501 globally. I think I get pitched at least every six months for one of these types of packages.

Unfortunately, many of these organizations hide their request for payment until the last minute. That said, how do you know when it’s someone selling pay-for-play vs. a real editor? It’s usually obvious.

“It’s usually pretty easy to sniff out based on their email blast. It’s pretty untargeted with no reference to what your company does or how it related to a story. Some people are up front about the payment but others want a ’15 min call to discuss.’ A quick LinkedIn search always shows them as a sales person versus a reporter or editor,” said Ramos.

It’s getting worse

This is a document I received from a company attempting an ICO. This sort of menu was quite uncommon until fairly recently when the “on-demand” economy melded with PR scammers. The completeness of the document is unique – you could feasibly plan your own PR efforts just by reaching out to journalists who work at all of these places. But you’ll also note that each spot has its own price, often in the low hundreds of dollars, which means that those spots are mostly pay-for-play anyway.

ICOLists by on Scribd

No PR company can promise coverage. In fact, many pay-for-play folks mention this in their communications, hiding it in plain sight. This snippet of text appeared in a contract for work from one of the pay-for-play providers. In short, you’re paying for something they cannot guarantee to get. Interestingly, the PR company below calls their product an IO – an insertion order – which is language used in ad sales. Further, they take great pains in explaining that it is almost impossible to achieve what they promise.

None of the pay-for-post folks I mentioned here would respond to my requests for comment.

Counter-point: Journalists are also at fault

Journalists should never expect money for coverage.

Yet many do.

“Lately I have worked on a number of blockchain technology pieces and I have encountered a wide variety of these asks,” said Brittany Whitmore, CEO at Exvera Communications. “A lot of the new, smaller blockchain-focused outlets seem to do a lot of pay-to-play, likely trying to capitalize on the ICO gold rush. The strangest request that I received was that the outlet would do a an article about the news for free but only if we paid them over $1,000 to promote the article with ads. I did not proceed.”

In one very detailed article on The Outline, Jon Christian explored this world and found that many writers received small sums for a single brand mention in a story, a sort of SEO flogging that rarely helps. He wrote:

An unpaid contributor to the Huffington Post, also speaking on condition of anonymity because, in his words, “I would be pretty fucked if my name got out there,” said that he has included sponsored references to brands in his articles for years, in articles on the Huffington Post and other sites, on behalf of six separate agencies. Some agencies pay him directly, he said, in amounts that can be as small as $50 or $175, but others pay him through an employee’s personal PayPal account in order to obfuscate the source of the funds. In a statement, Huffington Post said “Using the HuffPost Contributors Network to self-publish paid content violates our terms of use. Anyone we discover to be engaging in such abuse has their post removed from the site and is banned from future publication.” The Huffington Post writer also described specific brands he’d written about on behalf of one of the agencies, which ranged from a popular ride-hailing app, to a publicly-traded site for booking flights and hotels, to a large American cell phone service provider. “This is a classic example of payola,” he said of the brand mentions, invoking a term that’s been used to describe radio DJs who accept payments from record companies in order to play certain artists on the air.

Further, many influencers – folks who sell their Internet fame to the highest bidder – masquerade as journalists, asking for outrageous sums to flog an ICO on their YouTube channel or Instagram page. Pay-for-play services can also put out organic content like this in hopes of appearing in the news.

The rule of thumb? Paid posts and native advertising are not journalism. Ultimately, journalists who charge for coverage are marketers. No one at any reputable news organization will ask for cash but, sadly, there are a number of disreputable news organizations making the rounds.

ICO spamming/Don’t do it

All this still doesn’t answer the question: Should you pay-to-post?

“The short answer is no,” said Kevin Bourke of BourkePR. “I get asked all the time, and in fact, turned down another request just today. And I advise my clients to decline these offers as well.”

Pay-for-post disrupts journalism in a way that should be familiar and desirable to any modern-day entrepreneur. Middlemen are being knocked out everywhere and brands are approaching consumers from every angle including native ads in Instagram and Twitter. But the value of coverage – real coverage – from a journalists perspective is the opportunity to explain complex ideas to a ready audience. While posting a picture of a blockchain on Facebook and hoping for clicks is one strategy, explaining your views, opinions, and insights is far more important even if you approach it from a mercenary position.

“When you start paying for placement, you remove objectivity and credibility, and in my opinion, this is the reason you look for coverage of your company/products in the first place. That’s what influences readers/viewers. But I understand the temptation for startups. You come to believe that ‘all visibility is good visibility.’ I just can’t agree with that,” said Bourke. “I see the trend toward paid placements (now called sponsored content), paid awards and I can’t stand it – especially with the trade show awards in high tech. They’ve completely devalued the Best of Show awards in so many cases. Typically, only the big companies with budgets can afford them, so many of the smaller guys with no money but amazing products get left out. I understand that the publishing industry needs to figure out new revenue streams – these are very difficult times for them. But they need to figure out smarter business models and maintain the integrity of editorialized content, built on the opinions and perspectives of journalists and influencers.”

Via John Biggs https://techcrunch.com

[spryfilm]

“Crooked House” (2017)

Drama/Mystery

Running Time: 95 minutes

Written by: Julian Fellowes & Tim Rose Price & Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Directed by:  Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Featuring:  Max Irons, Terence Stamp, Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Abbington, Christina Hendricks, Julian Sands and Stefanie Martini

Josephine: “The murderer is never the one you initially suspect.”

The last few years has seen a resurgence in the adaptation’s of Agatha Christie novels into television shows/movies as well as cinematic movies, this could be the spin off of so many mystery shows being developed internationally that there really is no story like an old story. In fact what is unique is that many of these adaptations are not being updated but produced in the time period in which they were written, or at least very close to them. So now we have the release of a movie that was originally on television in the U.K. but is in New Zealand cinemas now, that is the mystery “Crooked House” (2017), which boasts a large cast of very well known actors that all suit Christies narrative tricks as well as arguably being the best thing about this adaptation that weaves a plot very carefully around peoples lives after the tragic death of the patriarch of a very wealthily English family, who, of course in the grand tradition, are all suspects at one time or another. Like many of Christie’s stories this does have a twist, almost a double one but it should leave you guessing until the end.

Agatha Christie as well as her work remain a strong part of popular culture, in fact it has been for almost a hundred years. In a writing career lasting more than 55 years, she wrote 72 novels and 15 short story collections, to be sure a massive accomplishment, which will no doubt stand the test of time. What made her stories stand out were, of course, the characters. She created memorable and dignified characters which any class of readers could relate to. Her most memorable and popular characters, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, are great examples of her skill to develop “high society” characters with mainstream appeal.

Agatha regularly looked for “creative inspiration” by studying the people around her; however, her chosen genre, the murder mystery, stunted her writing process because it was difficult at times to put reality into fictional environments; for example, she sometimes had trouble using attributes of acquaintances to do things she couldn’t imagine them doing, like murder, and this often caused writer’s block. To overcome this obstacle, she would develop many characters from scratch. She would note physical appearances of strangers whom she saw and met in public and then would use their likeness and subtle mannerisms to develop relatable characters for her mysteries.

“Crooked House” is co-written/directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner who has quite a bit of experience with thrillers, the highlight of his oeuvre is the excellent and underrated Gillian Flynn adaptation “Dark Places” (2015) which was a psychological thriller featuring Charlize Theron, so an Agatha Christie adaption does not feel outside his wheelhouse at all, for the most part he makes a very good job of it, he may have been a little short-changed with his lead, which is a missed opportunity. The other interesting element is one of the other credited screenwriters is Julian Fellows who is no stranger to the period or to the type of story that is being told here. Fellows is just the person to lend some credibility about the time period as well as some of the motivations for the characters, their behaviour as well, which is evident in his timeless screenplay for the relatively similar “Gosford Park” (2001), for which he received a well-deserved Oscar. There are many similar elements within this script but where it diverges besides the time period and setting is the pedestrian direction as well as the straight forward classic narrative, which is where cracks appear at the seams of the production. What “Crooked House” misses is some kind of unique narrative to pull audiences in as well as keeping them focused on this movie that really should be a must see as it touches on many elements that are meaningful today, one of those is tolerance and love instead of hate.

“Crooked House” revolves around the granddaughter of late business tycoon Aristide Leonides, Sophia Leonides, visits private investigator Charles Hayward in his office. Sophia hires Charles to investigate Aristide’s death, for she believes he was murdered by a member of his sprawling and idiosyncratic family. Sophia notes that Leonides’ regular insulin injection had been laced with eserine from his eye drops, the resulting chemicals in them causing him to die. Sophia believes this to have been a deliberate switch rather than accidental. Charles begrudgingly agrees to take on the case as a result of his feelings for Sophia as the two had enjoyed a brief love affair when they had met sometime prior in Cairo.

In many Agatha Christie adaptations one of the attractive elements is the normally star-studded cast that is assembled, “Crooked House” is no different with some fantastic talent from all levels of television, stage and movies. However, where this film drops the ball is with the lead in Max Irons as Charles who while trying his best is not really up to the material or is not really able to match up with the rest of the cast who are almost all more talented as well as more recognisable which only diverts attention away from the lead. The best protagonists who play private investigators always seem to have duality to their very nature whereas Irons does seem a bit bland as well as non-committal with his character, which, as it is the main part does impact the narrative as well as the feeling that a viewer may get from the plot. The remainder of the cast is filled out with some impressive actors led by the inimitable superstar Glenn Close as the matriarch of the family who plays the part with such wit and fierce, at times I found myself wishing the movie had centred on her, she is always great to watch and like her recent cinematic roles she leaves everything on the table. Then there are the rest who all prove why they are in such high demand as well as how professional they are with original characterisations as well as knowing whose movie this is, Agatha Christies to be sure. With actors like a true legend Terence Stamp, genre experts in Gillian Anderson, Amanda Abbington, Christina Hendricks, and Julian Sands it’s no wonder the supporting cast are a wonder to watch.

Sometimes I wonder how and why certain movies are produced, or, when there are literally hundreds of stories available why some are chosen over others. To be fair and without giving away any spoilers it is the final act that is the reason why this movie exists, it is relatively original as well as shocking in as much as it is also a tragedy for the entire family, one the audience may not see coming, which is possibly the point. But what is definite and assured is that an ending does not make a movie which is certainly the case here. The plot is somewhat interesting but the narrative as well as the way in which the director attempts to build up tension is by the numbers leaving the viewer wanting more but never getting it which means the story meanders along like a three-legged dog, it leaves one slightly bored as well really wanting more meat to dig your teeth into. Once the ending does finally arrive it is not quite enough to make the previous two hours’ worth it.

What I find confounding with this movie is that there have been so many good to great Agatha Christie adaptions that when one comes along that is uneven, a little miscast and not really thrilling it comes as a very large disappointment and really does taint the Christie brand.

“Crooked House” is out now only in cinemas.

Film review: “Crooked House” (2017) "Crooked House" (2017) Drama/Mystery Running Time: 95 minutes Written by: Julian Fellowes & Tim Rose Price & Gilles Paquet-Brenner…