#the triple meaning of bring your long stakes specifically

[weidli]

bring your long stakes

[scifrey]

WORDS FOR WRITERS: The Value of Fanfiction

There’s been a lot of chatter on social media these last few weeks, recycling that trashy, self-aggrandizing, tired old “hot take” that reading and writing fanfiction is somehow bad for you as a writer.

Before we go any further, let me give a clear and definitive answer to this take:

No, reading and writing fanfiction will not make you and does not make you a bad reader or writer.

 Period.

 Why? Here’s the TL;DR version:

1)      Reading and Writing, any kind of reading and writing, will make you a better reader and writer. And it’s enjoyable, to boot.

2)      Fanfiction has been around as long as Original Fiction, so we’d know if there was any negative impact by now (spoiler alert: there isn’t.)

3)      Practice is Practice, so matter what medium you get that practice in.

4)      Comprehending and writing fanfiction is harder than writing original fiction because you have to hold the Source Media Text in your head at the same time as you’re reading/writing a different story. It improves your understanding of storytelling.

5)      No hobby, no matter what it is, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else or yourself, is bad. And that goes double for if you decide to keep it a hobby. Not every fanfic writer wants to write original fiction, and that’s just fine. Not every hobby has to be monetized.

 Okay. But what do they mean by “fanfiction”?

 “Fanfiction is fictional writing written by fans, commonly of an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator as a basis for their writing.”-- Wikipedia

 Basically – it’s when you take elements (setting, characters, major themes or ideas) of a Media Text (a novel, a movie, a podcast, a comic, etc.) and create a different story with those elements. You can write a missing scene, or an extended episode, or a whole new adventure for the characters of the Media Text. You can even crossover or fuse multiple Media Texts, or specific elements, to create a whole new understanding of the characters or their worlds.

 Similar to fanfic, you can also create fanart, fancomics, or fansongs (“filk”), fancostumes (“cosplay”), and fanfilms. These are called Fanworks or Fancrafts.

 Fanfiction is usually posted to online forums, journals, blogs, or story archives and shared for free among the public. Before the advent of the internet, fanfiction was often printed or typed, and hand-copied using photocopiers or ditto machines, and distributed for free (or for a small administration fee to cover materials) among fans at conventions, or through mail-order booklets (“zines”).

 Fanfiction has existed pretty much since the beginning of storytelling (A Thousand and One Nights, Robin Hood, and King Arthur all have different elements attributed to them by different authors retelling, twisting, adding to, or changing the stories; there’s no single-origin author of those tales.)

 There are billions on billions of fanfics out there in the world—and while a majority of them are romance stories, there are also adventures, comedies, dramas, thrillers, stories based on case files, stories about the emotional connection between characters when one is hurt and the other must care for them, historical retellings, etc. There are also stories for every age range and taste, though be sure to take heed of the tags, trigger warnings, and age range warnings as your browse the archives and digital libraries.

 As a reader, it’s your responsibility to curate your experience online.

 So why are people so afraid or derisive of fanfic?

 People who are hard on fanfic say that…

 ·       It sucks.

o   Well of course it sucks! As it’s a low-stakes and easy way to try out creative writing for the first time, the majority of fanfiction is overwhelmingly written by new and young writers. Everything you do when you first try it sucks a little bit. 

I’m sure no figure skater was able to immediately land perfect triple axels ten minutes after they strap on the skates for the first time in their lives. No knitter has ever made a flawlessly perfect jumper on their first try. No mathematician has ever broken the code to send a rocket into space after having just been taught elementary-school multiplication. So why on earth do people think that new writers don’t need to practice? I can promise you that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first rap was probably pretty shaky.

·       It’s lazy or it’s cheating.

o   Listen, anyone who tells you that writing anything is lazy clearly has not sat down and tried to write anything. Writing is tedious. It is boring. It takes hours, and hours, and hours to get anything on the page, and then once it’s on the page you have to go back and edit it. UGH. There is nothing about being a writer—even a fanfic writer—that is lazy.

o   And anyone who tells you that trying to tell a fresh, new story within the limits and confines of a pre-existing world and have it make sense is cheating, then they have no freaking clue how hard it is to be creative with that kind of limitation placed on you. It’s harder when you have a set of rules you need to follow. What you do come up with is often extremely interesting and creative because of those limitations, not in spite of them.

o   The argument that using pre-made characters, settings, tropes, and worlds to make up a new story is cheating is also complete bunk. Do those same people also expect hockey players to whittle and plane themselves a whole new hockey stick from scratch before each game? No, of course not. And yeah, a baker can grow all their own wheat, grind the flour, raise the chickens and cows so they can get eggs and milk, distill the vanilla, etc. Or a baker can buy a box mix. Either way, you get a cake at the end of the process. Whether you write fanfic or original fiction, you still get a story at the end of the process.

·       It makes you a worse writer.

o   * annoying buzzer noise * Practicing anything does not make you worse at it. And reading stories that are not edited, expertly crafted, or “high art” will also not indoctrinate you into being a bad writer. If anything, figuring out why you don’t like a specific story, trope, or writing style is actually a great way to learn what kind of writer you want to be, and to learn different methods of constructing sentences, creating images, and telling tales. Or you know, just how much spelling and grammar matter.

·       It’s not highbrow or thoughtful enough.

o   Sometimes stories are allowed to be just comfort food. Not every book or story you read has to be haute cuisine or boringly nutritious. You are allowed to read stories because they’re exciting, or swoony, or funny, or just because you like them. Anyone who says differently is a snob and worth ignoring. (Besides, fun silly stories can also be packed with meaning and lessons—I mean, hello, Terry Pratchett, anyone?)

·       It makes you waste all your time on writing that can’t be monetized.

o   No time is wasted if you spend it doing something that brings you joy. Not every hobby needs to be a money-maker and not everyone wants to be a professional writer. You are allowed to write, and read, fanfic just for the fun of it.

·       It’s theft.

o   According to Fair Use Law, it’s not. As long as the fanfic writer (or artist, cosplayer, etc.) is not making money on their creation that directly impacts or cuts into the original creator’s profit, or is not repackaging/plagiarizing the original Media Text and profiting off it’s resale, then Fan Works are completely legal. So there.

 How, exactly, does fanfic make you a better writer?

 Fanfiction…

 ·       teaches you to finish what you start.

o   The joy of being able to share your fic, either as you’re writing it, or afterward, is a big motivating factor for a lot of people. They finish because they get immediate feedback on it from their readers and followers. Lots of people have ideas for books, but how many of them do you know have actually sat down and written the whole thing?

o   Fanfic is also low-stakes; there’s nothing riding on whether you finish something or not, so you have to inspire yourself to get there without the outside (potentially negative) motivation of deadline or a failing grade if you don’t get the story finished. You end up learning how to motivate yourself.

o   Fanfic has no rules, so you write as much or as little as you want, stop wherever you think is a good place to end the story, write it out of order, or go back and write as many sequels or prequels as you like. Again, it’s totally low-stakes and is meant to be for fun, so you can noodle around with what it means to write a “whole” story and “complete” it, which teaches you how you like to write, and how you like to find your way to the finish line.

·       teaches you story structure.

o   Before you can sit down and write a story based on one of your favorite Media Texts, you’re likely to spend a lot of time consuming that text passively, or studying it actively. Either way, you’re absorbing how and why Media Text structures the stories it tells, and are learning how to structure your own from that.

o   Once you’re comfortable with the story structure the Media Text you’re working in is told, you’ll probably start experimenting with different ways stories can be told, and find the versions you like to work with best.

·       teaches you how to write characters consistently.

o   Fanfic is really hard because not only do you have to write your fave characters in a way that moves the story along, but they have to be recognizable as those fave characters.

o   This means you have to figure out their body language, verbal and physical tics, their motivations and they way the handle a crisis (fight, flight, or fawn?), and then make up the details you may need for your story that you may never see on screen/the page, like how they take their eggs or what their fave shampoo is, based on what you already know about them. That takes some top-notch detective work and character understanding to pull off.

o   Once you know how to do that, just making up a whole person yourself for original fiction is a breeze.

·       Teaches you how to hear and mimic a character/narrator voice.

o   You have to pay close attention to how an actor speaks, or how a character’s speech patterns, dialect, work choice, etc. is reflected on the page in order to be consistent in your story.

o   And all of this, in turn, teaches you how to build one for yourself.

o   I have a whole series of articles here about building a narrative voice, if you want to read more on constructing an original voice for your narrator.

·       Teaches you how to create or recreate a setting.

o   Again, like achieving character consistency, or mimicking a character or narrative voice, it takes work and paying attention in order to re-create a setting, time period, or geographical region in a fanfic—and if you’re taking your characters somewhere new, your readers will expect that setting to be equally rich as the one the Media Text is based in.

o   Which, again, teaches you how to then go and build an original one for yourself.

·       teaches how to take critique.

o   Professional writing is not a solitary pursuit. In fact, most writing is not entirely the work of an author alone. Like professional authors work with editors, critique partners, and proofreaders, some fanfiction writers will sometimes work with beta-readers or editors as well. This are friends or fanfic colleagues who offer to read your fanfic and point out plot, character, consistency, or story structure errors, or who offer to correct spelling and grammar errors. This is a great way to practice working with editors if you decide to pursue a professional career, and also a great way to make friends and strengthen your community and skill set if you don’t.

o   Many fanfic sites offer readers the opportunity to leave a comment on a fic, rather like a reviewer can leave a review on GoodReads or Amazon, or any other online store or blog, for a novel they’ve read. Sometimes these comments/reviews are 5 star and enthusiastic! Sometimes they are… not. The exact opposite in fact. As you get comments on your fanfic, and learn to ignore the ones that are just mean rather than usefully critical, you gain the Very Important Skill of learning to resist firing back at bad comments or reviews, while enjoying the good ones.  It also teaches you how to ignore drama or haters.

·       Teaches you how to exist within a like-minded community.

o   While the actual writing part of writing is solitary and sometimes tedious, nothing is ever published into a vacuum, whether it be fanfiction or original. Besides your editing/critique/beta reader group, you will also likely develop friendships, a support network, and mutuals. It’s always great to uplift, support, cheer on, and celebrate one another’s accomplishments and victories, whether the writing is fanfic or original.

·       Teaches you that it’s okay to write about things important to you, or your own identity.

o   You can change a characters ethnicity, cultural background, sexuality, religion, or disabilities to match yours, and talk about your lived life through the megaphone of that character. Or, you can insert original characters based on you, your desires, and experiences.

o   Once you’re comfortable writing in your #ownvoice in fanfic, you can approach it in original fiction, if you like.

o   See my article titled Your Voice Is Valid for more on this.

 What if I want to be a professional writer?

 Notice how I didn’t say “real writer”. Any writer who writes any kind of story is a ‘real’ writer. I mean, pinch yourself—you’re real, right? The difference is actually between being an “amateur” writer (a hobbyist who does not write for pay), and a “professional” (who is paid for their writing). Just because you only play shinny on the street with your friends, or in a house league on the weekends, it’s doesn’t mean  you’re not still as much of a hockey player as someone who plays in the NHL.

 Writing fanfiction before or at the same time as writing original fiction that you intend to sell is a great way to learn, or practice, everything I’ve mentioned above. If you read it widely, it will also expose you to different story telling styles, voices, and tropes than your reading of published fiction.

 ·       Can I sell my fanfic?

o   No. For fanfiction to remain under the umbrella of Fair Use Law, you cannot profit off your fanfiction. There’s some grey-area wiggle room around things like charging a small amount for a ‘zine or a PDF to cover administrative costs, but zero wiggleability around, say, selfpublishing your fanfic and charging heaps for it.

·       Can I “file off the serial numbers”?

o   “Filing of the series numbers” is when you take a fanfic you’ve written and essentially pull it apart, remove everything that’s clearly someone else’s Media Text, and reassembling the story so that it’s pretty much a completely original piece of creative writing.

o   Yes, you can sell these, provided your filing is rigorous enough that you aren’t likely to be dinged for plagiarism. It’s widely known that Cassandra Claire’s Shadowhunters was once Harry Potter fanfic, and that Fifty Shades of Gray was once Twilight fanfic. But did you know that my Triptych started life as an idea for a Stargate Atlantis fic? There’s lots of stories out there that were once full fics, or the idea for the novel was originally conceived for a fandom, but written as original instead.

o   So long as you’re careful to really rework the text so that it’s not just a find-name-replace-name rewrite, you should be fine.

o   Be aware, though, that the agents and editors you might pitch this novel to know how to Google. They may discover that this is a filed-off story, and depending on their backgrounds and biases, might be concerned about it. There’s no need to inform them of the novel’s origin straight off in your pitch/query letter, but you may want to have a frank discussion with them about it after it’s been signed so they can help you make sure that any lingering copywrited concepts or characters are thoroughly changed before publication.

o   Should you take down the original fic-version of the novel while you’re querying/shopping it? Well, that’s up to you, and whether you’re comfortable with an editor/agent potentially finding it.

·       Should I be ashamed of my fic, or take it down, or pretend I never wrote fic?

o   What? Why? No! I mean, I have hidden some of my most immature work, but I’ve left pretty much my whole catalogue of fanfic online and I don’t deny that I was/am a ficcer. Why? Because it’s a great repository of free stories that people can read before they buy one of my books, so they can get a taste of how and what I write. Also, you will be in good company. Lots and lots of writers who are published now-a-days started in fandom, including:

Steven Moffat

Seanan McGuire

Rainbow Rowell

Claudia Gray

Cory Doctorow

Marissa Meyer

Meg Cabot.

Naomi Novik

Neil Gaiman

Lev Grossman

S.E. Hinton

John Scalzi

The Bronte Sisters

Andy Weir

Sarah Rees Brennan

Marjorie M. Liu

Anna Todd

...and me, J.M. Frey

 How fanfic can harm.

 Like with anything else, there are ways that reading and writing fanfiction can actually harm you, or others, but it has nothing to do with the reading or writing of fanfiction in and of itself.

 ·       Some creators may prefer that you don’t (and may or may not follow up with legal action).

o   Anne Rice famously went after fanficcers in the 90s who wrote fanfic of her work, handing out Cease & Desist notices like confetti.

o   99% of creators don’t care. Those who do will generally have a notice on their websites or social media politely asking fancreators to refrain. Mostly this is due to their general discomfort over the idea of anyone else getting to play in their worlds. The best thing to do is respect that request, and find a different fandom to write in.

·       Flamewars and fandom fights leading to bullying and doxing.

o   Regrettably, just like any other community filled with people who have different favorites, opinions, and preferences, there will inevitably be clashes. It’s up to you to decide how to react to negative interactions, and how to model positive ones.

o   Don’t forget, you curate your online experience, so don’t be afraid of that block button.

o   Also, don’t be the jerk who goes after people for liking different aspects of the fandom. Everyone is entitled to interact and like a Media Text their own way. “Don’t yuck my yum,” as they say.

·       Trying to make money on other people’s IP/Media Text (law suits, etc.)

o   It doesn’t belong to you, so don’t try to make money on it.

o   There’s a grey area here in terms of selling prints/plushies/jewelry/etc. and there’s no hard line about where one copyright owner will draw the line, and another won’t. Warner Bros. owns the film rights for both Harry Potter and Hunger Games, but I’ve seen Harry Potter-themed bars spring up while fans wanting to make Hunger Game fanfilms have been shut down. A friend of mine sells hand-made fandom-inspired items at cons—there is no rhyme or reason to what she gets told to stop making and what she’s left alone on.

o   Best thing to do if you’re told to stop is just so stop, move on, and find a different fandom to be active in.

·       Writing Real Person Fanfic (“RPF”) can be considered a violation of consent.

o   This article sums it up pretty well, but basically… if you decide to write RPF, be aware that they person you are writing about is a real person, with real thoughts, and emotions, and they may feel violated by RPF. If you decide to write it, never send it to the people it’s about, and always clearly tag it so other can choose to engage with it, or avoid it.

o   Also be aware that it could ruin their love for what they do. For example: the friendships between the members of 1Direciton became strained and the band eventually disintegrated because people wouldn’t stop sending band members smutty stories or art of them having sex with one another, and it made them too uncomfortable to continue in the band.

·       Showing/sharing fanfic & fanart outside of its intended context. Fanworks are for fans, and there are definitely issues if…

o   It’s shown to celebrities/actors/creators.

  Shoving your fantasies onto the people who create or portray your fave characters is rude, and wrong, and also kinda gross. If they seek it out themselves, that’s one thing, but the same way you wouldn’t throw it at a complete stranger, don’t throw it at them. You may love the characters these people play, but they are not their characters, and they are not your friends.

  It may also really weird them out and ruin their love for what they do.

o   it’s shown to writers working on the series.

  There was a famous case where a fanficcer sent a story to a novelist, and the novelist was accused of plagiarism by the ficcer when their next novel in the series resembled the plot of that fanfic. There was a whole court case and everything.

  Because of this, writers of TV shows, books, etc. don’t want to (and often times, legally can’t) read your fanfic. They don’t want to get accidentally inspired by what you’ve written, or worse, have to throw out something because it resembles your fic too closely. Just let them write their stories the way they want, and if they choose to seek out fic, they will.

o   it’s mocked by celebrities.

  I’m not letting Alan Carr and Graham Norton off the hook. If it’s super rude and gross to shove fanworks at actors/writers/creators when you’re a creator, then it’s doubly rude for anyone to take a story or art made for a specific audience (the fans), by a specific community (the fans), lift it out of it’s context, and invite the public to mock it while also shoving it at the actor/celebrity in a place where they are literally cornered and can’t leave (i.e. the chat-show sofa). Man, it really steams me up when they do that. It’s rude and it’s tone-deaf, and it’s not fair.

  And most of the time they do it, they don’t even ask the artist or writer for permission, first, which is just…. Uuuuugggghhhh. It may be fanfic, but it was still created by someone, and you should always ask permission before publicly sharing something created by someone else.

  Grrrrrrr.

 In Conclusion

 If someone tells you that reading or writing fanfic is bad for you as a creator, tell them to get bent.

Famous Fanfic

·       Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda

·       Wicked by Gregory Maguire

·       Wicked: the Musical by Stephen Schwartz

·       The Phantom of Manhattan by Fredrick Forsyth

·       A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman

·       Sherlock by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat

·       The Dracula Tape, by Fred Saberhaugen

·       Paradise Lost, John Milton

·       Inferno, by Dante

·       The Aeneid, by Virgil

·       Ulysses, by James Joyce

·       Romeo & Juliet, by William Shakespeare

·       The Once and Future King by T.H. White

·       A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain

·       The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

·       Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith

·       Phantom, a novel of his life by Susan Kaye

·       …and so many more.

[alecmagnuslwb]

Young Fools

Writer’s Month 2020 Day Twenty-Nine

Read on AO3

“And lastly with the Salem witch trials, Zatara and Constantine,” the teacher says just before the bell rings. John startles from where he’d definitely been napping through most of class.

Oh fuck, he thinks first, because group projects are absolutely not his thing. And double oh fuck, he thinks when he realizes who his partner is.  

John Constantine is unaffected. He walks through the halls of school head held high, beat up trench coat with a bi pride flag pin on it not giving a fuck. Ever since his mother moved them to the states to get away from his father the English transfer has made a name for himself as the school’s resident bad boy. Late to classes, always getting caught smoking and telling off anyone who looked at him sideways.

He’s perfectly content with everyone thinking he doesn’t give a damn about them and that he’s an asshole.

Except her.

Zatanna Zatara is the genius goth princess of his dreams and the only thing that’s left him truly feeling something other than annoyance or anger since they moved.

He darts out of the classroom as soon as he can though, just because he likes the girl doesn’t mean he’s going to happily do a group project or worse yet make a fool of himself in front of her.

“Hey Constantine wait up!” she shouts running after him in the hall. He doesn’t know how she manages it in the chunky boots she’s wearing, but she catches up to him in seconds. She trips a little when she reaches him grabbing his arm for stability. It’s in that moment he realizes this is the closest they’ve been in the year they’ve been attending school together and this is most definitely the first time they’ve touched.

John looks at her the uninterested demeanor he’s maintained on full display.

“Hi,” she says smiling at him and John feels his steely demeanor slipping away already. “You ran off on me there, partner.” Her arm drops and John misses the contact immediately.

“Uh, yeah,” he says scratching at the back of his neck. “Sorry, ‘bout that. I’m just not the best at teamwork.”

Zatanna nods her lips twisting up in thought.

“Well I can work around that,” she says with a confident pat to his arm. “Meet me after school in the parking lot, you’re coming over and we’re working on this project.”

She walks away leaving him no room for argument strutting off to catch up with her friends. John watches her go in interest and in confusion. No one, save for Boston who forced his friendship upon John and who he’s fairly certain just talks so much he misses all social cues, has ever ignored his standoffish behavior before. No one’s ever really fought back against it before until now.

There’s no way he’s getting out of this project without breaking his don’t give a fuck attitude around her and he just knows it.

For some reason even though he could very easily just skip the rest of his classes and not show up in the parking lot, he sticks around until the final bell rings, attending all of his classes and everything.

Zatanna walks out with her little pack of friends she’s often with and smiles when she spots him. She turns to them throwing a wave and then makes her way over to John.

“Hey,” she says once she gets to him. “Not gonna lie I thought the chances of you not showing were 80 to 20 not in my favor.”

John huffs a laugh. “More like 70/40.”

Zatanna laughs at that a genuine thing that lights up her dark blue eyes even more.

“Come on, my cars this way,” she says tugging on his sleeve. Across the lot a series of wolf whistles sound from Zatanna’s friends as they all pile into another car. Zatanna stops and rolls her eyes.

“Ignore triple a,” she says gesturing to the end of the lot.

“Triple a?”

“Abby, Alec and Andrew. They’re my best friends and it’s just easier to call them that than list them off,” she shrugs then nods at a black vehicle once they’re in front of it. “This is me.”

John looks at the car that previously he could only see the front end of and realizes starkly that it’s a hearse.

“Um, do you drive a hearse?” he asks walking to the passenger side.

They both get in and Zatanna chuckles.

“Yup,” she says starting the engine. “My family’s in the funeral business.”

“I thought your dad was a magician?” John says recalling some conversation he overheard when a couple of jocks were mocking her for her style. They’d ended up with live fireworks in their lockers the next day courtesy of him, not that she or they know that.

“He is on the side, funeral directing is the main source of income though,” she explains a little hesitantly. It’s clear some people have judged her families work. John is the son of a full time alcoholic and a grocery clerk so he’s not about to be one to judge.

“Creepy, and kinda cool,” he says with a smirk. She tilts her head to look at him briefly biting her lip holding in a smile. The rest of the ride is spent mostly talking about their project and John finds himself actively caring about something from school for the first time ever.

“You sure know a lot about witches being burned at the stake for a seventeen-year-old,” he says after they park in the driveway outside of her house which also serves as funeral home.

She chuckles opening the large double doors.

“Grow up around dead bodies and you find yourself into all sorts of spooky stuff,” she says gesturing for him to follow her upstairs. They walk past two large halls where he assumes funerals are held and a casket display room. John wonders how inappropriate it would be to ask her if they can go down to the mortuary before he leaves.

She comes to a stop at the top of the stairs pulling John into the first door on the right and just like that he finds himself in her bedroom. In the past year they’ve said maybe a three dozen words to one another, John always just noticing her from afar, and now he’s alone with her in her bedroom.

She pulls a wheelie chair from her desk gesturing for him to sit down as she crosses her legs and sits on her bed.

She dives right in basically planning out their entire project on her own, but asking for his input anyways. He listens closely while she talks, but surveys her room as well. The room is at least seventy percent books ranging from classics like Frankenstein to specific movie themed cookbooks. Her wall space that isn’t bookshelves is scattered with an array of indie band posters and photos of her with her friends. The thing that catches John’s attention most is the top hat and wand sitting on the desk on top of an old book he can’t read the title of. He wonders if maybe there’s a little more to her love of witches and her father’s side gig.

It doesn’t take long before they have a game plan, that shockingly he plans to actually follow if for no other reason than to not let her down, and John learns that she may or may not already own painted mini figurines of Salem witches for their diorama. They migrate downstairs after that both seemingly prolonging their time together with conversation swerving away from school.

Draped across a row of fancy folding chairs with an empty casket at the front of the room John finds himself telling Zatanna little bits and pieces of himself he hasn’t told anyone since coming to the states. In turn she tells him about her family and incredibly specific music tastes.

“Thank for not being weird about all this,” she says gesturing to the room at large after a while. “Or asking to see a dead body.”

John coughs at that bit glad he refrained from asking earlier.

“Most people don’t get it or think it’s too creepy,” she goes on picking at her fishnets lightly. He’s constantly in awe that she gets away with wearing them at school surprised he’s never seen her in detention for dress code violations with him.

John just shrugs. “So you live in a funeral home, I live in a shitty trailer park where my kitchen, living room and bathroom are basically all one room. Everybody’s got different lives, no point in judging someone else’s.”

She stops picking at her fishnets and looks up at him from under her choppy bangs with a smile. Her eyes catch on the clock behind him.

“Oh, shit you should go before my dad gets back. He’ll absolutely kill us both if he finds out I was alone unattended with a boy who willingly wears a trench coat,” she says after seeing the time. It’s already almost eight and John has no idea where the time has gone.

He turns down her offer of a ride, even though he’d kill for a few more minutes alone, opting to walk home instead. She walks with him to the front door pausing and tugging on his coat once he’s stepped outside.

“We should have lunch tomorrow, John,” she says leaning against the doorframe and calling him by his first name for the first time.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to impose. You and your friends got your thing,” he says. Part of him would also admittedly feel a little bad abandoning Boston, would he just sit there and talk to himself for forty-five minutes if John wasn’t there?

“Well you and your talkative friend can absolutely join us sometime if you’d like, but I was thinking more just you and me tomorrow,” she says reaching out and fixing the lapel of his jacket quickly. “I bring my lunch most days since I’m a vegetarian and I’m sure you know all the good spots where a teacher can’t find a couple students for a whole period.”

He smiles at her shoving his hands in his pockets so he doesn’t do something stupid like reach out and kiss her, especially if he’s reading this wrong.

“So we can work on the project?” he asks wanting to be certain.

Zatanna purses her lips in thought for a second and then morphs into a smile.

“Nope.”

John chuckles, “Well in that case I know all the secret spots.”

Her smile just gets brighter at that. She pushes off the doorframe and leans in to kiss him on the cheek lightly.

“Great,” she says pulling back and slowly closing the door. “See you tomorrow.”

And then all because of a kiss on the cheek resident bad boy John Constantine can’t stop smiling the entire walk home.

[writing-prompts-for-friends]

Notes on Robert McKee’s Story 33: The Principle of Antagonism

I had the hardest time trying to condense this section, so unfortunately this post will be almost entirely direct quotes from the text.

"The principle of antagonism: A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them."

McKee believes that the principle of antagonism is the most important and least understood precept in story design, and this is the primary reason screenplays and the films made from them fail.

"Human nature is fundamentally conservative. We never do more than we have to, expend any energy we don’t have to, take any risks we don’t have to, change if we don’t have to. Why should we? Why do anything the hard way if we can get what we want the easy way? (The “easy way” is, of course, idiosyncratic and subjective.) Therefore, what will cause a protagonist to become a fully realized, multidimensional, and deeply empathetic character? What will bring a dead screenplay to life? The answer to both questions lies on the negative side of the story.

The more powerful and complex the forces of antagonism opposing the character, the more completely realized character and story must become. “Forces of antagonism” doesn’t necessarily refer to a specific antagonist or villain. In appropriate genres arch-villains, like the Terminator, are a delight, but by “forces of antagonism,” we mean the sum total of all forces that oppose the character’s will and desire.

If we study a protagonist at the moment of the Inciting Incident and weigh the sum of his willpower along with his intellectual, emotional, social, and physical capacities against the total forces of antagonism from within his humanity, plus his personal conflicts, antagonistic institutions, and environment, we should see clearly that he’s an underdog. He has a chance to achieve what he wants—but only a chance. Although conflict from one aspect of his life may seem solvable, the totality of all levels should seem overwhelming as he begins his quest.

We pour energy into the negative side of a story not only to bring the protagonist and other characters to full realization—roles to challenge and attract the world’s finest actors—but to take the story itself to the end of the line, to a brilliant and satisfying climax."

To make your protagonist stand out even more, he needs to have a good antagonist that not only pushes him to the very brink of his ability and willpower, but also acts as a fine foil.

Take Story and Character to the End of the Line

“Does your story contain negative forces of such power that the positive side must gain surpassing quality? Below is a technique to guide your self-critique and answer that critical question.

Begin by identifying the primary value at stake in your story. For example, Justice. Generally, the protagonist will represent the positive charge of this value; the forces of antagonism, the negative. Life, however, is subtle and complex, rarely a case of yes/no, good/evil, right/wrong. There are degrees of negativity.

First, the Contradictory value, the direct opposite of the positive. In this case, Injustice. Laws have been broken.

Between the Positive value and its Contradictor, however, is the Contrary: a situation that’s somewhat negative but not fully the opposite. The Contrary of justice is unfairness, a situation that’s negative but not necessarily illegal: nepotism, racism, bureaucratic delay, bias, inequities of all kinds.

Perpetrators of unfairness may not break the law, but they’re neither just nor fair.

The Contradictory, however, is not the limit of human experience. At the end of the line waits the Negation of Negation, a force of antagonism that’s doubly negative.

Our subject is life, not arithmetic. In life two negatives don’t make a positive. In English double negatives are ungrammatical, but Italian uses double and even triple negatives so that a statement feels like its meaning. In anguish an Italian might say, “Non ho niente mia!” (I don’t have nothing never!). Italians know life. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

A story that progresses to the limit of human experience in depth and breadth of conflict must move through a pattern that includes the Contrary, the Contradictory, and the Negation of Negation.

(The positive mirror image of this negative declension runs from Good to Better to Best to Perfect. But for mysterious reasons, working with this progression is of no help to the storyteller.)

Negation of the Negation means a compound negative in which a life situation turns not just quantitatively but qualitatively worse. The Negation of the Negation is at the limit of the dark powers of human nature. In terms of justice, this state is tyranny. Or, in a phrase that applies to personal as well as social politics: “Might Makes Right.”

Consider TV detective series: Do they go to the limit? The protagonists of Spenser: For Hire, Quincy, Colombo, and Murder, She Wrote represent justice and struggle to preserve this ideal. First, they face unfairness: Bureaucrats won’t let Quincy do the autopsy, a politician pulls strings to get Columbo off the case, Spenser’s client lies to him. After struggling through gaps of expectation powered by forces of unfairness, the cop discovers true injustice: A crime has been committed. He defeats these forces and restores society to justice. The forces of antagonism in most crime dramas rarely reach beyond the Contradictory.

Compare this pattern to MISSING, a fact-based film about American Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon), who searched Chile for a son who disappeared during a coup d’etat. In Act One he meets unfairness: The U.S. ambassador (Richard Venture) feeds him half-truths, hoping to dissuade his search. But Horman preserves. At the Act Two Climax he uncovers a grievous injustice: The junta murdered his son… with the complicity of the U.S. State Department and the CIA. Horman then tries to right this wrong, but in Act Three he reaches the end of the line—persecution without hope of retribution.

Chile is in the grip of tyranny. The generals can make illegal on Tuesday what you did legally on Monday, arrest you for it on Wednesday, execute you on Thursday, and make it legal again Friday morning. Justice does not exist; the tyrant makes it up at his whim. MISSING is a searching revelation of the final limits of injustice… with irony: Although Horman couldn’t indict the tyrants in Chile, he exposed them on screen in front of the world—which may be a sweeter kind of justice. 

The principle of the Negation of the Negation applies not only to the tragic but to the comic. The comic world is a chaotic, wild place where actions must go to the limit. If not, the laugh falls flat. Even the light entertainment of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers films touched the end of the line. They turned on the value of truth as Fred Astaire traditionally played a character suffering form self-deception, telling himself he was in love with the glitzy girl when we knew that his heart really belong to Ginger.”

In Summary

“Fine writers have always understood that opposite values are not the limit of human experience. If a story stops at the Contradictory value, or worse, the Contrary, it echoes the hundreds of mediocrities we suffer every year. For a story that is simply above love/hate, truth/lie, freedom/slavery, courage/cowardice, and the like is almost certain to be trivial. If a story does not reach the Negation of the Negation, it may strike the audience as satisfying--but never brilliant, never sublime.

All other factors of talent, craft, and knowledge being equal, greatness is found in the writer's treatment of the negative side.

If your story seems unsatisfying and lacking in some way, tools are needed to penetrate its confusions and perceive its flaws. When a story is weak, the inevitable cause is that its forces of antagonism are weak. Rather than spending your creativity trying to invent likable, attractive aspects of protagonist and world, build the negative side to create a chain reaction that pays off naturally and honestly on the positive dimensions.

The first step is to question the values at stake and their progression. What are the positive values? What is the preeminent and turns the Story Climax? Do the forces of antagonism explore all shades of negativity? Do they reach the power of the Negation of the Negation at some point?

Generally, progressions run from the Positive to the Contrary in Act One, to the Contradictory in later acts, and finally to the Negation of the Negation in the last act, either ending tragically or going back to the Positive with a profound difference. BIG, on the other hand, leaps to the Negation of the Negation, then illuminates all degrees of immaturity. CASABLANCA is even more radical. It opens at the Negation of the Negation with Rick living in fascist tyranny, suffering self-hatred and self-deception, then works to a positive climax for all three values. Anything is possible, but the end of the line must be reached.”

McKee also breaks down what the positive, negative, contrary, and negation of negation are for many more common values such as love, loyalty, greed, courage, intelligence, etc. But that would make this post entirely too long. I definitely invite you to get this book and check them out yourself. 

I found this section incredibly helpful to me. Until now I've always thought of conflict in terms of "good vs. bad" and...not much more than that. I had never contemplated the Contrary, let alone the Negation of the Negation. If I can manage to pull off a conflict of that level, I think I might have a really good story on my hands! This has helped me to shape my antagonistic forces and plot. I hope it helps you too!

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

[enchantingsheepmoon]

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Previous SlotNext SlotRoad Trip Max WaysRising Sun

Triple Diamond slot machine represents a creation of the famous IGT software developing company, which was released back in 2014. This title comes in the form of a retro-style game, specially dedicated to the players who are into classic online slots. Both Triple Double Double diamond slot machine free play will make you feel like you are sitting behind an actual land-based slot device, although you will still be at the comfort of your home, sitting on your chair!

Triple Double Diamond Slot Review

IGT’s Triple Diamond slot is played across a reel set that comes in the form of a standard 5×3 grid, constructed out of three reels collocated into the same number of horizontal rows. This retro-designed reel grid contains an overall number of nine potentially active betting lines. And 'potentially active' means that you can determine by will how many lines do you want to mark as active at the beginning of each and every new round. The number of active paylines per spin can go anywhere between the minimum of one and a maximum of nine. The free Triple Diamond slot introduces a beautiful theme, with detailed, high-definition graphics, and life-like design, which provides an excellent first impression. It belongs to the category of classic video slots and, with its symbol designs (bars and 7’s), preserves the memory of early slot machines. The reels are placed in such a way to occupy the central position of the screen, as well as most of the screen itself, which provides great visibility.

The only two control buttons are placed at each side of the reel grid, blending just perfectly into the design. You can monitor parameters such as your balance, total bet amount and the amount of the won payout through the box below the reels. Everything is neat, manageable with ease. The game comes with the theoretical long-term return to player percentage of slightly over 95%. It belongs to the category of slots with medium to lower volatility, which implies that payouts are smaller in quantity but tend to occur more often.

International Gaming Technology

When it comes to the IGT provider, it represents one of the leading companies specialized in the development and production of multiple kinds of casino software, including a palette of games (slots, table games, video poker, card games, etc.), gaming platforms, land-based slot machines, lottery and sports betting software, etc.

Besides Triple and Double Diamonds free play slot machines, the company stands behind popular online video slots, such as the Cleopatra series of slots, Da Vinci Diamonds, Wheel of Fortune, Coyote Moon, or the Siberian Storm, which comes with the progressive jackpot! In the following parts of this Triple Diamond slots review, all features, options, rules, as well as the symbols and their payouts will be concisely overviewed.

How to Play Triple Diamond?

Playing Triple Diamond slot machine is not a big deal, while the rules don’t differ from the standard ones. The main goal of the game is to land a combination of more than two identical symbols, and they need to be placed on the same exact paying line, starting from the leftmost reel, to the right. Since this is a game with three reels, this would mean that you must cover the entire line with symbols to score a payout, unlike in 5-reeled ones. The exception is a symbol illustrated as the logo of the game, which awards payouts even when you manage to land a single one!

The controls of the game are pretty simple and very manageable. The green button on the left opens a menu, through which you get to adjust several parameters, such as the number of active paying lines per round, then the amount of your stake per one such line, and you can monitor the amount of your total wager as you adjust the bet per line. The yellow button located to the left of the grid starts the reels in motion. In the top right corner of the screen, you can see a small button with two white arrows. Clicking on it, a falling menu will present you three options: 'Home', 'Game Rule' and 'Paytable'. And that’s about all you need to know when it comes to Triple Diamond slots controls!

Triple Diamond Symbols & Payouts

The Triple Diamond online casino slot machine comes with an overall number of six symbols. Among them, five are ordinary, while the sixth comes with certain special functions, which makes it distinctive. Unfortunately, the game-play of the Triple Diamond slot includes no special symbols such as the scatter or the bonus icon. So, you can’t rely on a wild to substitute other symbols, or on the scatter to bring you payouts regarding the position on the grid or a certain number of free spins. This game is purely based on the random number generator, and that’s what makes it so thrilling!

When it comes to symbols, you can expect to come across five regular ones and one special icon in addition to them. Four of the regular icons are illustrated as various bars, while the fifth comes in the form of the lucky number seven. Bars come in following shapes and sizes: triple bar, double bar, and the regular bar. To score a payout with these symbols, you would have to land three of them in a combination, placed on a single active line. Triple bar combination pays 40x, double bar 20x, and the regular bar combination pays 10x. If you manage to land three bar symbols of any type, landed on the identical line, you will be awarded 5x the amount of your stake per line!

The only special symbol of the free slots Triple Diamond is illustrated to resemble the logo of the game and it, in fact, represents the wild. It has the ability to replace other symbols when forming a potentially awarding combination. It also carries the largest (jackpot) payout of the Triple Diamond casino slot online. If you manage to land a combination constructed out of three of these symbols on the same active line, you will be awarded a generous payoff amount that occupies the value of 1199 times your bet per line! Any two of these symbols will pay 10x, while any one of them pays 2x the value of your wager per one line. In the first case, the combination contains two special symbols and any other icon, while in the second case, two of them are of any type, and the third is the special one.

But that’s not all when it comes to the so called triple double diamond slots or just Triple Diamond special symbol! According to the rules of the game, any 3-symbol line win that contains one special symbol will pay 3x bet per line. If you manage to create a winning combination of three symbols, among which two are special ones, you will receive a payoff worth 9x your wager per line. All wins displayed in the box below the reels are shown in the currency you are playing with.

Betting Options

By clicking the green button located to the right of the reel set, you will enter a menu dedicated to betting options. Once there, through buttons labelled with + and -, you get to adjust two parameters that will affect the amount of your overall wager per a single round. The first parameter concerns the number of active paying lines you wish to add to the next spin. This number can occupy the values between the minimum of 1 and a maximum of 9.

The second parameter is labelled as 'LINE BET'. This value can range between a minimum of 25 and a maximum of 500. There are several bet line values to choose from, including the minimum of 25, then there is 30, then 50, 100, 200, 300, and a maximum of 500 in credits. You get to play the Triple Diamond slot for as little as £0.1 per spin.

The total bet amount depends on these two parameters. It can easily be calculated by multiplying the number of active paying lines with the amount of your stake per a single active line. It occupies the values from the minimum of 25 (with a single active line and the minimum line bet) up to the maximum of 4500 (all nine lines active, line bet set to the maximum).

Additional Rules

The winning combination achieved in the Triple Diamond free slots must contain at least three symbols of the same type, and they must be located on the identical activated paying line. The combination counts starting from the leftmost, up to the rightmost position on the active line. If there is the appearance of more than one combination on the grid, only the one with the highest value will be converted into a payout. Combination values displayed in the paytable are being multiplied with the number of coins you have staked on a single active payline. All wins displayed at the end of a successful spin are shown in the currency you have chosen to play with.

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How to Win in Triple Diamond?

There are several things you can follow in order to increase your chances to score any of the Triple Diamond slot machine wins. The first of all, which does not consider the game-play so much, regards to dividing your funds in a proper way. If you instantly go big, without spending a few rounds on getting familiar with the game itself, you risk going bankrupt very fast. So, spend your money wisely, and even better, play a couple of demo rounds of the free Triple Diamond slots before starting your real money game-play. The vast majority of online casino operators allows you to access this title through demo mode.

When playing the game, you should get familiar with betting options first. It’s important to understand that increasing the number of paylines increases the chances of creating a winning combination as well, although the amount of your total wager per round also rises. With slots, you must stake a sum to win a sum. If you are chasing for that magnanimous 1199x-line-bet jackpot payoff, then it is recommended to keep all nine lines active and wait for the combination of three Triple Diamond wild tokens to appear.

While on the run for the generous jackpot prize, potentially worth 270000 credits, you should keep an eye on bar combinations as well, while they will be filling up your account balance with smaller, yet more frequent sums of money, which will keep you alive for a greater number of rounds.

And last, but not the least, especially if you are not an experienced slot player, it is recommended to play several demo rounds of the Triple Diamond free slot, in order to get familiar with the controls, rules, and payouts. Preparation is the key to success!

When it comes to the game’s payout range, the minimum amount you can be awarded occupies the value of 2x line bet (a single wild in a 3-symbol winning combination). Then the payouts grow from 5 and 10x, over 20, 40 and 100x, all up to the maximum worth of 1199x line bet, taken by the non-progressive Triple Diamond jackpot prize!

Demo & Real Money

The game comes both as the real money version and as the free Triple Diamonds slot. And both demo mode and real money mode are available at the majority of online casino operators that offer games developed by the IGT software provider.

Demo mode is purely played with fictional money, credits, while in the other mode, wins and bet amounts are only displayed in credits. Those credits are later converted into the currency you have selected to play with, and added to your account balance in case of a win, or deducted from it when you are placing your chosen bet.

Triple Diamond Mobile Slot

The free Triple Diamond slot comes as a mobile version as well. This version comes in two forms, as a downloadable one, and as the instant-play one. For the first, you would have to download and install a game or casino app, while the second can be reached directly through the web browsing app of your chosen device, with the help of the Adobe Flash player extension. The mobile version of the Triple Diamond slot machine is perfectly compatible with portable devices such as smartphones and tablets, that are powered by software system platforms developed by Apple (iOS, MacOS), Google (Android) or Windows (Mobile). Since the mobile version is HTML5-based, the above-mentioned possibility of instant-play is achievable. When it comes to the game-play of the Triple Diamond mobile slot, it does not differ from the one dedicated to PC gaming. The rules and controls are the same as well. The game is designed in such a manner to perfectly fit all screen sizes and resolutions, for the best possible gaming experience!

Conclusion

If you are a player in search of a true classic, retro-styled online slot machine, then look no more because both Triple and Double Diamond slots from IGT will provide you with exactly what you desire! A 3×3 reel grid with up to 9 paylines, an amazing design that resembles a genuine land-based slot, classic symbols, such as bars and the number 7 will turn you back to the ‘80s. And the absence of bonus features, leaving only the wild symbol to help you on your path towards the jackpot payout, only makes the game-play more exciting! So, wait no more, and if you want to make sure that this is the game for you, play a demo round or two before starting to experience the thrill of Triple Diamond slot in real money mode!

Frequently asked questions about the Spiderman slot:

📌 Who produced the game and how many reels and paylines does it include?

The game was produced by the International Gaming Technology (better known as IGT), and it introduces a 3×3 reel grid.

📌 What is the minimum required bet for participating?

To play the Triple Diamond slot machine for real money, you must deposit at least £0.1 per spin. Playing the game in demo mode requires no charges.

📌 What is the maximum payout I can win by playing Triple Diamond slot?

The maximum (jackpot) payout occupies the value of 1199x line bet. If you are playing with all nine lines active and with the maximum bet per line of 225 credits, the jackpot would be around 270000 credits.

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📌 Can I play the game on my mobile phone or tablet?

Yes, Triple Diamonds casino slot online is playable on all smartphones or tablets that are based on software systems such as the Android, iOS or Windows Mobile.

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📌 How to increase my chances of winning?

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[hardersonne87-blog]

Tronwatch Wallet

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Well-liked community-developed wallets include things like iTRON, TRON Wallet, TronLink, in addition to TronPay. Other third-party pouches have integrated TRON through it has the own group, such as Trust Wallet, Cobo Budget, and Atomic Pocket book. Plan and Future Strategies TRON releases new usefulness using periodic space-themed launches. Exodus introduced the totally free P2P content distribution podium, Odyssey and Great Journey insert economic incentives, personal ICO capabilities and more. TRON mainnet 1. five and one 6 are usually identified as Star Trek in addition to Eternity (for now), plus plan to ultimately transform the network in to a fully-fledged blockchain gaming setting. BOSS and Founder Direct sun light recognizes videogames as one connected with the tips to crypto�s future, nevertheless integrating all of them with blockchain will be a good ambitious feat together with some sort of realistic deadline recently 2027.

[caughtinthetwistedvines]

Album Review: Shapeshifter by Knuckle Puck There were high expectations for Knuckle Puck’s sophomore full length album after the electric and profound release of Copacetic. Their first album resonated with so many people and doubled (maybe even tripled) their fanbase. This left a lot of excited and passionate fans begging for more. With a two and a half year gap between the albums, the fanbase had to be very patient as they waited to see what the band would release. Knuckle Puck did give fans a few songs to hold them over (Indecisive and Calendar Days) back in March that were released on a 7-inch vinyl. In July, fans finally received news that the band would release their sophomore album Shapeshifter in October. The wait was long, but the album was worth the wait. Shapeshifter has a wonderful balance of emotion and meaning. 

It’s evident that Knuckle Puck spent a lot of time producing songs that really captured them as a band. The pressure to release an album just as good or better than Copacetic hit the band hard. In an interview with AP, their vocalist Joe Taylor explained how disconnected they felt when they began writing and recording. It was if they felt they had to come up with something like Copacetic, but they weren’t in that same headspace anymore. They were different people now. The product they had created wasn’t something they felt was good enough so they started over until they had something they could be proud of. Kevin Maida, Knuckle Puck’s guitarist described their decision to change and improve the new album saying “if you’re not happy with it, why are you doing it?” Instead of giving in to the pressure that fans and the music industry wanted new content from them as soon as possible, they took the time to produce something that not only fans would enjoy, but they enjoyed creating. 

Shapeshifter is an album all about connections both with people and the world. Knuckle Puck explained that the new album highlights the importance of finding yourself and connection (or loss of) even if at times you feel disconnected. There are ways to connect your feelings to other people and things. 

This album personally resonated with me because of the intensity of it. Every song has its own unique sound that makes me feel something different. Songs like “Conduit” makes me feel as if I have to accept things I can’t control, while others like “Everyone Lies To Me” motivates me to go out and change the things I think are beyond my control. The album begins with “Nervous Passenger” which is slower compared to the other tracks, but it works well to set up the album. The slowness of it doesn’t make it any less profound. Taylor insists that he’s not the blood in his veins, which could mean that he’s looking to improve himself from the person he’s been. The album is immediately launched into the punchy and quick song, “Twist.” 

Joe Taylor’s incendiary, gritty vocals and Nick Casasanto’s soft but bold backup vocals sounded great together on Copacetic and Shapeshifter is no different. It’s clear to see that the members are all best friends. They mesh together like puzzle pieces, and each member brings an important part to songs that sound strong and impressive. 

The band definitely found themselves again, and it’s incredibly empowering to hear on this album. Songs like “Nervous Passenger”, “Gone”, “Double Helix”, “Wait”, and “Plastic Brains” address the loss of self and looking for a way to change either the self or outcomes in life. Others like “Everyone Lies To Me” gets political and addresses societal issues. 

A track that surprised me was “Double Helix” because of how intricate the meaning is. Many of the band’s songs from this album sound angry, but my initial thought was that the song was referring to a person that changes their mind often and isn’t consistent. Upon looking at the lyrics further and researching more, I learned that it was written about how Taylor doesn’t want to be related to his father.  The band uses the double helix image to represent DNA that Taylor wishes he wasn’t made up of because it’s in turn also a part of his father. The intricate lyricism of this song took me off guard, and made me respect the band even more. Tracks like this one and “Stuck In Our Ways”  which is about someone struggling to get off the high from addiction show that Knuckle Puck have grown as writers from the last album. 

Shapeshifter isn’t just about ambiguous concepts that anyone can relate to. They get specific in this album, and it really works. Shapeshifter has a different vibe from Copacetic, but it’s just as strong. One of my only complaints for this album was that there weren’t as many profound lyrics that resonated with me like with Copacetic. This album is about finding a different sense of self and working to improve one’s quality of life by working through issues that seem impossible to overcome. This is a concept that the fanbase seems to really connect with and understand. The album shows a new sense of maturity and growth for Knuckle Puck, and the band has really come into their own with Shapeshifter.

Must Listens: “Stuck In Our Ways” and “Plastic Brains”

Favorite lyric: “Like plastic brains we change/when losing who you thought you were is not the only thing at stake/is there any trace left of me?”

Any thoughts? Agree or Disagree? I’m willing to discuss the album with anyone further (:

[getfoundfastblog]

6 Reasons Why Your Business Should Consider Doing Video Advertising

[caption id="attachment_1386" align="alignnone" width="2500"] Digital video marketing can drive more traffic to your website.[/caption]

The benefits of digital video advertising have quickly switched it from a “nice to have” for larger businesses to a “must have.” Now, this status has begun to trickle down to smaller businesses.

Brands already embracing video ads have have a distinct advantage over their competition.

Soon, video advertising for small businesses could become table stakes for all business owners. Without it, they may not be able to viably compete for new customers and overall sales.

In other words: video ads provide so many advantages that small businesses without a video marketing strategy may get left behind.

Discover the benefits of video advertising and learn about six huge reasons your small business should consider video ads by reading on.

1. Digital Video Has Runaway Growth with No Signs of Slowing Down

First, business owners should know that digital video is not just a “fad.” It’s a legitimate trend that reflects our evolving use of technology.

Online video has become an absolute monster in the past few years with no signs of slowing down. People watch over 500 million hours of video on YouTube each and every day. An estimated one-third of all online activity is spent watching video.

Video uploaded to newer platforms has also quickly caught traction. Since introducing native video for Facebook users in 2013, the platform has grown to have over 500 million people watch at least one video in a given day.

There are many reasons behind this upsurge in video production and consumption, but mobile is one of the most important to keep in mind. As smartphone adoption rates rose and device owners gained access to cheaper data plans, the simultaneous explosive growth in content production and attentive audiences created a full-blown phenomenon.

[caption id="attachment_1387" align="alignnone" width="855"] Mobile video brings entertainment to people anywhere at any time.[/caption]

Over half of video content is now viewed via mobile device, and mobile video saw 20 percent consumption growth last year.

Altogether, these facts show that if your business invests in video, it won’t be stuck with something no one uses five years from now. Instead, not using video advertising could actually make your business feel like a dinosaur.

2. Most Marketers Are Buying into Video Ads, And They’re Seeing Real Results

While more consumers are watching videos, more marketers are also spending more money on video advertising. Comparing 2016 to 2015, marketers spent 53 percent more on digital video ads — $9.1 billion in total. Looking just at mobile video ad growth, spending increased 145 percent year-over-year during the same period.

And while video ads made up just 12.5 percent of overall digital ad spending last year, digital advertising as a whole eclipsed traditional TV advertising. TV has long been the king in the ad world since the 1960s. That fact that digital can unseat it is a big deal.

Also, many brands have begun to give video the lion’s share (56 percent) of their ad budget, signalling a larger sea change in the handoff between digital and traditional pay TV.

Overall, people have begun to pay less attention to traditional media outlets like broadcast TV and more attention to digital video. Businesses using video ads will find bigger and bigger audiences over time. Those who stick to older forms of ads will have shrinking audiences.

This trend has strongly motivated marketers to pay attention. Currently, over 67 percent of brands say that they purchase video ad inventory on Facebook. The majority intend to spend more on video in the next year.

Since “programmatic ad platforms” can automatically match your video ad with people most willing to buy, the tremendous appeal of video content has helped marketers find big, high-value audiences and better conversion rates.

3. Video Sharing Helps Your Ads Go Viral and Expand Reach

Video is not only appealing but also highly sharable. In fact, traffic to video sharing sites has more than tripled. Also, 92 percent of mobile video viewers report that they regularly share videos with others.

Because video is so sharable, a single ad placement can turn into free exposures from people sharing your ad with friends and associates. Video ads therefore help small businesses get more value for their dollar.

Additionally, video ads that are blatant advertisements can still hold a high amount of appeal to buyers. According to one recent survey, four times as many people would prefer to watch a product-focused video compared to reading about it.

4. Video Communicates More Than Words or Images Alone

Video content combines sight and sound with motion to create a deeply engrossing experience. By combining moody imagery with soothing music, for instance, small business brands can make viewers feel emotion more effectively than images or text can by itself.

[caption id="attachment_1388" align="alignnone" width="765"] The absorbing qualities of video appeal to broad audiences of all ages.[/caption]

Consider that a two-minute explainer video can be capable of delivering over 200 words of script. It will also show deeper information with animations, visual cues and things like editing. Maybe this is why people say that if a picture is worth 1,000 words, 1 minute of video must be worth 1.8 million!

Additionally, people tend to remember video far more clearly compared to text. The average viewer claims to remember 95 percent of what they saw in a video compared to just 10 percent of what they read through text.

For small businesses marketing, these benefits mean that video does more with less. Your viewers will get more of your message, enjoy it as an experience, and remember it better overall.

5. Video Helps You Rank Higher for SEO and Social

Google’s search index gives video approximately a 50 times higher chance of appearing on the first page of results compared to any content page that just uses text. Video search results also tend to show at the very top of SERPs (search engine results pages) or near the top-five overall results.

[caption id="attachment_1389" align="alignnone" width="812"] These video results appear at the top of the SERP above text-based web pages.[/caption]

By having your video more likely to appear in search results, you can get more clicks from search users directly in the SERPs. Having your video appear on the SERPs can also increase organic traffic by 157 percent compared to text-based webpages.

Put together: each video you make can generate more business with less effort.

6. Video Can Drive Serious Conversions

The addition of video to your existing campaigns can help convert more people more quickly. For instance, including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by over 80 percent. Similarly, including a video in the first email of your drip campaign can increase your subscriber click-through rate by 96 percent.

On top of this, using video anywhere on your website can drive engagement overall. According to studies, the average user spends 88 percent on websites that contain video. Additionally, blogs incorporating video tend to earn around three times as many inbound links compared to text-only posts.

Small business owners using both paid video ads and non-ad-related video content will therefore have an easier time finding more leads from multiple sources.

Some Tips for Incorporating Video Advertising for Small Businesses into Your Marketing Strategy

Start with a short 1-3 minute video explaining your company’s primary product or what makes you different than competitors.

Testimonial video serves as social proof to help win new customers still considering your services.

Consider uploading a few videos a month in lieu of text content to educate your customer base and help solve pain points related to your industry.

Facebook video advertising has been shown to lead the market in growth and share potential. Even a <12 second ad loop can draw the eye and drive engagement compared to a static image.

Product demonstrations comfort buyers who want to see the product in motion. This applies particularly to goods like electronics, clothing, fashion, jewelry and products like vapes. Even if you are demonstrating a product you don’t exclusively carry, you can earn traffic by providing video demos where others don’t.

Answering frequently asked questions about your specific services/products or your industry as a whole can be an amazing way to drive engagement.

You can always use content for longer videos as roll material for shorter, more compact ads.

Use video to introduce your team or show a glimpse behind the scenes of your company. This approach can help you win affinity and earn audience trust. Facility tours tend to be particularly entertaining when tightly edited together.

[caption id="attachment_1390" align="alignnone" width="848"] Having audiences meet your team makes you more approachable and memorable.[/caption]

Consider reporting on industry-related developments, including new products, regulations, major brand announcements and the like.

Feel free to simply entertain rather than educate! Old Spice commercials have become a viral sensation shared even by those who tend not to use their products, still growing their reach and overall brand awareness.

So, there you have it — six compelling reasons to jump on the video advertising bandwagon as well as 10 quick ideas to serve as inspiration. Remember that you can start small with just a person talking into the camera, and since every computer and mobile device has a camera now, your production budget can be as low as $0.

If you need more insight on how to use video effectively, take a look at our other small business marketing resources at Get Found Fast to help you find success for your company. Contact us here.

  Originally Posted on: 6 Reasons Why Your Business Should Consider Doing Video Advertising

[cryptoga-blog]

Cats Went Crypto Initially, Now It really is Time for Individuals

http://www.cryptoga.com/news/cats-went-crypto-initially-now-it-really-is-time-for-individuals/

Cats Went Crypto Initially, Now It really is Time for Individuals

Arthur Camara is a co-founder of CryptoKitties, developed by Canadian innovation studio Axiom Zen, in which he focuses on merchandise and engineering to enable bring blockchain technology to the masses.

The pursuing report is an distinctive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2017 in Review.

I admittedly was not investing in any cryptocurrency in the early 2010s.

By this time last yr, I was looking through CoinDesk’s 2016 Calendar year in Review, just starting off to fully grasp what the energy of distributed ledgers and decentralized networks could necessarily mean for our long term and our culture. And even with all that, I am now standing along with a staff who are pioneering entrepreneurship and innovation in the blockchain house.

Never allow this year’s unparalleled advancement in the crypto group fool you. We are not late to the social gathering, we are pretty early — we are nonetheless the Neil Armstrongs of our time, specially if we focus our attempts in the right locations. What we have viewed in 2017 is just a sneak peak of what’s coming. The new yr will bring a great deal much more expertise, much more groundbreaking suggestions and new cats to the blockchain.

We’ll also see a total bunch of new people as perfectly.

The change commences

A couple of weeks back we launched CryptoKitties, a game in which people can buy, accumulate, breed and sell genetically exclusive, electronic cats on the blockchain. Technically speaking, they are non-fungible tokens on the ethereum community that implement the ERC-721 token standard proposal, just lately developed by our technical architect and co-founder Dieter Shirley.

On the outside the house, even so, they are lovable electronic kittens with exclusive combos of features, introduced to people by a large-top quality user interface that lets people to interact with CryptoKitties’ intelligent contracts on the ethereum blockchain. Buyers who have by no means signed a blockchain transaction right before can immediately have an understanding of the mechanics and the technology, and understand how precious their ownership turns into in a decentralized ecosystem.

We set a great deal of notice into user expertise, gameplay, and structure, and the motive for that is uncomplicated: our purpose is to bring blockchain — usually mistaken for an solely financial instrument — closer to the masses. We are ultimately producing it much more approachable.

What happened in the course of a couple of days just after start was not some thing we could have predicted: CryptoKitties took the full Ethereum community by storm.

Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them new to the crypto globe, flooded into the app and begun breeding and investing hundreds of thousands of kitties. Our contracts, throughout multiple days, peaked at in excess of 20 p.c of all transactions in the main ethereum community, producing CryptoKitties the most utilised and client-targeted blockchain app we see in the globe currently.

With the achievements, we also arrived at unparalleled amounts of congestion and pending transactions. It was the initial time we could seriously exam ethereum’s scalability (and, regrettably, it was not able to manage these volume gracefully).

But you will find a bigger issue… The potential to create, trade, and tokenize points is the centerpiece of quite a few blockchain tasks, such as ethereum. (That is specifically a single of the main premises on ETH’s benefit, which has viewed around 10,000 p.c advancement in comparison to last year’s price tag.) That very same tokenization thought could be used to a wide variety of exclusive belongings, like virtual items or physical kinds, like art or serious estate.

With kitties on the blockchain, we have been in a position to properly prove that these use situation is not only theoretically achievable or speculatively desirable, but that you will find serious and tangible client demand from customers for this specific benefit proposition.

All of that with a game.

Reflections

Searching back again, it isn’t really really hard to have an understanding of why.

In the previous, the gaming marketplace released hundreds of thousands of new people to the own laptop. It served pump targeted visitors into modern social media giants through their early days, and it’s regularly been at the main edge of smartphone popularization.

With CryptoKitties, record is repeating by itself and by gaming, a new multi-million dollar market place has immediately fashioned. It really is a new market place of people who are now a great deal much more knowledgeable about the positive aspects of blockchain and the benefit of decentralization people who are eager to grow and experiment much more, immediately defining new sets of demands and trying to get new ground breaking solutions.

CryptoKitties is just the commencing of that chapter. Finance, exchanges, sovereignty, guaranteed. But a great deal over and above that.

In 2017, we all adopted the large ICOs, the ups-and-downs of different cryptocurrencies, tokens and altcoins, speculation about the long term and different variations of what banking, governance, currencies, asset management, identification, infrastructure and other spine services might quickly glance like. But perhaps what we haven’t compensated as a great deal notice to is to how strongly this escalating user foundation is demanding new and superior blockchain goods right now.

Merchandise Hunt, a single of the most well-liked web sites for launching, sharing and discovering goods, executed a global hackathon last month with a distinctive category for blockchain and crypto. We can by now discover a new merchandise or prototype in that category becoming launched on the web page pretty much each individual day.

Metamask, a single of the most well-liked ethereum browser wallets, has arrived at pretty much fifty percent a million people this month. This yr by itself, we observed the variety of blockchain-related development task posts triple. Coinbase grew to in excess of 13 million people.

Even Walmart has been launching pilot tasks employing blockchain.

Reflections

But together with enhancements that have been predicted for different industries, what we will also see upcoming yr are accelerated measures forward in the direction of consumerization of blockchain with:

Unprecedented advancement in blockchain people and client-dealing with apps.

Key initiatives for scalability. We by now adhere to vital get the job done in progress with sidechains, lightening community, evidence of stake, and state channels, but user demand from customers and money will thrust scalability attempts further.

Gaming, virtual belongings, client, and business goods as entry details to blockchain adoption.

Blockchain use conditions flourishing in rising marketplaces.

Key focus on fantastic user expertise.

There is nonetheless place for centralized players.

Eventually, as we expand toward mass adoption in the new yr, it appears to be inescapable that more powerful de-facto criteria will emerge, regulation and self-regulation will start out to get spot and experienced, and ordinarily central establishments will widen larger sized fascination in decentralized methods.

When there is surely an option for key disruption, much more hybrid methods will be developed, in which centralized and decentralized parts are put together to enhance crucial client values like transparency, liberty, agility, accountability, stability and warranty.

Just after all, the very same expanding bulk of people who are now comprehension the positive aspects of decentralization by new apps like CryptoKitties, have begun to thrust the marketplaces and instigate level of competition to bring individuals very same positive aspects to most of their everyday services. And they want individuals rapidly.

What we have viewed in 2017, and specially in the last couple of weeks, has been nothing shorter of remarkable. But it’s only just the commencing for what blockchain will do for the globe.

However as well early for mainstream blockchain use conditions? CoinDesk is accepting submissions to its 2017 Calendar year in Review. E-mail news@coindesk.com to make your voice read.

Bitcoin cat picture by using Shutterstock

The chief in blockchain news, CoinDesk strives to provide an open up platform for dialogue and discussion on all points blockchain by encouraging contributed posts. As these, the views expressed in this report are the author’s have and do not always replicate the perspective of CoinDesk.

For much more facts on how you can post an viewpoint or assessment report, perspective our Editorial Collaboration Manual or electronic mail news@coindesk.com.

[3one3]

The Sequel - 827

Kentucky Derby

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea/BVB players, and random awesome OC’s (okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

“I just made taco beef and then folded it into a big bowl of liquid cheese. It’s so fucking good.”

“Do you make your own seasoning for the beef or use a packet from the store?”

“I make my own, but it’s pretty much the same. Just without the weird chemicals. Babe, can you bring me another soda?”

“Oh me too, please!”

Christina and Stefanie each held their glasses of ice and lemon up behind them, for André. He made the mistake of getting up from one of the cushy recliners in the theatre in the basement- an invitation to act as the girls’ butler. He’d already been their slave for much of the evening. Christina planned her day around being available to go to Signal Iduna Park with him to watch his team take on Hoffenheim in a direct battle for third in the Bundesliga and a place in the Champions League group stage. Ironically, Marco scored an incredibly offside goal and it was allowed to stand. It was enough to win the game. In return for Christina going with André, he was taking care of the girls during their Kentucky Derby “party”. The two riders wanted to watch hours and hours of the pre-race coverage. André brought them snacks and drinks and took care of putting Lukas to bed, letting the dogs out and in, and feeding himself. It wasn’t so bad. Their elaborate analysis of the Derby contenders, and those running in the races on the undercard, was sort of interesting. The food Christina made in advance was good- particularly the nachos with the aforementioned spicy beef and cheese, and the bourbon glazed chicken wings. The girls were appreciative of his looking after them too. There was a lot of please and thank you, and he got extra smooches.

“Are you sure you don’t want more mint juleps? There’s a little bit of mint left,” he pointed out before taking their glasses. They were both on the enormous beanbag, on their stomachs, with a heavy and sturdy tray in front of them with the platter of nachos and a bowl of salsa, along with the empty little metal tumblers in which he served them Derby-inspired cocktails.

“Maybe later?” his wife asked more than answered. “Bourbon and mint don’t really go with nachos.”

Every year we get through this weekend without buying a racehorse is a good year, the player thought on his way upstairs. He’d listened to the horse crazy women discuss names for a racehorse, the qualities they’d want in a racehorse, their “secret” desires to exercise ride at a track, and how much fun they thought it would be to own a stakes horse. Christina did that every year during the Triple Crown races, or at least the ones when they were in the same place and watched them together. He assumed she thought about the same things on the other years too. May was, traditionally, not a great month for them. They were usually very busy doing separate things. André regretted poking the bear so to speak on Thursday night at Brody’s when he took a jab at his wife in regards to her being home for Lukas’ birthday. She’d teased him about being unsophisticated, or easily impressed, and that sounded like “dumb” to him. It hurt a little and aggravated a lot, so he took a shot at her in return. His hurt a lot more. It ruined the night. Christina retreated into a more demure, quiet version of herself for dessert, the long ride home, and bedtime. On Friday morning it was as if nothing happened, but the footballer knew he made a needless mistake. That was another reason to be helpful for Girls’ Derby Night In. It eased his guilt.

“If all the horses in our barn were Thoroughbreds, who do you think would be the best racing horse?” Stefanie posed as a topic of debate while her coach licked cheese off her thumb.

“Kimi, because he already is more Thoroughbred than the others,” she chuckled. “Or Rio, I guess. He’s always in a hurry. But then again...”

“Dirk. It would be Dirk. Just say it.”

“Yeah, it would. He’s the most competitive, he’s got a stride like a locomotive, stamina for days, and he’s fast. As far as I know, that’s what you want in a racing horse. But Jelly Bean, actually, could be good. He’s sort of built like one, and being batshit crazy has never hindered a racehorse,” Christina laughed heartily. Stefanie wasn’t offended. Everybody knew her gelding was nuts. “Oh, check it out. I would loooooove to have a facility like that.” Her tone turned longing as the American broadcast covered the story of one of the Derby contenders’ injury in the run up to the race. Girvin, the entry of a very young trainer and his retired jockey wife, had a quarter-crack in his hoof, which is pretty easily repaired and is no major drama. It does, however, as the girls knew, require a tiny break from meaningful training, just from a compression and stress perspective. The repair job would hold up better if given time before the hoof expands, slips, contracts, etc. during work. Girvin spent four days swimming instead of running on the track. His pool was a small circular track, indoors, designed specifically for horses. Some of Christina’s show jumping colleagues had similar setups at their stables, or underwater treadmills. Her horses that went to hospitals or clinics for major treatment in the past had used facilities like that, but she never really imagined having them at home. Tom mentioned during the planning process for her new property that they could easily build state of the art rehab and fitness facilities, including a pool, but it was more like a fanciful thing than a serious suggestion.

“Why don’t you?” Stefanie asked bluntly.

“I can’t really get my mind around spending that much money for something I don’t need. I mean...my horses are already among the most fit in the business, and we really have fewer injuries than average. What percent more could having a swimming pool get us? Certainly not enough to justify the cost,” the older rider explained flatly, without emphasis or emotion. That changed as she got to the second part of her answer. “And...I don’t know. I like the idea of doing everything possible to keep my horses feeling good. I want them to be happy, and healthy, and not suffering any for the wear and tear I inflict on them, but also...”

While Christina paused to decide exactly how best to express her feelings, André paused at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t know what they were talking about, but he recognized strain in his girl’s voice, and the stress of her being careful about what she was saying. The staircase was narrow and walled in, so he could wait there and be completely concealed while he eavesdropped. Whatever she was saying, he wanted to hear it, not interrupt and maybe divert the conversation. It sounds like she’s talking about not knowing if she still wants to compete, again, he thought. It sounds like she’s talking about something she should talk to me about but won’t, which is why we aren’t perfect again yet.

“I think if you take that step- If you go past magnetic blankets and electronic compression wraps and get into swimming, and treadmills, and hyperbaric chambers, that Theraplate thing, and aeromasks...aren’t you kind of pushing past what is normal and natural? Aren’t you treating the horse like a piece of equipment you can just keep trying to enhance and repair? To me that’s not fair to the horse, and it’s almost like cheating. I want to know what he has inside- what he was born with, and what he’s learned- not what I can get out of him artificially. I mean I don’t even use a lot of complicated supplements or do tons of joint injections. I think it would be crazy to have facilities like that- to go from using intelligent nutrition and common sense fitness training complemented with massage, basic acupuncture, some magnets in a blanket, and cold and compression therapy that have been around forever and are just sort of made easier by modern technology to using an AquaTred and a hyperbaric chamber to heal injuries faster. I just don’t like the idea of going that far. That’s too much technology and not enough horsemanship for me.”

Phew. Nothing to worry about there, André concluded. He continued through the little hallway and open door into the theatre room while Stefanie told Christina that she could understand and respect that point of view. It was a relief to him to realize their conversation wasn’t about what his girl wanted from life, or from her career, or anything else significant like that. It was a relief to him to know there wasn’t something on her mind that she felt she could speak to her friend about and not him. He put their drinks down on the tray and moved the julep cups full of melting ice to the stairs, then got settled in his wonderfully human-absorbing microsuede sectional.

“Thanks, babe. Do you want more nachos?” Christina’s leggings-clad butt wiggled when she reached for the soda.

“I still have some. It’s a while until the race. I’m trying to pace myself.”

“Did you pick a horse yet?” She turned around on her elbow and raised her brows expectantly. There was no way she could pass up making a wager against anyone who would take it. Her competitive streak was strong in all circumstances, and horse racing was developed almost expressly for the purpose of betting. In what her partner felt was a foolish and emotional move, she’d selected the horse in the outermost post position, with a lukewarm racing record, and only one eye. His name was “Patch” and he was one of three entries of Calumet, one of the most historic and successful breeding operations in the sport. Their history was less important to her than the fact that their silks were black and yellow, like Borussia Dortmund. Plus, the horse was “super cute”, and his name was “adorable”. The morning line odds on Patch weren’t good. A lot of sentimental money was placed on him throughout the day and that brought his odds down enough to make it look, on the tote board at least, like he could factor in the result.

“Which was the one that you said has a good sire?”

“Lookin At Lee is by Lookin At Lucky, who was a Baffert horse that won the Preakness. Always Dreaming is one of the favorites and he’s by another Baffert horse, Bodemeister, who is by Empire Maker and out of a mare by Storm Cat. Bodemeister was second in the Derby and the Preakness. Empire Maker was second in the Derby and won the Belmont, and the Wood and the Florida Derby. Storm Cat is one of the most popular sires ever even though he only raced twice. His granddad was Secretariat. J Boy’s Echo is by Mineshaft, who won lots of stuff but none of the Triple Crown races. I saw him race at Belmont. What a horse. He was by AP Indy, who is my favorite. He’s the one in the picture from Saratoga that’s in my office. Tapwrit is by Tapit, who if I’m not mistaken is currently the most successful sire ever in terms of money earned by his offspring. His own racing career was meh. Irish War Cry is by Curlin, who is also super important. He has Deputy Minister two rows back. He was third in the Derby, first in the Preakness, second in the Belmont, and then won the Jockey Club Gold Cup, the Breeder’s Cup Classic, the Dubai World Cup, the Jockey Club Gold Cup again, and then retired after coming like fourth in his second Breeders’ Cup Classic.”

“How the fuck do you have space in your head for all of that?” André asked, distraught. I thought I was asking for a simple answer, like one horse and maybe the place in the Triple Crown that the sire came. She doesn’t even care about racing. She knows more about things she doesn’t care about than I know about things I care deeply about. HOW DOES SHE DO THAT? There were a lot of things about Christina that made her partner personally jealous, and few did so as significantly as her memory for detail.

“I dunno,” she shrugged, turning back to the screen. “If I read something, it goes on my hard drive. And most of the time I went to the track with my dad. I didn’t do a lot of things with my dad. Those days stand out,” she finished, her voice trailing off.

“Wait, didn’t you tell me about another one whose sire you saw race?” Stefanie complained. She hadn’t settled on a contender yet either.

“Real Quiet is the grandsire of Sonneteer, one of the other Calumet horses. He was another Baffert horse. Actually he might have been like one of his first big time horses that made him famous. It was...98 I think? He won the Derby and the Preakness and then came up short in the Belmont. I was there. Everyone thought he would do it. He was super cute too. Yeah! He was the second big Baffert horse, because Silver Charm was in 97. He did the same- first in the Derby and Preakness, and then couldn’t win the Belmont. It was déjà vu for everybody at Belmont with Real Quiet. My dad bet on them both twice, so that we’d have the Autotote slip if the horse won the Triple Crown but could still cash in too, though I don’t know why that mattered. They both went off at even money, more or less. I still have them somewhere,” Christina added, staring at the enormous screen. They were really too close to it, but the girls had been listening more than watching anyway.

“Okay well which one of those you just talked about would you say is the best?”

“I don’t know. Hence has AP Indy blood too. He’s the third Calumet entry.”

“Ugh,” the footballer groaned in frustration. “You find something of note about every horse in the race!”

“Well they don’t get to the Derby by being un-noteworthy, boyfriend.”

“I’m taking Always Dreaming, because I like his name, you said his trainer is very good, and he won his last two races,” Stefanie confidently declared before downing a whole beef and cheese covered nacho. She was pretty much the only person in Dortmund that Christina ever felt like hanging out with besides André and Espen, in terms of adults. There was no regular sharing of deep and significant thoughts and feelings between them, but they could have fun together, and they could relate on many levels. Being able to stuff her face in leggings and a sports bra and talk about horses and Derby hats was just better with a girlfriend who also rides, as opposed to doing it with André, who couldn’t care less and simply humored her because he was nice.

“I want the one who looks like Dirk, but you said he’s not competitive,” André commented while poking the sole of her foot with his big toe.

“She’s never won a race, but that doesn’t mean she can’t do it,” the one who believed in horses more than people replied. “She has Tapit in her pedigree too, and Storm Cat. Tapit’s grandsire is AP Indy by the way, and did I mention that AP Indy was by Seattle Slew? You guys have heard of Seattle Slew, right? And his dam was by Secretariat. They bred him to a mare by Mr. Prospector, who was by Raise A Native, and they had Pulpit, who was big on his own. Then they bred Pulpit to a mare by Unbridled, who also had Mr. Prospector blood, and out of a mare by Nijinsky, who was by Northern Dancer, who-“

“All right stop. You’re just showing off now, or making this up.” Her favorite blonde poked harder at her foot and wished he had something to throw at her. He had trouble remembering the names of the humans that far back in his own pedigree. “I’ll take the girl horse. I’m trapped in Girls’ Night right now, so it’s fitting.”

“Oh like you have something better to do right now.”

“I could be out with the guys. They’re celebrating a little.”

Oh. I didn’t know that, Christina thought apologetically to herself. I didn’t know he chose to hang with us and bring us drinks. That’s extra nice of him. I was already trying to be nice to him for being nice, but I guess I should be extra nice too. Though I don’t know why everything is so transactional with us now. It’s been that way for so long. We make concessions for each other on a one for one basis. It used to be different.

“What’s the girl horse’s name again?” André questioned.

“Untrapped,” Stefanie supplied. “Even more fitting for you since you said you’re trapped in Girls’ Night, yeah?”

“I think Chris’ horse is going to do it,” he said with a smile that was a little fake. He poked softly and repeatedly at his girl’s foot again too, feeling like he needed to make up for saying he could have gone out. Her silence made him think of that as another misstep, like what he said at Brody’s. And he really hated that he had to think so much about individual responses. That too was different. It wasn’t always like that. He didn’t like needing to be hyperaware, or feeling like a lot rested on small interactions. Their relationship used to be effortless. “The world needs a happy story right now. What could be happier than a one-eyed horse winning from the outside?”

“Why haven’t the commentators discussed which horses are best in muddy conditions? That seems like a big deal. Don’t they usually address that? It’s so muddy there.” Stefanie was oblivious to anything happening below the surface of the conversation.

“The Churchill surface is really good. It doesn’t necessarily race as sloppy as it looks, and also this Derby field is such low quality across the board that it might not really matter. I think nobody has any idea who’s gonna win,” the American said. The horses and their connections were beginning to make the walk from the backside to the paddock, and it was the first chance to see the contenders live and up close outside of their stalls. Christina tried to study each one the way she did when she was at the track, believing she could see a special something, or even spot flaws. Sometimes she didn’t like the way a horse walked. Sometimes she loved the look in the eye. It could change her betting strategy. “They’ve really steered away from serious technical analysis this year, or they confined it to the coverage they do earlier on the sports channel instead of putting it on the main network part. Maybe they don’t want to make it about betting. Wait, see? Figures Donna Brothers would be the one to bring some perspective here. She just said she’s going with Classic Empire because he’s the only one who’s won on a sloppy track. I love her. Did you know the horse she usually rides out there to interview the winning jockey on the way back after the race is actually Bob Baffert’s? She borrows the horse he rides during the morning workouts.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” The younger German rolled her eyes. “How would I know that?”

“Well I mean some people deduce it because Bob’s horses always have the blue fuzzy on their nosebands and the horse she rides has it too...”

“Chris.”

“What? Okay fine.”

“You guys should have a race,” the non-rider in the room suggested. “With Kyle. You could do it on the tractor path, couldn’t you? The whole point of doing the bluestone dust instead of the gravel was to make it so you could ride on it, yeah?”

“Not exactly. I didn’t mean to ride on it like ride, ride. I wanted that because walking on gravel is kinda not brilliant on the way to the ring. We pick out their feet before we ride to make sure there’s nothing in there to cause problems. To then go walk on little gravel would be stupid. I don’t know that I want to go galloping on the path though. I wish we had grass. I really miss galloping out. So does Calvin.”

“What happened to asking the neighbors if we could ride over and use their empty field?” Stefanie chimed in before her coach could become too melancholy over the limitations of her property. André was glad for that too. He was still really unhappy about it. He hated that there was an oversight that meant a significant change in her training plans.

“I haven’t gotten around to it.”

“Why don’t we go talk to them tomorrow? I can’t imagine any German horse people telling you no. You don’t say no to the woman trying to win Olympic medals for you in a couple months when she stops by to ask if she can ride on your empty grass. Especially if you bring them nachos.” Stefanie gobbled another loaded chip and looked momentarily panicked when some of the cheesy mixture fell under her chin. There was a paper towel there to catch it.

“You know what?” Christina asked, as a total non sequitur. “The 7 looks more like Dirk than Untrapped. Which one is the 7?”

“Girvin. He’s the one trained by the husband of the lady jockey,” Stefanie supplied. “I think Sonneteer is the closest to Dirk. He’s the only true black. The rest are just dark bay.”

“Thank god the color of the coat determines performance. Really makes this easy,” André joked while he picked up his personal plate of nachos. They’re about to go into serious horse talk here, he reminded himself as the post parade began. The riders were up and the horses were out on the track. The camera got up close to each one and gave viewers a really good look at how they were moving and how they were behaving. Some looked unbothered by the six-figure crowd. Other were pumped and jigged around the way Rio always did immediately before and after jumping. A few were held tight by their pony riders, and a few trotted out alone. The girls would get into the nitty gritty and talk about things like the slope of a horse’s croup, and he didn’t even know what a croup was so it didn’t matter to him. I like the look of McKracken. He seems like a good guy, the player thought. Very chilled out and relaxed like this is no big deal and he’s got it. What did anybody say about that one? I can’t remember. Even if I paid attention, I probably still wouldn’t remember.

I know Chris hasn’t said anything lately about being unsure of what she wants from her riding, or if it really matters to her, or if she wants to keep doing it on the same level, but I know she’s still thinking about it. I see it in ebbs and flows. That’s the phrase, right? Sometimes she goes on and on about training, about every little thing, and it excites her just to speak about it, and other times she sounds almost resentful about the amount of time it takes and the hassle of traveling to competitions. But how can anybody who loves horses as much as she does- and loves them in the context of competing in particular- ever consider giving it up or scaling it back? Racing doesn’t even matter to her and she has all that information learned because it’s a horse thing and she wanted to know about it at some point. She has the drive to know things. Horses battling other horses to show what they’ve got inside is like the most important thing to her, like she was just saying when I came down. There has to be a way to balance that with everything else so that she enjoys her career more than she resents it. There has to be a way back to that. It used to be okay. It’s getting better. I wish I knew for sure that the reason we still have problems between us is that she hasn’t found the balance, and not that the reason she hasn’t found the balance is that we have problems. I don’t know which is the chicken and which is the egg, let alone which came first. I lie to her when I tell her I know for sure that it’s the horse situation she needs to fix first so that we can be perfect again. It could be that we’re on track to be that way and that it just takes time- that there’s nothing else we need to do- but I don’t want to wait. How long can it take? The problem was made over almost a whole year. Could it take that long to fix it?

“Great, my horse is last except for the one who pulled up at the start,” Christina groaned a few seconds after the 20-horse field broke from the gate. There was a three-way battle at the front between Always Dreaming, Irish War Cry, and Battle Of Midway. No one spoke as the field moved down the backstretch, and there was no clear leader by the time they turned for home.

“I’m going to win!” Stefanie said gleefully when her horse, Always Dreaming, finally started to look in control. The rest of the pack shifted some, and there was a horse in black and yellow closing fast but Christina couldn’t tell if it was her horse or one of the other two Calumet colts. In the end it was a near wire-to-wire victory for Always Dreaming, the only horse who wasn’t covered in mud. Lookin At Lee finished second, and Battle Of Midway third. Neither of them were ones that the girls talked about a lot, but the winner was among what they considered the class of the field, even though they said that class was far from the quality of horses entered in other years. The win wouldn’t pay much. Place and show would pay quite nicely.

“I wish they’d show the full finishing order,” Christina lamented. “I wanna know where my Patch pony ended up. And also what happened to the Godolphin horse that stopped. I couldn’t tell if he was injured or just having some kind of hissy fit. Usually they tell you. I haven’t seen any ambulance or anything. Actually, what would have happened if the horse totally broke down right there? It was before the finish line. Would they stop the race since it would otherwise be in the way when they come back around? I’m surprised that’s never happened.”

“You each owe me €20.” Stefanie sat up and held her hand out. Her hosts said they’d pay her later. André picked up his phone to try to find the full result for Christina, and Christina breathed a sigh of relief when the commentators said Thunder Snow, the horse who pulled up, appeared to be fine. She got to watch the start again, from in front of the gates, and saw that her horse broke badly and was hampered from the get go. He finished 14th. Untrapped came 12th. The TV beat the footballer to showing the information, but Christina got up and came to him anyway. She needed to stretch first, and then lifted the armrest out of the way so she could sit next to him on the comfy sectional and lean over on his arm. The other equestrian was busy texting or tweeting about her victory.

“Which horse did you really think would win, pretty girl?” André asked in a quiet, just-between-them way. He was sure Patch was a sentimental choice.

“I dunno. I really didn’t think about it,” she yawned. “Like the TV people, I just wasn’t that in to breaking down the past performances this year. There wasn’t a lot to go on anyway.”

“Tired?”

“Yeah. Bed soon. I want to get started at the regular time tomorrow so I can watch Arsenal and United. No staying in bed half the day.”

“Mkay. It’s almost 1, so...”

“Got it.”

The unspoken point was that it was time for Stefanie to go home, and she was ready anyway. She helped take plates and cups upstairs, verified the barn agenda for Sunday, and said goodnight. André was ready for sleep, and Christina was ready to snuggle and try to sleep.

[cstesttaken]

7 Must-Haves In The CMO’s Digital Marketing Budget

Content marketing—and specifically video marketing—are shaping the B2B marketing landscape this year. And marketers are taking note, loosening their purse strings to make more room to grow their digital footprint.

We’ve trained our consumers to crave authentic, real-time marketing, which they can find in well-thought-out content—and a few other places, too.

Here are a few must-haves in our digital marketing budget to stay ahead of the trends and deliver what our consumers want, when they want it, and how they want it. Each trend helps to bolster reporting, close the loop between marketing and sales, prove ROI, and bring human-to-human marketing to the forefront.

1. Visual Storytelling Meets Live Streams It doesn’t take Chewbacca Mom to show us how important visual storytelling has become. Consumers like to watch video. As many as four times as many consumers prefer to watch a video over reading text. But producing a video is hard. When you add in no ability to edit, limited consistency, and a lack of strategy, you’ve crafted a recipe for disaster to your brand.

UnMarketing’s Scott Stratten said live video is just content marketing’s latest shiny toy. “Content shouldn’t be a training bra,” he said. People can’t just try it because it looks neat. We have to have a clear plan and real strategy to return measurable KPIs if we want to be successful.

Live stream videos aren’t going anywhere. We can expect the trend to go from novelty to marketing mainstream this year. So the earlier you put a strategy in place, the better. Technology will allow the “consumer as voyeur” model to grow. Add in a sense of urgency to watch now or miss it forever, and you’ve hooked consumers—even in the B2B space.

2. Content Marketing It’s not exactly news to say content marketing should dominate your brand’s digital marketing budget and strategy in 2017. But the way marketers are approaching content needs to evolve this year. In a world where13 Potatoes That Look Like Channing Tatum is viral-worthy content, it makes sense to question if good writing is worth the effort. Spoiler alert: It is.

With88% of B2B marketers in North America already relying on some form of content marketing, people have succumbed to a sort of content shock. They’ve become numb to the mountains of content surrounding them at every corner.

No longer can we just create an onslaught of mediocre content designed to boost search results. We’re competing with everything that’s ever been published in the history of the Internet. Quality matters a whole lot more now than quantity, so invest in it. Around39% of your peers already plan to boost spending on content this year.

3. Content Distribution “If you build it, they will come” is a myth in content marketing.

Developing great content is still important, but great content is only noticed if sharing it is an integral piece of your marketing effort. With the mountains of content tangling search results, we need a way to get information in front of our most important contacts. We need our content to live on the channels our customers live on. Great content is important, but effective distribution is the only way people will see it. The success of your distribution efforts this year will have a direct impact on your campaign ROI.

Paid channels can give you a small boost, but 90% of social clicks go to organic content and on Google, organic content commands 80% of clicks. Invest time and resources to find the right channels and build them into your content strategy. According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2016 Report, marketers want to decentralize content. Many are experimenting with taking their content to new channels to see what resonates best.

4.  Internet Of Things By 2020, the total number of connected devices will more than triple, reaching over 30 billion, according to the latest findings from ABI Research. We have entered the Jetsons’ era of connected devices.

Of course smartphones and tablets will remain essential to the foundation for the IoT ecosystem, but we’ve only just scratched the surface on what’s to come. Consider this: Your car alerts your home thermostat when you’re 10 minutes away to raise or lower the temperature to your family’s comfort for maximum energy efficiency. Wearable devices that monitor your blood pressure send information straight to your doctor. Your water heater sends a diagnostic report to customer service reps and trouble shoots issues before a breakdown occurs. These are in development right now.

This uber-network of connectivity will offer up more data this year that can be used as actionable strategies. And it’s leading the way to more detailed insights on consumer habits and preferences, equipping marketers to target our audiences more accurately and efficiently.

5. Account-Based Marketing There’s been a seismic shift in marketing that’s taken a serious look at customer-obsessed marketing. This approach teams up marketing and sales to pin a long-term, high engagement revenue relationship with your key accounts—and they call it account-based marketing. ABM quite literally flips your lead funnel on its head. And marketers are loving it—almost as much as their customers. ABM puts focus to the customers who fit your brand’s ideal persona first. And it puts more stake in post-sale customer experience for marketers with the overall goal of creating advocates to market your brand with you.

Last year, more than70% of B2B marketers said they spent more of their budgets on ABM than ever, and the trend is only expected to continue, according to research from SiriusDecisions. The study found 27% of marketers devoted between 11% and 30% of their total marketing budgets to ABM last year. That’s up from 19% in 2015. Technologies like Salesloft and Salesforce (among others) help tag a list of companies that fit our best-fit customer criteria, so stack them into your digital marketing budget.

6. Email Marketing Email needs a better PR agency. We’re hearing the same prognosis we did more than a decade ago. Email is dead because Slack works better. Email is dead because no one uses it anymore. Email is dead because spam has choked what was left of it. But here’s the thing: Email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter, according to a study from McKinsey & Co.

There are more than 2.6 billion active email users across the globe, according to The Radicati Group. And 55% of company decision makers actually prefer to communicate almost exclusively through email. Not to mention the return on investment is more than any other digital asset at a staggering 4,300%, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Every dollar we spend on email marketing offers an average return of $44, according to my pals over at Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Email is not dead. It’s not even close to dead. It’s alive and growing. So invest in growing your email newsletter and your subscription list. If you haven’t hopped on the segmentation train yet, now is the time. MailChimp’s latest user data showed segmented campaigns get 14.63% more opens and 94.27% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.

7. Cross-Device Marketing Putting our message where our audience lives online isn’t a new idea, but it just got a lot harder. The average consumer is connected through at least five addressable devices. That means, as marketers, we’re looking at five times the work to make sure the content we’ve created is optimized for whichever platform our audience wants to digest it on.

We need to be where our audience is and talk in the language they understand. New platforms, like wearable devices, are going mainstream this year. Other platforms we haven’t even thought about yet will emerge, too. So make sure there’s enough room in your budget to experiment on them before you’re left behind the trend.

Source

http://www.cmo.com/opinion/articles/2017/1/23/7-musthaves-in-the-cmos-digital-marketing-budget.html

[rabbitstu]

How to Create a Beautiful Successful Fashion Photoshoot Production

Fashion photoshoot production. Part 2 of a series of 3 consider pre-production, production & post-production. This is for those planning or commissioning a fashion photoshoot.

Preparation and Planning into Action

Following on from pre-production it is now time to consider the fashion photoshoot production. In Part 1 we looked at the elements needed to be brought together in pre-production for a fashion photoshoot. Part 2 is taking the preparation and planning and bring it all into action to produce a fashion photoshoot and create some great images!

With the plans and team in place, it is time to get on set and get on with the fashion photoshoot production.

Who is in charge of the Fashion Photoshoot Production?

Although, ultimately a team effort, someone in the group needs to adopt or be assigned the role and responsibility of a Production Manager for a fashion photoshoot. The Production Manager will basically make sure everyone and everything is in the right place at the right time. For many fashion photoshoots, either the Photographer, their assistant or the Art or Creative Director will adopt the role of Production Manager. A very large or big budget shoot might have a specific person take on the Production Manager Role but for most, it will either be taken or shared between the Photographer and their team and the Art Director.

Prior to a fashion photoshoot, whoever has the Production Manager role should make sure that everyone has all the key information that will make the shoot run smoothly. Information that needs to be known by everyone includes:

Location details – including any GPS oddities that might be known about.

The schedule of the fashion photoshoot – who needs to be on set or in make-up and when.

Key contact details – especially, who to contact if anyone is running late or lost!

Catering

It is really east to get carried away in the creative buzz of fashion photoshoot and to forget some crucial things, like eating and drinking!

Depending on how long a production is lasting catering might range from water, tea, coffee and simple snacks etc. through to full meal breaks. It can be very useful to have some bottles of drinking water always available.

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Setting-up

3 things need to be set-up for any fashion photoshoot

The Cameras and Lights

If shooting at a location (indoor or outdoor) then the Photographer will need to be especially aware of the ambient light on the set. The Fashion Photographer and their assistants will need to make assessments of how the photoshoot can exploit the lighting conditions or decide if they need to use additional lighting to overcome the ambient light to produce the desired creative effects.

The lighting choices and size of the location will affect what lenses, apertures, and exposure speed the Photographer selects to make the photographs with.

Some fashion photoshoots use only available ambient naturally occurring light. This has the big advantage of reducing the amount and cost of kit needed and also will help create a particular ‘look’ for the fashion photoshoot production.

However, natural light is unpredictable. For example, I am based in the UK and it is easy for light conditions to go from cloudy and dull through to bright and harsh several times over a 30 minute period.

So many fashion photoshoot productions will rely on strobes, speedlights or powered constant lights in order to provide predictability and creative control for the photographer.

When choosing the location the Photographer will need to factor in the time needed in order to set-up the lighting to fit the creative vision of the art direction of the fashion photoshoot.

The Set

Fashion photoshoots sets can range from the highly sparse to the highly detailed.

If on location then the set may well be ‘ready-made’ or a studio location may only be using plain seamless paper. These sort of set-ups do not require much additional input.

However more editorial style photoshoots will often be seeking to create more of a fashion story so there will be a sense of environmental portraiture to the photography. Add to this mix that increasingly fashion photoshoots are also including video elements. These types of fashion photoshoot productions lend themselves to more complex setups, which may require additional props to be brought in and set-up.

On smaller fashion photoshoots it will often be the Photographer and their assistants setting up there with the guidance of the Art Director. On larger shoots then there may a specific individual or team doing this.

The Models

The Hair, Make-up (MUA) and Stylist team should be making sure the models are ready on time to be on set for the photoshoot.

It is very useful before hand to know how the Hair and MUA want the models to present themselves. Generally, models will be asked to have,

Clean Hair

Minimal or no make-up

If a photoshoot involves nudity, semi-nudity or bare shoulders, essentially any part of the body that is often covered by underwear then it is well worth asking the models to make sure that underwear is not so tight as to be leaving marks on the body, when removed. These marks can be time consuming and expensive in post-production to remove effectively. It is also useful for the Photographer and Stylist to liaise on the order of photographing the various styles as some shoot clothing may leave marks on skin that will be exposed by other outfits and this should be managed in the photoshoot schedule.

Most experienced models will know how to present themselves for Hair and MUA but making sure the information is available before the photoshoot will help decrease the chance of any problems or misunderstandings.

The Fashion Photoshoot

When a model or the models are ready for their shoot then it is time to go on set. How the fashion photoshoot production is conducted on set will depend a lot on the dynamic between the Photographer and the Art Director.

On smaller shoots the Photographer, may well be the Art Director, so it will solely be they who will drive the production at this point.

If a separate Art Director is on set and taking oversight then it is likely they will want to be viewing images as they are shot (assuming digital cameras are used) and giving feedback. If that is the case then the Photographer will need to shoot tethered.

Shooting tethered is to have a digital camera attached to a computer with software (usually Capture One or Adobe Lightroom) that allows the images to be seen on a larger screen immediately. This allows the Photographer and Art Director close up views of the images and to make directions about the photoshoot.

Fashion Photography is all about the image and creating an aspiration to the look. Attention to detail is very important. Post-production should be primarily about polishing the final images or preparing them for use in composites not correcting problems with make-up and wardrobe that occurred on set. So it is likely that throughout a shoot the Hair stylist, MUA and clothing Stylist will be need be on hand to make adjustments and freshen looks.

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Strikedown

Once the Fashion Photoshoot is over then it is time to take down the set and get the images ready for post production.

Location

Most rented locations, whether outdoor, indoor or studio will have Terms and Conditions about the state they are left in after being used. They may require damage deposits, which will be lost if the T&Cs are not met. Potentially not leaving the location in the right state could end up taking a hefty chunk out of already often tight budgets.

Whoever in the crew is taking on the Production Manager role, should be making sure that locations are left in an acceptable state.

The images

A lot is at stake on the images from a fashion photoshoot production.

Most shoots today happen using digital cameras. They have the advantage of allowing backups to be made relatively quickly and easily compared to film. Film, however, does remain the aesthetic choice of some Photographers and Art Directors.

Where Digital Cameras are being used then some will have dual memory card slots meaning that Photographers can save two copies of an image as they shoot. If a Photographer is shooting tethered then dual or even triple copies of images can be made as a shoot progresses.

However, multiple copies of images being made during a fashion photoshoot production can slow things down as things are written to hardware and add to the technical complexity and can increase distractions from creativity.

Where dual card slots on a camera are not available (and even if they are) then many Photographers will seek to make some form of back-up of the images before leaving a site after a photoshoot. Alternatively, they may ask assistants to create backups as memory cards fill up during an actual photoshoot.

They key message here is that if a back-up can be made then it should be at the earliest opportunity.

Should I back up to the Cloud?

One of the best ways of ensuring photography media security is to have backups in different physical locations. The Cloud makes that increasingly possible as an immediately available option today.

However, unless you have a really good Internet connection then uploading hundreds, if not thousands of RAW images from location, immediately after a photoshoot might not be the best way to preserve your sanity. The chances are it will be a very slow lengthy process.

If you are in a studio or location with great Internet and have the time, go for it.

Alternatively, stick to a local back-up until better a better connection is available.

One option is for a Photographer to shoot JPEG and RAW and back-up the JPEGs to the cloud. JPEGSs are far smaller files than RAWs and whilst not containing the information and editing options of RAW files do provide a ‘worse case’ option. However, I would consider this to be additional backup process to backing up RAW files on site as opposed to an alternative.

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Fashion Photoshoot Production Closing

For a fashion photoshoot to be successful then there needs to be a well understood and agreed Creative Brief. There also needs to be a strong supporting production plan. The production process described here will vary depending on the size of the particular photoshoot. The smaller the shoot then the less defined roles will be. Whatever the size making sure everyone knows where they should be and when is crucial to the success. A good production plan should never be obstructive and will allow the creativity of the fashion photoshoot to flow with beautiful images as the outcome.

The next part of this series will look at the post-processing of those images and final delivery to the client.

This brings us to the end of Part 2. If you have found it useful please do share http://ift.tt/2j65wj4. For notification when Part 2 is out please sign up to the Mail List, or follow me on Twitter or like my Facebook page. Part 3 will consider the post-production processes and the delivery of the final images.

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