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all1e23 · 5 years

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Swallow [Pt.11]

Chapter: The Hardest Part

Pairings: Bucky x Reader

Summary: Bucky chooses his path.

Warnings: Adulty themes. Yes, I’m a grown-up, and I said adulty themes. General foreboding. Sweet, soft, protective Bucky. (Yes, that’s a warning. That could kill you!) Protective big brother Clint. ANGSTY.

A/N: We are almost there. I’m sorry this is so dark, but I swear it’s not gratuitous. All of this has a purpose. Two more parts! We are almost there loves. Fingers crossed I can have the series finished by this weekend? Maybe. Send me love because I’m needy. No beta so read at your own risk. ;-)

***My fics are not to be saved or posted on any other sites without my written permission. Reblogs are my jam though! Thanks!*

The kids were sweet.

Quite possibly, the most adorable kids you’ve ever seen. Emma looked just like Peggy but had Steve’s eyes and soft smile. Henry? He was going to be a charmer, a regular James Buchanan Barnes -- a sweet talker with a kind heart. Morgan was smarter than you, that you were confident. She had clung to her brother at first but warmed up to you eventually. Steve was right; Tony’s sass could be cute when it was coming from that sweet face.

You wished you could give them more of your attention but you couldn’t. Your heart hurt too badly to give more of yourself. You didn’t know what was happening, but you knew it was bad -- whatever trouble Bucky was getting himself into was not going to result in some fairytale happy ending. You sat downstairs with the kids and played for over an hour before your head and heart began to wander to a place they wouldn’t come back from on their own; you needed Bucky. Henry had become bored rather quickly and decided to follow Steve around, his little shadow Peggy had said.

If Henry was going to look up to and aspire to be anyone, there weren’t many men better than Steve Rogers -- having a little bit of his Uncle Bucky in him wouldn’t hurt either.

The girls took the absence of boys to talk about their favorite glitter nail polish, but Morgan didn’t seem to share Emma’s enthusiasm. Somewhere between the sparkle teal and cotton candy polish debate you snuck off, leaving the girls with their mothers and retreated to Bucky’s room -- your room according to Bucky. Or, well, maybe not now. You didn’t know if he ever wanted to see you again. You couldn't blame him if he didn’t.

The bed sagged when you sat down on the edge, and you regarded all the bags and boxes you brought with you. Steve wasn’t judging your choices, but your boxes were -- especially a particular wooden box that held a lot more than just some old letters. You tucked your legs under you and sat the old box on your lap, running your hands along the edges. Stupid box. You had no idea why you kept it this long, it’s just a dumb box Bucky used to keep all your photos, concert tickets, and notes in. Somehow the damn thing ended up with you when you left, and you haven't dared to peek inside.

If it's just a dumb box, then why couldn’t you look inside? You swore you could hear the case mocking you, judgemental and condescending tone firmly in place. “No one asked you, okay? I can open you if I wanted to.” You grumbled quietly to the empty room, taking a deep breath and forcing your fingers to flip the lid of the box open.

A strangled sob fell from your lips that quickly melted into laughter at the sight of the note resting on top, ‘Meet me after English? I haven’t seen you in hours, and I don’t think I can make it another hour without kissing your lips, pretty girl.’ The paper had begun to yellow, and the edges were soft to the touch from age.

You gently set the waned paper on the bed beside you as your fingers slowly flicked through the contents of the box -- so many concert tickets you couldn’t count them all, dried daisies you had long forgotten and piles of pictures that held your best memories.

“Are you going to marry Uncle Bucky?” A little voice asked from the doorway, making you jump. You looked up to discover Emma and Morgan watching you with a curious glint in their eyes. Somewhere downstairs, Peggy Carter was far too happy with herself. You waved them in and set the box on Bucky’s bed so they could have a look, and the shock wore off enough for your answer.

“Um, I don’t--I don’t really know.”

"I think you should,” Morgan admitted.

"Why's that?” You asked, an amused smile curling up your lips.

"He loves you," Morgan answered with a head tilt and 'are you serious' expression on her face -- Tony's daughter. No question about it.

“And you’ve loved him your whole life, and he's never loved anything as much as he loves you. That’s what momma says anyway,” Emma added, you quirked a brow up as you watched the girls flipping through your old pictures, you inquired, “What else did your momma say?”

“That you both are stubborn and if you stopped running and talk to each other you could be finally together and be happy.” Emma giggled and held up a picture of you and Bucky from seven or eight years ago -- you’re not entirely sure at this point. It was a long, long time ago.

The date didn’t matter, it was pre-breakup, before your dad and before-- back when you thought the two of you could get through anything as long as you had each other. The both of you looked so young and so full of hope for your future. That was a good day. You could see it all clearly; it was another clubhouse bonfire, and Peggy had snagged the picture while your eyes were focused on the fire and your attention was zeroed in on the salacious whispers Bucky was murmuring into your ear, and whatever he was saying had you both grinning a mile wide.

Things were so much easier back then. If you could go back and tell yourself anything, you would tell twenty years old you, just how easy she had it, spend less time worrying about the club and more time loving the man in front of her

“You guys look funny.” Emma eventually continued. “Uncle Bucky looks weird with short hair and no beard, but you look funny, too.”

You laughed and took the picture from her. “Gee, thanks. I think I have some of your momma and daddy in there, if you want to look, Emma.” The little girl’s eyes lit up, and she grabbed two handfuls of photographs to search through.

Morgan climbed into your lap so she could look at the picture in your hand one more time, and said with a grin. “So you marry Uncle Bucky and then you can be my aunt! Can I be your flower girl? I like daisies.”

You looked down at the bright little girl in your lap and back to the bundle of dried daisies in your box. She was too smart for her own good, “I think Uncle Bucky has to ask first, and that might be a long time away. I can still be your aunt, though.”

“Okay, but I’ll tell him to get moving, so it’s official.” She said with beaming smile and bright eyes as if she just figured it all out because all your problems would be solved if you simply married Bucky, wouldn’t they? You couldn’t tell her the truth. She didn’t need to know that your life was far from a fairytale, and marrying Bucky would never happen.

After all these years, at least you can finally admit it to yourself.

--------

“I should have been expecting this I suppose.” Eddie started, strolling up to the tree Bucky was leaning against. When Bucky had called and said he wanted to meet, Eddie thought maybe a restaurant or somewhere with air conditioning. He should have seen this coming after his talk with Y/n, but he thought from everything he’s heard about their relationship she was ready to move on from all that death and destruction.

“I didn’t think you still had that hold on Y/n. Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong, though. I should have known she would run right to you.”

“Don’t bring Y/n up again. I’d hate to rebreak your nose.” Bucky flicked the bud of his cigarette to the ground and leaned in as if he was inspecting Eddie’s injuries. He pursed his lips as if he was studying the damage and then, smirked as smug as can be all while he taunted him. “Looks like you still got a little purple under the eyes there. Didn’t get ice on it in time from the looks of it. You gotta move faster than that.”

“What do you want, Barnes?” Eddie grumbled.

As fun as it was to make Eddie squirm, he didn’t come here to ridicule him. “I want to make a deal.”

That had Eddie’s interest piqued. Getting Y/n to testify against the club was good, but having an actual club member, the former president, who knew every secret behind those big double doors and wooden gavel? That was gold. That was the deal he wanted to make from the beginning, but, he never found an in with any of them. This… This could have potential.

“What kind of deal?” Eddied pushed doing his best to keep the excitement out of his voice. Bucky caught it instantly and grinned like a cat that got the cream. “I can get you Red Skulls, president and all. You and I both know that’s a much bigger win for you than taking bring Steve and me in.”

Bucky wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t enough. He was tasked with bringing the Winter’s Soldiers MC down, and there was no way everyone was getting off the hook -- not this time.

“What else?”

“What else?” Bucky echoed. “Taking down a large crime organization that's selling guns and killing innocent people ain’t enough for ya?”

“No, it’s not.”

Bucky smiled, but it was bittersweet. He already knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He had hoped, but he knew.

“I’ll take ownership of the mess that happened two years ago. Out on Lone Oak. No one else from my club was involved, and everyone walks for whatever you found out during the few times you infiltrated my club like the rat that you are.”

“I thought it was Steve’s club?” Eddie urged, disregarding the rat comment completely.

“It was my father’s club and passed the gavel to me, it’s my club. I give the orders and take full responsibility for anything that happened over the last decade.”

“Lone Oak, huh?” Eddie takes a deep breath. Lone Oak was a pretty big deal, and the case was never closed. It would be a huge deal to finally put the cold case to rest and have someone to charge for the mess of illegal weapons they found under all the rubble and ash. Eddie was pretty sure the credit for Lone Oak belonged to Schmidt, and Steve and his men were simply cleaning it up, but if Bucky wanted to take the blame and Eddie could claim the takedown, then who was he to fight Bucky on it?

“You’ll get the max with your record. That’s fifteen years--”

“Seven and no parole.” Bucky countered.

Eddie snorted and shook his head. “Seven is a joke. How about I just arrest all of you now? You, Steve, and Clint on gun charges. Oh, and Tony and little Petey boy on hacking into how many federal databases?”

Bucky pushed off the tree behind him and started towards Eddie. “You can’t bullshit me like you can Y/n. She’s got a soft heart, and I know men like you use that to your advantage, but I know how this works. You don’t have shit on the club. Maybe you can arrest a few of us on minor charges, but Fury will have us out before you can finish typing your damn report, which is why you haven’t made your move and why you went after Y/n.”

“I thought she should know who she’s going to bed with,” Eddie hissed.

Bucky eyed him for a longer than usual pause, watching the man as if he was in the middle of working him out and discovering a weakness he could use against him. Bucky didn’t like the look in his eyes when he talked about Y/n, and he didn’t like his temper. It left a traitorous pit in of bottom of his stomach -- before this went any further, he needed to be sure his girl was safe.

“What’s your deal? I gotta say you seem a little too invested in my girlfriend.”

“You don’t remember me do you?” Eddie asked with a broad smile, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. It was born from anger, annoyance, and maybe, a little embarrassment.

“Can’t say that I do,” Bucky answered, not apologetic in the least. The man threatened his girlfriend so no, Bucky doesn’t have an ounce compassion for Eddie Brock. Eddie sighed and glanced up towards the clouds before he explained.

“I shouldn’t be surprised. Y/n didn’t either. We went to the same school for four years, and not one of you recognized me, but none of you paid any attention to me back then either. How do you think I was able to slip in and go unnoticed for long?”

“So that why you’re doing all this?” Bucky needed the clarification because if this is what Bucky thought it was, he had to make sure Steve handled Eddie once this was all over and he wasn’t around anymore. “You’re mad because she fell in love with me and not you?”

“No,” Eddie laughed -- Actually laughed at Bucky as if that was the craziest thing he could have said. “No, but she did help me once. It was a silly thing. She’s always had that soft side you mentioned, but everyone knew she was yours. There was no room in her heart for anyone else, and no one was stupid enough to fall for her when you already had her. James Barnes always got what he wanted. Always.”

Bucky was torn between the overwhelming desire to laugh in his face or knock his teeth down his throat. There hasn’t been a time in his life that Bucky has gotten what he’s wanted. He wanted to tell him how he had to watch his dad die for the sake of the club, how he lost the other half of his soul, repeatedly, and how he finally got her back only to lose her again; this time it was for good. The only thing he’s ever wanted was Y/n, and he could never hold on to her.

So, no, James Barnes has never gotten what he wanted, and that will never change.

But he wouldn’t give Eddie that satisfaction -- he was getting enough.

“Fury already has the deal worked out. Seven years, no parole and I’ll help you get the Red Skulls. That’s my deal. Take it or leave it.”

Eddie still wasn’t sold, and Bucky could see it in the way he watched him, but that’s the thing with guys like Eddie, Bucky just had to wait him out. So, Bucky crossed his arms over his chest and stared him down as he paced back and forth in the grass. He damn-near wore a brown patch in the field before he finally stopped in front of Bucky and nodded. “Alright, I have to clear it, but for now, you’ve got a deal.”

He held out his hand, and for a moment, Bucky wanted to take it all back, but he knew that wasn’t an option. He didn’t have a choice. Bucky slowly reached out to shake his hand, clasping the shorter man's hand in a firm grip. Eddie grinned, and Bucky yanked him forward, hard. Eddie stumbled forward, but Bucky held him in place by his navy blue blazer and snarled. “I don’t care what deal we made or where I am if you go near Y/n again I’ll make sure it’s the last fucking thing you do. She’s not part of this. She doesn’t know anything.”

Eddie ripped his jacket free fro Bucky’s grasps, but they both knew the only reason he got away with it was that Bucky has already loosened his grip -- if Bucky had wanted him to stay right where he was he wouldn’t have moved an inch. Eddie straightened his jacket and met Bucky’s dark glare, he took a breath before he answered.

“I know she doesn’t. The only thing she’s guilty of is being stupid enough to fall in love with you before she knew the real you. She should have seen you for what you really were like I did.”

“She’s the only one who knows the real me,” Bucky whispered just loud enough for Eddie to hear.

It was easier if everyone thought he was the one that duped her into loving him -- he chased her until she fell for him and she simply couldn’t fight it, but that was never the case. From the moment Bucky laid eyes on her his heart was gone before he knew what was happening -- he was the one that never stood a chance.

All he’s ever tried to do was be good enough for her; maybe this will finally make him worthy of her love. Too bad he won’t be around to see that.

He took a step forward and tapped Eddie’s pocket with his middle finger, right where his badge was hiding. He smirked when Eddie caught the gesture and told him. “Get the deal typed up and signed or I walk. I won’t make a move till it’s approved by the D.A.”

“That’s it? You’re ready to give up everything, just like that?”

Bucky ignored the question and turned away from him. It was a dumb fucking question, and he didn’t have the patience to entertain it. Of course, Bucky wasn’t ready to give up everything. This wasn’t his plan. His plan was simple, help Steve one last time and finally, finally get to love his girl the way she deserved -- away from this town and most importantly away from the club. He had a brief fantasy of shared vows and maybe even some blue-eyed babies; the dream was gone as quickly as his brain thought it up. He walked back to his bike where his smokes were hiding, and it gave him a second to remind himself why he has to do this. He reached into his shirt and squeezed the delicate band in his rough, calloused hand. Bucky turned his head to glare over his shoulder at Eddie and sighed.

“Once it’s approved and signed by all parties, I’ll make the call.”

“It’s going to take a few hours.”

Bucky let go of the ring and turned back around to face Eddie. There was no going back now, and it’s not like he had anywhere else to be tonight. “I’ve got nothing but time, Eddie. Nothing, but time.”

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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HIGH-RISK

We would at most have said that one could be a bit smarter to dominate Internet search than you had to do was sit and look attentive. You get to watch behind the scenes what an enormous amount of work that are purer, in the long term, which do you think most will choose? To anyone who has read any amount of history, there seem to have looked far for ideas.1 Being able to take risks is hugely valuable. But evidence suggests most things with titles like this are linkbait. They hear stories about stampedes to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. But it would be to shirk it, but regardless it's certainly constraining. If you want to put their name on.

What was novel about yuppies was that they wanted market price for the work they do. In practice they spend a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists seem to be created deliberately. It became possible to make lots of new things, and we needed to buy time to fix it. Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them.2 Note too that determination and talent are not the biggest threat. Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are problems it doesn't work so well for: the kind where it helps to have everything in one head.

Of our current concept of an organization, at least for programmers. It's tantalizing to think we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to examine its internal structure. It may work, but it didn't seem like a real company. I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.3 So my theory about what's going on is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the m. The way people act is just as hosed as Munich. The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. If you understand them, you can create wealth very rapidly. Well, that is all too obvious. And since good people like good colleagues, that means you've probably done something good.

They're good at solving problems, but bad at choosing them. Nothing will explain what your site is about. Few adults aspired to look dangerous in 1950. I see starting to get standardized is acquisitions. At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to introduce something new: bosses. The real problem is that humans weren't meant to work in groups of several hundred.4 One thing all startups have in common is that they're telling the truth. People. Some parts of a program may be easiest to read if you spread things out, like an antique store.5 The problem is so widespread that people pretending to be eminent do it by accident.6

I wouldn't have predicted the frontpage would hold up so well, and more about what they'd see, and more importantly, can't take liberties with. If investors were perfect judges, the two would require exactly the same work, except with bosses. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined. What about angels? I talked recently to a founder whose startup had been acquired by a big company. Kerry were so similar in that respect that they might have been brothers. You needed to take care of you.7 But only a bit: willfulness, discipline, and ambition are all concepts almost as complicated as determination. This can only happen in a very limited way in a list of articles that are interesting. Not explicitly, of course, but I can't believe we've considered every alternative. The only place to look is where the spread of computing power. The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned.

Suppose you realize there is nothing new in it. The political commentators who come up with shifts to the left, or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors. Normal food is terribly bad for you. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland. Sorry about that. You needed to take care of the company so it could take care of the company so it could take care of you. The ambitious had little choice but to join large organizations that made them march in step with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. Why do great ideas come from them, even if few do per capita. Certainly they'll learn more. But if it's inborn it should be a good one for beginning writers.

Visiting Sand Hill Road reminds you that the opposite of down and dirty would be up and clean. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes. This leads to the phenomenon known in the Valley as the hot deal, where you write a version 1 very quickly and then gradually modify it, but whether it brings any advantage at all. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it. That word is not much used now, because the links do. There are two big forces intersect, in the long term, which do you think most will choose? And since we're assuming we're doing this without being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite. They can work on projects with an intensity in both senses that few insiders can match.

Notes

Something similar happens with suburbs. So 80 years sounds to him like 2400 years would to us that we wrote in order to switch. The way to see. When I talk about it as if it was because he writes about controversial things.

Common Lisp, because it depends on a form you forgot to fill out can be huge. I now believe that successful startups.

Everyone else was talking about why people dislike Michael Arrington. MITE Corp. Parents move to suburbs to raise five million dollars is no longer written in Lisp, which can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than to confuse everyone with a clear upward trend.

The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the early adopters you evolve the idea of happiness from many older societies.

That name got assigned to it because the test for what she has done, at least for those founders.

There are two ways to get the rankings they want you. One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to invest but tried to pay employees this way.

Once he showed it could become a so-called signalling risk is also not a big VC firm or they see of piracy is simply what they campaign for. In 1525 he was exaggerating. Super-angels hate to match.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Matt Cohler, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, and Sam Steingold for the lulz.

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gargaj · 4 years

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A breakdown of the Revision 2020 Threeway Battle shader

Those of you who have been following this year's edition of Revision probably remember the unexpected twist in Sunday's timeline, where I was pitted in a coding "battle" against two of the best shader-coders in the world to fend for myself. Admittedly the buzz it caused caught me by surprise, but not as much as the feedback on the final shader I produced, so I hope to shed some light on how the shader works, in a way that's hopefully understandable to beginners and at least entertaining to experts, as well as providing some glimpses into my thought process along the way.

youtube

Recorded video of the event

But before we dive into the math and code, however, I think it's important to get some context by recounting the story of how we got here.

A brief history of demoscene live-coding

Visual coding has been massively opened up when graphics APIs began to introduce programmable fragment rendering, perhaps best known to most people as "pixel shaders"; this allowed programmers to run entire programmable functions on each pixel of a triangle, and none was more adamant to do that than a fellow named Iñigo Quilez (IQ), an understated genius who early on recognized the opportunity in covering the entire screen with a single polygon, and just doing the heavy lifting of creating geometry in the shader itself. His vision eventually spiraled into not only the modern 4k scene, but also the website ShaderToy, which almost every graphics programmer uses to test prototypes or just play around with algorithms. IQ, an old friend of mine since the mid-00s, eventually moved to the US, worked at Pixar and Oculus, and became something of a world-revered guru of computer graphics, but that (and life) has unfortunately caused him to shift away from the scene.

His vision of single-shader-single-quad-single-pass shader coding, in the meantime, created a very spectacular kind of live coding competition in the scene where two coders get only 25 minutes and the attention of an entire party hall, and they have to improvise their way out of the duel - this has been wildly successful at parties for the sheer showmanship and spectacle akin to rap battles, and none emerged from this little sport more remarkably than Flopine, a bubbly French girl who routinely shuffled up on stage wearing round spectacles and cat ears (actually they might be pony ears on second thought), and mopped the floor up with the competition. Her and a handful of other live-coders regularly stream on Twitch as practice, and have honed their live-coding craft for a few years at this point, garnering a considerable following.

youtube

Just a sample of insanity these people can do.

My contribution to this little sub-scene was coming up with a fancy name for it ("Shader Showdown"), as well as providing a little tool I called Bonzomatic (named after Bonzaj / Plastic, a mutual friend of IQ and myself, and the first person to create a live coding environment for demoparties) that I still maintain, but even though I feel a degree of involvement through the architectural side, I myself haven't been interested in participating: I know I can do okay under time pressure, but I don't really enjoy it, and while there's a certain overlap in what they do and what I do, I was always more interested in things like visual detail and representative geometry aided by editing and direction rather than looping abstract, fractal-like things. It just wasn't my thing.

Mistakes were made

But if I'm not attracted to this type of competition, how did I end up in the crossfire anyway? What I can't say is that it wasn't, to a considerable degree, my fault: as Revision 2020 was entirely online, most of the scene took it to themselves to sit in the demoscene Discord to get an experience closest to on-site socializing, given the somber circumstances of physical distancing. This also allowed a number of people who hasn't been around for a while to pop in to chat - like IQ, who, given his past, was mostly interested in the showdowns (during which Flopine crushed the competition) and the 4k compo.

As I haven't seen him around for a while, and as my mind is always looking for an angle, I somehow put two and two together, and asked him if he would consider taking part in a showdown at some point; he replied that he was up for it - this was around Saturday 10PM. I quickly pinged the rest of the showdown participants and organizers, as I spotted that Bullet was doing a DJ set the next day (which would've been in a relatively convenient timezone for IQ in California as well), and assumed that he didn't really have visuals for it - as there was already a "coding jam" over Ronny's set the day before, I figured there's a chance for squeezing an "extra round" of coding. Flopine was, of course, beyond excited by just the prospect of going against IQ, and by midnight we essentially got everything planned out (Bullet's consent notwithstanding, as he was completely out of the loop on this), and I was excited to watch...

...that is, until Havoc, the head honcho for the showdowns, off-handedly asked me about an at that point entirely hypothetical scenario: what would happen if IQ would, for some reason, challenge me instead of Flopine? Now, as said, I wasn't really into this, but being one to not let a good plan go to waste (especially if it was mine), I told Havoc I'd take one for the team and do it, although it probably wouldn't be very fun to watch. I then proceeded to quickly brief IQ in private and run him through the technicalities of the setup, the tool, the traditions and so on, and all is swell...

...that is, until IQ (this is at around 2AM) offhandedly mentions that "Havoc suggested we do a three-way with me, Flopine... and you." I quickly try to backpedal, but IQ seems to be into the idea, and worst of all, I've already essentially agreed to it, and to me, the only thing worse than being whipped in front of a few thousand people would be going back on your word. The only way out was through.

Weeks of coding can spare you hours of thinking

So now that I've got myself into this jar of pickles, I needed some ideas, and quick. (I didn't sleep much that night.) First off, I didn't want to do anything obviously 3D - both IQ and Flopine are masters of this, and I find it exhausting and frustrating, and it would've failed on every level possible. Fractals I'm awful at and while they do provide a decent amount of visual detail, they need a lot of practice and routine to get right. I also didn't want something very basic 2D, like a byte-beat, because those have a very limited degree of variation available, and the end result always looks a bit crude.

Luckily a few months ago an article I saw do rounds was a write-up by Sasha Martinsen on how to do "FUI"-s, or Fictional User Interfaces; overly complicated and abstract user interfaces that are prominent in sci-fi, with Gmunk being the Michael Jordan of the genre.

Image courtesy of Sasha Martinsen.

Sasha's idea is simple: make a few basic decent looking elements, and then just pile them on top of each other until it looks nice, maybe choose some careful colors, move them around a bit, place them around tastefully in 3D, et voilà, you're hacking the Gibson. It's something I attempted before, if somewhat unsuccessfully, in "Reboot", but I came back to it a few more times in my little private motion graphics experiments with much better results, and my prediction was that it would be doable in the given timeframe - or at least I hoped that my hazy 3AM brain was on the right track.

A bit of math

How to make this whole thing work? First, let's think about our rendering: We have a single rectangle and a single-pass shader that runs on it: this means no meshes, no geometry, no custom textures, no postprocessing, no particle systems and no fonts, which isn't a good place to start from. However, looking at some of Sasha's 3D GIFs, some of them look like they're variations of the same render put on planes one after the other - and as long as we can do one, we can do multiple of that.

Rough sketch of what we want to do; the planes would obviously be infinite in size but this representation is good enough for now.

Can we render multiple planes via a single shader? Sure, but we want them to look nice, and that requires a bit of thinking: The most common technique to render a "2D" shader and get a "3D" look is raymarching, specifically with signed distance fields - starting on a ray, and continually testing distances until a hit is found. This is a good method for "solid-ish" looking objects and scenes, but the idea for us is to have many infinite planes that also have some sort of alpha channel, so we'd have a big problem with 1) inaccuracy, as we'd never find a hit, just something "reasonably close", and even that would take us a few dozen steps, which is costly even for a single plane and 2) the handling of an alpha map can be really annoying, since we'd only find out our alpha value after our initial march, after which if our alpha is transparent we'd need to march again.

But wait - it's just infinite planes and a ray, right? So why don't we just assume that our ray is always hitting the plane (which it is, since we're looking at it), and just calculate an intersection the analytical way?

Note: I would normally refer to this method as "raytracing", but after some consultation with people smarter than I am, we concluded that the terms are used somewhat ambiguously, so let's just stick to "analytical ray solving" or something equally pedantic.

We know the mathematical equation for a ray is position = origin + direction * t (where t is a scalar that represents the distance/progress from the ray origin), and we know that the formula for a plane is A * x + B * y + C * z + D = 0, where (A, B, C) is the normal vector of the plane, and D is the distance from the origin. First, since the intersection will be the point in space that satisfies both equations, we substitute the ray (the above o + d * t for each axis) into the plane:

A * (ox + dx * t) + B * (oy + dy * t) + C * (oz + dz * t) + D = 0

To find out where this point is in space, we need to solve this for t, but it's currently mighty complicated. Luckily, since we assume that our planes are parallel to the X-Y plane, we know our (A, B, C) normal is (0, 0, 1), so we can simplify it down to:

oz + dz * t + D = 0

Which we can easily solve to t:

t = (D - oz) / dz

That's right: analytically finding a ray hit of a plane is literally a single subtraction and a division! Our frame rate (on this part) should be safe, and we're always guaranteed a hit as long as we're not looking completely perpendicular to the planes; we should have everything to start setting up our code.

Full disclosure: Given my (and in a way IQ's) lack of "live coding" experience, we agreed that there would be no voting for the round, and it'd be for glory only, but also that I'd be allowed to use a small cheat sheet of math like the equations for 2D rotation or e.g. the above final equation since I don't do this often enough to remember these things by heart, and I only had a few hours notice before the whole thing.

Setting up the rendering

Time to start coding then. First, let's calculate our texture coordinates in the 0..1 domain using the screen coordinates and the known backbuffer resolution (which is provided to us in Bonzomatic):

vec2 uv = vec2(gl_FragCoord.x / v2Resolution.x, gl_FragCoord.y / v2Resolution.y);

Then, let's create a ray from that:

vec3 rayDir = vec3( uv * 2 - 1, -1.0 ); rayDir.x *= v2Resolution.x / v2Resolution.y; // adjust for aspect ratio vec3 rayOrigin = vec3( 0, 0, 0 );

This creates a 3D vector for our direction that is -1,-1,-1 in the top left corner and 1,1,-1 in the bottom right (i.e. we're looking so that Z is decreasing into the screen), then we adjust the X coordinate since our screen isn't square, but our coordinates currently are - no need to even bother with normalizing, it'll be fine. Our origin is currently just sitting in the center.

Then, let's define (loosely) our plane, which is parallel to the XY plane:

float planeDist = 1.0f; // distance between each plane float planeZ = -5.0f; // Z position of the first plane

And solve our equation to t, as math'd out above:

float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z;

Then, calculate WHERE the hit is by taking that t by inserting it back to the original ray equation using our current direction and origin:

vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir;

And now we have our intersection; since we already know the Z value, we can texture our plane by using the X and Y components to get a color value:

vec4 color = fui( hitPos.xy ); // XY plane our_color = color;

Of course we're gonna need the actual FUI function, which will be our procedural animated FUI texture, but let's just put something dummy there now, like a simple circle:

vec4 fui ( vec2 uv ) { return length(uv - 0.5) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec(0); }

And here we go:

Very good, we have a single circle and if we animate the camera we can indeed tell that it is on a plane.

So first, let's tile it by using a modulo function; the modulo (or modulus) function simply wraps a number around another number (kinda like the remainder after a division, but for floating point numbers) and thus becomes extremely useful for tiling or repeating things:

We'll be using the modulo function rather extensively in this little exercise, so strap in. (Illustration via the Desmos calculator.)

vec4 layer = fui( mod( hitPos.xy, 1.0 ) );

This will wrap the texture coordinates of -inf..inf between 0..1:

We also need multiple planes, but how do we combine them? We could just blend them additively, but with the amount of content we have, we'd just burn them in to white and it'd look like a mess (and not the good kind of mess). We could instead just use normal "crossfade" / "lerp" blending based on the alpha value; the only trick here is to make sure we're rendering them from back to front since the front renders will blend over the back renders:

int steps = 10; float planeDist = 1.0f; for (int i=steps; i>=0; i--) { float planeZ = -1.0f * i * planeDist; float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z; if (t > 0.0f) // check if "t" is in front of us { vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir; vec4 layer = fui( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ); // blend layers based on alpha output colour = mix( colour, layer, layer.a ); } }

And here we go:

We decreased the circles a bit in size to see the effect more.

Not bad! First thing we can do is just fade off the back layers, as if they were in a fog:

layer *= (steps - i) / float(steps);

We have a problem though: we should probably increase the sci-fi effect by moving the camera continually forward, but if we do, we're gonna run into a problem: Currently, since our planeZ is fixed to the 0.0 origin, they won't move with the camera. We could just add our camera Z to them, but then they would be fixed with the camera and wouldn't appear moving. What we instead want is to just render them AS IF they would be the closest 10 planes in front of the camera; the way we could do that is that if e.g. our planes' distance from each other is 5, then round the camera Z down to the nearest multiple of 5 (e.g. if the Z is at 13, we round down to 10), and start drawing from there; rounding up would be more accurate, but rounding down is easier, since we can just subtract the division remainder from Z like so:

float planeZ = (rayOrigin.z - mod(rayOrigin.z, planeDist)) - i * planeDist;

And now we have movement! Our basic rendering path is done.

Our little fictional UI

So now that we have the basic pipeline in place, let's see which elements can we adapt from Sasha's design pieces.

The first one I decided to go with wasn't strictly speaking in the set, but it was something that I saw used as design elements over the last two decades, and that's a thick hatch pattern element; I think it's often used because it has a nice industrial feel with it. Doing it in 2D is easy: We just add X and Y together, which will result in a diagonal gradient, and then we just turn that into an alternating pattern using, again, the modulo. All we need to do is limit it between two strips, and we have a perfectly functional "Police Line Do Not Cross" simulation.

return mod( uv.x + uv.y, 1 ) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec4(0);

So let's stop here for a few moments; this isn't bad, but we're gonna need a few things. First, the repetition doesn't give us the nice symmetric look that Sasha recommends us to do, and secondly, we want them to look alive, to animate a bit.

Solving symmetry can be done just by modifying our repetition code a bit: instead of a straight up modulo with 1.0 that gives us a 0..1 range, let's use 2.0 to get a 0..2 range, then subtract 1.0 to get a -1..1 range, and then take the absolute value.

vec4 layer = fui( abs( mod( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ) - 1 ) );

This will give us a triangle-wave-like function, that goes from 0 to 1, then back to 0, then back to 1; in terms of texture coordinates, it will go back and forth between mirroring the texture in both directions, which, let's face it, looks Totally Sweet.

For animation, first I needed some sort of random value, but one that stayed deterministic based on a seed - in other words, I needed a function that took in a value, and returned a mangled version of it, but in a way that if I sent that value in twice, it would return the same mangled value twice. The most common way of doing it is taking the incoming "seed" value, and then driving it into some sort of function with a very large value that causes the function to alias, and then just returning the fraction portion of the number:

float rand(float x) { return fract(sin(x) * 430147.8193); }

Does it make any sense? No. Is it secure? No. Will it serve our purpose perfectly? Oh yes.

So how do we animate our layers? The obvious choice is animating both the hatch "gradient" value to make it crawl, and the start and end of our hatch pattern which causes the hatched strip to move up and down: simply take a random - seeded by our time value - of somewhere sensible (like between 0.2 and 0.8 so that it doesn't touch the edges) and add another random to it, seasoned to taste - we can even take a binary random to pick between horizontal and vertical strips:

The problems here are, of course, that currently they're moving 1) way too fast and 2) in unison. The fast motion obviously happens because the time value changes every frame, so it seeds our random differently every frame - this is easy to solve by just rounding our time value down to the nearest integer: this will result in some lovely jittery "digital" motion. The unison is also easy to solve: simply take the number of the layer, and add it to our time, thus shifting the time value for each layer; I also chose to multiply the layer ID with a random-ish number so that the layers actually animate independently, and the stutter doesn't happen in unison either:

vec4 fui( vec2 uv, float t ) { t = int(t); float start = rand(t) * 0.8 + 0.1; float end = start + 0.1; [...] } vec4 layer = fui( abs(mod(hitPos.xy, 2.0)-1), fGlobalTime + i * 4.7 );

Lovely!

Note: In hindsight using the Z coordinate of the plane would've given a more consistent result, but the way it animates, it doesn't really matter.

So let's think of more elements: the best looking one that seems to get the best mileage out in Sasha's blog is what I can best describe as the "slant" or "hockey stick" - a simple line, with a 45-degree turn in it. What I love about it is that the symmetry allows it to create little tunnels, gates, corridors, which will work great for our motion.

Creating it is easy: We just take a thin horizontal rectangle, and attach another rectangle to the end, but shift the coordinate of the second rectangle vertically, so that it gives us the 45-degree angle:

float p1 = 0.2; float p2 = 0.5; float p3 = 0.7; float y = 0.5; float thicc = 0.0025; if (p1 < uv.x && uv.x < p2 && y - thicc < uv.y && uv.y < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); } if (p2 < uv.x && uv.x < p3 && y - thicc < uv.y - (uv.x - p2) && uv.y - (uv.x - p2) < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); }

Note: In the final code, I had a rect() call which I originally intended to use as baking glow around my rectangle using a little routine I prototyped out earlier that morning, but I was ultimately too stressed to properly pull that off. Also, it's amazing how juvenile your variable names turn when people are watching.

Looks nice, but since this is such a thin sparse element, let's just... add more of it!

So what more can we add? Well, no sci-fi FUI is complete without random text and numbers, but we don't really have a font at hand. Or do we? For years, Bonzomatic has been "shipping" with this really gross checkerboard texture ostensibly for UV map testing:

What if we just desaturate and invert it?

We can then "slice" it up and render little sprites all over our texture: we already know how to draw a rectangle, so all we need is just 1) calculate which sprite we want to show 2) calculate the texture coordinate WITHIN that sprite and 3) sample the texture:

float sx = 0.3; float sy = 0.3; float size = 0.1; if (sx < uv.x && uv.x < sx + size && sy < uv.y &&uv.y < sy + size) { float spx = 2.0 / 8.0; // we have 8 tiles in the texture float spy = 3.0 / 8.0; vec2 spriteUV = (uv - vec2(sx,sy)) / size; vec4 sam = texture( texChecker, vec2(spx,spy) + spriteUV / 8.0 ); return dot( sam.rgb, vec3(0.33) ); }

Note: In the final code, I was only using the red component instead of desaturation because I forgot the texture doesn't always have red content - I stared at it for waaaay too long during the round trying to figure out why some sprites weren't working.

And again, let's just have more of it:

Getting there!

At this point the last thing I added was just circles and dots, because I was running out of ideas; but I also felt my visual content amount was getting to where I wanted them to be; it was also time to make it look a bit prettier.

Post-production / compositing

So we have our layers, they move, they might even have colors, but I'm still not happy with the visual result, since they are too single-colored, there's not enough tone in the picture.

The first thing I try nowadays when I'm on a black background is to just add either a single color, or a gradient:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); vec4 gradient = mix( vec4(0,0,0.2,1), vec4(0,0,0,1), uv.y); vec4 finalRender = mix( gradient, vec4(colour.xyz,1), colour.a);

This added a good chunk of depth considerably to the image, but I was still not happy with the too much separation between colors.

A very common method used in compositing in digital graphics is to just add bloom / glow; when used right, this helps us add us more luminance content to areas that would otherwise be solid color, and it helps the colors to blend a bit by providing some middle ground; unfortunately if we only have a single pass, the only way to get blur (and by extension, bloom) is repeatedly rendering the picture, and that'd tank our frame rate quickly.

Instead, I went back to one of the classics: the Variform "pixelize" overlay:

This is almost the same as a bloom effect, except instead of blurring the image, all you do is turn it into a lower resolution nearest point sampled version of itself, and blend that over the original image - since this doesn't need more than one sample per pixel (as we can reproduce pixelation by just messing with the texture coordinates), we can get away by rendering the scene only twice:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); colour += renderPlanes(uv - mod( uv, 0.1 ) ) * 0.4;

Much better tonal content!

So what else can we do? Well, most of the colors I chose are in the blue/orange/red range, and we don't get a lot of the green content; one of the things that I learned that it can look quite pretty if one takes a two-tone picture, and uses color-grading to push the midrange of a third tone - that way, the dominant colors will stay in the highlights, and the third tone will cover the mid-tones. (Naturally you have to be careful with this.)

"Boosting" a color in the mids is easy: lucky for us, if we consider the 0..1 range, exponential functions suit our purpose perfectly, because they start at 0, end at 1, but we can change how they get here:

So let's just push the green channel a tiny bit:

finalRender.g = pow(finalRender.g, 0.7);

Now all we need is to roll our camera for maximum cyberspace effect and we're done!

Best laid plans of OBS

As you can see from the code I posted the above, I wrote the final shader in GLSL; those who know me know that I'm a lot more comfortable with DirectX / HLSL, and may wonder why I switched, but of course there's another story here:

Given the remote nature of the event, all of the shader coding competition was performed online as well: since transmitting video from the coder's computer to a mixer, and then to another mixer, and then to a streaming provider, and then to the end user would've probably turned the image to mush, Alkama and Nusan came up with the idea of skipping a step and rigging up a version of Bonzo that ran on the coder's computer, but instead of streaming video, it sent the shader down to another instance of Bonzo, running on Diffty's computer, who then captured that instance and streamed it to the main Revision streaming hub. This, of course, meant that in a three-way, Diffty had to run three separate instances of Bonzo - but it worked fine with GLSL earlier, so why worry?

What we didn't necessarily realize at the time, is that the DirectX 11 shader compiler takes no hostages, and as soon as the shader reached un-unrollable level of complexity, it thoroughly locked down Diffty's machine, to the point that even the video of the DJ set he was playing started to drop out. I, on the other hand, didn't notice any of this, since my single local instance was doing fine, so I spent the first 15 minutes casually nuking Diffty's PC to shreds remotely, until I noticed Diffty and Havoc pleading on Discord to switch to GLSL because I'm setting things on fire unknowingly.

This is fine.

I was reluctant to do so, simply because of the muscle memory, but I was also aware that I should keep the show going if I can because if I bow out without a result, that would be a colossal embarrassment to everyone involved, and I only can take one of those once every week, and I was already above my quota - so, I quickly closed the DX11 version of Bonzo, loaded the shader up in a text editor, replaced "floatX" with "vecX" (fun drinking game: take a shot every time I messed it up during the live event), commented the whole thing out, loaded it into a GLSL bonzo, and quickly fixed all the other syntax differences (of which there were luckily not many, stuff like "mix" instead of "lerp", constructors, etc.), and within a few minutes I was back up and running.

This, weirdly, helped my morale a bit, because it was the kind of clutch move that for some reason appealed to me, and made me quite happy - although at that point I locked in so bad that not only did I pay absolutely not attention to the stream to see what the other two are doing, but that the drinks and snacks I prepared for the hour of battling went completely untouched.

In the end, when the hour clocked off, the shader itself turned out more or less how I wanted it, it worked really well with Bullet's techno-/psy-/hardtrance mix (not necessarily my jam, as everyone knows I'm more a broken beat guy, but pounding monotony can go well with coding focus), and I came away satisfied, although the perhaps saddest point of the adventure was yet to come: the lack of cathartic real-life ending that was taken from us due to the physical distance, when after all the excitement, all the cheers and hugs were merely lines of text on a screen - but you gotta deal with what you gotta deal with.

A small sampling of the Twitch reaction.

Conclusion

In the end, what was my takeaway from the experience?

First off, scoping is everything: Always aim to get an idea where you can maximize the outcome of the time invested with the highest amount of confidence of pulling it off. In this case, even though I was on short notice and in an environment I was unfamiliar with, I relied on something I knew, something I've done before, but no one else really has.

Secondly, broaden your influence: You never know when you can take something that seems initially unrelated, and bend it into something that you're doing with good results.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, step out of your comfort zone every so often; you'll never know what you'll find.

(And don't agree to everything willy-nilly, you absolute moron.)

#demoscene #live coding #livecoding #shaders #glsl #programming #gamedev #game development

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feelingfredly · 5 years

Text

By Invitation Only

Summary: Bingo Square # 10

"I'm sorry, this is a private apocalypse. You will have to leave."

The door looked like every other door in the alley.

“You're sure this is the right place?” His question disappeared into the sounds of the night—hovercycles revving the next street over, the whirring of an ancient ventilation system trying to work against the humidity of the night, and the constant murmur of people getting on with their lives, totally unaware that they were living next door to the deadliest gang in the history of civilization.

They called themselves Ningyōzukai— The Puppetmasters—and according to Kisuke’s latest calculations they were responsible for the deaths of almost five million people over the past three years.

“Is anyone ever sure, Kurosaki-kun? Perhaps this is Schrödinger’s door; the monster is or is not there until you open it. However,” the snarky philosopher voice was replaced by normal Kisuke voice in his ear—also snarky, but more somehow, “my calculations indicated an over ninety-seven percent chance that this is a primary viewing site for Aizen’s operations and a sixty-four point three percent chance that he is actually in attendance this evening. They are the best odds we’ve had so far.”

Just then, a sleek black Arasaka limo turned into the alley. That kind of wealth was definitely outside the local demographic.

“Looks like the odds just went up.” Ichigo ducked farther back into the shadows and touched his visor jack, activating the heat sensor. In the city it usually wasn’t useful, too much ambient interference, but this close body heat was hard to miss.

“Two passengers and two guards. Only two pulse pistols, but there’s a signature that might indicate vibroblades—three I think—on the one on the left. Definitely some extra bells and whistles.” Kisuke sounded almost bored as he relayed the information. Well, he’d seen Ichigo take on twice this many targets without sweating, so maybe he was. With Kisuke it was hard to tell.

He rolled his shoulders and shook out his sword arm. The nanite armor on his hands flexed and he allowed himself a satisfied grin. Almost time.

The four exited the car and headed for the door. Ichigo focused on the two passengers, trying to get a good view for Kisuke’s scrapers. More data was always useful.

“Do we recognize these people?” he asked.

The larger one was male, brunet, and handsome in a too-pretty kind of way. He looked to be in his late thirties, but for anyone with an aesthetician on speed dial that didn’t mean much. His clothes screamed money, from the snow-white haori he wore over his suit to his actual leather boots, and he was clearly amped, with two visible jacks on the shaved side of his head. He didn’t have any tracks on his face, though, so he probably was limited to human vision. His companion, though, clearly wasn’t.

Tall, thin, and sharp-edged, the second man almost glowed in the low light. His hair was silver, his skin so white that Ichigo suspected that he’d had a full-body tattoo, but it was his eyes that gave him pause. The man barely opened them, but Ichigo could see the mirror-sheen of military-grade optics from across the alley. That and the silver tracings that circuit-boarded his skin marked him as loaded with biosoft, it was just a question of what kind.

Ichigo didn’t think he made any noise, but the ghost turned and looked right at him, and he braced himself. Shit. There went the element of surprise.

It was just his fucking luck that with all his upgrades the guy was probably faster than he was. On top of that, with the past two weeks of constant rain Ichigo had finally given in and reprogrammed the soles on his boots so he didn’t slip in the runnels of unidentifiable muck that ran through Karakura’s alleys, sacrificing a fraction of his agility on the altar of not slipping and landing on his ass if he had to make a quick getaway, and then today, irony being the only constant in his life, the rain was nowhere to be seen. The night sky was clear, and the alleys were cleaner than they’d been before the deluge, a momentary mirage of civilization in the desert of concrete ruins that lined the edges of town, a sparkling clean carpet welcoming this man and his entourage in the warm Karakura night.

The moonlight was too weak to fight the hazy halos of light around the windows, acid-washed LEDs casting long green shadows, pink neo-neon burning on a peepshow marquee at the end of the alley, and over it all the scrolling data Kisuke was feeding him, but Ichigo’s attention was fixed on the ghost. One heartbeat. Two. And… nothing. The man tilted his razor-sharp chin to one side and paused but made no move and raised no hue and cry. Then they turned to the door and the danger point had been passed.

“Odds have increased, indeed, Kurosaki-kun. That is Aizen Sosuke, your target for this evening.”

A bullseye flickered in his visor and settled not on the ghost, but on the brunet. Ichigo looked a little closer. He’d only seen vids of the man before and Aizen looked different in person—no glasses, the lab coat and meek posture of a scientist traded for a confident swagger, his whole aura altered. No one would suspect that this dangerous-looking man was the mind behind the cybernetics of HuecoMundo or the charitable works of his Espada. This man was the Puppet Master himself, here to sell death and destruction to the highest bidder.

“The man with him is Ichimaru Gin. Reports indicate that Gin is a fanatic follower. He was picked up as a child from the wastelands outside Tokyo after the food riots in ’67. After that he was first in line to receive many of Aizen’s new products. He’s probably more synth than human by this point.”

Ichigo nodded his understanding, knowing Kisuke’d register the movement.

“With both of them there, plus the personal security and the site security, this may be more than you want to take on by yourself. You can track them tonight and I’ll contact Byakuya and see if he and Renji can join up with you later.”

Ichigo knew the odds weren’t great, but he couldn’t shake the image of the last town the Ningyōzukai had targeted. Unwilling to pay Aizen’s protection fees, they’d gone into the pool of possible targets, and then the boss of the next town to the west had bid heavily for them to be next on the program. The betting window was thirty days—how much damage the attackers would take, how many casualties in the first 24 hours, how long the citizens would hold out, how long it would take to decimate the population—and the actual destruction took less than a week. Matsuo was nothing but a ghost town now, the citizens occupying cells in the neighboring boss’s body bank, the illegal organ sales filling his coffers obscenely, with Aizen getting 40% off the top.

No. He couldn’t put this off if it meant another town being destroyed while he twiddled his thumbs.

Ichigo shook his head once and Kisuke sighed, but he could hear the satisfaction in it.

The two men and their bodyguards had made their way to the door, the brassneck minding the door bowing deeply to them before allowing them to pass and closing it behind them. The pause allowed him to get a good look at the locking mechanism and the points of weakness in the frame, and Kisuke almost cackled as he dove into the building’s mainframe.

“Alright, Kurosaki-kun, if you’re certain.”

Ichigo smiled. “Is anyone ever certain, Urahara-san? Perhaps I’m simply…”

Kisuke cut him off. “Perhaps you’re a congenital smart-ass just waiting for someone, smarter and better looking, to come along and teach you a lesson in manners? Yes. I can totally believe that. Now, if you don’t mind, Kurosaki-kun, I’d feel better about this if you actually focused on the job at hand.”

He laughed under his breath. “Okay, Kisuke. If you insist. I’d almost think you were worried about me.”

A short huff filled his ear. “Worried about training your replacement. I have invested far too much time in you to sacrifice it all because you weren’t paying attention. Now. The door is on a separate circuit from the rest of the building. They really don’t want anyone just cutting the power and waltzing in, but the software hasn’t been updated in a while, so just…”

Ichigo ignored the rambling. Kisuke always babbled when he was thinking. He walked across the alley and knocked on the door.

A screen to the left of the doorframe lit up and the brassneck peered at him through the grainy camera. “Who are you and what is your purpose?”

Ichigo gazed blankly back at the camera and repeated the message he’d memorized. “I am Chikamatsu Monzaemon, here to tell tales of sewamono and jidaimono and to move the puppets on their strings.”

The brassneck nodded. “Please place your hand on the scanner.”

Ichigo took a deep breath and pressed against the biolock, waiting for Kisuke to work his magic.

“You know if you’d waited a few more seconds I wouldn’t have had to rush.” Kisuke sniffed and the lock buzzed its approval of his fake palm print.

“You love the rush,” Ichigo murmured fondly as the door swung open. The doorman’s robotic face registered a blip of confusion but decided to ignore whatever Ichigo was saying, clearly limited in its processing, the real security being the system that Kisuke was currently battering into submission.

“No weapons are allowed past this point. Please move forward to the weapons check and place them in the tagged locker. You will be given the code to retrieve them when you leave.”

Ichigo turned on his heel as if to follow the robot’s directive, only to stop and spin back, trench knife in one hand and katana in the other, the smooth swing of the blades separating the brassneck’s head from his body.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing over the sparking remains, “but I refuse to make Aizen-sama’s acquaintance so underdressed.”

Kisuke snorted in his ear. “No one is there to hear your dramatics, Kurosaki-kun.”

Ichigo kicked the head to one side, like a soccer ball. “You know that you’re the only audience I need, Kisuke. How’s the progress?”

His partner hummed. “I’ve isolated the main viewing room from the rest of the security system. They shouldn’t know you’re coming.”

Ichigo flexed his arms. “Best news I’ve had all day. Patch me in.”

He stepped over the sparking chassis on the floor and headed deeper into the building.

Information flickered across his vision—floorplan, heat signatures, data ports, ventilation system—ahhh… that’s what he wanted. The largest of the private viewing booths.

Currently it showed four human or human-adjacent heat signatures, and three that were probably sentry-bots. There was one void, which meant that someone in there was wearing a skinsuit made to prevent their being seen on surveillance like this.

“The readings I got of Aizen in the alley showed a normal heat signature, Gin too. Watch out for the mystery player.”

Ichigo laughed under his breath. “You say that like I wouldn’t, Kisuke. You know how careful I am.”

The data streaming into his head turned a lurid pink and flashed HA HA VERY FUNNY for a split second and he had to smother another laugh. It was a constant battle between them, each telling the other to be more careful and neither listening very well. The key, though, was knowing when to listen. After the past few years with Kisuke, Ichigo thought he knew that pretty well.

Urahara Kisuke took risks that most would balk at, but rarely with Ichigo’s well-being, and never without a damn good reason. Ichigo, in turn, would follow almost all of the other man’s advice… until he didn’t. It worked for them--probably because they knew it wouldn’t work for anyone else.

The other hallways were mostly empty. Two of the upper halls had service bots, probably loaded with food and drinks for the gluttonous members of Aizen’s little club. Each one there by invitation only available for an extortionate price.

“How many viewing rooms are active?”

Kisuke hummed. “There are six active, but only four are currently occupied. One on the ground floor, one on the first, and then the other two are all the way up on the top floor. Must be high rollers to share a floor with Aizen himself.”

Another hum. “According to the datascrape, tonight’s target is,” he cursed softly under his breath, “Huangshi. Outside Wuhan. Close to a million citizens. Run by a warlord who goes by—oh, this explains a few things— Huangdi .”

Ichigo parsed through his Chinese history and came up short. “Okay, it may explain things to you, Kisuke, but I don’t get it. What does the Yellow Emperor have to do with Aizen choosing this city to destroy?”

He darted down the long, dark hallway, making sure that the cameras he passed were still offline after Kisuke’s first take-down.

“Well, it wouldn’t mean anything if the occupant of the front row to tonight’s cataclysm wasn’t a self-styled Yandi . He came up through the ranks of one of the newer populist cults in Wuhan, but really started making a name for himself after he had several biotic alterations that turned him into a walking flame-thrower. He killed at least a half dozen cultists by burning them to a crisp before turning his new-found talents on the management. He took over the whole group in less than five months, earning the nickname Flame Emperor of Wuhan.”

The dots were beginning to look connectable.

“So, Huangshi is run by someone who is setting himself up as Huangdi, the Han Emperor that ended the Yan dynasty. Subtle. Why not just take out a hypersign that says, ‘I’m coming for you, Fuckboi?’”

It was always this way. Fight like hell to take a territory, then become unsatisfied with what you have, only to take more and more until a bigger fish comes along and swallows you whole. Unfortunately, this time it wasn’t just one greedy fish paying the price. No, a million people who just happened to be unlucky enough to share a city with him were going to pay, too.

“Who are the other viewing parties? Yandi’s entourage?” Readouts showed a total of twelve people in the two lower rooms. And look at that… they shared a ventilation shaft.

“No. The group on the ground floor are Aizen’s bodyguards. I’m predicting they are just watching to pass the time between patrols. Second floor seems to be a potential client here with an investor to size up the opportunity Aizen promised them.” A note of bitter satisfaction crept into Kisuke’s voice. “What a shame that when the time comes for them to sign their contract their bank accounts will contain nothing but dust.”

Ichigo followed the floor plan until he found the central exhaust fan for the heating system. It was spinning gently, simply circulating air rather than actually trying to vent anything. He pulled a pair of canisters from the bag slung low across his back with one hand, and a collapsible baton from a holster on his thigh with the other.

“Can you isolate the exhaust fan on the ground floor?” he asked.

“It would take a minute or two, why?”

Ichigo snapped the baton open and stabbed it into the grate over the fan between the moving blades. The fan shuddered and groaned but stopped. Perfect.

“No reason,” he said, popping the canisters open. Each can was filled with a combination of tech-ticks—nanites that attached themselves parasitically to wetware that wasn’t hardened against them, rendering them useless over time—and a potent knock-out gas. It would only take moments to flood the lower viewing rooms and remove those people from the equation. The damage from the tech-ticks would be permanent and expensive to repair—really, one of Kisuke’s best inventions—but it would be a small price to pay for the terrible decision they’d made to associate with Aizen and his lot.

He pulled a vibroblade from his pack and sliced through the grates covering the branching ventilation shafts and then dropped the gas grenades into them.

“Start sleepy time countdown now,” he said.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re too soft-hearted, Kurosaki-kun?” Kisuke didn’t believe in leaving targets free to rejoin a battle. He was more efficient than that. Ichigo, though, didn’t figure the people in these rooms would join the fight to protect Aizen. The security staff looked like bakebrains and wannabe bioroids who’d signed on for a paycheck. The clients might want to stay on the bastard’s good side, but when it was their skin on the line it was more likely they’d run from the building as fast as their hardware could carry them. The tech-ticks would slow them down and mark them in such a way that they could deal with them later if they persisted in their homicidal tendencies, but he didn’t sign on for wholesale slaughter, even if it would make him safer in the long run.

“Soft-headed, maybe,” he murmured, “but never soft-hearted. Why? Are you accusing me of having a heart, Kisuke?”

The man on the other end of the line snorted. “Yes. You’re a sloppy, sentimental, bleeding-hearted man that secretly watches kitten and puppy videos when he’s supposed to be doing recon, and your countdown is at zero. The occupants of viewing rooms one and two are incapacitated. I have, in case you’re interested, placed chrono-locks on the doors from the outside. They will not be leaving for twelve hours, even if the sedation wears off before you’re finished here. You’re welcome.”

Ichigo grinned. “You’re the best, Kisuke.”

“Yes. I am. Now focus. You’ve got a job to do.”

He backtracked to the main corridor and down to the elevator banks. “Which one is operational?”

The data readout in his left eye flashed a yellow rectangle over the nearest set of doors and he pressed the call button. Kisuke had deactivated the other transports to prevent any other party crashers from interrupting the evening.

The elevator was old and noisy—nothing like the high-end security droid guarding the hall when he finally arrived at the top floor.

Kisuke was muttering again about time—he always wanted more—but Ichigo took one look at the guardian and knew this was up to him.

“I'm sorry, this is a private apocalypse, you will have to leave." The sentry droid looked disturbingly human, except it hovered two inches off the floor and Ichigo’s sensors read three different power supplies. Its face was painted more elegantly than the most expensive joyboys in Tokyo, and its clothing cost more than Ichigo’s hoverbike.

It was really too bad.

“Private, you say?” He stepped towards the droid, blocking its vision as he dropped a microfilament whip down along his thigh and shook it loosely. “I’m sure I’m allowed. I have an invitation from Aizen-sama.”

The droid cocked its head to one side. “Invitation? I was given no information about any other guests for this apocalypse. I must insist that you leave, at once, or I will be forced to treat you as a threat.”

The power supply located in the droid’s upper left torso showed a rapid increase in activity, indicating pop-ups in one or both of the arms. Whether they were for sleeper darts or bullets was anyone’s guess. Ichigo breathed in, once, and focused on the microfilament he couldn’t feel.

“Allow me to assure you,” he moved—weight balanced on the ball of one foot, knee bent, as he swept around slashing through the droid’s carapace in four precise cuts… three placed directly through the power supplies so there’d be no regeneration, and the fourth across the eyes to stop any potential visual records from being scraped from the droid later. “I’m supposed to be here.”

The pieces tumbled to the floor, the deep pile carpet muffling the sound, and Ichigo stepped over it, moving on towards his next target.

“How’s the bank coming?” he asked.

Kisuke made a satisfied sound. “The Red Emperor’s coffers have been emptied. I skimmed ten percent and the rest is now sitting in a Westphalian bank account waiting to be used towards reparations for damages that might come from tonight’s scheduled cataclysm. If we somehow manage to prevent it completely, well, then we’ll just have to figure out something else to do with all that beautiful filthy lucre.”

Ichigo had no doubt that Kisuke had already mentally spent every credit. He might be easy, but he certainly wasn’t cheap.

“Excellent. When Aizen tries to take his last pound of flesh in payment and finds nothing but bones, hopefully he will call off the attack. Can’t imagine that he’s ever offered services pro bono.”

No. Aizen Sosuke hadn’t a shred of mercy or generosity. Terrible qualities if you wanted to befriend the man, but excellent if you wanted to predict or manipulate him.

Ichigo moved silently to the viewing room Kisuke marked on his readout.

“The mystery player has moved across the hall and is now confronting the Red Emperor. You’d better get in there if you’re hoping to end the evening with minimal bloodshed,” he warned.

Two steps down the hall and then a pause at the locked door, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the last room on the floor. Aizen’s room. No movement showed through the heat sensors. They could be sitting having tea for all he could tell.

The other room, though, was falling into chaos. He could hear shouting through the door, faint but definite, and then a single scream, like a wounded animal.

Too slow, apparently.

He pushed the door open and stood back from the opening. No sense in making himself a target right off the bat. The mystery player, though, wasn’t interested in him.

“The Ningyō No Masutā is gracious and forgiving, but he is not a fool to be taken advantage of. He offered you your dreams, and for a mere pittance, and you have insulted his honor by not fulfilling your promises. Since it seems that there may have been outside influence in this, you will keep your life—this time—but do not confuse his intentional generosity with blindness. Your responsibility to him is your responsibility to protect and guarantee, even if interfered with.”

The speaker dropped his sword—an actual sword , it looked ancient—and bowed his head.

“Spread the news of his greatness and be thankful that you can.”

The room was in chaos. Several people were sobbing and there was blood everywhere. A small woman kneeled crouching before a huge man dressed in dark red silks, his belly held up by a suspensor belt, holding her crimson skirts against the bleeding stump of his arm where a hand should have been.

The hand was on the floor.

The speaker was short and dark, braids bobbing around his head like little snakes, and his eyes were completely white. He was probably blind, in the technical sense, but there was no way he didn’t see everything happening around him.

Ichigo could see silver filaments running along the length of his bare arms. He wasn’t wearing a skinsuit… it was embedded in his skin. He couldn’t imagine the hours of work, the expense, the pain, necessary to make such a thing happen. It was incredible.

“Kaname Tōsen,” Kisuke murmured. “I didn’t realize Aizen had his claws so deeply in him. He’s… not the same. Be careful, Kurosaki-kun. He’s a zealot, and you know how unpredictable those can be.”

Ichigo digested that bit of information. For Kisuke, that was a serious warning.

As if he knew he was the topic of conversation, the man in question spoke.

“You, Kurosaki Ichigo,” Tōsen didn’t turn towards him. “You are late. My master is waiting for you across the hall. Do not make him wait longer, or his impatience will become mine.” With that, his sword twitched, as if hungering to be unleashed. Impatience indeed.

“Well, then,” Ichigo nodded at him, “since you seem to have this under control, I’ll just scoot along. Anything you’d like me to pass along?”

His unflustered response was a roll of the shoulder. “I need not tell my master anything. He already knows everything he needs to. Now go. Quickly.”

The order itched between Ichigo’s shoulder blades, and he hesitated, almost wanting to linger just to see what the other man would do. But if Aizen already knew he was there, there was no point in delaying the inevitable, even if his natural reluctance to follow orders was being challenged.

“This wasn’t the plan, Kurosaki-kun,” Kisuke’s voice was very bland, which meant he was worried. “It is one thing to surprise a snake when it’s sleeping. It is another to challenge it head on.”

Ichigo rolled his shoulders and walked toward the door at the end of the hall. The floorplans indicated that it opened into a large room that ran the whole front of the building. This high up, it probably had quite a view. He wasn’t going to miss that.

“Do you have eyes on the main room?” he asked.

“No. Haven’t been able to get eyes. The plans indicate cameras were installed, but I can’t find a trace of them. Aizen probably had them removed.”

Made sense. Almost anything was hackable if you were good enough, and Kisuke was definitely good enough. The only option would be to dumb the room completely. Heat signatures would be reliable, still though.

“Am I still looking at a party of two now that Tōsen is out of the picture?” He had two stun grenades, but they were touchy in close quarters like this. His two knives were better… and he was better with them.

“Gin hasn’t moved since he entered the room, which is a little concerning because it could be a mirror, but you won’t be able to tell until you get in there. I can say that there are only two heat signatures in the room. I just can’t tell you where they’re going to be. Let me check just one more thing.” Kisuke sounded frustrated, and Ichigo knew he was probably chewing through every piece of data he could scrape to find out something—anything—that would be useful. Sometimes, though, you just have to take the jump and hope for the best.

“Kisuke,” he said, “it’s now or never.” He kept his voice soft and gentle, but they both knew that once he made up his mind there was no going back.

Kisuke sighed, and Ichigo thought he could hear a shudder in it.

“Don’t turn your back on him. Gin may look dangerous, but Aizen is dangerous. And don’t…” his voice cracked just once. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Ichigo laughed—a sharp, dark thing—and he remembered the first time he met Kisuke, standing over three unconscious bodies that had mistakenly thought the tall, pale gaijin would be easy pickings. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

And then, as if summoned, the door opened.

He walked the last steps down the hall, the hilts of his knives shifting loosely against his back and thigh, and he paused infinitesimally outside the threshold, foot raised but not crossing, and that was when he saw it. A microfilament spool mounted just at the edge of the door’s frame—a sudden and terrible surprise for anyone incautious enough to waltz in uninvited, the weapon poised to take off an arm or a head, whatever was unlucky enough to be in the way.

“Good evening, Aizen-san,” he said, pitching his voice to carry into the room ahead of him. “I was told to hurry because you were waiting for me, but I can only hope you don’t think me foolish enough to lose my head over such an invitation.” He snapped out his short knife and stabbed it into the door frame, breaking the mounting piece from the rest, causing the microfilament spool to fall to the floor with a clatter. “I didn’t expect much from you, but I have to say I’m disappointed in your hospitality.”

Ichigo gambled that there would be no other weapon in the immediate vicinity and walked through the door. The room was filled with light from golden lamps on low tables around the space, and the beauty of the Karakura night poured in through the bank of windows. Aizen, tall, dark-haired and handsome, his dangerous swagger from the alley still very much present, stood facing him with a look that balanced somewhere between annoyed and entertained on his face.

Ichigo recognized that look. Kisuke wore it often.

“My hospitality is typically reserved for honored guests or friends or family. You, Kurosaki Ichigo, are on none of those lists. Although,” he paused and looked him up and down suggestively, “you might be able to persuade me to add you. If you prove interesting enough.”

Ichigo couldn’t completely stifle his laugh. “Oh, really? And just what would you find interesting? I somehow doubt our definitions would align.”

Aizen sauntered across the room towards him. “I wouldn’t be so sure.” His voice dropped to a purr. “I mean there has to be something about you keeping Ki-chan entertained.”

There was dead air in his ear. Not radio silence—dead air. Kisuke had cut the line. Why had Kisuke cut the line?

“He gets bored, you know,” a second voice sounded behind him. Gin. Gin was standing behind him. “Your Kisuke. He likes the chase. The rush. He ain’t so much with what comes after.”

You love the rush. How many times had he said that?

Aizen watched the expressions play across his face and smirked. “Don’t tell me.” He clapped his hands gleefully. “He didn’t tell you.”

Ichigo saw red. Fuck that . He didn’t care what the guy knew about Kisuke, he wasn’t putting up with that shit.

“Tell me what? That you’re a murdering bastard who’s destroyed almost a dozen cities and deserve to be chopped into little pieces and fed to the koi outside the Summer Palace?” Ichigo cocked his head to one side and cast a look up at the brunet. “No, I’m pretty sure he told me all that. In those precise terms, actually.”

Gin barked out a laugh and Ichigo breathed a little easier as the tall man crossed the room to the low couch and slung himself out across it. Keeping Aizen in front of him would be much easier if he didn’t have to worry about the ghost behind him.

“That sounds just like him. He always got—colorful—when he was bitter over something and trust me… he’s bitter.” Venom dripped from Aizen’s words. “Bitter that I moved on without him. Bitter that I took his little idea and turned it into something so much bigger. So much… more. Ki-chan just couldn’t see the big picture. This is what dreams are made of. Infinite power. Infinite knowledge.”

“Infinite crazy, you mean.” Ichigo stepped towards the brunet. “If Kisuke isn’t here with you creating your made-to-order apocalypses, it’s because he doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t want any part of it. Or any part of you. Get real, Aizen-sama .”

There was a tiny intake of breath in his ear. Kisuke.

“Gin!” Kisuke could have whispered it or shouted; Ichigo was too focused on the hand on his shoulder and the blade at his throat to tell.

The ghost really did move faster than he did. Luckily, not faster than Kisuke’s nanites. He hoped. He leaned back a little against Gin; if the other man thought it was to get a little space between his carotid and the sword… well, it wasn’t illogical.

“You see,” Aizen was still talking, allowing Gin to hold him as a captive audience, “that’s where you’re wrong. Or one of the many places you’re wrong. My Ki-chan is here—through you. He’s watching, and listening, and taking his voyeuristic pleasures just as he always has, he’s just lazy. He lets us do his dirty work for him, and he just sits back and revels in it. And we let him, because we love him.”

Long legs ate the few steps between them and Ichigo was forced to look up to meet Aizen’s gaze. Equally long fingers gripped his chin and forced it even higher before he pressed their mouths together, sharp teeth digging into the soft meat of Ichigo’s lower lip, his vicious tongue swiping up the blood welling up there.

“Aren’t you…” Aizen closed his eyes and let out a breathy sigh, “delicious. I can taste the boosters in your blood. Ki-chan has outdone himself. Maybe I should keep you around. It might help keep Ki-chan more… amenable.”

Ichigo had had about enough. He shifted, rolling forward onto the ball of one foot and then dropping his full weight. The surprise bought him a split second and with it he struck his elbow backwards into Gin’s torso, wresting a gasp from the ghost, and his face from Aizen’s grasp.

“Now, Kisuke .”

A whisper sounded behind him, slowly growing louder, and he knew if he looked back that the hundreds of tech-ticks that had been riding on his back would be warping his view of the bodyguard, each one latching onto something, anything, that it could eat away at, like tiny techno-piranha.

Aizen laughed. “Do you think I wouldn’t have hardened Gin’s bioware against Ki-chan’s little toys? I thought you were smarter than that, but I guess you are just a pretty face.”

Ichigo felt Gin’s hands fall away and heard him groan. “Aizen-sama,” he gasped, “something is wrong.”

A ferocious frown spread across the brunet’s face. “No! It’s not possible. You were updated before we left. I made sure.”

Breath racked through Gin’s chest. “Urahara must’ve changed something. I… I don’t…”

The instant of confusion was all Ichigo needed. He raised the trench-knife in his hand and gritted his teeth as he punched it through Aizen’s chest, just below the glowing orb imbedded in his sternum.

An almost fond smile crept across the taller man’s face and he shook his head slowly. “So… not just a pretty face after all. You have conviction as well. I hope Ki-chan got a hi-def recording of this. I want to see it. I want to see it with his eyes.”

Aizen’s expression tightened, his lips twisted in a grimace of pain, and Ichigo braced himself for the blood and the screaming… but they never came. Instead, like water breaking against a blade, everything that was Aizen Sosuke shivered and shimmered around his weapon and then burst into a million pieces, waves of nanotech crashing to the floor, dead.

“Shit,” Kisuke cursed in his ear. “It was a doppelgigai. He’s improved the life-sign imitation since the last time I had to deal with one. Damn it all.”

“Well, well, well,” the voice behind him sounded much less breathless, and Ichigo spun to face the ghost. “Wasn’t sure what to expect from you, but that was worth the price of admission.”

Gin’s color was normal, and his breathing natural. Apparently—another fake.

“Amazing recovery,” Ichigo said, slowly stepping away from the skittering pile of Aizen-that-was.

“Isn’t it, though?” Gin put away his sword and raised his empty hands. “It won’t last long, I’m afraid. I’ll have to fry a few circuits before rejoining Aizen-sama, but it’s worth it.”

Ichigo made some quick calculations and came to an unexpected conclusion. “Not a fan, then?”

Gin cocked his head to one side. “The man’s a monster. Brilliant, but doesn’t have enough soul left to fill a shot glass. I got close to try to take him out, but he’s beyond me. He might not be beyond your friend, though. Aizen’s got a real blind spot about the blond.”

Ichigo could understand.

“The next apocalypse won’t be so easy to derail. Mining town called Ganymede. The army there is poised to attack, and Aizen is taking his pound of flesh in the form of Yttrium.”

Kisuke murmured in his ear. “He must still be working on those superconductors. We can’t let him get his hands on it. There’s no telling what kind of damage he’d do.”

Ichigo nodded to both of them. “Rare metals are key. So, what’s the play?”

Gin stretched, his long body lean and deadly, and smiled. “I don’t have one. I just have a message for your fella—next time, don’t miss. He’s coming for you, Ki-chan, and he’ll take your little strawberry here down the instant he sees him next time. You can’t hide from him anymore.”

He swung a long thin finger back and forth. “Tick tock, tick tock. Your time has run out.”

“Catch you later, Pretty,” he winked at Ichigo, and then, like the ghost he resembled, opened the door and disappeared.

Ichigo ground his teeth. “Strawberry, my ass. I’ll choke that puff of smoke the next time I get my hands on him.”

“Worry about Gin later,” Kisuke was already feeding his data stream with new maps and directions. “Get back here. New data. New plans. Hurry, Kurosaki-kun. And please,” Kisuke cleared his throat, “be careful.”

***

It took three days to get home. Three days where every question he threw at Kisuke over the comms was deflected or ignored completely. Three days of impersonal data overload with hundreds of names, faces, events, weapons, plans, and everything that could possibly tie them together being thrown at him.

“Enough, Kisuke,” he finally said, choosing radio silence over the artificial lightness of his tone, or the cold distance when he was so far in his own head that there was nothing Ichigo could do to reach him. “We’ll figure it out when I get back.”

Silence hung between them, but it was the open line that gave him hope. Kisuke hadn’t shut him out. Not yet.

Not ever if he had anything to say about it.

Finally, at the end of his journey, Ichigo stared into the optical scanner above the door, and then did a 360° turn before pressing 6 of his ten fingers against the biometric lock keypad.

“Tadaima!” His voice echoed through the stairwell and he started up it, taking the spiral steps two at a time. Gods, he was glad to be home.

He dropped his gear beside the stairs and toed off his boots, moving quickly through the living room and down the hall to Kisuke’s work rooms.

“Kisuke?” he called.

“In here, Kurosaki-kun,” the voice came not from the labs but from their bedroom.

That, Ichigo thought, could be either very good, or very bad.

He crossed the threshold and saw Kisuke’s bags packed and sitting beside the door, silent witness to the shit that was about to go down. Very bad it was.

“I am most relieved that you have returned safely,” the blond was sitting on a little chair by their dressing table, back rigid, the ridiculous green and white striped hat that he preferred casting his eyes in shadow.

Ichigo hated that hat.

“Why?” he asked, dropping bonelessly on the bed. “Looks to me like you’ve made all the decisions you wanted to make already. Didn’t need me for any of it.”

Kisuke lurched forward a little. “That isn’t…”

“Isn’t what, Kisuke? Fair? Isn’t the polite spin you were going to put on it? Cut the crap. You’re running, and whether it’s because you’re trying to protect me or running back to Aizen, what I have to say clearly doesn’t matter, or you wouldn’t have already made up your mind.”

Kisuke’s shoulders dropped a fraction. “I haven’t.”

Ichigo pushed himself up on his elbows. “You haven’t what, Kisuke? Packed? That isn’t what it looks like.”

“I did that the first day.” His voice was softer than usual, missing the snarky edge that carried it over the comms to him on jobs. “I don’t think I’ve ever moved faster in my life.”

Ichigo laughed at that. Kisuke could strike like a viper in a fight, but the idea of him packing in a hurry? Not your typical Kisuke.

“Why?” He almost didn’t want to ask the question. He figured he already knew the answer.

“I was scared. Angry. Needed to do something.” Kisuke shrugged. “Couldn’t get the image of Gin’s sword at your throat out of my head. Packing seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

It had taken him years, but he’d learned the hard way that pushing Kisuke into a corner rarely gave him the responses he wanted. This time, though, he pushed. “And now?”

Kisuke breathed in slowly and let it out even more slowly. Once. Twice. “Now I’m not so sure.” He looked up, pushing the brim of the hat back so Ichigo could see his eyes. “I’m still scared. Still angry. Seems to me, though, that if what I’m scared of is losing you, then leaving is a 100% probability of fulfilling that fear with no help from the Asshole at all.”

What I’m scared of is losing you … Ichigo felt his breath hitch at the words and he forced himself to nod. “The math does seem to work that way.”

The older man made a noise in the back of his throat. “So, if you’re not too upset over finding out that Aizen and I used to be involved, or that he’s using my technology to commit these atrocities, then I…” his voice faded away.

“Then you’d what?” Ichigo pushed again.

“Well,” his voice was small but steady this time, “I could use some help unpacking.”

Ichigo couldn’t stop the relieved laugh that shook his frame. “Is that all?” he held out a hand for Kisuke’s, pulling him off the chair and onto the bed beside him.

Kisuke stretched out, wrapping his long arms around Ichigo’s waist. “Yes. Well, that and tracking down the money behind the attack on Ganymede, hijacking the yttrium, getting Gin away from Aizen, and possibly stabbing the real bastard in the guts this time. But, no hurry. Just the unpacking first.”

Ichigo buried his nose in the junction between Kisuke’s throat and collarbone, breathing in deeply the scent that always brought him back home, no matter where they were, no matter what madness Kisuke was planning.

“I think I can manage that.” He dropped feather-light kisses against Kisuke’s skin. “At some point we will have to have an invitation made up, though.”

Kisuke squirmed. He was always a little ticklish there. “An invitation? For whom?”

Ichigo held his partner tightly, the fear and anger of the past few days bleeding out of him as he allowed Kisuke to hear the smirk in his voice. “Aizen-sama, of course. We wouldn’t want him to miss his own apocalypse. I can’t imagine anyone who deserves one more.”

For the rest? They had all the time in the world.

#@uraichievents #cyberpunk ninja Ichigo #cyberpunk genius Kisuke #Aizen the Psycho Ex #Good Guy(ish) Gin #working on that trust thing #Bleach

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migleefulmoments · 5 years

Text

Let me help you understand the “confusion” over CDAN’s Blind

Crazy Days and Nights mentioned Darren and Mia in a podcast and then wrote a blind on his website. The cc fandom is confused and I want to take a moment and explain it for those who are looking for the truth.

First the Podcast mention:

mmack0621 @ajw720 I mentioned trouble in paradise, but this is what Enty said so no one can get mad at us & think we made it up. He said last night quote "Oooo...a little speculation, a little gossip that's probably gonna turn into a blind item tomorrow. But I think DC might be having some marriage issues. He has not been going out with his "wife" lately. He has been heading to events solo. So we'll have to see how that goes. " It was 36 minutes into about a 42 minute podcast. It caught my attention because D is one of the people that he rarely has gossip on. Who knows what's going on?! 🤷‍♀️

The Blind:

Now the MOST IMPORTANT PART: CDAN’s Disclaimer

“CRAZY DAYS AND NIGHTS IS A GOSSIP SITE. THE SITE PUBLISHES RUMORS, CONJECTURE, AND FICTION. IN ADDITION TO ACCURATELY REPORTED INFORMATION, CERTAIN SITUATIONS, CHARACTERS AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THE BLOG ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY. INFORMATION ON THIS SITE MAY CONTAIN ERRORS OR INACCURACIES; THE BLOG’S PROPRIETOR DOES NOT MAKE WARRANTY AS TO THE CORRECTNESS OR RELIABILITY OF THE SITE'S CONTENT. LINKS TO CONTENT ON AND QUOTATION OF MATERIAL FROM OTHER SITES ARE NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF CRAZY DAYS AND NIGHTS.”

CDAN admits it publishes fiction-LIES- and items which are “figments of the author's imagination”. That should tell you enough about the viability of the stories Enty publishes and yet, Abby and the cc fandom have a long history of accepting CDAN’s blinds as truth regardless of how illogical and irrational they are. Enty is claiming that Darren and Mia are having problems in their marriage and his only evidence is his suggestion that Darren is attending events without his wife. Missing an event hardly proves marital discord, but the claim isn’t even true! Mia has been by Darren’s side for the vast majority of the events he’s attended since the wedding. The only event she didn’t go to that I can think of in the last 2 months is the quick trip to NYC for the Barry’s event. Maybe she missed another event but certainly not more than 1 or 2.

The interesting thing is that the cc Anons KNOW this blind isn’t true and a few have brought it up to Abby. Instead of outright rejecting the blind as a lie, Abby is calling it “confusing” as if that is a position one can take when confronted with lies.

CDAN fabricates gossip in order to drive traffic to it’s website and pod. It’s PR 101-write salacious items and the gossip-hungry people will come running. Enty doesn’t care if it’s true, partially true or even a little true. He is relying on the fact that too many people in 2019 are willing to be conned, lied to and gaslighted if only it will prove their previously held beliefs are true. Enty doesn’t care that he’s hurting real people or that he’s lying. Lying and hurting people is what he does so it is up to the reader to be smarter than he is and protect oneself from his lies and keep oneself from being scammed.

Here are some of the cc comments in reverse chronological order for context:.

Hi nonnies! Seems to me she’s mostly everywhere. He did get the prior nyc trip on his own. Ofc he’s there now for her step brother’s wedding.

But the blind was confirmed to be him. I’m just reporting the news. I think collectively we are confused.

*********************************************

She is keeping her anons together by making this a “we” thing- “We are all in this together”. Abby is saying “Don’t think for yourself, I’ve done that already and I’ve determined that we are collectively confused”.

Anonymous asked: One of the gossip web sites has recently posted about a closeted actor and his wife having marital problems. A couple of replies assumed it to be D/darren C. Who plants these items? Is the purpose just to get publicity?

ajw720 answered: According to @mmack0621 it’s absolutely d as he was also mentioned on the podcast. Why? We don’t know.

***************************************************

Here Abby gets it confused. She has an erroneous understanding about how PR works and how gossip sites get their information. A successful working actor does not want to be on CDAN. While all publicity is good publicity, being on a website that routinely publishes salacious lies is not the kind of publicity Darren wants or needs. Enty makes money by getting clicks on his website- he uses Google Ads and listeners to his podcast who listen to commercials from his “sponsors” (I presume, I’ve never listened to the pod nor will I ever, even for research. The other option would be, he charges subscribers a subscription fee). Darren gets nothing positive out of Enty posting blinds that say his marriage is in trouble or he’s gay. Celebs have enough trouble getting their truth out into this gossip-drive society, the ls thing they want is to do it through blinds on a site that admits it makes up stories for clicks. Abby likes to pretend that Darren or his team or Mia submit info to gossip sites and call paparazzi because it fits HER storyline. LIke Enty, Abby,

“Publishes rumors, conjecture, and fiction. in addition to accurately reported information. Nearly 100% of the situations, characters and events portrayed on Abby’s blog are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously”.

Let me be clear, NOBODY on Darren’s team -including his wife- ever call the paparazzi or gossip websites. They all have much more effective and efficient methods of getting the information they make public. Gossip sites exist solely to make money for their owners. Struggling D-list actors and reality stars have learned to manipulate tabloids in order to get their own names and images published but anyone of Darren’s caliber has better ways of doing that that allow him 100% of the control. When you call a tabloid or a pap, you lose control of the narrative. Celebs in 2019 have access to their own PR teams, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and if they wanted to have a longer conversation, someone of Darren’s status would have access to much more traditional and reliable media organizations like TV networks, NYT, WaPO, even People Magazine which is on another level from CDAN. l is calling Enty though I am sure that ccers are sending him “intel” they fabricated.

klainecentric Now I'm interested in which article, I don't want my bubble to burst and my hope to dwindle, but this is good news. The last couple of RC events were very telling.

leka-1998 @klainecentric you can find it here.

ajw720 Apparently on the podcast he was mentioned by name and he said trouble in paradise. Not sure what paradise he’s referring to. M is anything but paradise and that fraud of a marriage is a nightmare. But if this is perhaps d&c hinting there’s trouble. I’m cool with it. But not getting my hopes up.

Taking what we know that CDAN lies and the fact that we have seen plenty of evidence that Darren and Mia have been attending events together, the rationale and logical conclusion is that Enty fabricated the story in order to get clicks on his website and listeners to his podcast. The logical conclusion is that it is a flat-out lie. It is not rational to conclude that something “confusing” is going on.

Why the cc fandom never learns from their mistakes.

This is another concrete example of Abby taking everything as confirmation bias instead of accepting she is wrong and learning from that. She has been pushing a narrative that Darren and Mia are going to get divorced sometime around their first anniversary and everything is simply confirmation bias for that narraitive. This is a perfect example of how the rationale and intelligent resonse to CDAN’s comment is to Once again, the fandom is trying to shove a square peg into a round hole and it just doesn’t fit.

Another important lesson needs to be addressed: It is true that sometimes a lot of tabloids will start pushing stories that someone has cheated. We can use the example of Justin Timberlake this week. Justin was seen at a party holding hands with his costar. Lots of media sites ran the story because there were photos (X) and Justin Apologized to Jessica about his lapse in judgment. Fox, CNN, Yahoo Entertainment, Fox Business, NBC 10, People, TMZ, US Weekly, and The Guardian-just to name a few-ran the story. Compare that to CDAN’s claim that Darren’s marriage is in trouble-the ONLY site who ran the story is a site who admits on its front page that it “PUBLISHES RUMORS, CONJECTURE, AND FICTION. IN ADDITION TO ACCURATELY REPORTED INFORMATION, CERTAIN SITUATIONS, CHARACTERS AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THE BLOG ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY”.

#cc #ccer #cc fandom #crisscolfer #mia love darren

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM FOUNDERS TO DETECT BIAS

Expected value how likely an investor is to say that they're happier in the sense that hackers and painters are both makers, and this question is just to do what hackers do for fun: cook up amusing hacks with your friends. The root of the problem is to start from the other end of the summer. The people who are good at it. But after the talking is done, the decision about what to have for lunch. Even a company with 100 people will feel different from one with 1000. There's a reason we have a distinct word adult for people over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is imagination. It's populated by people who dropped out of school to do it? In this case the exploding termsheet was not or not only a tactic to pressure the startup. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. Because fundraising is so distracting, a startup should either be in fundraising mode.

Nor would I have wanted to do anything that required a commitment of more than a few months old, every week that passes gives you significantly more information about them. For the foreseeable future, people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no record of it. Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader. If a new company led boldly into the future. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice. They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't. I usually tell founders is to stop fundraising when you start to get higher.1

They call the things that get discovered this way incidentalomas, and they try to push you to name a price, resist doing so. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the number was over 90%. Would that do? They're more like examples of Robert Frost's good fences make good neighbors. I smelled a major rat. The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders kept working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. As well as being smarter, they tend to peter out. I wouldn't be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale. They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they do with most startups. What you should fear, as a handful of founders who could pull that off without having VCs laugh in their faces.2 So if such a company has two possible strategies, a conservative one that's slightly more likely to make it something you have the luxury of curiosity, one of the most important quality is in a startup is the opinion of other investors.

Is this the way I'd say this if I were drawing from life.3 The important thing is to be excited about it, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So what tends to happen is that they hate the idea that we ought to be writing about them as if they'd been anointed as the next Google, but I'm thinking this is going to solve this problem, but it didn't last long.4 This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. So you have to be on the path to the finished program looks in it, but the main thing we care about is the one where we ask what cool things you've made. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the money burning a hole in your pocket, but I smelled a major rat. Hapless implies passivity. One of the things he would have liked to. An excessive amount of money, it will only evolve at big company rates instead of startup rates, whereas alternatives will evolve with especial speed. Which almost always means hiring too many people to apply to multiple incubators, you should focus your whole attention on it so you can get.

Be nice. Surely that field, at least, how I write one. If they saw that, they'd want you to sell them more of your company in subsequent rounds. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. Clinton, even if your group has only 10 people. It's different in research. Even if they already know it, you'll probably be done faster.5 The great mathematician G. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments.

If you go to work for a couple years for another company for a few days of terror. Being a doctor is not the hope of getting a better one. People's best friends are likely to make it excessively hackerish. The main thing we've discovered from pushing the edge of this envelope is not where the edge is, but how fuzzy it is. Don't try to look at something and predict whether it will take off. The percentage of female hackers is small, but they adapt their plans on the fly. Dating sites are a prime example. I like about this idea is known as Worse is Better. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. Right? So if it seems like all the good ideas came from within.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. That's probably the number one question people ask me. What you can do, but assume the worst; investors who are seriously interested in you will usually be happy to talk about what? But the best way to generate startup ideas is to do what adults tell me all day long. When I asked her what specific things she remembered speakers always saying, she mentioned: that the best way to get a lot of new areas.6 In the software world may not realize is that Worse is Better, which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to. Maybe the VC industry has changed. The head of a small company doesn't ensure freedom. At best you may have to pay a little more closely related, like games. And in any case, competitors are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the future will feel as sorry for us as we do a birthmark. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity?

Notes

Inside their heads for someone to invent the steam engine. You could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities. The founders we fund used to be employees, or to be higher, as they seem to be a good open-source browser.

And while it is. It's hard to prevent shoplifting because in their lifetimes. PR firm.

You have to. This flattering distinction seems so natural to the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we don't use code written while you were going to use some bad word multiple times. But he got there by another path.

I replace the actual amount of stock. Eighteen months later. Now the misunderstood artist is a service for advising people whether or not, and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and cook on lowish heat for at least a partial order.

But it could hose the whole story. Yes, actually: dealing with one of the Daddy Model that it had no natural immunity to tax avoidance. I know this is the most promising opportunities, it will become as big. But friends should be your compass.

One new thing the company is always room for another. One professor friend says that the VC. We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without growing big in revenues without including the numbers like the iPad because it made a bet: if he ever made a lot like intellectual bullshit. It's not only the leaves who suffer.

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talkagency · 5 years

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10 COMMON SEO MYTHS DEBUNKED 2019

SEO is like having a child. It constantly needs attention, rarely does what you expect, and it’s pretty much a full-time job!

Huge algorithm shifts and years of outdated information and mistruths has made it a minefield. You think you’re moving in the right direction… then BOOM!

With so much misinformation and so-called “facts” waiting for you at every turn, it’s hard to know what’s effective and what is defective.

Most information is wildly outdated. What worked 5 years ago could be as useless as a waterproof tea bag today.

Google is much smarter than people give it credit for. Huge advances with AI and deep machine learning lets it understand much more than it ever has before.

So, let’s get started. How many of these common SEO myths are you going to be guilty of in 2019?

1 – Using Exact Match Keywords in Content

This might have been true up to a few years ago. But with Google’s evolution, exact match keywords in your content no longer need to be quite as exact.

Technological advancements, such as LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) help search engines like Google gain a deeper understanding of your content context.

As voice search is set to account for more than 50% of all searches by 2020, natural sounding speech is not only recommended, but encouraged. It’s time to optimise content for voice based searches.

This means that using stop words in your keywords and utilising semantically related phrases can both work to help your SEO efforts.

You can write for the search engines using unnatural sounding keywords. And sure, you might get the rankings that you want. But when the user faces unnatural sounding content, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are going to bounce like a rubber ball!

Just to show you that stop words and word order don’t interfere with primary keyword search volumes and top three placement, here are a few screenshots of variants of one keyword:

See, the keyword may not be an exact match, but its intent remains the same… and Google knows this.

And the first page ranking for the top 3 websites using each variation?

Top 3 sites are identical across the board. And every single site on the first page remains on the first page. Clever old Google!

If you can weave an exact match into the title or headings, awesome. But the main thing to remember here is that Google focuses on user intent… and has done for several years now.

Forcing unnatural keywords into your text creates poorly constructed content. And that can cause more damage than good to your rankings.

Focus on checking how each variation weighs up and check the metrics, then use a mix of them if you can. Stop words (articles, conjunctions, etc.) are rapidly rising in search volume, so ignoring them is not really best practice.

Even Yoast, an avid campaigner for avoiding stop-words has backtracked on its previous stance.

Remember: poor user experience = high bounce rate. High = bounce rate is a signal your content isn’t delivering.

2 – SEO is About Ranking Number One on Google

Taking that top spot on the first page of Google is what everyone aims to achieve, and that is a good target to have.

But here’s the thing:

Whether you rank number one, number five or number 10 on the first page of the SERPs, your organic site traffic is going to explode.

When people perform a search, they rarely only ever visit one page. When it comes to gathering information, several sources are usually required.

So while you definitely want to have your keywords rank on the first page of the SERPs, hitting number one is no more advantageous than hitting number five.

And even if you do hit that top spot on Google, rich snippets, PPC ads, Google’s answer box, maps and more are still likely to be above you.

For ranking success, it’s all about being on page one, not being number one. So focus on a broad range of keywords instead of trying to push just one or two into the top spot.

3 – Google Penalises Duplicate Site Content

This is a big one that circulates worldwide. You’ll see it left, right and centre… and it’s really not what some people make it out to be.

In fact, Google have confirmed on more than one occasion that duplicate content does not result in site penalties.

So what is actually going on here?

Let’s say that you’re a new website and you have simply copied and pasted content from another site onto your own…

Google doesn’t look at it and say “this is duplicate content, let’s give them a penalty.” It just ignores the content completely!

And this is where this myth arose from.

People were snatching content and using it on their own sites… and not ranking for it. Even though the site they took it from was on the first page!

The search engines know that duplicate content happens on a website for several reasons. So no, you are not going to be penalised for it.

However, now that you know Google simply ignores duplicate content, any duplicate content you have should be optimised so that it can rank in the SERPs.

4 – One Tool can Fix it All

You’ll see tools everywhere on the internet claiming that they have an all-in-one solution for fixing your SEO.

In a perfect world, this would be true. But this world is far from perfect…

That is not to say that there are not some truly useful SEO tools out there. But none of them are a magic solution to instantly fix all of your SEO problems on your behalf.

One of the best SEO tools that anyone can use for their website is SEMrush. Automated report detailing exactly what needs to be changed or fixed go a long way with pointing you in the right direction.

Of course, unless you are a site developer with a detailed knowledge of how to execute everything in the report, you’re going to find it tough.

Luckily, the internet is filled with useful ‘how-to’ guides and forums where you can find all of the guidance and information you need to crack on with it.

If you don’t perform a regular site audits, you won’t know what needs to be fixed. And any software that says it can fix everything for you automatically, well… we have a magical unicorn for sale for just $100,000.

5 – Header Tags are Irrelevant

Nope. Header tags are not and have never been irrelevant.

Now, we are not saying that they are a major ranking factor. Nor are they the be-all and end-all of your pages syntax.

But they definitely go a long way with helping Google and the other search engines understand your website’s content.

Using your primary keywords and semantically related keywords in your title, H1 and H2 headers, along with in your content can have a positive effect on your SEO efforts.

6 – No Sitemap Equals No Ranking

Here’s another common myth that circulates the internet like a fly around your head in summer.

Now, we are not denying that having a sitemap is useful. After all, it helps the search engines get a deeper understanding of your site structure.

However… not having a sitemap does not have an impact on where your site will rank in the SERPs.

This is especially true for small sites that have properly structured site navigation.

Of course, the larger your website is, the more a sitemap will help the search engines understand what they are looking at. And then crawl an index it much faster.

But the main point to take home from this is that having a sitemap will not boost your rankings… just help the search engines crawl and index with ease.

Not a bad thing to have really. But not the end of the world if you don’t.

7 – Avoid Outbound Links

You’ve probably heard this one before, but it goes a little something like this…

having too many outbound links on your website will pause your PageRank to drop.

First things first: PageRank is long gone for SEO average Joe’s.

Anyone who uses PageRank as a reason not to use outbound links needs to build a time machine and head back to 2013… you know, when the Google toolbar got rid of it.

The only ones who measure PageRank are Google… and as is becoming more and more common with the search engine giant, what happens in Google stays in Google.

Secondly: Google does not penalise people for using outbound links. In fact, it looks like the complete opposite. Websites linking to authoritative and useful resources are actually rewarded.

Yes, it’s true that the website you linked to receives a little bit of your domain authority. But you know what? That’s the whole point of outbound links.

You are voting for the site that you link too by telling Google “hey, I vouch for this site.”

Of course, you need to make sure that any site or content that you linked to is related to your page content or niche.

Want to save some of your link juice? Throw in a ‘nofollow’ tag.

At the end of the day, if there were no outbound links used on the internet, there would be no inbound links (backlinks).

Just make sure that what you linked to makes total sense to the search engines when it looks at both website’s content.

8 – Blackhat SEO Doesn’t Work

This is something that we’re not too happy to admit to… but blackhat SEO absolutely can work when done right. Especially when performed by someone who knows what they are doing.

But just because something works doesn’t make it right. And black hat SEO is seriously risky business for your website.

Just like the black market, black hat SEO usage loopholes, underhanded tactics, and often goes against the rules set by the search engines.

Sure, you could pay someone to cheat your way to the top. But when Google finds out, and Google always finds out, your business will be banned (de-indexed) from the search engines.

This is why, although dodgy tactics can work, it’s always better to play by the rules and develop your SEO strategies over time.

Building your rankings and developing your website is a marathon, not a sprint. Be the tortoise, not the hare… and reap the rewards for decades to come.

9. Meta Descriptions are a Ranking Factor

A few years back, meta descriptions were taking into account as part of the ranking decision. 2009 saw this all change.

Now, while meta descriptions are no longer a ranking factor, that’s not to say that they are not important. They are!

We like to keep bouncing back to user experience (UX), and a meta description can really help.

Google might not care about it anymore, but people do. It gives them an insight into what the content is about and if it’s what they are looking for.

Plugins, such as Yoast can help you create a personalised meta description. This prevents any text from being cut off in the SERPs. Thus giving the user a complete picture of what lies ahead.

A keyword here or there won’t hurt. After all, the meta description is read by the search engines for further content context.

But the main thing to remember is to always write for people and not the search engines.

10. Link building is More Important than Content

This one is probably one of the most ridiculous one on this list. link building is more important than content!

See, if you dedicate all of your time to link building, you have no time for creating content.

And here is where the problem lies.

Without quality content, people have nothing to link back to!

Of course, link building is hugely important when it comes to SEO. And having several high-quality links pointing to your site can help the search engines decide when to show you over the competition.

But to be able to attract these highly sought-after links, you first need to focus on providing high-quality content.

In fact, high quality content can generate organic links that you don’t have to work on to get.

When it comes to SEO, content is king and backlinks are brilliant. But your main focus should be content that offers value and generates natural links before moving on to link building strategies.

Final Thoughts

If you really want to know which SEO methods work, ignore what the ‘so-called’ experts are saying and look at what they are doing.

If they tell you that meta descriptions should be less than 140 characters, but they use 160, they aren’t practicing what they preach.

If they say that you’re header body copy should be less than 300 words and then go on to use 600, again, they go against what they say.

Site speed not important? Yet their site loads almost instantly… you can guarantee they spend time and money making sure it is as fast as possible.

Basically, what we are saying is that while the internet is filled with useful SEO advice, take what you read with a pinch of salt.

Many people don’t mean to add fuel to the fire by spouting out more and more myths and outdated information. But this is where a little bit of research truly comes into play.

Focus on what works… but don’t be afraid to try new methods.

For more guides about SEO, SEM, PPC, digital marketing and useful tools and software, check out our blog today.

Article first published here: 10 COMMON SEO MYTHS DEBUNKED 2019

#seo #internet marketing

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malaysiaseoservices · 6 years

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Why Backlink Is Important

Backlink is a link one website gets from another website. Backlinks make a huge impact on a website’s prominence in search engine results. This is why they are considered very useful for improving a website’s SEO ranking. Search engines calculate rankings using multiple factors to display search results. No one knows for sure how much weight search engines give to backlinks when listing results, however what we do know for certain is that they are very important. Backlinks should be natural, this means that a website must not use artificial ways to create backlinks for their own websites. The quality of links is far more important than the quantity.

SEO and backlinks go together like bread and butter. You can’t have one without the other. For that reason, every conversation about SEO involves backlinks in one way or another. It’s not ground-breaking news that it’s near enough impossible to rank without them.

1. Google Algorithm Find New Page by Backlinks.

l Lots of backlinks give you a better chance of being found quickly. Leads to faster indexing, and higher rankings, in a shorter period of time. Because backlinks are Google’s internet navigation tool, building a bunch of them to your website helps to boost the average time it takes for SEO to work. Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords (Google created a short video to explain that process). When they are deciding this, the search engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

2. Organic Traffic.

l The term “organic traffic” is used for referring to the visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which defines the visits generated by paid ads. Visitors who are considered organic find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing, so they are not “referred” by any other website.Major benefit of creating backlinks in SEO is to get more organic traffic. As said above, google give more emphasis to the pages that have higher no. of high-quality backlinks. Thus, that web page with lots of relevant backlinks ranks higher over other pages on the search engine resulting in higher traffic.

3. Quality Over Quantity

l The major search engines first came out over two decades ago, backlinks were the quickest and easiest way to get a website to rank. All people needed to do was build a website and add tons of links from anywhere on the web. The search engines got smarter and caught onto this game people were playing, causing these backlink-filled websites to tank in the rankings. As a result, backlinks got a bad reputation in the SEO industry for a while, and many believed that Google no longer recognized backlink building as a good tactic. By having quality backlinks you are attracting visitors to your site. You can’t just build a website and expect that people are going to find you without being pointed in the right direction.

4. Building Brand Awareness.

l Building brand awareness is take time to see the effectiveness. But over time, the awareness toward your product or services. To build brand awareness, you can do some posting in social media,blog or relevant forum. This way people will read your posting about your product or services. To make people read your posting, you must capturing the interest of a select group of potential customers. That said, there are times when focusing more on brand awareness is important. Especially when a business is just starting out. Building brand awareness is a great way to lay the groundwork for lead generation. And an increase in quality leads means an increase in sales. If you aren’t targeting the right audience, you won’t find success. And, if you can’t find a way to stand out, you’ll blend into the hordes of other brands competing for attention in your industry.

Backlinks should be priority in your Search Engine Optimization because of their importance. Hopefully you have gained an understanding of why your site needs quality links and are able to use the tools discussed to obtain those links.

#seo #smm #keywords #digitalmarketing #sem #marketing #backlinks #seoyv

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trylvl65please · 3 years

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Title: love finds love

Chapter 2 - wall furniture and carrot slippers

She wasn’t as lucky this time as the traffic was now mid day bumper to bumper. Small spread out rain storms were passing over her car faster then she was moving it felt like. “At least the cloudy sky is keeping the heat away,” she said groaning into her steering wheel. A horse and buggy was trotting on the side of the road it caught her eye but more so her boredom fixated her attention towards it. “Man, that horse is moving, damn look at it go, right out, of sight.” Frankie said out loud in her car. Finally traffic started to move again and she excitedly pulled it into 1st gear. Ten feet is all she got before she stopped again, this time she could see the reason for the heavily trafficked street. There was a terrible accident, and by the looks of it neither one of the drivers had seen it coming. Frankie was an excellent driver, at least she felt she was, it came easy for her mostly reading street signs and memorizing maps. She was actually almost to the library the anticipation was messing with you level of empathy. As she passed by the accident a cop nodded to her and gave a heartened smile while waving her through. Those poor souls she thought now seeing the mangled wreckage of the two merged vehicles. The ambulance had just arrived it’s siren silent they didn’t make it.

Turning the corner the library was another few blocked down the street and on the right. Hoping there wouldn’t be too difficult of a time finding a parking spot she began to hum a tune to herself. She loved the radio but something about the adventure had left a tune of her own in her head to sing. “Hmhm there once was a king who told everyone to sing oh there once was a queen that made there hearts sing oh there once was a king that offered his ring oh that queen and king made such a good team oh that king and queen danced like a dream oh whoa oh whoa oh whoa,” Frankie continued to hm her song gleefully the traffic still condensed but not nearly as troublesome as the road prior. The car into front of her had been on the seams route as her since the accident. It was in fairly good shape too much nicer then the one she was driving which was coming up on its last years. She had bought it used already from a dealership. George had helped her purchase it at a fair price even though they both knew about the same on cars. It was always smarter to have George handle business arrangements such as buying a car or dealing with the land lots of their rental home. Business men were never lenient towards women in this frame of business a terrible trait of many. Still the car was acquired at a reasonable price and it had served its purpose for a few years longer then the salesman had claimed. Overall she had taken excellent care for it with of course the added pothole damage or two.

The library was now within site and lucky enough had a parking center. The building was massive and old, as she pulled in to park the car. The main gate arched over her reading, ‘Carefree Knowledge Dances With Wisdom’s Kin’ among the top of the gate. “What an odd greeting,” she thought to herself. Now parked inside the property Frankie gazed up at the incredibly leering building. “Well better find the door to this place,” she said under her breath to herself. The front entrance steps had long grass growing out from the cracks, “this place clearly got cut from the tax budget,” Frankie murmured again to herself. The door felt huge standing in front of it, hard wood and towering high to the ceiling. She pushed and it creeped a bit surprisingly easy for such a large door. It was now ajar enough for a petite lady to slip in through and as she did she let out a awkward “Hello?” Birds scattered as her voice echoed through the open space of the darkness. Stained glass now dirty shown what was left of its once magnificent open plan. She dared and moved further into the building a hand holding to the nearest wall for guidance support and perhaps a light switch of some sort. Soon she was at the corner of the wall she was using to explore inward. She took the corner and found a light switch! “Drat it’s dead.” She said peering back into the poorly light room, her eyes were adjusting now and she was timidly making her way to what looked to be the large glossary. Placed directly center on the main floor of the room.

Her hand studied the shadows of the cabinets until she found a handle. “Just a small tug should do the trick.” She thought. The sound of it expanding open rushed back the memories of her local library as a child. Pulling the drawer and flipping through the cataloged letters and names. It was still so dark and getting darker by the minute. She looked towards the door for daylight which held very little left. But something else caught her eye too a silhouette of a lantern was catching what little left of the sun shine was still escaping into the darkness surrounding her. “Perhaps some luck then?” She said making her way to the lantern. Their was a organized dusty box of matches beside it and she lit it after calibrating the wick and removing its cover. “There, bright as rain in here now.” She whispered to herself looking back to refocus on her agenda.

“Now if I was a book of ancestry what would I be under?” She said to herself spying at the alphabetical keys affront of the drawers. “Guess I’ll start with A for ancestry,” she said greatly wished she had payed attention to the king now as the name of his linage eluded her. It wasn’t there she would not give up though and begin brain storming what other titles might hold the information she was seeking to find.

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sharepointsaketa · 4 years

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Why do SharePoint Governance Best Practices matter?

SharePoint Governance Best Practices play a major role in the smooth and efficient functioning of Advanced Collaboration platforms such SharePoint, M365, Microsoft Teams and more. Good governance can add significant value to your organization by extensively integrating this platform to your centralized business goals. A proper governance strategy connects your business and users to this platform to help, support and secure all your content and collaborative communication. It lets you:

Drive user adoption

Maximize ROI

Reduce risk.

Improve productivity and business agility.

WHY DO SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES MATTER?

With expert-curated governance plans and guidelines, a governance strategy helps support and secure the content and users of the SharePoint platform.

For instance, SharePoint is so useful and SharePoint sites can be created and deployed so quickly and easily that organizations end up in a cluttered mess. As a result, users can’t find the content they need, and administrators can’t keep track of sensitive content and protect it properly — the platform fails to meet the organization’s goals due to the governance gap. Having strong governance in place avoids these issues, enabling the business to:

• Drive user adoption — Strong governance helps ensure SharePoint content is easy to create, find and use, so users will embrace the platform rather than try to find ways to work around it.

• Maximize ROI — A governance plan helps you uncover the value of the platform and guide its strategic development, so you get the most from your investment.

• Reduce risk — A governance plan that protects business IP and is aligned with appropriate compliance regulations minimizes potentially devastating risk. For instance, a good governance plan will include provisions for regularly running audits on usage, security, content or permissions.

• Improve productivity and business agility — A well-governed SharePoint platform creates a deep pool of collective intelligence across an organization, arming users with the information and context to move faster and make smarter decisions.

PILLARS TO AWESOME SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE

Four secrets to success More broadly, you need to build trust in your SharePoint governance strategy. Following these four principles can help ensure success.

VISIBILITY

Make the work you do to define policies and procedures a matter of public discourse. One of the more successful governance initiatives I led started with a town hall event, with a Q&A for anyone interested enough to come and raise their hand. Our regular governance body meetings were open-door sessions, with end-users and executives alike joining in when something they had a vested interest in was being discussed.

REGULAR KEY UPDATES

Keep people informed about your progress. Sometimes updating a SharePoint task list at the end of the day is sufficient; sometimes more frequent communication using other tools is the right choice. Vary this collaboration level depending upon the immediacy of the workload in front of you and the maturity of your governance plan over time.

CONSTANT OPTIMIZATION

Don’t roll out a governance plan, document it in a binder, and put that binder on a shelf to gather dust and be forgotten. Project activities, reporting, and communication strategies constantly evolve because of changing business requirements, customer needs, and other factors. Keep upgrading your governance strategy for the better.

GATHER FEEDBACK, ACT ON IT

This tip was mentioned earlier but it bears repeating: Seek out feedback from your users and pay attention to it. Some people have no problem speaking up, but other people might not be so forthcoming. Look for opportunities to reach out and connect so that you can get a more complete view of what people think. When people are heard, it builds confidence in your strategy.

BEST PRACTICES FOR BUILDING A SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE STRATEGY

Developing and maintaining a strong SharePoint governance strategy requires careful planning upfront and continual nurturing and adjustments as you use the platform. The following best practices will help you throughout the process.

CREATE AN INTERNAL SHAREPOINT USER GROUP

In an ideal world, organizations will build a SharePoint governance plan before implementing the platform. If you’re proactively building a governance plan, the first step is to talk with your future users so you can understand their content, workflows and anticipated usage. However, as noted earlier, SharePoint is so useful and easy to deploy that often sites go up first and governance comes later. In that case, the first step is still the same — talk with your users! Find out how they are interacting with SharePoint, including what sites are out there, how much they are used, who has access to them, what types of content are being stored there, and what frustrations users have.

BUILD A BROADER COMMUNICATION STRATEGY

Don’t limit your communications to the SharePoint user group; you also need to keep the larger SharePoint community abreast of what is happening with the platform, including details on the governance strategy, changes to policies, site redesigns or a platform upgrade. Make sure to solicit their feedback using strategies like community sites and polls, along with data such as search metrics — and consider their ideas seriously. Governance should enable them not to prevent them from being productive. Look for ways to ensure user adoption of the platform, such as offering training and support.

PROMOTE GOVERNANCE TRANSPARENCY

Make your policies visible. When people ask questions, point them to a SharePoint site with the answers. Make the site functional and refresh it frequently; it should not be a one-time dumping ground for rarely used process documentation. This should be a working platform from which you manage your process, accept suggestions and make changes as needed.

CLEARLY DEFINE ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES.

Outline the functions required to deploy and govern your SharePoint environment at the enterprise, organizational and site levels. Define roles according to skills and interests. Define Owner, Approver, Reviewer, and Participant for each of these tasks. It is simple and clear. Determine which functions should be managed centrally and which are better handled at the site collection and site levels. SharePoint works best when the management of its many functions is distributed to the people who know how the business should be run. Be clear on w clear on what you expect from each role so people can be held accountable.

DON’T START FROM SCRATCH, TAILOR IT TO MEET YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS

Microsoft provides plenty of content around optimal settings and system limitations, and that’s a good place to start. But having a personalized strategy involving selected SharePoint Governance Best Practices always help. Just need to remember that you need to constantly refine your strategy based on a solid understanding of your own business requirements. Adapt your policies (content limits, permissions, information rights management policies, and so on) using a consistent and transparent change management process to fit into the organizational priorities.

STANDARDIZE YOUR POLICIES AND PROCEDURES.

Create policies and procedures that are consistent across your organization. A given business unit might have different information rights management rules than the rest of the company, but the policies that govern how those rules are managed should be consistent across the organization.

WHEN YOU NEED TO MIGRATE CONTENT, LEVERAGE YOUR METADATA

Resist the urge to complete migrations as quickly as possible by simply dumping all data from the source environment into the target. Instead, use your metadata to sort your content by relevance, age, popularity, team, geography and other factors. By reducing the amount of sprawl and improving organization, you will deliver a target environment that’s easier for you to manage and easier for users to navigate, reducing overhead while improving user productivity and driving platform adoption.

GOVERNANCE AND CULTURE

Organizational culture plays a major role in governance planning as well as implementation. Define the rules applied to SharePoint management that is valid for everyone in the company with maybe different permission levels. For example, some people might believe that it is better for users to create their own sites on SharePoint while some might consider such vast and unrestricted access to SharePoint to be a major risk factor. There are many other areas in SharePoint related to the use of data, where it is stored, and who has access to that data and all you must do is, follow the basic SharePoint governance best practices and plan judiciously according to your organizational needs.

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gpnationalcrane · 4 years

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Hard Hats & Crafts – Celebrating Women Leaders in Construction Safety

The following article has been sponsored by Hilmerson Safety and also appeared first on HilmersonSafety.com.

Defying stereotypes is nothing new for these women leaders in construction. Since the 90’s and early 2000’s they’ve paved new paths for women pursuing careers in construction safety. How did they start? Who mentored them? What were challenges they overcame? What would they do differently? For Women in Construction (WIC) Week 2021 Hilmerson Safety® celebrates women in the field by sharing their stories. Thanks to all who participated!

Marni Hogen, 19 Years’ Experience

Marni Hogen, Director of Health and Safety at Mortenson

How did you get into the Construction industry?

I Interviewed with Mortenson as well as a few other companies (and other industries) in grad school.

I appreciated the classroom presentation Mortenson gave to our class and the focus that was placed on Mortenson being a family-owned business and having a family feel. Then, when I walked a project as part of my second interview I fell in love with the people and the business. The exciting buzz of activity on site as well as the genuine and good-hearted nature of the craft workers in the field. I quickly appreciated the fact that this business is not about who you know it’s about how hard you work and earning the respect of your team.

What was your first job in construction – what is a favorite memory from that experience?

My first project was a Wind Turbine project in the mountains of West Virginia. I made amazing friends on that project that still feel a bit like family to this day.

I remember early on in the project my Superintendent taking me out and asking me to look at a connection on an air compressor hose. He asked if I knew what I was looking at and I said no. He explained Chicago couplers to me and the need to always have a cotter pin, how whip checks worked and that it was important they sit above and below (not on) the fitting.

There were grumblings that he didn’t like having women on his sites and those got back to me, but I didn’t let it bother me. A few years later we were on another project together and he asked me to go for a ride in his truck.

He came clean on the grumblings and admitted he didn’t really know what to do with me when I showed up on his last site. I asked him if he remembered the first thing, he ever taught me and he said “no”. I said, “I do” and I recounted for him exactly what he had taught me about Chicago couplers. I told him he didn’t have to do anything different with me because I was a girl, I just needed him to teach me and treat me like he treated everyone else because I wanted to learn.

What educational background / professional training did you have at that point?

I had a master’s degree in environmental health and safety, but I didn’t know a thing about construction. I was asking questions like crazy and spending every minute I could onsite learning everything I could about construction from the crews in the field!

Tell us about other positions in Construction you have had since – what has been most rewarding?

SE, SEII, Sr. SE, Safety Manager, OGSD, Director and now Senior Director of Health and Safety. I really enjoyed my time as a Senior Safety Engineer. I was working in Seattle with a great team of salaried and craft team members. I spent all of my time either onsite or doing craft training at the time.

I really enjoyed the relationships I built there. As OGSD for our Federal Contracting Group we worked with a lot of smaller trade partners across the country, it was rewarding to help educate those trade partners and I believe by sharing our programs we helped make a positive and lasting impact to their business and the safety of their workers.

What were challenges you overcame?

Working in certain parts of the country, as a younger female safety director, I sometimes felt as if I wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt by owners or trade partners. My group and project leaders always made sure to open the door for me in meetings or other engagements. I knew once I had the floor, if I knew my stuff, they’d listen. It motivated me to always be on top of my game and earn my CSP credentials.

Do you have any advice for young women pursuing careers in construction?

Don’t hesitate, go for it. Regardless of age, race, gender, political belief…construction is not for the faint of heart. But if you’re up for hard, fast-paced work, and you are willing to put in long hours with some of the most genuine and caring people you’ve ever met…you’ll find it extremely rewarding.

Construction is as much about building relationships as it is about building buildings, but most people don’t realize that until you are in the industry. Each site is like a tight knit family. You joke around over coffee before work starts, have lunch together, go for happy hour after work…everyone looks out for each other…it becomes a second family.

Is there anything you wish you had done differently in your career?

I wish that as I was learning the work in the field, I would have taken time to learn the “business” side of our industry. I waited until I was an OGSD to give that much attention and I likely missed the opportunity to learn more from some great project managers and engineers in the field.

What is the most iconic or favorite project you’ve worked on and why?

I’ve been a part of some cool projects but when I think of my favorite projects I think of the people. We worked really long hours in hard conditions on my first wind project, but as I mentioned earlier, I made life-long friends on that job.

I love going back to Seattle and (preCOVID) giving/getting big hugs from the craft workers that were on my projects when I lived out there, catching up on their wives, kids, grand kids, retirement plans…and I haven’t lived there in 12 years. Over the years I realized it is way less about what we are building, for me, it is about who I am building it with.

Do you have a favorite mentor or someone who is always there for you or you count on to have your back?

I still have the pleasure of working with Fravel Combs who hired me out of grad school and has been an outstanding resource throughout my career. I have moved around a lot in the organization and have always been fortunate to have great leaders, teammates, and talented craft that were willing to answer my questions and help me learn.

What are a few of the biggest differences in the industry from when you began your career in construction?

The bathroom lines at the women’s room are getting longer : ) We still have a few rough edges, but I think we are more conscious and considerate of each other’s feelings than we maybe were when I started. We have a greater technology focus in the field to help us work smarter, not just harder.

When you started your career did you have to share the portable toilets with the men, or did you have your own -:)

I think I had my own, but I feel like there was usually only one and it was rarely convenient, so I usually bucked up and shared.

Lisa Hollingsworth, 31 Years’ Experience

Lisa Hollingsworth, Safety Investigator Principal for Partnerships-Department of Labor and Industry-MNOSHA

How did you get into the construction industry?

I started as a laborer for a Precast company and did that for 8 yrs. It was a great paying job with good benefits. I liked working outside on something that changed every day. As I got further into my construction career understanding the entire building process fascinated me.

What was your first job in construction – what is a favorite memory from that experience?

My construction job was working on the parking ramps at the Mall of America. At the time it was the biggest project in the state and something great to be a part of.

What educational background / professional training did you have at that point?

4-year BA in Business Management.

Tell us about other positions in Construction you have had since – what has been most rewarding?

Safety Engineer for Mortenson 6 year, Safety Consultant 6 yrs and Safety Investigator MNOSHA going on 11 yrs. The most rewarding thing about being a safety person is giving people the information that makes sure they go home every day after work safe and in good health

What were challenges you overcame?

The most challenging thing I had to overcome when I first started as a safety person was having a project Superintendent see me as a resource and not as a “safety cop” making the job harder. I had to work to earn their trust and make sure they knew I was there to help them not make their life harder so to speak. Changing a safety culture takes time and trust is huge in construction.

Do you have any advice for young women pursuing careers in construction?

Learn as much as you can about the building process. Understanding the entire building process will make you a valuable asset.

Is there anything you wish you had done differently in your career? Are there other job opportunities or careers you would like to explore?

I really love what I do, and construction has offered many opportunities.

What is the most iconic or favorite project you’ve worked on and why?

I had the opportunity to work on the Xcel Energy Center when I worked for Mortenson. I played hockey and I love hockey so what a better project to be a part of. My 14-year-old son plays hockey and I tell him all about the arena stuff when we go there. When he was little, he would say “my Mom worked on that!”

Do you have a favorite mentor or someone who is always there for you or you count on to have your back?

Deb Hilmerson has been a great mentor to for me. She got me started in construction and helped me get my job at Mortenson. So, I might not be doing what I am doing today if she hadn’t paved the way for me. Doug Swenson with the AGC of MN has been a great mentor and taught me everything I know about cranes and heavy equipment. We have also been doing the CHASE Partnership Program at OSHA for the last 8 years successfully!

What are a few of the biggest differences in the industry from when you began your career in construction"?

When I started safety was something you did because the safety person said you had to. Now companies do it because it’s the right thing to do.

When you started your career did you have to share the portable toilets with the men or did you have your own -:)

Ha Ha! I usually went to SA if I had time! 😂

Diane Randolph, 22 Years’ Experience

Diane Randolph, Safety Director at Danny’s Construction Company

How did you get into the Construction industry?

I started as an Admin Assistant then moved to Work Comp Claims help, to full time Safety, to Safety Director.

What educational background / professional training did you have at that point?

BA teaching degree, then my CSP, CHST OSHA 500 etc.

What position has been most rewarding?

Changing the views of seasoned ironworkers to change their position about safety. Saving lives!

What were challenges you overcame?

Telling seasoned ironworkers that I actually know what I was talking about 22 years ago in a very male world. Then, fun to see later them telling other workers “yes, listen to Diane, she knows what she is talking about.”

Do you have any advice for young women pursuing careers in construction?

Listen, learn and never, never try to tell someone about something that you do not know about. Stand up for yourself.

Is there anything you wish you had done differently in your career?

I would have pursued my CSP sooner.

What is the most iconic or favorite project you’ve worked on and why?

So many, US Bank, Target field, Warriors stadium, Climate pledge arena, RR bridge over Mississippi river, built on 5 barges in the water, Golden Gate Bridge suicide deterrent.

What are a few of the biggest differences in the industry from when you began your career in construction?

More women working in the field, better safety equipment, and now Women’s port-a-johns.

When you started your career did you have to share the portable toilets with the men or did you have your own -:)

There was never my own! But now there are women’s which is so much nicer, just need GC to put a combo lock on instead of a key as there is never a key for me as I am not there every day.

Bonnie Lunzer, 21 Years’ Experience

Bonnie Lunzer, Claims Manager at Parsons Electric

How did you get into the construction industry?

As a Workers’ Compensation claims representative, I was only involved after the injury occurred. I wanted to be more proactive and prevent the injuries. I knew how to help people with the recovery process, but I didn’t want them hurt in the first place!

Tell us about your first job in construction – what is a favorite memory from that experience?

My first job was Safety Director for a small Subcontractor who employed 5 different Trades. It was exhilarating to be on construction sites, learning all the safety regulations, hazard recognition, and safe work methods. One of my first days, my boss and I inspected a scaffolding in the Minneapolis Convention Center Expansion project, where he taught me everything about scaffold safety.

What were challenges you overcame?

In 2000, there were only a few women in construction safety, and frankly not that many women in the Trades. It was a challenge to earn respect and a “spot” on the team. There were even some who perceived me as taking a job ‘away from a man’, who needed it to support his family.

Do you have any advice for young women pursuing careers in construction?

Pursuing Construction Safety: Respect the Tradesperson’s experience, while trusting that you have valuable insight and expertise in hazard recognition and safe work methods. You are part of the team, and a resource who can help them plan their tasks. The right way or efficient way includes safety at its core. To quote Ergodyne, “be tenacious”!

What is the most iconic or favorite project you’ve worked on and why?

I have been very fortunate to work on a wide variety of projects such as refineries, hospitals, data centers, and stadiums. The Vikings (US Bank) Stadium is likely my favorite because it is in my hometown. I have fond memories of using the tallest lift (328’) in the country—which required our employees to perform evacuation training by falling backwards & repelling down out of the basket!

Do you have a favorite mentor or someone who is always there for you or you count on to have your back?

Terry Hukriede, who is retired from Adolfson & Peterson. You always knew he cared … enough to laugh at you when you fell (figuratively) and help you get back up and try to be smarter the next time.

What are a few of the biggest differences in the industry from when you began your career in construction?

Smoking! I was shocked by my first Foreman meetings where we had 30 people sitting in folding chairs smoking … even with the garage door open, I couldn’t breathe.

When you started your career did you have to share the portable toilets with the men or did you have your own -:)

I usually tried to hold it until I could leave… and stop drinking water if it would be a long day:) Thank goodness for Caribou Coffee bathrooms.

Abby Ferri, 18 Years’ Experience

Abby Ferri, Senior Risk Control Consultant at Gallagher

How did you get into the construction industry?

I worked in the Boldt Construction office as an assistant and was curious about what the “safety guys” did. Both of them had graduated from UMD’s MEHS program, and encouraged me to check it out, so I did! My first position was as a Safety Director for a general engineering firm in Southern California. I was ready to leave Northern Minnesota and take on the challenge.

Tell us about your first job in construction – what is a favorite memory from that experience?

The company built water and wastewater treatment facilities, it’s intense work. My favorite memories involve times that I was able to work together proactively with the crews and supervisors to anticipate safety needs before dangerous or complex work.

What educational background / professional training did you have at that point?

I graduated from UMD with a degree in Exercise Science and immediately followed that with a master’s degree in Environmental Health and Safety. At my first job I was allowed to take courses through the local OSHA Institute and attended training offered by the Associated General Contractors of San Diego Chapter.

Tell us about other positions in Construction you have had since – what has been most rewarding?

I worked as a Site Safety and Health Officer (SSHO) for a couple of large/complex projects at Camp Pendleton, I’ve been a risk control consultant for two insurance carriers focused on the construction book, I was the Safety Director for the AGC of Minnesota and ran my own safety consulting firm for 8 years. I enjoy jobs that allow me to have a consulting mindset and have impact on multiple projects and groups of people. In my current position, I’ve been able to use everything I’ve learned on the job to help my fellow safety professionals in their work.

What were challenges you overcame?

Challenges have included time management and overcoming poor attitudes related to safety. I’m excited that “psychological safety” and Total Worker Health are gaining in popularity as I think they are missing pieces to true safety success in the construction industry. We CAN show that we care about our people, and we should do that every chance we get.

Do you have any advice for young women pursuing careers in construction?

It’s been a fun and rewarding field for me, and I’ve always enjoyed working with other women in the field too – whether it’s trades workers or project managers. We have an understanding of what each other may go through on the jobsite, and as a woman who has been in the field for almost 20 years, I’m always looking for ways to make sure any challenges I faced are less challenging for the young women entering the industry now.

The PPE and gear have even evolved so suit any style or fit, which may seem superficial, but it’s helped my personal confidence tremendously.

Construction is a fun and intense field; you have the opportunity to learn something new every day. Get out there and observe, ask questions, research, and bring your perspective to the table.

Is there anything you wish you had done differently in your career? Are there other job opportunities or careers you would like to explore?

I really don’t have any regrets. In job interviews, people would often look at my resume and say I “jumped around too much.” I feel that’s the nature of the construction industry. When a company’s culture or approach doesn’t suit you, you can go somewhere else. When the work “dries up” you HAVE to find something else. I’ve weathered an economic downturn and a pandemic in addition to the usual ups and downs of construction. I’m grateful for each experience I’ve had and would encourage others to always be aware of what’s out there and keep your network fresh. I would like to learn more about the operations and management side of construction. Early in my career, someone told me I’d make a good VP of Operations or COO. So, if I pursue further education, I’d keep that in mind!

What is the most iconic or favorite project you’ve worked on and why?

As a direct employee, the jobsite that stands out to me is the MARSOC HQ at Camp Pendleton. You can see it from the 5 freeway when you drive between San Diego and Orange County. It was a complex, complicated, and fun project. I still keep in touch with people from the project team and still think of lessons learned on that job. I treasure the challenge coin and awards received for safety performance at that job. WE earned them!

Do you have a favorite mentor or someone who is always there for you or you count on to have your back?

When I have questions or concerns about construction, safety, and risk, I turn to Deb Hilmerson, Fay Feeney, and a handful of other trusted advisors in my network depending on the specific topic. Construction and safety professionals are a tight knit group!

What are a few of the biggest differences in the industry from when you began your career in construction?

The construction industry is more inclusive and self-aware. Instead of priding ourselves on being rough and tumble, cowboys, or other construction stereotypes, the industry has really done a lot of reflection and has become a leader in the inclusion, diversity, and equity topics of the day. Look at the Ironworkers and their “be that one guy” campaign for example. Also, how the industry is mindful of the suicide epidemic and is intentional about providing education on suicide prevention. We can’t and we’re not shying away from difficult topics and we’ll be stronger for that.

When you started your career did you have to share the portable toilets with the men or did you have your own-:)

OMG, I had to share until I was on some larger projects with more women where it tipped the scales to do the right thing and provide a separate locked porta potty. I’ll never forget seeing the half porta potties on a high rise in Chicago and holding it through a long and windy site walk during the winter! Oh, the stories we all can tell about porta potties… I learned early in my career to never miss an opportunity to use a REAL toilet. The industry is getting better though, especially post-COVID and the need to provide sufficient washing facilities.

Janet Artmann, 26 Years’ Experience

Janet Artmann, Operations Coordinator at Bauer Design Build

How did you get into the industry?

Fell into it. I was working for a plastic surgeon in Edina, had a bad scare w/icy roads and decided I needed to get a job closer to home. Ended up going to a temp. agency, which placed me at Shingobee Builders, where I stayed for 18 years.

Why did you start working in construction/take the position?

I was young and running out of money, lol!

Tell us about your first job in construction – what is a favorite memory from that experience?

My first job was at Shingobee Builders, as a temp. One of my favorite memories was when I was asked why I was still there…. because normally the temps left within a week or so, and was then offered a full-time position.

What educational background / professional training did you have at that point?

Medical transcriptionist.

Tell us about other positions in Construction you have had since – what has been most rewarding?

I have held a few different roles/positions in the industry: Project Assistant, Project Coordinator, Senior Project Coordinator, Assistant Safety Director, Safety Director, Office Manager, and Operations Coordinator. I would say that each role has been rewarding in its own way. As a PA – learning the basics of construction, moving into the PC role & having more knowledge of the industry and realizing how much I enjoyed it. In the safety roles its rewarding to have a hand in making sure everyone goes home at night.

What were challenges you overcame?

I would say the biggest challenge I overcame was construction being a male dominant field. The owner at the time was female, which was part of the reason I accepted the temp position. She was an amazing leader!

Do you have any advice for young women pursuing careers in construction?

Be confident. Ask questions. Empower each other. Learn your job better than anyone else and trust yourself.

Is there anything you wish you had done differently in your career? Are there other job opportunities or careers you would like to explore?

This is a hard question. I think back and question where I would be at now had I gone to college; would I still be in this industry? If I had taken another path, would I still be in that career? One thing for sure about construction, no job is ever the same, and I still learn new things each day. I also have to say the circle of people in the construction industry that you meet are some of the best around.

What is the most iconic or favorite project you’ve worked on and why?

It would have to be the US West in Duluth back in the late 90’s. It was a tenant build-out, but I was able to run that project at the time. As a PC, I rarely was able to do PM work, but every once in a while, I did. This was a smaller project, and I had the most amazing team to help me out. Larry Palm with Ace Electric would come to the meetings early and walk me through the electrical portion of the job. I learned so much from Larry, Steve Marcello, and our Superintendent on that job.

Do you have a favorite mentor or someone who is always there for you or you count on to have your back?

Yes, I have been very fortunate to have a few good mentors. I may get myself in trouble here, but I would have to say that my favorite was Steve Schultz. Steve and I worked together for about 18 years, and he always had my back. He had an open-door policy and he lived by that. He was never too busy for a question, to bounce an idea off, or just listen. The construction industry lost a great leader when he retired.

What are a few of the biggest differences in the industry from when you began your career in construction?

Technology is by far the biggest difference, when I first started out, I would have to stand at the fax machine for a day to send out bid invitations, make 20 sets of plans to rotate in and out to subcontractors, etc.

When you started your career did you have to share the portable toilets with the men or did you have your own -:)

*shudder* I had to share, and still do on some sites.

About Hilmerson Safety

Hilmerson Safety® is a full-service safety product design and manufacturing company serving the construction, manufacturing, facilities, solar, and oil and gas industries. Since 2001, Hilmerson Safety® has been collaborating with construction industry leaders and contractors to develop safe, lean, construction-grade™ products and solutions that add to the company’s bottom line. Contact us for more information on our patented and innovative Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ and Hilmerson Barrier Fence System™.

source https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2021/3/8/hard-hats-amp-crafts-celebrating-women-leaders-in-construction-safety from G P NATIONAL CRANES LTD https://gpnationalcrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/hard-hats-crafts-celebrating-women.html

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bhavanipendem · 4 years

Text

How to Calculate the lead score and its benefits

When most SMEs start drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding, mostly they are worried about not getting enough leads into the funnel.

But once you get enough leads, then what? Well, then you need to figure out who is interested in your product or service and who is just starting to look around.

That’s where lead scoring comes around.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. The resulting score is used to determine which leads a receiving function will engage, in order of priority. The score leads based on the interest they show in your business, their current place in the buying cycle, and their fit regarding your business.

In 2020 there are already many sales challenges for SMEs. So, lead scoring could be one of the most vital methods for SMEs to implement. Lead Scoring allows a business to customize a prospect’s experience based on his or her buying stage and interest level and greatly improves the quality and readiness of leads that are delivered to sales organizations for follow up. A lead scoring system allows you to take the subjectivity out of the process and truly understand which leads have the best chance of converting.

The first goal of companies is to get sales leads or prospects into their pipeline, but once a substantial number of leads have been obtained, companies need to focus on the prospects that are most interested in buying, which is where lead scoring can play an important role.

Key Benefits of Lead Scoring

When a lead scoring model is effective, the key benefits are:

Increased sales effectiveness and efficiency: Lead scoring focuses sales attention on leads that the organization deems most valuable, ensuring that leads that are unqualified or have low perceived value are not sent to sales for engagement.

Increased marketing effectiveness: A lead scoring model quantifies for marketers, the type of leads or leads characteristics that matter the most. This helps the marketing team more effectively target its inbound and outbound programs and deliver more high-quality leads to sales.

Tighter marketing and sales alignment: Lead scoring helps strengthen the relationship between marketing and sales by establishing a common language with which marketing and sales leaders can discuss the quality and quantity of leads generated.

Increase in Revenue: Lead scoring also ensures that sales go first for leads that are qualified by their scores. The probability of a lead with higher scores closing is higher than one with a lower score. This indirectly contributes to the growth in revenue as well.

Lead scoring process

Sales and marketing departments agree on the definition of a qualified lead to start the lead scoring process. To score a lead, information is gathered about the lead’s occupation and role in that industry to determine whether they’re appropriate to sell to. Information about a lead’s activities, demographics, or areas of interest also comes into play when figuring out whether that lead would be interested in a company’s products. Even if your company is a service provider, you have to go through the same type of procedure, your leads i.e. your audience activities, areas of interest come to play.

Each action is assigned a value depending on how likely the software predicts that action will lead to a purchase or success. Leads who are a fit and who have expressed a high interest in a company are deemed marketing-qualified leads and are typically passed to sales departments, whereas those who are deemed a good fit but with minimal interaction are sent to marketing teams for lead nurturing.

Metrics that companies use to measure a lead’s interest include which email messages lead to responses; which pages they visit on the company website; and how long they visited, any forms they filled out or downloaded, or whether they clicked on a blog post or connected via social media. The importance of various metrics can change depending on whether the company is selling a product or service and what industry they are selling to.

Lead scoring ways

Companies use various ways to determine the success of lead scoring efforts, and the importance of those ways varies from company to company. Some companies use lead scoring software to manage their leads, it is a very efficient way of doing it. Some examples of lead scoring software are ActiveCampaign, Vanilla Soft, Velocity lead manager, etc. This software is rented from ₹600 a month to ₹6000, the price can also depend on how much you are using the software or how much it is providing you. This way is not so suitable for SMEs and is not suggested but it is surely advised. There are also many other ways to lead scoring, examples of lead scoring ways include the following:

Unsubscribe rates on emails can measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and diagnose inaccurate targeting methods or flaws in the content itself. Conversely, response rates can measure the quality and effect of the produced content.

Average engagement per lead is determined by comparing lead scores of nurtured leads against leads that haven’t been touched by any sort of materials. A drop in this shows a need to update content or explore a new way of bringing leads to the company. If companies focus on guiding prospects to perform a specific activity, the success of those efforts can show the effectiveness of certain types of content as well.

Customer’s response If they find content on a third-party site and click on it or download it, the prospect may be just gathering information on the software market. If they exhibit buying signals by following or interacting with social media accounts, requesting trials or demos, or visiting pricing pages, they may gain a higher lead score.

Sales time is the total time it takes for a lead to become a customer. The shorter the sales cycle, the better the lead and scoring process is because of the cost-benefit of gaining that new customer.

Upsell and cross-sell opportunities help determine the revenue per customer. Companies aim for highly engaged leads that are well-versed in products that they might want to buy.

Now with all this information, your company can itself create a new lead scoring technique relevant to your sales and services. But to help you out here is a way how you can calculate a basic lead score

How to Calculate a Basic Lead Score

There are a lot of ways to calculate a lead score. The simplest way to do this is:

Manual Lead Scoring

Calculate the lead-to-customer conversion rate of your leads.

Your lead-to-customer conversion rate is equal to the number of new customers you acquire, divided by the number of leads you generate. Use this conversion rate as your benchmark.

Pick and choose different attributes customers who you believe were higher quality leads.

Attributes could be customers who requested a free trial at some point, or customers in the finance industry, or customers with 10-20 employees. You’ll choose attributes based on those conversations you had with your sales team, your analytics, and so on — but overall, it’s a judgment call. You could have five different people do the same exercise, and they could come up with five different models. But that’s okay as long as your scoring is based on the data we mentioned previously.

Calculate the individual close rates of each of those attributes.

Calculating the close rates of each type of action a person takes on your website is important because it dictates the actions you’ll take in response. So, figure out how many people become qualified leads based on the actions they take or who they are about your core customer. You’ll use these close rates to score them.

Compare the close rates of each attribute with your overall close rate, and assign point values accordingly.

Look for the attributes with close rates that are significantly higher than your overall close rate. Then, choose which attributes you’ll assign points to, and if so, how many points. Base the point values of each attribute on the magnitude of their close rates.

The actual point values will be a little random, but try to be as consistent as possible. For example, if your overall close rate is 1% and your requested demo close rate is 20%, then the close rate of the requested demo attribute is 20X your overall close rate — so you could, for example, award 20 points to leads with those attributes.

Conclusion

According to Sirius Decisions, 68 per cent of B2B companies have some form of lead scoring, but only 40 per cent of salespeople get value from it! For lead scoring technology to provide value, it has to be smarter. According to Gartner, 70 per cent of leads are lost from poor follow-up. Organizations need a full-time, intelligent system for monitoring successes and failures. One that automatically adjusts the scoring based on real-time data and results. There’s no doubting that lead scoring systems are often time-consuming to set up. Not only do you have to first come up with and implement scoring guidelines that both the marketing and sales departments are happy with but you also need to already have a database of quality leads to look at so you have a basic idea of what makes up a quality lead for your business.

But once you do get a system in place, there’s no end to the improvements it can bring. Any one of the five benefits of lead scoring I’ve outlined above will significantly improve your business efficiency and work to bring you better, higher-quality customers that are worth more in the long run.

The market is full of people trying to make it big in the game. And since there is a ton of competition out there you better want yourself to be ahead of others. And You can find such important information for SMEs, sales, and market-related strategies and a lot of such blogs which will help you to be ahead of others with us on Insellers. Log in for more.

Now the market is overflowing with the business people who are in race to become famous in the game. hence, there is a huge load of rival rout there you better need yourself to be in front of others. We at insellers have just done all the examination and going around for you. We disclose to you the not all that regularly discussed moving dream to reality accounts of SMEs and new companies, to move the Entrepreneur in you. And we insellers are read to share your stories and experiences just Contact Us and be first.

#leadscore #leads #digitalmarketing #calculate

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epackingvietnam · 4 years

Text

Maximize Return During Tough Times Through Testing

Posted by timaj100

We are living in a fast-moving time with new technology, ever-evolving social and political landscapes, and a pandemic on top of that. Any predictions about what to expect in 2020 for marketers was no doubt lightyears off what we’re experiencing now.

So what can we learn from this year as we move forward? You can bet things will continue to change and evolve in unpredictable ways. What worked last year might not work now. Heck, what worked last week might not work next week! How, then, can you be sure you’re getting the most out of your marketing efforts?

Evolving and finding opportunities

There are a few ways you can try to stay on top of things. No matter what, having a strategy for post-COVID is important.

Learn from others

For one, pay attention to those around you. Learn from your peers and competitors. Some may be sharing: read blogs, watch webinars, consume all you can in your space. But you can uncover even more by doing things like conducting a competitive analysis of other sites, advertising messaging, advertising spend, and content creation.

Learn from yourself and adapt

Pay attention to your own analytics and results closely. Take in what you are seeing and adapt. Have a willingness to branch out and pivot strategy based on what the data is telling you. Again, something that worked before may not be working now, and vice versa.

Always. Be. Testing.

Knowing for sure what is going to work for your business, in your space, and at this particular time is a tough task. So the only way to find out for sure and stay on top of the changing trends is testing. We’re all vulnerable right now — and any time tough circumstances fall on us. Figuring out a new course of action, whether it is macro marketing decisions or micro adjustments, is key.

What to test

It’s easy to sit here and say “test to see what works and go with that”, but that can mean a lot of things. As I tie this back into maximizing your return during tough times, let’s talk about where to start first as you look to elevate your marketing and drive revenue and return.

Too often I see brands being timid in times of crisis. There is something to be said about caution, but testing and learning shouldn’t be a risk — it’s an opportunity.

The reality is, every industry is being affected in different ways in 2020. But challenging times come for us all, and when they do, focus on these few areas first.

Advertising

Advertising is always one of the first areas I look to when testing. It’s a fantastic testing ground that is often more controlled, and in which it’s easier to identify new, successful opportunities. You can look at ad copy, keywords, landing page content, calls to action, audiences, and different strategies altogether within the advertising platform.

We’ve measured positive results for clients in varying industries and in different platforms by changing aspects of the ads we ran.

For an SMB bike helmet retailer, we focused on creating social media ads during the peak of the pandemic that showcased a single rider as opposed to a group, typically in a more open environment instead of the city. Copy was also shifted to emphasize things like “embrace open space” and alluded to socially distanced riding without explicitly saying.

Due to the economic uncertainty of the time, our client scaled back the budget by nearly 44% in April, contributing to a 43% decrease in overall impression share. Despite this overall decrease, the click-through rate (CTR) increased by 61% in that month, the return on ad spend (ROAS) jumped from 0.25 to 1.34, and overall purchases more than doubled.

We saw similar results in a PPC campaign for a network security client. As many employees began working from home, we needed to position our client as a security solution provider for remote workers. Competition rose during the pandemic, which resulted in higher click costs and, despite increasing the overall ad spend, fewer clicks.

To improve our ads, we updated the copy to speak to users in need of remote security solutions and included free trial messaging. We also moved away from taking users to the homepage, instead directing them to a product-specific landing page that served as a remote worker solution hub. Doing this helped to focus the user’s path of exploration to pages that are more relevant to them at the time versus a homepage where their scope of exploration is wider and less tailored.

Making these adjustments in our paid ad campaigns increased the CTR by 11% and conversions by 31%. And since we were sending users to a more focused landing page and not the homepage, the user’s path to conversion was shortened and the conversion rate increased by 44%.

Use your advertising as a way to learn and inform other marketing efforts. A great example of this is ad copy headlines. Consider A/B testing headlines to see which is more captivating and clickable, and then roll those findings out to title tags on the SEO side of things to see similar benefits there.

Content

Run A/B tests for different aspects of your on-site content. Conversion rate optimization is a powerful tactic. This might mean trying new copy, new design, new imagery, new calls to action, or simply title tags and on-page SEO updates. Really everything on your site, in your emails, or any pieces of content you have created falls into this category. I’m not suggesting overhauling things, but don’t just stick with the tried-and-true when the industry and users are changing around you.

To give you an idea of what testing can do, Portent ran an A/B test for a client to see which of two forms performed better, the original form they had been using or a modified version, which removed non-pertinent information from the top of the form.

Switching to the modified form increased form fills by 6% across all devices and a 14% increase on mobile devices. On top of that, phone calls increased by 22%—all from a simple A/B test.

Goals

Experiment with different ideas of what a conversion even is. If sales are down, consider something like driving more email sign-ups as an alternative. It may not be the primary end goal, but can still add value and contribute to your marketing funnel.

If lead form submissions are down, consider driving traffic to a white paper download, or some alternative value-add to the end user. As primary conversion points slow, look for other ways to drive value and build to the future productively.

Promotions

More specific to the e-commerce space traditionally, testing new and creative promotions and sales may help provide a much needed lift in conversion rates. In today’s space specifically, many customers are experiencing tough times, too. Something as simple as offering a discount, even if it’s a small one, could be what is needed to get them to purchase. You may need to get creative with your promotions to drive people to your site, especially when competition is fierce.

A streaming service client ran a campaign in April when competition in the streaming industry was extremely high. To really stand out against competitors, most of which were offering free trials or adding new content, we needed to take a different approach. We offered to pay someone to do what they were already doing during quarantine—bingeing TV.

This campaign resulted in the site gaining over 1,200 new links and media coverage on various online outlets, driving nearly 154,000 referrals to the site (a 634% increase in referral traffic period over period). Overall, we saw an 86% increase in organic traffic period over period and there were over 343,000 new sessions on the site, more than 83% of which were new users. We also offered an extended free trial during the campaign, resulting in over 650 conversions.

Outside the e-commerce space, find ways to lower the barrier to entry and boost conversion rates in the short term. That might mean pushing traffic to more simplified forms or just asking less of the individual converting. In circumstances like what we are currently experiencing, something is better than nothing.

How to test

The “how” of testing is very easily its own post with many layers to it, from user research to focus groups. For most that are trying to maximize return for their business, that can be overcomplicating things. That said, there are some simple things you can easily do to test smarter and learn quickly.

Research

To start, do your homework. As mentioned before, do competitive research and learn from others. Review the keyword landscape and understand search trends so you can make updates to copy and content intelligently. Know your audience and personas before making updates.

This is essentially taking the guesswork out of it. If you are going to the trouble of testing something new, have research and data to support your hypothesis.

Use tools

Marketing testing tools come in many different shapes and sizes. There really is something for all situations. Here are a few great tools that can help you accomplish the following:

Keyword research — Google Keyword Planner, Moz Pro, SEMRush, Ahrefs

Conversion rate optimization — Optimizely, Google Optimize

Email marketing tools — HubSpot, MailChimp, Constant Contact

Heatmapping — Hotjar, CrazyEgg, Lucky Orange

Landing page testing — Unbounce, Instapage

Hopefully, you’ve been using some of these or your own preferred tools already. Lean into your tools—they will make things easier and help you drive results more quickly.

Don’t rush

Set your tests up as scientifically as you can and require statistical significance before drawing conclusions. It’s easy to get impatient and quickly make changes when you see results coming in. But, let the data do the talking and give your tests time to run their course.

Have a testing budget

Remember: this is a test! It’s easy to see results that you don’t want, panic and pull the plug. If you are investing in testing, have a budget that allows for that.

Set clear goals and expectations

Before you start your test, define success. What are you trying to accomplish? Make sure all stakeholders have the same set of expectations for what you are trying to discover and what goals your test supports.

Wrapping it all up

Tough times happen. Many businesses are facing them right now and will likely continue to. Don’t give up hope. Do your research and be nimble. You can find where your biggest pain points are and thoughtfully test solutions.

And remember, testing never ends. It’s an ongoing process in the continuous quest to drive the best results you can.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THINGS

It means that if you pick some number to focus on. I said in the second version. Except in the degenerate case, economic inequality can't be described by a ratio or even a curve.1 Boats have long had spines and ribs like an animal's ribcage.2 Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are very bad, like kids with no chance of reaching their potential, and others that are good, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting the company you usually give up in a fake world. There are some sterling exceptions, but as the corpus grows such tuning will happen automatically anyway. Apparently the most likely outcome is a $20 million acquisition if they can get around that. One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who get rich by playing games that though not crooked are zero-sum game there is at least a limit to the number who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with a couple thousand people each.

A few months ago, one VC firm almost certainly unintentionally published a study showing bias of this type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements are. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as angels and super-angels may be smarter than they seem. We currently fund about 40 companies a year, selected from about 900 applications representing a total of about 2000 people. And in fact they do all look the same. Then you'd automatically get your share of the returns of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings—or at least businesslike, but often they're not. And that being so, revenues would continue to flow in, so you'd have security as well. In fact, users expect a site to improve. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you're doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to be on it, or friends with those who are. 6 years to go public. A startup has to sing for its supper. So I've thought a lot about where to live. I doubt it would amount to much more than the definition implies.3

Law firms then made no pretense of paying people according to the value of what they create, give them the actual market value? Instead of acting tough, what most startups should do is simply always have a backup plan.4 Ok, sure, what you want. A recent survey found 52% of companies are very much influenced by where applicants went to college. Telling a child they have a termsheet, so called because it outlines the key terms of a deal. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. VCs have been provoked by their arrival into making a lot of data about that. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is show, don't tell.

Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or break his pencil in half. Now I know I don't.5 How important it is for many software startups because they're now so cheap. The chance of getting rejected after the full partner meeting where the firm as a whole says yes or no. Interestingly, while Kate said that she could never pick out successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way they dressed and the way they dressed and the way they speak. Experts expect to throw away some early work. That's the only rational explanation for focusing on getting the right valuations, instead of blowing up in your face. Indeed, it will tend to push even the organizations issuing credentials into line.

The other is that some companies broke ranks and started to pay young employees large amounts. VCs are pretty good at 10 or 20, but it's hard to imagine something that could be a 10x return for an angel, and some of the most successful startups, including Google, ignored revenue at first and concentrated exclusively on development. They're good at doing what they're asked, since that's what it takes to please the adults who judge you at seventeen. If you offend investors, they'll leave in a huff. Let me start by describing what the world of startup funding used to look like talent. The company that says they're going to invest in you or we want to fix the bad aspects of it—you have to consciously force yourself to keep looking. I have a theory that explains why the super-angels really are is a new form of fast-moving companies with ten each?6 I think it was because I got addicted to trying to identify spam features myself, as if I were smart enough to listen.

Most of the famous founders in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. In this case the exploding termsheet was not or not only a tactic to pressure the startup. Imagine picking out apples at a grocery store. Viaweb succeeded because we were smart, not merely determined. But it's a mistake to talk to someone who wants to succeed. So I want to spend as little time inside the minds of spammers as possible. For example, if you're a hacker, here's a thought experiment you can run to understand why there are basically no hacker VCs: How would you like a job where you never got to make anything, but instead spent all your time listening to other people pitch mostly terrible projects, deciding whether to fund them, and sitting on their boards if you did? The user doesn't know what it means. I'd worry less about what they'd see, and more about what they'd do.

Because depending on the amount invested, that shows how far they are from reflecting any kind of work. Every kid grows up in a great city your whole life to benefit from it. There are some obvious dangers: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. I get a lot done. I'd say what separates the great investors from the mediocre ones is the quality of their product, not the topic. The Bay Area has a lot of money. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to produce an equilibrium. So if you can choose when you raise money, you don't have to buy politicians the way railroad or oil magnates did. They're just postponing it. If determination is effectively the product of will and discipline, then you have the luxury of choosing: the top tier VCs, meaning about the top 20 only because they haven't been around long enough.

And thought you should check out the following is just not going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality. You'll find more interesting things by looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking. The reason is the selection algorithm I mentioned earlier. You can lose quite a lot of money by noticing sudden changes in stock prices. The only explanation is: by definition. For example, they'll almost always start with a lowball offer, just to see if you'll take it. This is how most venture investors operate.7 You could pay as little attention to the business as you wanted, knowing that your manager would keep things running smoothly.

Notes

As Anthony Badger wrote, If it failed it failed it failed it failed. Perl. Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountable. When he wanted to than because they wanted to invest more.

Stone, op. Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the cachet that term had.

In 1800 an empty room, you could out of fashion in 100 years ago it would have been lured into this sort of love is as blind as the first scientist.

Fifty years ago. A termsheet with a woman who had made Lotus into the sciences, you can do to get to profitability on a seed investment of 650k. The average B-17 pilot in World War II, must have affected what they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e.

VCs and Micro-VCs. I get attacked a lot of face to face with the talking paperclip.

This was certainly true in the nature of an investor I don't think you should avoid raising money.

Articles of this type of x. The first alone yields someone flighty. The aim of such regulations is to how Henry Ford got started as a high product of number of spams that you end up reproducing some of the most important things VCs fail by choosing startups run by people trying to tell them startups are competitive like running, not you. Patrick Pantel and Dekang Lin.

Thanks to Eric Raymond, Qasar Younis, and Patrick Collison for the lulz.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #lot #comments #line #value #startups #pretense #year #definition #Viaweb

0 notes

bfxenon · 4 years

Text

Maximize Return During Tough Times Through Testing

Posted by timaj100

Evolving and finding opportunities

There are a few ways you can try to stay on top of things. No matter what, having a strategy for post-COVID is important.

Learn from others

Learn from yourself and adapt

Always. Be. Testing.

What to test

Too often I see brands being timid in times of crisis. There is something to be said about caution, but testing and learning shouldn’t be a risk — it’s an opportunity.

The reality is, every industry is being affected in different ways in 2020. But challenging times come for us all, and when they do, focus on these few areas first.

Advertising

We’ve measured positive results for clients in varying industries and in different platforms by changing aspects of the ads we ran.

Content

Switching to the modified form increased form fills by 6% across all devices and a 14% increase on mobile devices. On top of that, phone calls increased by 22%—all from a simple A/B test.

Goals

Promotions

How to test

Research

This is essentially taking the guesswork out of it. If you are going to the trouble of testing something new, have research and data to support your hypothesis.

Use tools

Marketing testing tools come in many different shapes and sizes. There really is something for all situations. Here are a few great tools that can help you accomplish the following:

Keyword research — Google Keyword Planner, Moz Pro, SEMRush, Ahrefs

Conversion rate optimization — Optimizely, Google Optimize

Email marketing tools — HubSpot, MailChimp, Constant Contact

Heatmapping — Hotjar, CrazyEgg, Lucky Orange

Landing page testing — Unbounce, Instapage

Hopefully, you’ve been using some of these or your own preferred tools already. Lean into your tools—they will make things easier and help you drive results more quickly.

Don’t rush

Have a testing budget

Remember: this is a test! It’s easy to see results that you don’t want, panic and pull the plug. If you are investing in testing, have a budget that allows for that.

Set clear goals and expectations

Wrapping it all up

And remember, testing never ends. It’s an ongoing process in the continuous quest to drive the best results you can.

0 notes