#though perhaps the existence / linking of our two blogs somehow will help. that's the only goal is to help people who may be victimized nex

[sworntoprotect]

THE MEGA RP PLOTTING SHEET / MEME.

First and foremost, recall that no one is perfect, we all had witnessed some plotting once which did not went too well, be it because of us or our partner. So here have this, which may help for future plotting. It’s a lot! Yes, but perhaps give your partners some insight? Anyway BOLD what fully applies, italicize if only somewhat. Long post!

MUN NAME: Pie     AGE: +25       CONTACT: IM, Ask, Discord (mutuals only, by request)

CHARACTER(S): Cullen

CURRENT FANDOM(S): Dragon Age

FANDOM(S) YOU HAVE AN AU FOR:  I have a modern verse for everything not Dragon Age, but I might add some actual alt verses for other fandoms

MY LANGUAGE(S): English (native), Spanish (intermediate), Korean (baby lol beginner), bits and bobs of other languages (namely French and French Patois)

THEMES I’M INTERESTED IN FOR RP: FANTASY / SCIENCE FICTION / HORROR / WESTERN / ROMANCE / THRILLER / MYSTERY / DYSTOPIA / ADVENTURE / MODERN / EROTIC / CRIME / MYTHOLOGY / CLASSIC / HISTORY / RENAISSANCE / MEDIEVAL / ANCIENT / WAR / FAMILY / POLITICS / RELIGION / SCHOOL / ADULTHOOD / CHILDHOOD / APOCALYPTIC / GODS / SPORT / MUSIC / SCIENCE / FIGHTS / ANGST / SMUT / DRAMA / ETC. (I started this and realised I’d be bolding almost everything, so: EVERYTHING)

PREFERRED THREAD LENGTH: ONE-LINER / 1 PARA / 2 PARA / 3+ PARA / NOVELLA. / ALL

ASKS CAN BE SEND BY: MUTUALS / NON-MUTUALS / PERSONALS / ANONS.

CAN ASKS BE CONTINUED?: YES / NO / OCCASIONALLY   - only by Mutuals?:  YES / NO

PREFERRED THREAD TYPE: CRACK / CASUAL / SERIOUS / DEEP AS HECK. / ALL

IS REALISM / RESEARCH IMPORTANT FOR YOU IN CERTAIN THEMES?:   YES / NO.

ARE YOU ATM OPEN FOR NEW PLOTS?:  YES / NO / DEPENDS. (after my paper is submitted, yeah sure)

DO YOU HANDLE YOUR DRAFT / ASK - COUNT WELL?:  YES / NO / SOMEWHAT. (irl makes coping difficult sometimes)

HOW LONG DO YOU USUALLY TAKE TO REPLY?: 24H / 1 WEEK / 2 WEEKS / 3+ WEEKS / MONTHS / YEARS. / DEPENDS ON MOOD AND INSPIRATION, AND IF I’M BUSY 

I’M OKAY INTERACTING WITH: ORIGINAL CHARACTERS / A RELATIVE OF MY CHARACTER (AN OC) / DUPLICATES / CROSSOVERS / MULTI-MUSES / SELF-INSERTS / PEOPLE WITH NO AU VERSE FOR MY FANDOM / CANON-DIVERGENT PORTRAYALS / AU-VERSIONS.

DO YOU POST MORE IC OR OOC?: IC / OOC. (I strive for more IC over OOC, but my queue does a lot of work too)

ARE YOU SELECTIVE WITH FOLLOWING OTHERS?: YES / NO / DEPENDS.  

BEST WAYS TO APPROACH YOU FOR RP/PLOTTING:  Talk with me over IM, asks, or Disco. I’m down for almost anything as long as I see it’s feasible.

WHAT EXPECTATIONS DO YOU HOLD TOWARDS YOUR PLOTTING PARTNER:  Transparency. If you have an idea, let me know! If you’re stuck, let me know! If you want to start something new or scrap something or whatever...LET ME KNOW! I promise I don’t bite and I understand.

WHEN YOU NOTICE THE PLOTTING IS RATHER ONE-SIDED, WHAT DO YOU DO?:  I’m not very good with coming up with plots myself, so I’m typically the weak link when it comes to that. Sorry! But you bet I’ll pull up a plot generator and start throwing things down to see what sticks haha.

HOW DO YOU USUALLY PLOT WITH OTHERS, DO YOU GIVE INPUT OR LEAVE MOST WORK TOWARDS YOUR PARTNER?:  I’m all about equal opportunity, so I try not to leave the plotting work to my partner. Let’s negotiate and find something that makes both of us happy. That’s the point after all.

WHEN A PARTNER DROPS THE THREAD, DO YOU WISH TO KNOW?:   YES / NO / DEPENDS. - AND WHY?: If you want to drop a thread, I’m completely fine with it. I want to know so that I don’t end up replying to something you have no interest in anymore. Saves both of us the time.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY LEAD YOU TO DROP A THREAD?:  If drafts eat it (as they are wont to do these days) or if I feel it has reached a natural conclusion. I rarely, if ever, drop a thread in the middle. I’ll just let you know I’m going to finish it on my side and allow you a chance to finish on yours if you’d like.

WILL YOU TELL YOUR PARTNER?:   YES / NO / DEPENDS.

IS COMMUNICATION IN THE RPC IMPORTANT TO YOU? YES / NO. - AND WHY?: You don’t need to chat with me every minute of every day, but I like knowing the people I’m writing with. Discerning your personality and your approach to your muse gives me a much stronger understanding of how to write with you, and what vibes between us. Plus, it’s easier to remember different people’s boundaries if I talk with them a lot, too.

ARE YOU OKAY WITH ABSOLUTE HONESTY, EVEN IF IT MAY MEANS HEARING SOMETHING NEGATIVE ABOUT YOU AND/OR PORTRAYAL?: I am all for constructive criticism. Even if you think it’s nitpicky, it’s going to be a great help. Good crit allows us grow as writers and as people in general. However, I am not for baseless accusations, childish name-calling, or outright insults under the name of “constructive crit”. Remember the “constructive” part: we need to build each other up. 

DO YOU THINK YOU CAN HANDLE SUCH SITUATION IN A MATURE WAY? YES / NO.

WHY DO YOU RP AGAIN, IS THERE A GOAL?: I love a good story. While I don’t agree with everything Cullen does (and no one should, for anyone real or imagined), his story is intriguing. He’s a deeply flawed, deeply broken man. I love to take on a character, toss them in every situation I can think of, and watch them evolve and grow.

WISHLIST, BE IT PLOTS OR SCENARIOS:  A real redemption arc, for one. A realistic struggle with substance abuse and recovery. A future of happiness.

THEMES I WON’T EVER RP / EXPLORE:   Rape or sexual assault, unless being spoken about as a past event (as I truly believe that Cullen was sexually assaulted at Kinloch along with the other psychological and physical torture he endured). In-game racism is baked in, unfortunately, but it’s not something I seek out to roleplay as a PoC myself. Finally, while I play Cullen as canon-straight, I will not play out homophobia and most definitely not transphobia. If he rejects your muse for hitting on him, it’s not because he’s being homophobic: he’s just not interested. That also doesn’t mean he’ll never be interested; people can and do change, and I ship chemistry overall. He doesn’t hate your muse for their gender, orientation, or sexual preferences. I feel like I really have to spell this out for people who don’t understand. If you feel personally insulted by this somehow, feel free to address me directly, off anon. It’s probably an issue of fuzzy wording that I’m 500% willing to fix and talk about.

WHAT TYPE OF STARTERS DO YOU PREFER / DISLIKE, CAN’T WORK WITH?: I love starters that set the scene and provide plenty to work with, be it in terms of interacting with the environment or with the other person. If your muse shows immediate disinterest in communicating (and I don’t mean argumentative, which is perfectly fine), I am not going to respond. I might politely ask for more if I feel like it’s a salvageable interaction.

WHAT TYPE OF CHARACTERS CATCH YOUR INTEREST THE MOST?:  Stoic soldier types, bubbly short girls, and semi-mad scientists.

WHAT TYPE OF CHARACTERS CATCH YOUR INTEREST THE LEAST?:  Characters that come across as Mary-Sue / Gary-Stu types. No flaws and barely any room to grow. 

WHAT ARE YOUR STRONG ASPECTS AS RP PARTNER?: I'm very easy-going and I have an unearthly level of tolerance for almost everything. I try to provide partners with as much to work with as possible IC, and will pretty much support your very existence OOC. I believe in open communication so you’ll know what’s going on with me and/or our threads. Also, I typically reply within a week or two. Currently I’m tethered to finishing a big paper so I’m not a good example of that right now.

WHAT ARE YOUR WEAK ASPECTS AS RP PARTNER?: I can get overwhelmed by too much which slows my pace down considerably. I’m also a bit distant and do shut down on occasion; that’s usually no fault of my partners, though. Just my brain being a dick.

DO YOU RP SMUT?:  YES / NO / DEPENDS. (the closer we are OOC, the easier getting here will be)

DO YOU PREFER TO GO INTO DETAIL?: YES / NO / DEPENDS. (it’s not going to be XXX but it will be descriptive)

ARE YOU OKAY WITH BLACK CURTAIN, FADE TO BLACK?: YES / NO.

WHEN DO YOU RP SMUT? MORE OUT OF FUN OR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT?: I prefer to write smut for character development and to mark a progression in a relationship. Plus Cullen is not a “one and done” guy so getting to the smut stage will take a bit of build-up.

ANYTHING YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO RP THERE?:  Hmmm things that he personally wouldn’t go for I guess? Honestly I don’t know. And obviously, no rape/animal abuse/predator nonsense.

ARE SHIPS IMPORTANT TO YOU?:   YES / NO Ships are a great way to further explore a character and their motivations. People do not exist in pure isolation, so I don’t believe characters should, either.

WOULD YOU SAY YOUR BLOG IS SHIP-FOCUSED?: YES / NO. I bolded both because the focus of the blog isn’t ships, but this thirst trap guy is really easy to ship with other people I tell ya hwat. I am severely picky with romantic ships for Reasons, but I don’t eschew any other types of ships. I encourage them!

DO YOU USE READ MORE?:  YES / NO / SOMETIMES WHEN I WRITE LONG STUFF.

ARE YOU:  MULTI-SHIP / SINGLE-SHIP / DUAL-SHIP  —  MULTIVERSE / SINGLEVERSE.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE TO EXPLORE THE MOST IN YOUR SHIPS?: Characters who challenge Cullen into revising his point of view and force him to be a better person. Also, characters who understand his past and they are in no ways obligated to forgive it, but do recognise that he’s struggling very hard to mend whatever mistakes he can and is willing to pay the price for his decisions.

ARE YOU OKAY WITH PRE-ESTABLISHED RELATIONSHIPS?: YES / NO / DEPENDS.  - Be a good salesperson and I might buy it.

► SECTION ABOUT YOUR MUSE.

- WHAT COULD POSSIBLY MAKE YOUR MUSE INTERESTING TOWARDS OTHERS, WHY SHOULD THEY RP WITH THIS PARTICULAR CHARACTER OF YOURS NOW, WHAT POSSIBLE PLOTS DO THEY OFFER?: Cullen is a massive stick in the mud, which means it’s incredibly easy to taunt him and get him flustered all at the same time. He’s loyal, he’s intelligent, and he’s largely self-aware. He likes swords and using them. Anything your character hates about him, he most likely hates about himself 100 times more.

WITH WHAT TYPE OF MUSES DO YOU USUALLY STRUGGLE TO RP WITH?:  Those from the start that show absolutely no interest in speaking with/interacting with him. Mun and muse are going to struggle to stick around. I’m not going to fight for attention and neither is he.

WHAT DO THEY DESIRE, WHAT IS THEIR GOAL?:  Redemption. He wants to be a better person and make up for the past as much as he can.

WHAT CATCHES THEIR INTEREST FIRST WHEN MEETING SOMEONE NEW?:  He can sniff out a fellow Templar a mile away (or several miles, in the case of Samson). 

WHAT DO THEY VALUE IN A PERSON?:  Honesty, a strong will, devotion (not necessarily to the Maker or the Chantry, but to a just cause that focuses on protecting others).

WHAT THEMES DO THEY LIKE TALKING ABOUT?:  War stuff, chess, books, trebuchets, dogs.

WHICH THEMES BORE THEM?:  Lectures about anything. He did his time in Azkaban in the Circles. No more. Please no more.

DID THEY EVER WENT THROUGH SOMETHING TRAUMATIC?:  His parents died trying to escape the Blight, he was tortured for weeks/months on end by blood mages, almost all of his friends died because of it, he was manipulated and brainwashed by his superior, he was forced into a near-debilitating substance addiction by his workplace... yeah just a few things.

WHAT COULD LEAD TO AN INSTANT KILL?:  Darkspawn and abominations. 

IS THERE SOMEONE /-THING THEY HATE?:  Darkspawn and abominations. Blood mages on principle. Regular mages (but he’s working hard to remedy this extremely bad and prejudiced thinking). Himself.

IS YOUR MUSE EASY TO APPROACH?: YES / NO.    - BEST WAY TO APPROACH THEM?:  Just be polite and he won’t turn you away. He’s guarded, yes, but not impossible to talk to.

SOMETHING YOU MAY STILL WANT TO POINT OUT ABOUT YOUR MUSE?: You’ll find out by writing together! ;D

CONGRATS!!! You managed it, now tag your mutuals! ♥

tagged by: pirated tagging: anyone who actually read this

[tarralin]

Settling

Fox Hunt, Chapter Two

(Board gifted by @under-sengoku-skies)

Find links to Master List, Ao3, and Ko-Fi in blog bio!

Enjoy!

~*~

The following hours flew by in a blur. There were numerous introductions of the warrior’s allies- whom MC knew she would probably never remember- as they arrived on the scene. Then, two of those allies almost started the next World War amongst themselves. And if that weren't enough, the sudden need to distance herself from the rapidly growing crowd reared its head in the form of bolting from the temple courtyard.

But at least she found Sasuke the College Kid!

After almost running off a cliff.

But then the warrior's men, Hideyoshi and Masamune, found her.

And now, here she was… in the castle of the warrior she saved, Nobunaga… staring down at the most hideous kimono in existence.

“How is it a foreign woman came to learn our language?” Mitsuhide's voice brought her back to present.

MC rolled her eyes as she finally took the horrendous garment he offered. “I speak and write twenty-five languages.” Cue the astonished reaction…

The man stumbled back several steps

Yup, there it is… and now you're going to say something about how amazing that is…

“…I’ve never heard of such a thing."

Eh, close enough.

“I imagine not,” she shrugged. “Foreign lands, foreign concepts...”

“Foreign times…”

MC’s feet froze in her tracks. It's true that she had let slip her theory of being blown into the past almost immediately to two of her hosts. Mitsunari had quickly dismissed the thought as a result of dehydration and smoke inhalation from the fire and, up till now, it hadn't been mentioned by any of the other warlords. Mitsuhide asking of it now meant the men had already been discussing things involving her.

MC schooled her features into one of embarrassment as she turned to face him. “Oh, you heard about that? I'd hoped those two would have kept my delirious antics to themselves.”

“You thwarted an assassination on our Lord as well as pulling him from an enflamed building. It’s only natural for everyone to be curious about the mysterious angel who appeared out of nowhere at the most crucial time. The town is, of course, already over flowing with gossip and rumors after Masamune's dramatic entrance with the new Princess in tow. I myself am awfully curious how one such as you came to be at that temple…”

“I was separated from my pilgrimage and seeking shelter is all,” Sasuke had came up with a strong cover story for her almost immediately and by God she was sticking to it.

“How fortune for us. Then, perhaps the Lord is right about you bringing good luck.”

MC shrugged half heartedly. New mission: Do not let guard down around this man. The “guidebook” she had picked up outside the temple described Mitsuhide Akechi as the leading force behind the coup that took Nobunaga’s life. Sasuke had assured her their trip to the past had set them on an alternate version where events haven't occurred here as they had in her history. So technically, there was a chance the man in front of her was a different person than the Mitsuhide history presented. However, MC wasn’t a gambler and this version of the man asked too many smart questions for her liking.

“Anyway,” she tried for a subject change as she plopped down onto her futon. “What exactly does my job as Chatelaine entail? I should have asked earlier but I figured Hideyoshi had heard enough of my voice for the day.” It was that precise moment her door burst open and two of the first men she met strolled through.

“Funny finding you here, Mitsuhide,” Hideyoshi’s eyes narrowed so sharply, MC was sure daggers would pop out at any moment to tear them to shreds. He was already suspicious she was somehow involved in the failed assignation of Nobunaga and finding Mitsuhide here with her surely wasn’t helping build the right image. A quick glance to the white-haired warlord’s face revealed he had come to the same conclusion…

But was enjoying the drama.

“Mitsunari, Hideyoshi, what impeccable timing! The Princess was just asking about her duties as Chatelaine. I was just dropping off an offering my staff had gathered for her arrival.” Mitsuhide turned back to her with trademark smirk rising into a full foxlike grin. “I’ll be sure to pass on your love of the gifts to my head maid.”

“Please do,” she pushed through gritted teeth as he disappeared into the hallway.

~~~

The position as Chatelaine of a castle of warlords ended up being rather similar to her service years as a Marine Sergeant with the maids acting as her soldiers. They were rather lackluster in their work at first but after a few days under MC's guidance, most of the daily chores were finished up in early afternoons. By her fifth day in the castle, the maids were surprised to find they had no work left to be done after lunch service.

“Are you sure it’s ok for us to leave? There is a war council today…”

“Kinu, I told you I can take care of it myself. Go have fun, you’ve all more than deserved the rest before next week.”

“Next week?” Kinu’s eyes widened with surprise. “What’s happening next week?”

“I’ve made a list of alterations and repairs for the castle that we'll be starting on Monday. I’ve just been waiting for everyone to get use to how I run things first.” Silence fell as the maids exchanged weary glances on their way out of castle.

MC was still grinning when she entered the audience chamber with the cart she had loaded up with refreshments. She quickly set up each space of the hall for each warlord to their liking as best as she could remember. She may have only been in this room for a few moments her first day but her trained mind was able to capture many of the tiny details.

Nobunaga of course always sat at the dais but tended to twist his stance so he could see who was speaking, a minor issue MC fixed by arranging the seating positions into a bit of a triangle with his position at the base. Masamune often took notes during meetings until he ran out of ink, so she placed two extra vials at his spot as well as a new set of writing brushes. Mitsunari would need to be searched to make sure he didn’t have a book elsewise he would be transported to the Twilight Zone at some point. Ieyasu’s section had been provided a doctoral journal of the latest medical procedures from the western countries that she had personally translated.

That left only the two Man-Children who had been bickering nonstop since she walked through the door.

MC had learned that Mitsuhide was a rifleman and yesterday’s trip to the port had been a God Send as there was a western ship in port that had a supply of matchlock ammunition. A neat package of bullets and gunpowder was the last personal touch on his placement. Hideyoshi received a new pipe and tobacco to hopefully lift his spirits into a more amicable mood.

She had just sat at her place when the men started arriving and taking their places. The expressions of surprise that danced across their faces was almost comical. MC kept her own features neutral until Nobunaga addressed her directly.

“It seems you are settling into your position nicely.”

“Surprisingly,” she scoffed. “House keeping has never been part of my skill set, but delegation? That I can do.”

“Delegation? How so? What did you do in your home land?”

“Not house keeping,” she smiled politely.

“Ah, it seems the new Chatelaine truly has taken control of the castle,” Mitsuhide remarked as he graced the hall with his presence. “Gossip has it you’ve commanded the staff as well as Ieyasu does his troops.”

“Well, if you imagine the castle as the battlefield and the staff as my soldiers then you'll find they are quite similar. I, for one, strive to assure my soldiers are performing at top level at all times.”

Surprise flashed across his eyes so fast, MC thought she may have imagined it. She didn’t get to ponder it though as Nobunaga's command for silence signaled the start of council.

[inky-thoughts]

How to Organize a Zine 101 #3

Hello~

I already talked about figuring out your zine and the zine’s schedule as well as what you should bring with you to successfully manage a zine.

I think the next step should be building up

Web Presence

I already talked a wee lil bit about it in Part 1 but I think I should elaborate a bit more on it as it’s basically the backbone of almost every fanzine nowadays.

A small disclaimer: Please take everything with a certain grain of salt as I am not a professional when it comes to social media managment. These are just some pointers I consider useful/helpful as they worked for me or other zines I had a brief overview of.

Where to post?

First of all, think about what platforms you want to use, and get familiar with them if you aren’t already. Learn “the way” of it to know which rules/guidelines to follow, because not every platform is the same in tonality or which kind of content spreads fastest.

The most common platforms that I’ve found to work with zines pretty well are Twitter and Tumblr. As both are available as apps for practically almost every phone, it’s also easy to check and keep updated with when you’re on your way.

Tumblr is quite interesting because it’s bascially like a website (and yes, you should keep in mind that the mobile version doesn’t support tumblr sites) and you can conveniently store all info to your zine, answer questions in public, and reblog post e.g. previews of zine entries. It’s easy to spread information quickly if you use the correct tags and post them in the best time frames for your audience.

Twitter is kind of like a news ticker, or gets used by many like this. It’s easier to engage with people and “spread the word” by tagging people who might be interested in the zine.

Also, think about where you as a manager have the bigger following so you can forward e.g. tweets or posts or make your own announcements about the zine to your following and potential customers.

What to post?

Obvious things are announcements like schedules, FAQ, details on the zine, application progress, previews, contributor lists, links to online shops, etc. This is kind of basic together with updates like if important e-mails to the contributors went out etc.

However, this isn’t everything at all. What I found great in other zines (which we completely ignored for our zine and I think that’s a very sad thing actually) was having specific dates (in fandoms stuff like characters’ birthdays, anniversaries etc.) or more general things like widespread holidays, or “event dates” (? - like world women’s day, labour day, you get the twist) that somehow correlate to your zine. For example, one zine I participated in was about the girls of a certain fandom, so they chose the Day of the Girl to start previews to kickstart the preorder phase - and I really loved that! It brings everything in another perspective because it’s not just a zine for a few little nerds to enjoy, but it conveys a much more pronounced message that way. Including those kind of dates, whether it’s just a small post like “Happy New Year” with a small update on the zine progress, or a special sale because it’s xy character’s birthday and it happens to also fall perfectly into your schedule, it just makes your zine feel more honest and considerate of their passion for the zine’s content. It isn’t mendatory, but it definitely has a more lasting impression.

Also, you might want to think about what medium you want to choose - photos/pictures generally get more attention as it is highly visual (plus it’s easier to find on a twitter accound for example) and can be a nice addition to your text. This is where you definitely should think about some kind of corporate design for your zine that is eye-catching enough to get attention from a lot of people and still matches tone and intention of the zine. Gifs may give a post a bit more animated, funny, or simply emotional expression, so having a few sets of gifs/images (perhaps from the source material if it’s a fan zine) handy isn’t such a bad idea. It’s something we didn’t have and I basically have only regret about it.

How?

You also might think about the tonality of how you appear on the zine’s social media. Generally, fandoms are a rather friendly and casual place to be, so you can slip a small joke or something like that into your posts, however, you shouldn’t go all “LOLZ dat boi xDDDDDD” because you still want people to take you seriously and (if it’s a for-buy zine) pay real money for your zine. Keep a certain level of professionalism but don’t have a complete stick up your butt is all I’m saying as you don’t want to alienate people because of one thing or the other.

If you’re modding the zine with several mods (which I highly recommend!), also add signatures at the end of each post (we did it with -Mod [our name]) so it’s easier to clear up misunderstandings etc. as people know who they’re talking to and maybe one mod just didn’t read the memo or something. With tweets it’s just wasting precious characters but on tumblr you aren’t limited at all.

Also remember tagging: It feels like a science itself, and partly it is. First, tag what it’s about. You need to reach the fans, so if it’s about a certain ship or characters, tag those. Tag the fandom, and, very important, tag that it’s a zine. having those covered at first makes you pop up in e.g. tumblr search more as tumblr had changed that only the first 5 tags will be where you’ll appear. Some blogs which collect zine posts have a specific tag they’re tracking, so including some of these comes in quite handy. The rest is mainly to maintain a system on your blog, which everyone needs to figure out themselves. Tagging on twitter is kind of different as you have a limit, I would always go with ships/content first, then perhaps fandom, and zine only if you’ve got some characters to kill. Also please don’t use completely unrelated tags only because they’re currently trending - this is just plain annoying and it’s more likely that people will ignore you instead of gaining some interest in your project.

When?

Do your research on what times are the best to post your content to get your target audience, especially as shipping can be very expensive so you want to have national interest in first place. Every social media has their own specific timeframes where content goes viral the fastest. There is no 100% correct formular, but some tendencies at least, so you can help your luck out a little bit.

Grooming Your Media

To most social media, the key to success is consistency, so you definitely shouldn’t sleep on this. Luckily, social media are (except for most forums but then again your phone usually also has a web browser) usually available as app version, meaning you’re quick to responst or check in. - That’s what you usually think but truth be told, apps also don’t always work perfectly, and especially the tumblr app is known to be rather wonky. I also (this is a personal preference, though) find it easier to compose posts and pick the right pictures on my computer, so if you’re the same way as I, I would advise you to calculate half an hour up to maybe 3 per day/every two days to check in on all your zine’s accounts. It depends a bit on how active the current phase is and how many questions/inquiries people are sending your way.

Tumblr luckily has the queue option, and it definitely saves you a lot of time when you need to bring up an important post regularly. Through the queue, the blog also stays more active, thus has likely more traffic or is simply more noticible as it stays fresh in mind.

Twitter, however, doesn’t have this function (or I’m definitely not aware of it), and, truth be told, also isn’t concipated for this kind of thing. There aren’t really many updates you can post during certain phases of the zine, but there might help the above mentioned dates you might want to keep in mind. Tweeting about the occassion and connecting it with your zine might raise interest and more traffic on your account. And yes, then there are the really busy phases where you simply can’t keep up with social media as the zine demands all your attention. However, sometimes people just want to know how busy you are, so tweet it! A sentence or two are probably enough, and then you’re basically good to go for the day. Just remember to retweet your tweet during your breaks.

And, again, checking on your media should be a regular thing because waiting for an answer for 1-2 days is a different thing than a month or so later (this accidentally happened to us because we didn’t get a notification), so don’t just check “does the system signal me that there are new messages” but actually go into all possible messaging systems directly to check because sometimes tech is a bit wonky. (Also check the message requests!!!)

To maintain a certain level of activity can be a pretty tough job and by now I’m actually inclined to believe that one of the mods should be responsible solely for the social media management while the others work on the actual zine. However, I can’t say I’ve had experience with handling stuff like this that way. It definitely would have gotten a lot of pressure off my shoulders (I mean there’s a reason why companies have a special department handling all this stuff.)

Also, when I say “post regularly,” you can determine what is regular. This can be 24/7, every other day, or once a week, maybe also every two weeks but I suppose no less than that or people might forget you even exist. It’s just important to keep that schedule up so people can build a habit of expecting and getting to see a new post at a certain time.

It feels a bit hypocritic for me to talk about this topic because I think I’m not doing a very great job at it myseld simply because I easily neglect stuff like this, but again this small series is about learning from our/my mistakes so you don’t have to make them with your zines.

Thank you for reading, I hope I’ll find the time to write the next installment soon!

<< last | next >>

Masterpost

[misterpeterjoshua]

To confirm, I have not necessarily been kidnapped and I'm not necessarily being held hostage. But it's been months since I had access to a bed or shower and my online access to the public, my fans, and emergency funding has been stolen. It's really scary, and really difficult, and really traumatizing, and I hope the authorities catch whoever is responsible and fix the problems as soon as possible

Peter Joshua is my stage name that I use for all public publication, mention, performance, sale, and display since 2016. I am retired from public performance, but I had a fairly successful career in performance art (acting/singing) before the identity theft

While I am trying to take some time off, you can probably find a brief run of my debut play with music, "Ten Thousand Bucks", in a space off Broadway next summer. I'm really proud of it and excited about it, though some things obviously need to be cleared up first. I have an audition listing on Backstage if you'd like to submit for an audition. It has almost been fully cast, and I hope to have a casting director take over next spring. It's kind of a Sci-Fi comic tragedy, or something

Also, my life's opus, my debut abstract contemporary sculpture, "Peter Joshua s Yamaha YPT 210 Keyboard For Sale on eBoy" (2018) is coming to global public auction late this year or early next. I may be hosting the auction on my own, though I hope to receive an offer from Sotheby's or Christie's, who I have been in constant contact with about the sale for over 3 years. I'm very very proud of the piece and I hope it finds a nice home. on affiliation, risk valuation, the indelible value of rejection, shame projection, modern marketing techniques, relativity of taste and morality, the nature of value, satire, representation, mega meta modernism, transparency, our mandate to refrain, and the cost of access

Assuming I survive, you can also likely expect to see an album from me in the next year or two, as well as something along the lines of a fashion line

I gave my life to art and the public. I was viciously punished for it and it hasn't ended yet. I still trust art. Hell, I am art. I do not trust the public or any members of it. From the top to the bottom, I have been exploited, hurt, and abused beyond belief

That's not the fault of my fans, I don't think. Though I don't have the clearest grasp on the scope of my fandom, due to the communications malfeasance. I hope they show themselves soon. I'm really hurting and I need help and I have lived in public for a half decade and I need public witness and even aid

I have made blogs elsewhere. They are instantly hacked and hidden. I suspect a rogue internal entity, though I really have no idea who is responsible. It's a mess. I have called it terrorism, and I stand by it. The internet is supposed to be open access. That's the only good thing about it. My rights are being violated, not in a petty inactive microaggression way, and a very applied active terrifying harmful way

To think that a half decade of my life was stolen, and that I lived through unspeakable terror and trauma, perhaps at the hands of some underpaid deranged tech occultist with unhinged access to an internal mute button. It's pretty infuriating. Though I suspect higher powers are involved, at their own disgrace. I know lots of people don't like me. It's my favorite thing about myself. Between atheism, homosexuality, socialism, and other areas of interest, enthusiasm, and study, I'm bound to pick up some scum haters. That's one of the most exhilarating parts of life. I have no problem or even discomfort with people loathing my existence. It's the human rights abuses, felonies, state crimes and I believe war crimes and applied domestic terrorism that I have a problem with

Anyways, if anyone can see this, I hope you find it to be a mildly charming far more than cry for help. I have attached the links to my public social media channels below. I don't know if they're visible. You may please follow and share my work. I started writing poetry as a way to vent grief, fear, and confusion, and to make a few bucks for food. I am happy with the poems I created in the last 2 years, and you can probably find them in a published collection in the next year or two

If anyone on earth would like to contribute to my survival, I am desperately seeking emergency funds. I need to pay my rent, bills, legal fees, and I need to get off my feet for a bit and heal from some deep physical, mental, psychological, and emotional grief and trauma

Here are my tip links, though I believe PayPal and venmo may be stealing from me. If you send me money, and don't receive a thank you, please notify me somehow as well as the police. If anyone knows anything about the coding bugs, hacks, visibility restrictions, and theft on my public and private communications and financial channels, please report any information you have to the NYPD and FBI. The crimes remain an extremely urgent emergency security concern for myself and many others, and aggressive murder attempt, a hate crime, and an act of domestic terrorism. Yes, it's heavy. And it's really really scary and it's been going on for a really long time, while I have begged everyone I could find or contact to please assist

I have no idea what's going on. It must end

PayPal.me/mrpeterjoshua

Venmo: mrpeterjoshua (5571)

You may send any amounts you'd like, anything would make my day. You may also request a signed print of one of my poems, which I will likely gladly create and send. Make me an offer. The poem prints are not to be resold for profit and I retain all copyrights. Public display or sale for charity would be fine

Members of the public, press, or anyone else may reach me for anything at any time. I believe some of my incoming and outgoing emails are being intercepted by an unknown entity, which is obviously illegal and unacceptable. Between my facebook, twitter, instagram, and the three email addresses here, you should be able to reach me, though I can't always reply to everyone

Instagram/Twitter: mrpeterjoshua

Facebook.com/misterpeterjoshua

misterpeterjoshua@gmail.com

mrpeterjoshua@yahoo.com

savepeterjoshua@outlook.com

I'm sorry to burden Tumblr and it's users with this update. I've been really hurting for a really long time at the hands of some of the world's worst people, and I could really use some help

I hope you all have the most marvelous end of summer and that you're autumn is filled with warmth, bountiful harvests, safety, and peace

~peter joshua

[porgthespacepenguin]

“this is not going to go the way you think”

(this was initially a comment on @trashywestallen’s blog that has now evolved into a full, 6500 word crazy meta. send help)

Or, the Lorca/Burnham meta that just wouldn’t quit and that nobody asked for.

Warning: those are just my ramblings/wild theories based on too much watching of the show, too little sleep, and some literary/cinematographic analysis.

Expect spoilers up to episode 10.

A lot of people on the Star Trek subreddits have been complaining that some of the plot twists so far on DSC have been too obvious (specifically, the Voq/Ash theory and the mirror!Lorca theory). Setting aside the fact that most of the general audience (who do not spend as much time as we do analyzing every word and frame) probably did not see those twists coming, at all…

I have a nagging feeling that there is another plot twist that has been under our nose this whole time.

I think Lorca is mirror!Lorca and was involved (romantically) with mirror!Michael. There, I said it. Worse: it was serious (perhaps she was even his wife, though obviously it would have had to be a  secret).

Either mirror!Michael was helping him secretly against the Terran Empire and was in on the coup, or more tragically, she wasn’t and was actually sent to stop him. She died, or was presumed dead: but the show was careful to mention it wasn’t Lorca who “killed” her, it was one of his followers (seems like an odd distinction to make, no?).

That’s a pretty radical theory, I admit. But bear with me for a while, will you?

Episode 10: the turning point

Three major plot point stand out immediately:

”Amazing isn’t it? Different universe, and somehow the same people had a way to find each other. Strongest argument I’ve ever seen for the existence of destiny.”

Their whole conversation in Lorca’s ready room is fascinating, but I’ll focus on the most relevant parts.

First off, while “finding each other” can apply to multiple people, it’s usually used for two. Lorca is almost certainly talking about the two of them here, not the crew in general.

And then, that bombshell... “destiny”. Defined as, “the hidden power believed to control future events; fate.”

That’s a pretty strong word to use. Essentially, Lorca is suggesting that fate has brought the two of them together, in this universe… and maybe even in another (mirror) universe.

Ever logical, Michael immediately rejects the very idea.

“I’m not sure I believe in the existence of destiny.”

This sort of talk is way too much for Michael to handle right now. She was raised on Vulcan: logic informs her thinking. But what Lorca is trying to tell her has nothing to do with logic. She just doesn’t hear him at all.

The rest of their conversation continues in a similar vein:

“Part of you had to know that wasn’t the end of your story (...) You were destined for something more.”

“Destiny did not get me out of prison, Captain. You did that.”

Two ways of looking at the same thing: one poetic and even romantic; the other factual and rational.  And perhaps they are both right, from their perspective: after all, if Lorca really is mirror!Lorca, who has lost his own Michael, only to find her again in another universe… that would be pretty incredible.

As he often does, Lorca immediately deflects:

“Let’s agree to disagree. For now.”

That “For now” is also important. Is there something that could realistically change her mind in the future, that he knows about and we don’t? Only Lorca knows.

Visually the scene is also very telling. They start off separated by his desk (which Lorca uses to create a barrier between them in many scenes, notably their first meeting) but then at his invitation, they move to the window, where the camera frames them with alternating two-shots (used primarily to establish links between characters) and close-ups (to create intimacy and focus on emotional reactions). There are also a few shots of them from behind, with their reflections in the window as well.

Mirror? Reflection? Did you want fries with your symbolism? (Note that shots of Lorca looking out a window with his reflection appearing also happens at least in episode 3, when Michael and Lorca first meet, and episode 6, after the whole Katrina debacle. They’ve not been subtle with this use of imagery).

- Not a scene but more a general feeling throughout the episode. How many times have we seen Michael touch Lorca previously? I’ll help you: exactly once, and honestly it barely counts (at the end of episode 3, when Michael takes a fortune cookie from his hand). As for Lorca, he never touches her.

Yet in this episode? Michael is all over him, starting from that moment on the bridge where she lays a hand on the small of his back to interrupt him (before that whole Scottish accent thing). That has literally never happened before.

Don’t even get me started on the whole hair and neck stroking she has going on later. In fact, as soon as she steps into her Terran persona she becomes a lot more tactile – only with Lorca, mind.

Now, I don’t know whether this means Michael is attracted to him or not – at least not consciously! – and in fact this might not even be the point.

Rather, those touches serve to establish and anchor a sense of physicality between the two of them, for us the audience. Essentially telling our unconscious minds:

“Look, here are are two very attractive people (that leather jacket, oh my lord) that are touching each other. The line has been crossed. Make of that what you will.”

I predict we will see an influx of new people wondering about the Lorca/Michael dynamic after watching episode 10, wondering if there was indeed something there or if they are imagining things.

- The ending scene! Either this is a very clever juxtaposition, or some super strange editing. Since TPTB have been doing excellent work on filmography so far, I’m hoping it’s the former.

I’m talking about the “love” scene between Tyler and Michael (and I use parenthesis here not because I dislike Ash/Michael -- I don’t -- but because at this point neither he nor Michael know who he is, or what he is, and … he just killed Culber in cold blood so… yay romance?) followed immediately by Lorca in the agonizer booth, screaming in pain.

Now that’s an odd editing choice. Or is it?

Cinematically, a cut like that is a common technique: it’s called cross-cutting, and is often used to show than two actions are happening at the same time.

According to Wikipedia:

“This creates a sharp dichotomy between the two actions, and encourages the viewer to compare the two shots. Often, this contrast is used for strong emotional effect (...).”

If we go back to the theory that mirror!Lorca and mirror!Michael were together, as more than just reluctant allies, and that he has feelings for both versions of her (yes, prime!Michael too after learning to know her)…

Well, Michael and Tyler consummating their relationship brings utter and complete agony to Lorca.

This is all symbolic, of course, but re watching the scene with all this in mind… It’s chilling. Tyler above Michael, the scene telegraphing that they are about to have sex…

Cut to Lorca screaming in the agonizer booth.

At the very least, they are implying some fairly dark things about Michael/Tyler going forward, but I also think it’s significant that Lorca is the one shown in pain here.

An aside: Michael/Tyler, from Ash to ashes

Poor Michael. Poor Tyler. I’ve been sure of the whole “Ash is Voq” thing almost since his introduction (remember the eye wound Michael inflicts on Voq in episode 2? Now check Tyler’s same eye in episode 5. Go on. I’ll wait.) but I thought there might be hope for them somehow, despite the fact that both had killed each other’s mentors (eaten, actually, in Voq’s case…)

Until episode 10.

I won’t dwell too much on the fact that, out of all the possible scenarios for Ash/Voq, we ended up with the worst one for their future: Tyler is Voq, physically and mentally -- not the other way around. The Tyler personality is an overlay, and we don’t know yet how much of that personality is real. But regardless: the body belongs to Voq.

I would have had a lot more hope if Tyler had been physically Tyler, with Voq’s personality implanted somewhere inside. This duality could have allowed a positive resolution for the plot line (driving out Voq’s consciousness, for example) and therefore their relationship.

Moving on.

Tyler/Voq murders Culber in cold blood (or so it seems to the audience), then proceeds to break into Michael’s room (and yes, this is meant to feel slightly creepy, even out of character for Tyler, who has so far respected her boundaries) and seduces her.

Everything is consensual but feels a bit… off. And for good reason.

They are surrounded by enemies, Michael is emotionally shaken from having had to kill a familiar face/friend (and the ironic juxtaposition of their two kills, one a cold-blooded murder, the other an act of self-defense, is just heartbreaking), and Lorca is being horribly tortured a few decks below.

Yikes.

Sex, and death, and pain. Those are not good things to put together when hoping for a happy ending. Symbolically there is no going back from this, I don’t think.

If they had consummated their relationship previously, in a more positive setting, I could still see their romance perhaps going in a positive direction (at least this would have been a good sign, though Culber’s fate might have made that moot as well).

As things stand, it feels like watching the death warrant of their relationship being signed and… ouch.

Poor Michael. Talk about a devastating first love.

Did someone say first love?

Interestingly there is a common trope pair, “First Love” / “Second Love”, that is often combined with “Wrong Guy First”. From TVTropes:

“This is the plot that results when a Love Triangle is used to illustrate the Aesop "Be Careful Who You Give Your Heart To".

Our heroine is a young woman with two suitors. Suitor #1 (...) seems to be everything a young woman would want. But he's not. Suitor #2 appears to be flawed. (...) If he's handsome, he's not as handsome. He could be many years older than our heroine. He often has the kind of personality that makes him hard to get to know.”

There are many literary examples of this trope, from Jane Austen, Tolstoy, or Dickens, all the way to Harry Potter or even the Hunger Games.

But no, wait. That can’t be right. It’s not like there is someone else who has been watching over Michael from the side lines since the beginning.

Right?

Well...

“I did choose you” : Going back to the beginning

After having this “red alert something is happening here” moment while watching episode 10, I went back and re-watched most of Lorca and Michael’s earlier interactions with this theory in mind.

(As a general note, I think Lorca generally avoids lying outright and prefers a more… Obi-wan approach. “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view.”)

Episode 3: First meeting and new beginnings

Their first meeting is almost theatrical in its setting. Michael enters a darkened room, and Lorca has his back to her, facing the window (where, again, his reflection can be seen). He is clad (armored, really) in darkness and mystery.

Lorca initially sounds almost like he is flirting: 

“I like to think it makes me mysterious. No?” 

“Don’t be shy.”

When I watched the episode for the first time, I thought it might be part of his personality (like Kirk) but no. He does not do this with other people. Only Michael.

In fact, I now think he is deflecting. The whole situation is somehow painful or difficult for him, and he uses humor to hide it. Which of course falls utterly flat, because Michael does not really get humor (at least not at this point).

He keeps his back to her for a long time, and even takes a breath before turning around, as though he has to fortify himself before seeing her.

Now that doesn’t make a lot of sense at face value, if Lorca is just a captain and Michael just a mutineer.

But it is a lot more understandable if Lorca is mirror!Lorca and the last time he saw Michael was before she (well, her mirror counterpart) died.

Because of him.

Lorca then comes to stand behind his desk, in a move he will be shown to use often in the future. Make no mistake, this is a highly defensive maneuver.

They talk about Michael’s shuttle being diverted, and no surprise, Michael’s logic bluntly dispels Lorca’s attempts at plausible deniability. (Something, by the way, that happens many times in the series: she rarely lets him get away with misdirection. Though amusingly she has also, so far, never caught up with what he is actually trying to hide.)

To which Lorca says:

“Maybe the universe hates waste.”

Considering their discussion in episode 10, similarly in Lorca’s ready room, this line takes on a lot more meaning. He is referring to destiny here, although obliquely.

Visually, two things happen in succession: Lorca has a little half smile, and then tilts his head and holds her gaze for a long moment. Now what does body language have to say about that?

“In courtship, the head tilt shows a playful and engaged attitude. It shows interest but can also be a tease (especially when combined with a half smile and sideways glance).”

Lorca is definitely flirting with her this time. In fact, his next move supports this idea. He moves around the desk and comes to stand in front of her. He does not completely leave the security of the desk, mind, instead choosing to lean against it (a sign of insecurity) while his shoulders are set back in a classic power pose.

Michael is startled and takes a few steps back, swallowing. I don’t think she is scared of him, not on a conscious level. But on an unconscious level, we have a (presumably) virginal or inexperienced young woman suddenly approached by an older, attractive man who has been flirting with her (though I doubt she consciously noticed). She is shaken.

He either doesn’t notice, or (more likely) pretends not to notice and basically offers her a job. She refuses (not just the job, but the whole Call to Adventure -- more on that later).

He tells her she doesn’t have a choice.

This is a crucial moment. Lorca talks to her harshly, tells her there are no free rides on his ship (ironic, since he is the one that dragged her here!) and that she will be put to work. Almost at once, he moves back behind the safety of his desk, walls firmly back up. He will be the “bad guy” because she needs him to be, but he is not enjoying it.

Make no mistake, Michael needs it. At this point in her story, she has lost hope. She is a ghost of her former self. She was right about the Klingons, but with the guilt of Georgiou’s death, she had taken on the guilt for the whole war as well. She is depressed, withdrawn. She has given up.

What Lorca does is put her back on her feet. He gives her a job, a purpose (however temporary), and even a mystery to chew on (of course he knew she was going to try to break in, and he wanted her to -- that’s why he assigned her to Engineering).

He reminds her of who she was (“You were once a Starfleet officer.”).

Of course, at that moment, she doesn’t see his actions as a gift, but rather a burden, an obligation. If she had the energy for it, she would resent him.

It will take her three episodes to process and express her gratitude for the second chance he has given her (more on that later).

Lorca does all this obliquely, as he does many (most) things. In fact, I believe he does not want Michael to be grateful to him (perhaps out of guilt). Mind you, he is also testing her: Lorca is a pragmatist. And if he is mirror!Lorca, he doesn’t know this version of Michael yet, and what she is capable of.

When Michael leaves with Landry, there is another closeup on Lorca’s face, and he has this very odd expression. Like this has affected him, was hard on him, somehow.

This makes no sense at all if Lorca is prime!Lorca and is simply meeting a mutineer he wants to recruit. But even if our Lorca is indeed mirror!Lorca, why would meeting Michael’s prime counterpart affect him so? Unless there is more to it than meets the eye.

At the end of the episode, we go back to Lorca’s ready room, in a lovely symbolic mirroring/book-ending of their first meeting.

Lorca is looking every inch the Captain, standing firmly behind his desk, arms wide, shoulders straight. Again a classic power pose. He offers her a position aboard Discovery. She initially refuses him again but this time, she doesn’t back down.

I can’t emphasize how different Michael’s behavior is in both encounters.

When they first meet, she is defeated, submissive, withdrawn. When she refuses Lorca’s first offer, it is weakly, and he steamrolls her objections without difficulty. When he steps closer to her, she steps back. She looks down at the floor.

In this scene, however, Michael has regained her confidence. She looks Lorca straight in the eye when she refuses him, and he is on the defensive (or seems to be). She flings his question (“Why would you refuse?”) back at him (“Why do you want me to stay?”) and even stalks toward him.

Of course, Lorca being Lorca, Michael doesn’t quite get to keep the upper hand for too long. She gets derailed into a rant about Lorca developing and testing biological weapons, which then veers into a slightly pompous speech about being a Starfleet officer to the death.

Meanwhile, Lorca is smiling, a fond smile (that almost seems out of place considering he is supposed to have met her a couple of days before). This is what he has been planning all along. His experiment was successful.

His next sentence is very telling:

“I know exactly who you are, Michael Burnham. I know exactly who you are.”

Well, well.

Essentially, he is implying here that either he knows her because… he actually knows her (and that should not be possible); or he knows her because they are the same. They are kindred spirits.

Either way, it’s a fairly odd thing to say to someone you’ve known for a few days!

Still smiling fondly, he stops her from making more of a fool of herself and proceeds to dazzle her with his shiny new technology. He is really pulling all the stops here to impress her, even taking her on a virtual tour of the galaxy.

And then he outright admits it:

“I did choose you (…) but not for the reasons you think.”

This sentence works on so many levels, it’s pretty incredible. Note that she asked him why he wanted her to stay; and he answers that he chose her. Those are not even remotely comparable in terms of emotional involvement.

Then the camera switches to choker shots (tight close-up shots that cut off above the eyes and under the mouth/chin) which are traditionally used to create … romantic tension. Or at the very least emotional tension.

Lorca holds out his hand, with a fortune cookie in it (fortune cookie which she refused in their initial meeting, mirroring!).

(No time to discuss in too many details, but in fortune cookie, there is “fortune”... another reference to fate/destiny.)

She takes the fortune cookie from his hand. This time, she accepts his offer, and symbolically, the Call to Adventure.

An aside: Michael’s hero journey

I have mentioned the Call to Adventure a couple of times now, and I realize it might be helpful to take a brief detour into the Hero’s Journey before we continue.

The Hero’s Journey, or monomyth, is a template of narrative analysis that is widely used in storytelling. It is not absolute, or perfect (it has received its fair share of criticism) but so many stories follow these patterns that they have become embedded in our collective unconscious. As such, they can be helpful in understanding the symbolic underpinnings of a story.

The Hero’s Journey (according to Campbell, who first wrote about it in 1949) is broadly composed of 3 acts (Departure, Initiation, Return), further divided in 17 stages.

For the purpose of this meta (and considering DSC is only in its first season!), I will focus mostly on the first stage, Departure.

(Note that not all stages need to be used in a story, nor do they need to happen in a linear fashion. They may also happen multiple times, in multiple forms.)

The call to adventure

The refusal of the call

Supernatural aid/meeting the mentor

Crossing the first threshold

The belly of the whale

Acceptance of the call

When we meet Michael again in episode 3 (which narratively is the beginning of the story, with episodes 1 and 2 serving as a prologue), she is a broken woman. So heavily laden with guilt, in fact, that she has essentially given up and turned her back on everything she is and believes in.

When Lorca offers her a (temporary) job on Discovery, she turns him down. On paper, this looks like a textbook refusal of the call, and it is. But looking deeper, even before she comes aboard Discovery, Michael has already refused it, and in fact, has been refusing it for a while.

"Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. [Her] flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and [her] life feels meaningless. (...) All [she] can do is (...) await the gradual approach of [her] disintegration." (Campbell)

From the moment Captain Georgiou dies, Michael shuts down. She refuses all attempts to move forward, essentially locking herself away and throwing away the key. She has given up on herself. This is Michael’s true refusal of the call.

“The mentor gives the hero the supplies, knowledge, and confidence required to overcome his or her fear and face the adventure.” (Christopher Vogler)

Lorca then plucks her from her prison, as if by magic, and sets her to work on his ship. This is the supernatural aid/meeting the mentor stage.

"With the personifications of [her] destiny to guide and aid [her], the hero goes forward in [her] adventure until [she] comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.” (Campbell)

Lorca then sends Michael to the Glenn, along with Stamets, Tilly and Landry. This plot point represents both the Crossing of the First Threshold and the Belly of the Whale stages, combined.

At Lorca’s orders, and despite herself, Michael has to leave the safety of Discovery for the danger of the Glenn. This is her first mission since her mutiny, and since she turned down the call. She is forced to cross the threshold of the boundaries, the walls she has drawn around herself.

“It is a turning point in the Hero’s Journey where the hero is swallowed by a larger monster or representative of evil and comes out with a new sense of self. The hero is consumed but emerges alive. (...) and [comes] to terms with death.” (Gordon Napier)

“That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. The devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis.” (Campbell)

On the Glenn, everything is dark and scary. There are dead bodies, horribly disfigured. There is a monster roaming. Michael barely escapes with her life, after crawling through tunnels with the tardigrade in pursuit, before jumping into the shuttle at the last possible moment (quite heroically I might add). This stage is the metaphorical Belly of the Whale.

Incidentally, an important theme throughout the episode, and especially the tardigrade pursuit, is “Alice in Wonderland”: a vivid tale where physical metamorphosis, the search for identity and the hero’s journey all play a prominent role.

After Michael faces her trials successfully, she starts to remembers who she is: a Starfleet officer. She has begun to process her grief and can now start her hero’s journey anew (a journey of healing and growth).

Later, when Lorca offers her a permanent position on Discovery, Michael accepts both his second offer and the symbolic call to adventure (after a fair bit of convincing).

And she does it on her own terms, too: if Lorca had been working on a biological weapon, she would have refused him, but not for the same reasons she had turned him down initially. Not out of fear and self-doubt, but with a renewed respect for herself and her beliefs.

She has started to remember that she is a hero.

There are many other aspects of the Hero’s journey when it comes to Michael in Star Trek Discovery, but this goes beyond the scope of this already huge meta.

Episode 5: Keeping secrets

Episode 5 doesn’t technically have any direct interactions between Michael and Lorca. There is, however, a fairly significant scene between him and Katrina Cornwell, on the matter of our favorite mutineer.

Halfway through their fight, the admiral asks Lorca an enormously important question:

“(...) Why give everyone another reason to judge you?”

Of course, Lorca immediately deflects with another question of his own, putting Katrina on the defensive. And he never actually answers the question, which means that whatever it is, it’s important.

Episode 6: Shadows and mirrors

After Michael senses Sarek’s pain and collapses, Lorca is right there at her bedside when she awakens. Does he usually do this for his crew? Somehow I doubt it.

Then Michael asks him to mount a rescue for Sarek and… Lorca does it. No questions asked.

He defies a direct order from Starfleet, which later on brings down Cornwell’s inquisition on him (by the way, she’s a psychiatrist who thinks nothing of sleeping with someone she considers psychologically unstable? Hmm.). He ends up in real danger of losing his ship. All this because Michael said please.

Then there is of course the infamous conversation between Lorca and Tyler in the shuttle:

“Bring her back in one piece.”

“Not a scratch.”

“I’m talking about her. Or don’t come back at all.”

First off, wow. Lorca is definitely overreacting here. This is not normal Captain behavior. In fact, Tyler’s reaction (thinking Lorca meant the shuttle) is much more logical than what Lorca actually means (“Anything happens to Michael, you’re a dead man”).

Whether he means it 100% is up for debate, but the message is crystal clear: this is a threat.

Bring her back to me or else.

Note that at no point in this conversation does Lorca feel the need to refer to Michael by name, simply using “her” as though it was obvious who and what he means. And to him, it is. But to poor Tyler, or even to the audience, this serves to point out the stark disconnect between normal concern over a mission vs. abnormal worry over a particular individual.

Before leaving, Lorca claps Tyler on the arm and this feels like a dominant gesture, a way to establish a hierarchy that has nothing to do with Starfleet’s. Especially after their friendly chat/threat.

Upon first watching the episode, this scene seriously made me raise an eyebrow because he sounds way too protective/possessive for a captain just caring about a crew member (and not Tilly or Tyler, who are also going on the mission, remember?).

At the end of the episode, Michael thanks Lorca, pointing out that he didn’t have to save Sarek. Lorca answers, truthfully:

“I didn’t do for him.”

He then adds that he needs his team at peak form but those are just empty words. At no point in the series does he ever choose an individual crew member’s needs over the ship/the mission. In fact, being the pragmatist that he is, he does not hesitate to put them in danger if the mission requires it (see Stamets -- though I honestly don’t believe Lorca knew or could have foreseen what would happen to him when they made that last jump).

Except when it comes to Michael.

Finally, we are offered a  shining example of the rule of threes (commonly found in fairy tales, but not only). From TVTropes:

“The Rule of Three is a pattern used in stories and jokes, where part of the story is told three times, with minor variations. The first two instances build tension, and the third releases it by incorporating a twist.”

Lorca makes her a third and final job offer: a place not only on Discovery, but on the bridge, as science officer. By his side.

In a reversal of the previous offers, Michael accepts at once, without an ounce of hesitation. She does not need any convincing.

She also says something quite meaningful, in light of her initial reactions to his first two offers:

“I am grateful… to serve under a captain like you.”

Characteristically, Lorca seems to refuse her gratitude. He looks startled, says nothing, just offers a small smile then walks away.

At this point in their story, we don’t know if this is out of guilt (atonement), his personality or even a narrative continuation of the “Wrong Guy First” trope, where the sidelined suitor is still trying to ensure the heroine’s happiness. Perhaps a mix of all three.

Episode 9: On the bridge we fight

Pahvo is in danger. Discovery, by association, is in danger. The Federation is in even more danger than usual because of the Klingon’s stealth technology.

Lorca decides to send a team to place beacons on the Klingon ship. He picks Tyler, and Tyler picks Michael, as she is the most qualified for the job.

And Lorca just goes, “No way, Michael’s not going, it’s too dangerous”. Too dangerous for her, but not for the other crew members sent on the boarding party, mind you. Including Tyler who is standing right here.

As is quickly becoming her habit, Michael just insists and proceeds to bludgeon Lorca with her logic while the rest of the crew (and the audience) tries to understand what is going on.

Lorca looks supremely uncomfortable. His whole posture is one of avoidance. He sits down onto his chair and seems to just shrink on himself, turning away from Michael in clear dismissal. He avoids her gaze, snaps at her and even resorts to orders (something he hasn’t done since their first meeting).

“Sir, you offered me a place on this ship.”

“And now I’m ordering you to stay!”

Meanwhile, everyone else on the bridge is just watching them in disbelief, and with no small amount of discomfort. They do not understand what they are witnessing -- a battle of wills.

Until finally Michael, reaching the logical conclusion of Lorca’s odd behavior, stumbles onto the truth:

“There is no logic to your thinking. Unless this is about me.”

At that Lorca finally has to look at her, but he doesn’t say anything because there is nothing to say. She is right on both counts: he is not being logical at all, and this is about her.

Amusingly, Michael still manages to miss the point completely, misreading Lorca’s agitation and protectiveness by viewing herself as a resource (to be hoarded) rather than a person (to be protected).

I honestly felt bad for Lorca in this scene. If Michael were even a tiny better at understanding feelings, in herself or in others, she would probably realize that his behavior is not normal. But she is oblivious, for which Lorca is probably very thankful.

After that, well, she has basically put him on the spot, and in front of the whole bridge to boot. He glances at Saru, then back at Michael. He has lost and can only concede. He has no more arguments beyond, “I am afraid to lose you” and that is not something he can say.

(Mind you, if this scene had been between the two of them in private, without the whole bridge watching, he would never have allowed her to go. Logic be damned.)

So Lorca finally relents, but you can tell it’s against his will. Like pulling teeth.

He even orders her to come back safely (but not Tyler, who is also going on that super duper dangerous mission and is standing right here!) Then we have another shot of his face, looking pretty damn unhappy. Wretched, even.

Possessing the emotional intelligence of a brick (and I say that as someone who loves the character), Michael thanks him and looks satisfied. For her the matter is resolved.

She totally doesn’t realize that:

She, a convicted mutineer, has just pitted her will against her captain’s and won.

She should be in the brig or confined to quarters right now, not going on the mission.

Lorca only gave in because whatever secret he is trying to protect is more important to him than his pride.

One wonders what Saru and the bridge crew made of that little scene.

Lastly, note the contrast between their confrontation in this episode, and episode 6 where Michael risks her life to go save Sarek.  

Of course, going on a rescue mission inside a nebula is probably less dangerous than infiltrating the Klingon Ship of the Dead, but it still carries a vast amount of risk (as evidenced by Stamets’ flippant “Are you really that crazy?”).

If Lorca only saw Michael as a tool he cannot afford to lose, for whatever purpose, he would never have allowed her to risk her own life going after Sarek.

He even had a perfect excuse: Starfleet explicitly forbade it. There was no reason for him to take such a tactical risk (which nearly cost him the Discovery and later brought down the wrath of Starfleet over his head), unless he knew this was important to Michael. And therefore, important to him as well.

So. What is Lorca’s deal?

Only Lorca knows, really. But we can try to explain his behavior in three basic ways:

Our Lorca is prime!Lorca and just cares about Michael because he likes her. That option definitely doesn’t explain everything, and seems to be disproved by episodes 9/10 (he did override the ship to jump somewhere, and he definitely didn’t want Saru to look into the logs. Mirror!Lorca seems also conveniently absent from the MU).

At this point, it seems relatively safe to assume our Lorca is mirror!Lorca. Which leaves two options:

Lorca wants to use prime!Michael for something, perhaps related to overthrowing the Emperor. He sees her as a tool, perhaps a valuable crew member. Now that theory explains many things, but not all, especially how Lorca just seems to care so damn much (and in that scenario, allowing Michael to risk her life to save Sarek just makes no sense, as stated above).

We go back to our starting theory. Lorca cared about mirror!Michael, in whatever capacity. She died (because of him, even if indirectly) and he feels grief/remorse because of it. He might also have started to care for prime!Michael in her own right. And he doesn’t want to lose her again. He just can’t bear it.

(Note that in this last theory, Lorca might ALSO need Michael for something related to overthrowing the Emperor. Lorca is a pragmatist, and if they were both working together originally, he might be hoping she will help him again.)

What does this mean for the future?

Short answer: it’s too early to tell.

Long answer?

Right now, if I am right and there is something between Lorca and Michael, I am inclined to think it’s one-sided. She respects him and might be attracted to him, unconsciously, but her attention is on Tyler. Lorca is not even trying to position himself as a contender, either.

Unfortunately, Tyler/Michael is likely going to go down in flames, and it’s going to hurt. All aboard the pain train, direction tragedy.

Michael is going to regress emotionally for a while. Losing a first love is hard, losing it to betrayal is awful. She is going to have to grow as a person to get past this.

I think at some point in their stay in the MU, someone (an enemy perhaps) will reveal that mirror!Michael was Lorca’s wife, or at least someone important to him. And that bombshell is going to alter Michael’s perception of Lorca (honestly she would need a bomb dropped on her head for her to catch a hint at this point).

Michael is most definitely not going to know what to do with that information. Expect a heroic BSOD, followed by her trying to understand things logically (and Lorca is not gonna be down with that, at all).

Lorca will not take it well either. He is an intensely private man, and I don’t think he had ever intended to tell Michael anything. He is likely going to close himself off as well (Tyler’s betrayal probably won’t help).

I don’t think Lorca will die in S1. Narratively, he is one of main characters (with Michael and Voq), and incidentally a fan favourite. We’ve already lost Culber (hopefully temporarily), and Ash is likely going to turn back into Voq. Stamets is still out of commission. Frankly, if Lorca dies there are not that many characters left!

Not to mention that neither Saru nor Michael are anywhere near ready to be captain yet.

Whoever she is in the mirror universe, Admiral Cornwell is not a friend to Lorca (unlike in the prime universe where they were likely friends with benefits).

We will stay a few more episodes in the Mirror Universe, though probably not until the end of the season.

[acertaincritic]

Writer’s Rambling - Foreshadowing

Ha! You did not expect that I’d write another one of these so out of the blue, did you? Well, that’s because I gave no indication that I would, and obviously you cannot see the future. The same thing can happen in a book - the plot seems to be going in a certain direction, but then a totally unannounced event changes everything. Worse even, perhaps there’s a mystery to solve, and the final culprit turns to be the one character that never betrayed any clues that it might be them.

This means that there was no foreshadowing, and while it doesn’t matter when you write a personal blog, it does matter when you’re writing a book. So today we’re going to take a closer look at what foreshadowing is, and how to do it well.

Spoilers for “The Exiled Queen” by Cinda Chima Williams and “The Rithmatist” by Brandon Sanderson.

Foreshadowing is, simply put, letting the reader know that something will happen. Thanks to it the sudden changes of the plot’s direction don’t come across as willy-nilly, and the clever reveals seem actually clever. It makes the story appear planned and orderly... That is, if it’s done right. If it’s done wrong, it can make your plot predictable and boring, and your characters stupid for not figuring out what the reader had many chapters ago.

Then should I even foreshadow?

Yes.

.

OK, long answer. Yes. Foreshadowing comes with a risk, but a total lack of it makes the plot contrived and chaotic. It leaves the reader unsatisfied with the conclusion, because it never had the proper build-up.

This isn’t to say that every plot point has to be foreshadowed. Particularly in the first half of the book, readers tend to be more forgiving of unexpected plot twists. For instance, if the protagonist is attacked by bandits and then saved by a stranger who traveled the same road, it doesn’t require any foreshadowing. The reader will understand that the scene was the stranger’s introduction and will accept it. Problems would arise only if the stranger later vanished with no explanation, and never reappeared in the same book. However, if the skirmish with bandits happened near the end of the story, and was considered a serious obstacle, an unknown character coming to the hero’s aid feels like a cheap way out.

There are also stories that simply don’t require much foreshadowing. Perhaps there aren’t many unexpected reveals, no mystery or plot twists. While it might sound like too simplistic a plot, I cannot exclude that such books exist, or even that they may be entertaining (the same as books with failed foreshadowing can be entertaining too).

Now that we decided that foreshadowing is generally desired, let’s take a look on how to foreshadow, shall we?

Overt foreshadowing

This is the first type of foreshadowing, one that most writers can do by instinct. It’s simply telling the reader that something will happen. Rather than trying to hide it, we pound them with it in the head. This is useful near the beginning, when we want to let the reader know what plot points they should look forward to or promise an interesting conflict when there isn’t one yet.

A simple sentence like, The monsters crept up the perimeter of the village, but so far, none was able to cross the barrier can foreshadow a) that the monsters are going to eventually break the magical protection and attack the village, or b) that the hero will have to face the monsters once they leave their home, whether they are banished or decide to travel on their own accord.

Mind you, this wasn’t a super overt foreshadowing. Foreshadowing can be overt, covert, and the many shades in between. Some readers will notice more than most, and some won’t notice even the most blatant hints; you should measure it so it works for the majority, not for every single person.

A more overt case of foreshadowing would be something like, Liza didn’t know yet that her life would completely change after she borrowed her uncle’s ancient-looking book. It leaves no room for doubt, and clearly sets what the reader should expect from the plot. While ‘change’ in itself is vague, the fact that Liza will take her uncle’s book and that the said book is somehow special is obvious long before it happens in the plot proper.

Now, while this type of foreshadowing is generally easy, there are two pitfalls to be mindful of:

1. It’s too vague.

This is especially important if we rely on the said foreshadowing to pull the reader through the slow beginning. I’d first advise not to write slow beginnings at all, but if you decide you need the long paragraphs of exposition for some reason, a solid promise of interesting plot can serve as a patch. However, just saying that John didn’t know how his life was going to take a turn for the worse is simply too vague to hold the reader’s attention for long.

This takes me back to “The Shamer’s Daughter” by Lene Kaaberbøl, which opens with the main character saying, Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really Cilla’s fault that I was bitten by a dragon. This promises us that she will be beaten by a dragon, an adventure much more interesting than watching Diana’s normal life which we get at the beginning. Of course, that the said normal life is written well, filled with conflict, and doesn’t linger for too long, is a huge help too.

2. The book doesn’t deliver/delivers too late.

What would you think if the main character constantly had bad feelings about the future, some ominous fear creeping up her spine, yet until the end of the book nothing happens? At the very least it would be a letdown. And while I don’t see such a thing often - most writers feel that they should deliver what they had promised, weather straight or subverted - I do see it sometimes.

An example can be found in Cinda Chima William’s “The Exiled Queen”. Throughout the book, there are mentions of a big ball near the end of the academic year, one that the heroine, Raisa, claims she won’t go to. Of course, then she falls in love with a guy (Han), and eventually is maneuvered by her friends to go to the ball with him.

Except, the ball never happens. Or rather, before it happens, she gets kidnapped by Micah. Han also leaves the school to search for her, and that’s how the book ends. Bah, the kidnapping itself is a case for too vague foreshadowing and too late delivery. The fact that Micah Bayar is a danger to Raisa was brought up very early in the story. As it was never touched upon again throughout the book, the reader already wrote this danger off from their ‘foreshadowed plot points’ list long before the kidnapping actually happened. Then, shortly before the deed, Raisa has a feeling that something bad is going on - but it’s too vague, and so the reader still feels like this ending came completely out of nowhere, and even worse, trampling over the ball, which they were looking forward to.

What particularly irks me about this case is that it was so easy to add a little more foreshadowing - enough to justify the kidnapping without making it obvious. See, Micah was a constant character in Han’s POV. All the author had to do was have Han notice, shortly before the kidnapping, that his rival is strangely agitated, or nervous, or perhaps the opposite - too quiet and distracted as he sits through his classes.

Ehh, I could write a whole essay on Cinda Chima Williams. She’s an author who balances at the edge of ‘average’ and ‘good’, and never takes the one step up to reach excellency. How little she’s lacking seriously drives me nuts when I read her books. But, let’s not dwell on that.

Covert foreshadowing

The second type of foreshadowing. This is foreshadowing that we want the reader to notice only after the foreshadowed plot point comes to fruition. The reader should facepalm, thinking, How could I have not seen it! after the big reveal or plot twist.

This is, naturally, the difficult type of foreshadowing. Anybody who’s book savvy will immediately recognize some obvious tropes that many less experienced writers may think will be a surprise. For instance, when a character is presumed dead, but they never found the body... Unless it’s A Song of Ice and Fire, you can be pretty certain that the ‘dead’ character is very much alive and will come to save the day later (or try to spoil the day, if it was a villain). The first example from the top of my head is Murtagh’s ‘death’ in the sequel to “Eragon” - though picking on “Eragon” feels like picking on a toddler, so maybe let’s leave it that.

Even when the trope is not an obvious one, most readers will still see the obvious clues. So, what can we do to hide our foreshadowing?

1. Redirect.

Simply put, we want the reader to believe that the piece of foreshadowing we’re giving is about something else than it really is about. Let’s look at what I proposed above about “The Exiled Queen” and the foreshadowing for the kidnapping. If Han only notices that Micah is readying for something, the reader may link it to Raisa’s bad feelings and guess the plot twist. However, if Han also worries that Micah is planning an attack on him again, we may just successfully divert the reader’s attention away from Raisa. They will look out for Han and any sign of danger in his POV, so when Micah comes to kidnap Raisa instead, they’ll still be surprised - but not irritated that the author pulled it out of nowhere.

2. Dress it up as something else.

One of the reason I love Sanderson is that he is a master of covert foreshadowing, and non obvious resolution of his plot. “The Rithmatist” is a great example - it has a big detective plot line. There’s a series of kidnappings of children, and at one point the inspector leading investigation complains how the culprits are bold, that they kidnap from the area just when the police moves into it. He seems like a detective truly determined to catch the kidnappers, frustrated that they keep eluding him.

Then it turns out it was actually him who kidnapped the children. Brilliant.

To be fair, it wasn’t the only thing Sanderson did. He also diverted the reader’s attention by pointing to two other possible culprits. And he failed at foreshadowing another major plot point - that the inspector was being possessed, and so he himself didn’t know he was responsible. I feel like the reveal would’ve been more satisfying if the man was doing it of his own volition, but nevertheless, I loved the book.

3. Give information backward.

This is a little trick I learned, and I was actually surprised that it worked. It turns out that if you give pieces of information backward, the reader is less likely to link them together. For instance, if you first have your hero learn about powerful artifacts that look like jewelry, and then describe a particular pendant on another character’s neck... Well, most readers will realize that the pendant is a magical artifact. However, if you first introduce the character with the pendant, and then have the hero learn about magical artifacts, chances are that most people won’t notice.

Now, I advise caution. This technique works best with minor plot points rather than big reveals. It won’t work with something too tropical and big, and it requires a good instinct when it comes to timing. Put the two pieces too close, and the reader will see through your ruse; put them too far away, and they’ll never see the connection even looking back. Overall, it’s a supplementary technique rather than the main one.

4. Use the readers’ expectations against them.

Last but not least, you can use tropes that readers will project onto your book. For instance, you know how there’s this idea that the king’s brother is always power-thirsty, and murders the ruler to take his place? Well, if your book has a king’s assassination as an important plot line, and you put a seemingly fishy brother on the scene, the reader is less likely to notice the servant in the background who maybe had a grudge against the murdered ruler.

The trick here is not to overdo it. If you make the royal brother appear straight-out evil, the reader will realize that it’s too obvious and probably not the real culprit. On the contrary, you should make it appear as if you’re trying to hide that the brother is the real killer - show him displaying remorse, perhaps give money to charity or otherwise do good deeds. Again, balance is needed; if he’s a saint, it may completely throw the reader off and they’ll look for other culprits - and spot the real one.

When it’s done right, once the big reveals comes, the reader should realize that all the little things they thought were you trying to hide the brother’s evil nature, were actually signs that he is indeed innocent. Basically, they should realize that they had played themselves.

If you’re interested to see how it can be done in practice, I recommend Brandon Sanderson. I always recommend Brandon Sanderson

-

That’s all for today. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to storm my ask box. Thank you for reading ‘till the end, and salty writing :)

[ukdamo]

The Quality of Silence is not Strain’d

One of mine...

This is a My-Space post from January, 2007. I post it today as a remembrance. Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.

I was at Meeting today, and then went for a swim.

Somehow, when I emerged from Meeting for Worship, and the Preparative Meeting  which followed it, I was Treasurer of PM. Ah well. I will have some distance to go before I emulate the dedication of our retiring Treasurer, Anne: 22 years! Mind you, with a well attended MfW consisting of 7 Friends, it's hard to hide in the corner when appointments come round!!

Preparative Meeting, is, as you might expect, the Meeting that prepares for the Monthly Meeting. In effect, PM is like a parish and MM like a diocese. Quakers belong to their MM but actually have their point of insertion in their local PM - which is where they go to sit in gathered silence each Sunday.

On the first Sunday of the month, after Meeting for Worship, we stay for a second meeting at which we discuss and order the mundane necessities of the PM and look to the Monthly Meeting, which follows on the Saturday after. Monthly Meeting is hosted by each PM in turn, so we each have a go at providing hospitality. MMs from all over the UK, send representatives to Meeting for Sufferings - a sort of 'Quaker National Committee' that orders and organises all Quaker Meetings and the charitable and educational work that Friends undertake.

Yesterday evening I was thinking about what I might do in Berlin. I will probably revisit some ground and see some new stuff. I am not likely to return to Sachsenhausen, where I spent a day ten years ago on my visit to Berlin. The camp has a special resonance for me, for it is, as far as I am aware, the only camp that has a specific memorial to the gay men whom the Nazis murdered in the many concentration camps. I wrote an extended reflective piece after that visit - too long to post as a blog, really - but I can e-mail to anyone who cares to read it. I will go to the recently completed Holocaust Museum and memorial and I'd like to go out to the villa at Wannsee, where the Final Solution received its most chilling impetus and organisation in a wintry January, 1942.

Some of the experiences from the Sachsenhausen visit found their way into a shorter reflective piece I wrote for publication in a Quaker magazine. I have posted that below.

The Quality of Silence is not Strain'd

The Siege of Leningrad (present day St. Petersburg) in the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians refer to W.W.II, lasted approximately nine hundred days. One of its most remarkable characteristics was the use made of the city's public-address system. On every major thoroughfare there were loudspeakers. To sustain the population - when food, warm clothing, shelter, fuel, and other necessaries of life were lacking - the speakers played music. When performers were too weak to play or sing recordings were used. When they were unavailable, a ticking metronome was placed in front of a microphone. Anything was better than silence. On the one occasion that the metronome stopped, so did hearts, but after some hours it recommenced its tick-tock and existence continued. A meagre existence, life in the midst of death, but life nonetheless. Life measured by the absence of silence, "I hear, therefore I am". Silence became a synonym for extinction, defeat, the end of future possibilities: silence was equated with death.

Silence = Death: that was the proclamation on the striking posters produced by ACT-UP, a gay group formed in America in the early 1980's to protest against the cavalier attitude of the US government of the thousands of young men who were dying of AIDS. In part due to their campaigning, the government began to take the disease seriously and funded research into its causes and its treatment. There can be no doubt that ACT-UP intended its posters to be read as the literal truth. Like the citizens of Leningrad forty years earlier, these activists recognised that there was little between them and the abyss. Making a noise was an assertion of vitality, staking a claim on life, an insistence on being respected and valued; "I speak, therefore I am".

Present day trends in our society suggest that noise is becoming the background radiation to life. We have piped music in shops, in toilets; it pours out of TVs and radios, hi-fi systems, car stereos. We have noisy machinery woven into the web of our existence. Even the computer I am composing on beeps and whirrs, clicks and sighs. There are increasingly few quiet places in our lives. Sometimes I feel as if they have been banished, taking sanity and solitude with them. It is difficult for Friends to make a response to a society that scarcely tolerates or comprehends silence but, instead, avoids it, minimizes it, and fears it as a harbinger of death.

In Britain Yearly Meeting, silence is revered as something creative, spiritual, fecund. We regard it as vital to our flourishing as persons. Quaker Faith and Practice offers -

• 2.13 True silence....is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. (William Penn, 1699) • 2.16 Silence...may be an intensified pause, a vitalised hush, a creative quiet, an actual moment of mutual and reciprocal correspondence with God. (Rufus Jones, 1937)

This Quaker perspective appears diametrically opposed to the examples offered above. What does the one have to do with the other? The recent protest by OutRage! during the Easter sermon of the Archbishop of Canterbury is surely antithetical to the gathered stillness of a Meeting for Worship?

Like ACT-UP before it, OutRage! intends to focus attention by being noisy and visible. I am reminded of the advice offered by Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night...." There's no serenity and peace, it asserts, in the graveyard, especially when arrival there may be said to be premature. Faced with this din, I avow that I think OutRage! does valuable service when it jolts us out of smugness and comfort. Yet, paradoxically perhaps, I find silence to be restitutive. More than that, I find it creative. Sometimes I experience it as deep dark soil where precious things germinate and grow. Whilst remaining convinced that a silent OutRage! would be worse than useless I am equally convinced that outrage which does not arise spontaneously from the rich, fertile earth of reflective silence is merely a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, the shrieking of a demagogue. I don't believe Peter Tatchell to be a demagogue.

I further sense that if, as is commonly held, silence does indeed mark the end of possibilities, then it may also mark the beginning of possibilities. If we make a foray into the world of physics, silence may be compared with a Möbius strip. This marvel has curious properties: it is a loop which has only one side and, when divided, produces two interlocking rings. My imagination and experience suggest to me that silence manifests equally odd characteristics. It seems to present but one face yet, when tested to destruction, it yields two linked, though paradoxical, conclusions. It is a Janus, facing in two directions at once, a quantum effect, which makes parallel lines meet. If silence = death, it also = life.

Leaving physics behind us, let's turn to look at sex. (Always a winner with the reader). Here we can find an example that suggests that the apparently contradictory qualities that we experience as silence are not really opposed. Many centuries ago, Augustine of Hippo (it is reported) noted that after intercourse every creature is sad. Post coitum omne animal triste, as the dictionaries of quotation have it. Augustine, if indeed it was he, was commenting upon observed and experienced behaviour. What he wished to convey by his epigram was that at the moment of most complete union the individual nonetheless apprehended that something was missing. It was precisely the inability to seize and hold this something which Augustine (and many others since) lamented. Augustine would have named this something "God", contending that humans are restless until they find their home in God. To be as humanly fulfilled as possible, in that peak experience, still left a gap, a yearning for something more. "There's gotta be something better than this!" as the song has it. The experience allowed a glimpse of something transcendent.

Let's stick with the topic but listen to a different version. The French are, by reputation, ardent lovers. They have also provided western philosophy with some of its keenest thinkers. It is no surprise, therefore, that the French language yields another example of the connection between sex/death and that something extra. The French term for orgasm is "le petit mort" - the little death. The association of this moment with something that takes you out of self and with finitude and limitation is even more explicit here than in Augustine's thought. The paradox brings two opposites together: the moment of climax - when, arguably, we are most fully alive and ecstatically alive - and death. I feel that this helps illuminate the dark corners where silence can be equated with both the end of possibilities and their beginning. The experience of Friends is not necessarily opposed to that of the wider society. Silence may be experienced as either the end of possibilities or their beginning, or both simultaneously, depending on the circumstances in which it presents itself to us. Our experience may be one of desolation and loss, or it may be filled with the exuberance of ecstatic hopes for fulfilment. But what of the silence of the grave? It is there that I now turn.

A visit to a Nazi concentration camp, KZ Sachsenhausen, proved a seminal experience for me. I travelled to Berlin, and from there to Oranienburg (where the camp is situated), to place a remembrance at the memorial to the gay men who were worked to death, beaten to death, tortured or shot by the Nazis. The memorial plaque puts things very starkly: it says that gays were "silenced to death". On a cold and snow-raked February day in 1996, I found the experience of that reality almost overwhelming. My journal entry notes, "I am possessed by the unshakable conviction that no-one should visit at a pretty time of year - it would be sacrilegious". The wintry desolation seemed appropriate. It continues, "A party of British teenagers came in through the gatehouse. They were chatty, boisterous, as kids are. But their voices grated on my ears - even more than the shrill rooks. Some places in the world must only ever be silent places. Not because noise is a bad thing! No, ACT-UP is right when it says Silence = Death. But in Sachsenhausen the silence is needful: it is what makes it permissible to be noisy elsewhere. If the potent and clamorous silence of that place is ever trodden underfoot, then the laughter, songs, protests, whistles and dancing that enliven and affirm us wherever we are will be themselves in danger of being silenced forever". In that horrendous place, I experienced an extended "moment of mutual and reciprocal correspondence with God": we howled in anguish. We were united, too, in a resolute defiance. For the spirit-in-me perceived, however dimly, that there is a hope which is not annihilated by death. Silence offers possibilities as well as the end of possibilities, life as well as death, creativity as well as extinction.

I recognised that February day that silence was a living thing, like remembrance itself, and that it carried with it both pain and possibilities. To insist on it being either one thing or the other was to debase it, to render it insipid monochrome rather than glorious Technicolor. In that charnel-house, more than in any other place I have yet visited, I was brought to the realisation that I must labour hard to sustain the complexity of silence. It presents awkward problems, allowing a creative tension between the different characteristics of silence to co-exist, because the natural tendency (as astro-physicists know) is for complex states to collapse into simpler, more stable forms. Readers can demonstrate this at home by spinning a coin. What saves me from adopting a seductively simple yet despairing attitude to silence is the intimation of something beyond the point where noise, and possibilities, stop. For I am convinced that they stop short. This is the crucial difference between those who fear silence and those who reverence it. For the latter, something glints in the dark beyond the margins and gives assurance that silence is not a void. The transcendent quality of silence, which the visit to Sachsenhausen made real for me, encourages me to embrace that something and encourages me to welcome the quiet, rather than feel threatened by it. Even death, with its great maw, cannot swallow everything up; I looked those monstrosities full in the face and I still dance, more exuberantly than ever! The silence of the grave does not have the last word. If ever I feel overwhelmed by the effort required to see beyond the surface, tempted to opt for an unidimensional and impoverished silence - which betokens only death and not life - I find reading the following poem, by Brian Wren, of some help. I simply substitute the word silence for the word 'peace' whenever the latter occurs in the text. May it work for you.

Say No to PEACE if what they mean by 'peace' is the quiet misery of hunger the frozen stillness of fear, the silence of broken spirits, the unborn hopes of the oppressed.

Tell them that PEACE is the shouting of children at play, the babble of tongues set free, the thunder of dancing feet, and a father's voice singing.

d xx

[thornewoodhospitalblog]

After a lengthy conversation, the mods (the Bee Sisters) felt the group would benefit from a master list of questions and concerns brought to them over the course of the last 3 days. Each solution has been put into one of the three categories (Set-Up, Rules and Frustrations). A solution to each of these concerns have been written in bold. If you cannot agree to these solutions, we suggest messaging us immediately. If we are not messaged, that will be taken as your acceptance of these solutions.

"I’m confused about the timeline. What day is it when my starter goes up? How long do my threads last? What information do I know in one thread and not the other?” 

Most roleplays assume the time is semi-fluid. We’ve found some writers find this passage of time confusing. Therefore, we will be posting the date every morning (12AM GMT) along with Lakewood’s weather. This means, even if the thread takes a month to finish, if the starter was posted July 1st, it will still be July 1st in that thread. If you start two threads during the same day, whichever one that was created first will be first in the timeline. For example, if Lexus posts a starter tomorrow, July 1st, and Cameron responds to it July 2nd, the thread will still occur on July 1st. If Lexus replies to a starter created after the posting her starter on July 1st, that means the events in her starter transpired first. 

In the case of pregnancies and other time-dependent plot developments, we can stretch the timeline by saying a character is pregnant for about a month “roleplay time.” One trimester for each week, roughly. This can be discussed when you clear that plot line with us, as discussed in the rules. 

“How do characters (not writers) learn of the gossip posted about in the gossip blog?”

Only staff members have access to their cell phones, so it might seem difficult to conceptualize how patients get wind of Thornewood-related gossip. Cordelia, a fellow patient, also must abide by these rules. Therefore, the rumor mill she pioneers is not circulated via text messages, tweets, etc., but through word of mouth. It is not explicitly stated how characters overhear this gossip because the gossip blog is an optional resource. Some writers may choose to have certain characters of theirs interact with it, some not. As a result, though there are many ways for a character to overhear this gossip (whispering of NPCs in the halls, a canon character tells your character, etc.), we cannot explicitly say “Ann Forrester gathers all of Thornewood into one room to divulge the gossip every week,” because then the information becomes canon. There would be no option for the information (and we use this term loosely when it comes to gossip) to be taken or left. It would have to be included. 

"I’m struggling with writing/replying to open starters. Can’t this policy be optional?”

Our main goal is to help alleviate any problems you may be experiencing while at Thornewood, but this policy cannot be optional because it would do more harm than good for it to be so. Here’s why: when new writers join the roleplay and see starters from two weeks ago, they do not feel like they are contributing to the current story. Therefore, it is paramount that all writers must reply to 2 open starters within the first 2 - 3 days of their acceptance, and post one of their own. This ensures that there is a constant influx of open starters for new writers to reply to. Please understand that preexisting writers (writers who have been with us since the beginning, writers who have been with us 2 weeks ago, etc.) can and should also post open starters before acceptance dates in order to help out the new writers. If you are struggling to write open starters, we have guides to help with this process linked on our writing tips page and are more than willing to collaborate with you on starter ideas. Remember, an effective open starter contains dialogue and a situation another writer can respond to (ie: “did you hear about Ann Forrester?” [good example for a gif chat], or bumping in to another character and perhaps their coffee spills either on you or them, pulling a character down a vacant hallway to ensure they don’t get caught by the guard coming around the corner, commenting on the good/shitty food at Thornewood while in the dining room, etc.) 

"I’m nervous about the emphasis placed on grammar in this roleplay. Will you scream at me if I make a typo?”

Absolutely not. Our advertisements for this roleplay say that we are a “literate roleplay,” which means our writers write using proper grammar (no text speak like LOL or no capital letters, appropriate punctuation like apostrophes or commas, using the correct “too” vs “to”, etc.). We will never give a warning for a typo unless there are so many typos that it detracts from the understanding of the post. We have given a warning for grammar once, and this was after repeated attempts to stress the importance of “quality” responses. Fragment sentences, posts written in first person (this roleplay writes in third person) and posts written in present tense will result in a warning. In order to be marketable to other potential writers, we need to maintain a base level of literacy. This, by no means, translates to “every post most be perfect.”

“I don’t like the writing tips you post on the main, especially the meta-disrespect one!” 

Let me say this first, and then I’ll address perhaps not liking the tips: 

In short, tips should be discussed if they are not understood. Tips are optional things to consider, aside from god-modding and meta-disrespect. These tips are not sub-tweets, as we have given warnings about things before, like grammar, and do not have a “too vs to” guide. The meta-disrespect guide was worded in an aggressively funny way by its writer (aka not Thornewood) and explained by the staff (aka Thornewood) but it is not about a particular writer in Thornewood. Meta-disrespect is ignoring the personality of a character. Saying Cameron is a “fuck up” when he clearly is not due to the fact that he is a byproduct of growing up in an impoverished area like Camden, NJ, is meta-disrespect. Unless you truly believe that people who are raised in impoverished households are somehow fuck ups, which is actually a gross ideology and will not be tolerated in the roleplay as that could lead to OOC drama very, very quickly. In short, meta-disrespect is directly ignoring the personality of a character. Of course characters can have different interpretations of other characters. If your character is super macho and they meet Cameron (who is super outspoken and known to have an intimidating reputation as Thornewood’s oldest resident, as written in his bio) and they’re not intimidated by him; that’s fine. You should, however, comment “[Your character] noticed Cameron’s desire to intimidate [them] and while his tactics may have worked on a less headstrong person, [Character] refused to cower to him.” Therefore, you’re acknowledging a writer’s intention for their character, but you’re also staying true to your character and their natural reactions to all sorts of different people. 

So, about not liking the tips:

Take them with a grain of salt. They are optional things to think about. Writing as a hobby, we assume, means you want to improve just like we do. Therefore, we post guides we have found helpful in our 7+ years of roleplay group experience. If you ever have any other problems with the tips posted on the main blog and perhaps feel you’re struggling with what the tip suggests to do, and would like to follow the tip, message the main. We love to workshop writing!

"I’ve noticed that someone is online, they know they’ve owed me a reply for days, but they’ve replied to someone who gave them a response yesterday. I think they’re showing favoritism, what do I do?”

Favoritism absolutely sucks in a roleplay. This is not a problem that “has to exist” or “will always exist” and here’s why: we will be issuing warnings if we see repeated acts of favoritism. Of course, everyone misses a reply here and there, but if you’re frequently dropping your threads with a writer, that isn’t cool. If you’re frequently putting a writer on the back burner because you’re so invested in your other plots, that isn’t cool. We get that everyone has their “favorite” plot (be it a romance plot, a friendship plot, an enemy plot), but it’s not acceptable to only engage with that particular plot and not give replies to people you’ve owed replies to. Sometimes inspiration for a reply doesn’t strike so you have to move to another reply. That’s okay, but tell the writer you owe a reply to “hey, I’m having writer’s block for our thread! Give me [an hour, a day] and you’ll have a reply!” Sometimes certain threads just aren’t working, either, that’s okay, too! Just tell your writing partner, “hey, I’m feeling really stuck with this thread. Do you mind if we plot a little bit more instead? I just feel like our characters need more [in this example] fluff before our big angsty plot unfolds. Maybe our characters could sneak out in the middle of the night, or steal cookies from the kitchen, or maybe your character could find mine crying about her brother’s declining health in the hallway and your character can comfort mine?” Talk to your writing partner OOC, and if after contacting them you’re still not getting results — contact the mods! 

"My thread got dropped and my feelings are really hurt! What do I do?” 

It feels bad to be invested in a thread and then have a writer drop it. To avoid this kind of yuckiness in the future, we are implementing a rule that you must contact your writing partner if you’re dropping a thread. If you wanted to be really nice, you could even say something like “Hey, Casey! I love Lexus and Felicity, but I just really don’t think they’re connecting in this thread. Do you mind if we scrap it and start a new one? Maybe this one can take place in the garden? What if they got caught in the rain and had a huge mud fight?” Talk to your writing partner and if the problem persists — talk to the mods!

“Time-Sensitive special events seem restrictive. I have a great plot that I want to write about during this special Thornewood Event, but I don’t think I can do it justice in X days.”

We understand wanting to plot something super awesome for a Thornewood Event. The novelty of these events inspire greatness and plenty of possibilities for compelling plots. Thornewood-wide events place every character in the same room, which can be near impossible, and staff meetings do something very similar in the way that they allow the staff to directly interact with not only each other, but the elusive Charles Forrester and his wife, Ann. However, the novelty of these events would wear off if they were able to be played out indefinitely. For instance, if a staff meeting goes on until every writer ends their thread with their fellow staff member’s writer, the July staff member event could go on for months. Then what would we do during August when the next staff meeting occurs? That being said, we do understand that sometimes writers can get a little excited and plot a little too much for five days -- your mods have done that too, especially with Summerfest, our first ever Thornewood-wide event. Our warning to “plot accordingly” might have been difficult to hear over the loud shrieks of excitement. That’s okay!! Upon plotting with your fellow writer, if you both feel you cannot accomplish your desired plot within the allotted time, message the main to ask for an extension before the first day of the event.

Closing statement of an incredibly long post: 

While most mods do not offer explanations for their decisions, and this will not become an on-going practice in Thornewood, the mods felt the last two/three days have been wild enough to justify a little bit of an “unorthodox” response. We hope these solutions will provide more clear directions for everyone going forward so we can get back to our ships, guilty-pleasures and angst. To avoid such craziness in the future, we all need to move forward with the understanding that you must talk to the mods about any issues you’re having, as we will never be offended and will only seek to provide solutions for your problems. That said, do not approach us if your mind is already made up and we cannot change your leaving despite offering solutions to your problems. Things happen, we understand people leave. Sometimes you don’t have the time anymore, don’t have the muse anymore, whatever. All good. We’ve left roleplays before, too! We do not understand not communicating about issues until it is too late for a reconciliation. 

Best, 

The Bee Sisters

[reviewdoctorwho]

The Edge of Destruction- Bordering Insanity

Only three serials in and we hit the show’s first bottle episode. And, surprisingly enough, it’s actually a true bottle episode (defined by using a single set that they already had built and using now other characters other than the principal cast), which not many shows fully manage. Since it’s only two episodes long, expect the Background Info part to be roughly as long as the synopsis. For such a short, strange serial, there’s a lot started here that has repercussions far off into the future. Regardless, buckle up because we are about to take a dive into the most paranoid, chaotic, confused two episodes of Classic Who I’ve witnessed so far.

Synopsis: Our four heroes have set off from Skaro when something goes wrong in the TARDIS, causing an explosion that knocks everyone out. Everyone slowly comes to, and they all begin acting strangely. Their memories of their adventures together come and go, they faint at random times, Susan gets particularly violent and stabby, and overall everyone just acts like they were told to act like a crazy person on a soap opera. The crew aren’t the only things acting up aboard the TARDIS- the machine itself starts freaking out in strange ways: clock faces aboard the ship start melting, the fault locator goes on and off, and the viewscreen shows photos of ancient places, over and over in a pattern. The crew investigate, and throughout tensions are rising. The Doctor suspects Ian and Barbara of sabotaging the ship in some way as retaliation for having kidnapped them, everyone else thinks that maybe some alien thing has taken over the ship or perhaps someone on it, and at one point The Doctor actually attempts to throw the two human companions out of the TARDIS into the mysterious void they’re parked in!

In the end it’s Barbara who figures out what’s going on (using some absolutely horrible logic you have to just cringe your way through): there’s something wrong with the ship itself, and the TARDIS is actually doing all the strange, clock-melting things on its own as a warning to the crew. The Doctor refuses to believe that the ship is somehow sentient, but checks the TARDIS console anyway and finds the problem- the spring under the Fast Return switch is stuck down, essentially cutting the brakes as the TARDIS hurtled back in time. All the issues were the TARDIS freaking out as it was running up against the very beginning of time itself. The Doctor fixes it, apologizes to Ian and Barbara for being absolutely insane earlier, and they head off to the next destination. The last episode ends with the police box materializing on a snowy field, and there’s a huge footprint not far from the ship…

Background Info: Shannon Sullivan’s website (links in the sources/inspiration section of my blog) explains the reason for this episode existing better than I ever could: “Doctor Who was nearly cancelled before it even began.” Even before they’d began shooting anything for the show, the man in charge of the budget was hesitant to fund the show past the Unearthly Child/100,000 BC serial due to perceived cost issues. In order to get the money, they had to agree to only doing 13 episodes at first and figuring out future budget after the ratings came in. The problem was, the serials they had planned would only be able to film up to the second episode of the upcoming Marco Polo serial. Rather than filming part of it and hoping they’d get the rest of the money on merit alone, they decided to hastily cram in a short two-episode bottle serial in to both cut back on budget and end the 13 episode run evenly. Script Editor David Whitaker wrote the episode, but it was rushed since it was a bit of an last-second thing, and they also had trouble getting a director that was actually available.

First episode of the show to only feature principal cast with no outside characters- something that wouldn’t be done for another decade or so.

One of the few bottle episodes of Doctor Who, and the first one of the show

Opinion: This episode is strange. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, which is fitting seeing as it’s an episode entirely built around confusion and mixed emotions. On the one hand, I like the idea of an episode where the problem is entirely aboard the TARDIS (though lord knows Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS and this episode both make me realize it’s not going to be done as well as my imagination wants it to be), but on the other hand this serial is so hacky and poorly thought-out that I just don’t enjoy watching it for the most part. This whole serial is a case of setting up an idea and going “wait, maybe we shouldn’t actually do this.” Barbara implants the idea that the TARDIS is a living, thinking being that’s capable of warning the crew of impending doom, but at the same time it’s also a machine that can have a spring get stuck down and nearly kill everyone. The Doctor has paranoia about his companions turning on him, but rather than explore the feelings of mistrust amongst the crew it’s just wiped away with a very quick, barely heartfelt “oh yeah, sorry I almost tried to throw you into the void.” On top of all that, you can tell that the story as a whole was barely thought out because of the idea that getting knocked unconscious would turn Susan into a stabbing, screaming psychopath. When that’s the direction you take with a usually precocious character, it’s a good sign that you haven’t really thought out the actual character while writing it. Overall, this episode has some bright points that really form where the show goes in the future (the TARDIS being alive, the contemplation and discourse over the role of companions in the show, etc) and some brilliant character building moments that really help to make the relationship between these characters shine. That being said, this serial is still rushed and confused and just all around strange to watch. I called this post the Brink of Insanity because not only do the characters get driven into paranoia and panic with just one mysterious issue, but also the way they show this paranoia and panic is absolutely bonkers.

Favorite Moment: Oh, that’s absolutely going to be Susan stabbing the crap out of the bed she’s placed into after having passed out in the console room. That one scene makes the whole serial worth watching. It’s so over-the-top dramatic!

[alannxzp6768-blog]

Fortnite Free V Bucks Works Simply Under These Ailments

Money Laundering Scheme Uncovered Using Fortnite V

Now for some latest exciting news: New leaks have surfaced online that point to snow arriving at the plot of Fortnite Battle Royale for the winter season. Fortnite possesses a children person base. That's why Epic is making sure that all eligible persons now direct qualifiers are 13 years or big, and that players between 13 and 17 years old must have permission from the mother or appropriate guardian” to reduce to the Earth Cup. This stuff contains more than 14 Programs to create your Fortnite FPS go top and reduce lag, also it contains over 30 Windows Tweaks & boosts to capitalize on thing with finally Boost your FPS while playing Fortnite.

To Get Free V Kicks in Fortnite Battle Royale, there are groups of legit ways available for you. Though, that free v bucks query also get itself an opportunity for scammers to dodge game players by suggesting them V Bucks Generator for Fortnite Game. If you happen to use Discord, then make sure you optimize this as well to boost your FPS in Fortnite and other activities while Conflict is operating in the history.

Fortnite Battle Royale has been free to play as their release, and its virtual currency is a major revenue issue for Epic Games While items got in the mass offer no competitive advantage, they do the game pleasure with fresh. Your basic point to Fortnite, the biggest game in the time, combining info on Battle Royale and Keep the planet modes to the ultimate one-stop winner's manual.

These cheats for Fortnite is 100% performing and authorized to use from the competition. You can simply get Unlimited V Responsibilities for PS4 by using these procedures. Don't you worry, you can also receive V Bucks For Xbox One, PC, iOS and Machine using the same approach. Traps are specifically useful in Fortnite, especially to protect the rear. It is not recommended to silent, if you choose for a more passive game, try to recover different types of corner (in the floor, within the walls) Fortnite buy v bucks so as to help obscure you.

Epic Games: Fortnite Battle Royale says it does not direct the experience to help children under the times of 13 in the BRITISH. Edge with April 13, players can make out the Fortnite World Cup Open Qualifiers available as a game approach in the setting selection screen. Each qualifier can provide a total prize consortium of $1 million, which means Epic will spread $10 million entirely with Open Qualifiers to the Planet Cup.

Although Fortnite has been doing the most impressive multiplayer plot with sports for more than a time now, nothing of their stuff if the game isn't satisfying to enjoy. But there's a reason it's captured the interest of millions around the world for that long, and it isn't right into the Floss dance and Head Trooper skin. Fortnite is a collection of choice based episodic story games. Every piece in this game circles in different figures. The Fortnite can be little tough later, that's the reason a person could require Fortnite V BUCKS Hack tool free those are available about separate click.

With Season 7 in full swing, version 7.01 might not look to exciting in association. That said, the new edition of Fortnite consists of the Infinity Blade gun from Epic Games' Infinity Blade series, the new Close Encounters limited-time mode, and more. Figure 2a: Data reveals the estimated revenue by item type with consequences go by Fortnite players May 2017 — June 2018, based on the Edison Trends dataset.

The Best 5 Examples Of VBUCKS

The moment the announcement starts, you'll see a preview in the upper-right trap of the activity (which you can minimise, if you want). This critique window enables people suddenly toggle the microphone and webcam happening with away from, and also click on the "chat" tie to foresee what people are speaking on your bad Fortnite death streak. If you're question what items come in the Fortnite shop right now, for the morning that you're reading this, you can head onto the Fortnite Battle Royale shop items guide We'll be updating that web site every morning, to return all the brand new items which Epic gets to the Fortnite store.

If you want help with redeeming the fortnite receive in xbox stay or playstation or microsoft marketplace then consider the blog. If you may understand and struggling to download fortnite game then e-mail us right now to get carry on the generator. V-Bucks are the most popular in-game get for Fortnite players, cooking up 83% of pieces acquired and 88% of spending. While another V-Bucks amounts are intended for buy, the track most popular Fortnite thing is 1,000 V-Bucks for $9.99, report for 53% of things bought and 33% of investing.

Recognition for look at the Fortnite: Battle Royale & Fortnite: But The planet videos! Want additional? I announced daily Fortnite videos or anything interesting for Fortnite Battle Royale. Fortnite's fundamental and less common horde mode offers daily login bonuses, daily problems, and compensates for Storm Shield Defense missions. They become brief and relaxed ways to get a small total of currency each day, although you'll should actually pay for the genre.

Fortnite: But The planet is a house survival game using all the same products and rifles as you'll locate in Fortnite Battle Royale, and rushes the person with body defenses before facing down an assault of AI controlled zombies. Survive the night then a person earn rewards like because fresh tools, gear, corner and size materials to do it all again. With state two very different modes along with live with early access, it is wonder how so Fortnite works both within PVE and PVP modes. As such, you don't require a tremendous powerful PC to be able to play the game.

Fortnite provides a in-game feedback tool in the Main Menu with the contest to turn up bad player behaviour. You can also email Epic Up for, the creator of Fortnite, complete their website - reporting any problems you may have. Fortnite: Battle Royale, is no doubt the most significant free to play games from the planet by far, then it must come to no wonder for anyone to know that gamers can buy cosmetics with real-world currency.

Pleasure Of VBUCKS

More just: Playing "Fortnite" is free, but growing through the game's loot-unlock system is not. While people project in to the center Fortnite game free v-bucks no human verification you will be presented rotating missions from the daily Quest machine. As soon as you have finished each one, you'll find your own loose V-bucks and you will be able to spend them in points to the conflict Royale mode.

So these were some of the best means which could be used to receive free v dollars in fortnite game without spending any real money. Fortnite Battle Royale is an online multiplayer survival shooter developed by Epic Games , in which 100 players fight to get the last one shelf in activities lasting less than forty seconds. It is a free game using some mechanics in the first Fortnite, a success sandbox game, and many aspects on the battle royale” type of games.

The account confidence is our own top priority! Defend the credit in enabling 2FA. As a reward for protecting the bank account, you'll uncover the Boogiedown Emote in Fortnite Battle Royale. It's unclear at this time the way the Hidden Treasure item will work, however. It'd make sense if the item somehow uncovered a singular, powerful weapon hidden somewhere around the map—but most Fortnite fans don't know what to expect quite yet.

Teenagers in the United States are reportedly preferring cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and in-game currency Fortnite ‘V-Bucks' over traditional holiday rewards to comprise gift license and fiat cash. Of course, later you can imagine Fortnite Battle Royale approaches a little more elaborate, such as attracting a enemy inside of the headquarters with avoiding done various hole you have left completely on purpose, to fill up your fund with prime. That is further confused than it does.

No one could really pinpoint any indications which exist major indicators of substance with Time 7. While many feel the Fortnite map could be converted to a ‘Winter' theme in time for the Holiday's, that remains unclear which path Epic Games will take. In fact, you can prepare your expertise from the competition and become one of the better Fortnite players without having to spend a single change in in-game purchases. However, purchasing V Bucks does have the advantages.

Flamemaster”, a tenth grader, says they are, Annoying, obnoxious, dangerous, and infuriating.” What is now wrong? Of course, every game say their drawbacks, next I remain not trying to establish how Fortnite is a negative game, only demonstrate how many people who engage in it take ruined what could have been a respectable game. You will accept an e-mail alert if the cost of Fortnite - 10,000 (+3,500 Bonus) V-Bucks will lower.

Motion blur: Try it happening creates a shadow effect as moving. It's a graphic setting to about participants enjoy, except for a competing competition of Fortnite, it may make things harder to consider it while go in speed. Bear this off is advised. Way your stats for Fortnite battle royale, complete with global leaderboards for single, couple and squad gamemodes. Unlike most multiplayer shooters, the point of Fortnite Battle Royale is to live, not to have kills. This is perhaps the most important Fortnite tips to help memorize: you may get 98 kills and still lose.

This looks like Xbox have a current advertising for Fortnite Battle Royale where players can purchase 3 months of Xbox Live Silver and 1,000 V-Bucks instead of a reduced price of $9.99. Remember that once you have the V-Bucks, they are available by any platform if the idea linked with your Epic account. Creative mode lets "Fortnite" players team up to build, not battle.

Having moving storm rounds with creative would and lived all right received from the Fortnite competitive the public when players will be able to consistently practice hectic end-game scenarios commonly met by LAN events. Fortnite could also follow PUBG's pattern and put in news plans to spruce up the gameplay (but made with Fortnite's signature, goofy style). More vehicles might be another interesting direction to go inside, with competitors PUBG , H1Z1 and now Name of Function: Blackout successfully featuring vehicular gameplay.

[helplesslyfictional]

Loki Fanfiction - Remember the Old Ways, Chapter 7 - “Disorder”

Author’s Note: I apologize for the lateness of this chapter, since I've been trying to update every week. Since I haven't written in a considerable amount of time, I had difficulty with the structure of this and the subsequent chapters. Any input is always appreciated, since creators don't like to create in a vacuum!

Chapter Summary: Thor adjusts to meeting Sophia. As Loki's future weighs on him, he distracts himself. Pairings: None! These stories are focused on family relationships.

What characters, then?   Loki, Thor, Odin, Frigga, OCs [Sophia]

When? Pre-Thor 2011: From Asgard to Earth, will go through Thor 2011 Warnings: SPOILERS for Avengers Infinity War (under cut), mature themes, emotional trauma and abuse, swearing, anxiety, mentions of mental disorders, medication Taglist: @loki-the-fox; @i-am-loki-and-now-i-speak-up; @trickster-grrrl; @deviantredhead; @mylokabrennauniverse; @leanmeanand-green; @juliabohemian; @latent-thoughts; @lucianalight; @nox-th-lk-sf; @be-a-snake-stab-your-brother; Please let me know if you would like to be added/removed from tags and I’m more than happy to do so! If I added you it’s because I’ve been tracking your blog/work and have noticed you might be interested. :)

AO3 story link; Wattpad

tumblr: Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6

Thor was breathing heavily as he assessed Sophia, his hand at the ready to summon Mjolnir from his side. Loki knew that Thor might call the guards if he didn’t explain quickly. Not taking his eyes off her, Thor asked tensely, “Is this who you were talking to?”

“Yes,” said Loki quickly, stepping toward Thor and placing a hand on his arm cautionarily. “She’s not a threat, Thor, she’s not even here.”

Thor looked at him sharply. “I felt her touch me.”

“Yes, well, I haven’t figured that part out yet.” After everything that had happened, Loki felt worn out. However, he wasn’t going to forget his manners. “Sophia, meet Thor, Crown Prince of Asgard.”

She looked at Loki with uncertainty, pursed her lips, then stiffened and gave a slight bow. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, your majesty.”

Loki was impressed with how easily she slipped into such decorum, particularly with their emotional, casual meetings, and made a mental note to ask about it later.

Thor looked Sophia up and down. She was wearing a simple grey shirt, black trousers, and socks. “What are you doing here? This is a private conversation.”

Loki stepped in front of Sophia. “It was actually our private conversation before you barged in,” he said defensively. “That was why I didn’t let you in the door.”

Crossing his arms, Thor gave a sly smile and drew in a breath. “Oh. I didn’t know you were pursuing a woman, you should have told me.”

Sophia’s eyes widened. “Hey!” Loki heard her say, before he grasped her arm to stop her retort. “You’re mistaken, brother, we were merely trying to understand the communication we’ve been having after Osk’s enchantment flared.”

“Has it been troubling you, Loki?”

“No, brother, it has been extraordinary.” As Loki explained what they had learned earlier, Sophia seemed to relax a little more. Thor’s stance also changed from one ready for combat to one of interest. Outside, the sky-shroud began to gather clouds, softening the noonday sun and spitting out a few snowflakes, which landed on the balcony and promptly melted.

“Why this Midgardian woman?” said Thor, stroking his beard. “Why did Osk connect the two of you?”

“Thor, we talked about the third child in the prophecy with Osk. I think that Sophia is - possibly…” Loki didn’t finish the sentence as he realized he hadn’t told Sophia about any of this. He wasn’t ready to tell her.

But if he only had eight years left, then they needed to find out quickly.

Thor’s eyes darted between them both. “Our sister? But...she is definitely not Asgardian.”

Sophia gave a start, uncrossing her arms. “What? Wait, what? What did you say?”

Loki opened his mouth to answer, but Thor was faster. “He didn’t tell you? A prophecy gives the possibility of us having a sibling.”

“No! Did you say sister?”

“Yes, we - “ Thor started, but Loki was finally able to speak over him.

“I didn’t tell you because we aren’t even sure ourselves,” he said, giving Thor a meaningful glance. Thor caught it and gave a little nod.

“Sure of what? There’s nothing to...look into.” She laughed in disbelief. “There’s absolutely no way that’s possible.”

“She did say she was born of her parents,” Loki said to Thor.

“Right! I mean, my mom has pictures of being pregnant with me. Pictures of me in the hospital as a baby, nail clippings, hair clippings, even, which is - admittedly - a little creepy, but hey, she keeps a baby book? She even tells me about my birth every birthday. Every birthday. Which gets weird, ‘cause I’m like 30 and tell her, just hold on, please, I really don’t want it, but she even does it over the phone…”

Loki snapped his fingers. “Sophia!”

She shook her head, saying, “Sorry. Sorry.”

“Maybe Osk got it wrong,” said Thor. “Since she was near death.” He absent-mindedly stroked his abdomen, a motion Loki hadn’t seen before from his brother. “If she could be wrong then perhaps I am as well.”

Loki sighed, rubbing his temples. “It just doesn’t seem like she would be wrong, Thor. The enchantment didn’t just form this connection, it made me...switch...souls, for lack of a better word. When you were sparring, with Sophia when she was...walking, I suppose.”

Thor closed his eyes. “So that’s what happened. It was disconcerting; I thought I was having another vision.”

“Yes. And while I was speaking with you, Sophia - Sophia swapped with me.”

Thor raised his eyebrows. “When?”

Sophia stirred. “I asked you about your second vision.”

Loki tapped his fingers against his leg as he wished he became impatient. “It’s signs like that which make me think that this is deeper than just...accidental communication.”

“How am I now able to see Sophia now?” asked Thor, frowning and moving closer to her. She stood straighter and raised her chin slightly.

“You’re asking me as though I’m an expert,” said Loki with an ironic laugh. “It seems like it was something Sophia did, to be honest, but I’m unsure.”

Sophia eyed Thor, whose height, similar to Loki’s, was comparatively significant. “I was feeling your emotions, seeing your vision...memory. I don’t understand it, but being around you is...strange.”

“I am very imposing,” Thor said, glancing up at Loki with a smile.

Loki snorted. “Depends on your definition of the word,” he said.

Sophia looked annoyed. “This is not a joke!” she said, going and sitting in a chair. The princes stiffened, and she got up quickly. “Sorry, I forgot about that etiquette. Good to know it’s the same between worlds.” She shook her head. “You are throwing around all these ideas, all these serious things, and I’ve been trying to just listen and absorb. But my body’s been taken over, I’ve been seeing things, and I’m here! On Asgard, meeting literal gods! For a few moments, I was even Loki himself - it’s hard to even comprehend.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Everything I’m feeling is so strange, but in some ways it just feels so - right.”

To Loki’s surprise, Thor nodded. “Though I do not know how to describe it,” he said.

Sophia closed her eyes. “It’s like when you are writing with pen and ink, scratching against the surface of the paper. Or the hum and fluctuation of a bow just after you release the arrow. The tactile clack of machinery or the resonance in your chest when listening to an actual instrument played. Things that just...feel right.”

Thor nodded, looking at Loki. “Like the vibration of a sword,” he said.

Loki considered what they were saying, and knew he’d felt this a few times. “Holding a healing stone,” he said in response, aware that Sophia wouldn’t know what he was talking about.

Sophia suddenly sat up, looking to the side. “I have to go,” she said in a worried tone, then vanished.

Thor gave a start, and Loki looked at him in confusion. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Thor gave a tired sigh. “These past few days have been difficult, particularly with these visions, that’s probably what it is. I hope that by...sharing them...it will help, somehow.”

Loki pursed his lips, the sadness from before coming forward as he imagined Thor’s vision. “Thank you, brother. Perhaps we can make the best of things before then.”

Thor smiled sadly. “I hope so. Until we find out more, can we make sure this stays between us?”

“As long as you don’t threaten me over it, I think that can be arranged.”

Thor nodded. “Thank you, brother,” he said seriously. With that, he walked to the balcony and flew off with Mjolnir, leaving Loki alone in his room with nothing but his creeping thoughts.

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

After attending a concert in the afternoon, Loki retired once more to his room. Normally he would feel peaceful and relaxed being out of sight from his family and the public, but it felt odd, after the intensity of that morning, to be by himself.

Eight years. Thor’s proclamation hung in the back of his mind. Could his future be changed? It seemed that if it couldn’t, Time would not have attempted to balance out this ‘great wrong’ Thor predicted. There would be no reason to have visions, to be claimed as ‘Children of Time.’

Eight years. Eight years until he no longer existed in the universe. Until there was no Loki. Eight years, then, to try and prevent what Thor had seen.

Thor could see the future. Despite knowing about it for a few days and its dour tidings, the confirmation was exhilarating. Loki was himself a little jealous. Seeing the past would likely be useful, but seeing the future was far more prestigious. Even the Seers seemed to have been renowned for that ability. Knowing the past could come through study and careful observation. Thor generally seemed to get the best of everything anyways, but Loki knew he shouldn’t begrudge his brother such a invaluable gift. Even though it would have lent Loki some measure of usefulness if he were to be an advisor at his brother’s side, as he expected.

Although he couldn’t expect that any more. He and Thor would have to discuss what to do prior to the coronation, if they could. Thor was becoming more busy in preparation, and so was becoming more difficult to pin down.

As the evening set in, Loki became restless, trying to keep his mind off his demise. He kept coming back to the idea of visiting Sophia again, even though he felt it was too soon. They’d all done so much that morning.

But what could it hurt? The worst she could do was say no, or be in a situation where it wasn’t appropriate. Briefly, Loki wondered if Sophia had told her parents. Given her first inclinations that she was insane, he thought that she probably wouldn’t risk a similar reaction.

This time remembering to ward himself, even casting a circle to silence his noise, Loki closed his eyes and remembered what it was like to be with Sophia. Barely a second passed when he appeared next to the ragged, flowered sofa. Sophia was sitting on it, reading.

Loki didn’t want to surprise her. “Sophia,” he said softly.

She looked up and smiled, then grew serious. “I thought maybe you’d take some time to process what you learned.”

“Process?” asked Loki, sitting cautiously on the sofa, “I don’t want to think about it further right now, honestly.”

Sophia studied him, then closed the book, setting it on the coffee table. “I can understand that. Sometimes it’s better to wait until you’re a little more ready to do so.”

“I don’t know as I’ll ever be ready,” Loki said, leaning back. “Aren’t you worried about your parents?”

“They’re not home right now, otherwise I would be.” She turned and put both her legs on the couch, adjusting until she was comfortable. “You’re really just looking for something to do, aren’t you. For a prince, it seems like you should be more busy.”

“I’m the second son,” said Loki nonchalantly, “so I have considerably fewer obligations. Plus I’ve made sure I’m not available to be given commitments in the first place.” Sophia grinned. Loki looked around at the room, aware of how cramped and dark it was. “Why do you live here?” he asked.

“I wondered when I’d have to talk about this,” said Sophia. “I live with my parents because I have no money.” She looked at his eyes, seeming to check for judgment.

“Why are you worried about my reaction?” he asked point-blank.

She hesitated. “I suppose you’re from a different society. I don’t know what your culture values, but mine values wealth, hard work, and independence. All of which I’m not doing at an age when many people are ‘supposed’ to be independent.” She did a strange thing with her fingers when she said the word ‘supposed.’

Loki imitated the motion. “What’s this?” he said, unable to keep back a smile.

She laughed. “It’s used to…” she stopped and thought. “I’m trying to put it into terms for someone who doesn’t use our punctuation. It’s used to separate a word and indicate it’s a name for something that doesn’t fit.”

“Like sarcasm, then.”

“In some ways.”

Loki imitated the motion again, which made her snort with laughter. “Asgardian society prizes valor, strength, and bravery,” he said. “In many ways, I also fall short of those virtues when measured up.”

Sophia cocked her head, thinking. “I think it depends on your definitions of those values. Strength doesn’t have to be physical.”

Loki gave a wry laugh. “True, and hard work doesn’t have to mean labor. But if societies are to judge, it’ll be at face value.” He looked around at the room, somehow disturbed that it was the same as his previous visit. “Do your parents not like windows?”

“Ha, they do, which is why they live upstairs,” Sophia said sarcastically. “No, I chose to live down here so that I didn’t have to spend time in my old bedroom. It works out better anyways since I get my own bathroom down here.”

Loki recalled his experience earlier. “Did your bedroom have scalloped decorations on the walls?”

Sophia’s eyes widened. “Yes. How did you know that? Did you see it in my mind?”

“From when I was connecting with you this morning, yes. I think we may have - we may have had similar experiences as children.”

At this, Sophia shrunk back. “I certainly hope not,” she said softly. “What was it that you experienced?”

Loki shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. He didn’t mean to touch on something so deep. He began to worry he might bring up something that might make Sophia distraught. But he wasn’t going to lie about this. “When I was a child, I felt as though I couldn’t...express my emotions without either angering my father or...well, my mother…” He didn’t want to say it. “My mother seemed not to listen to me. So I would try and deal with my feelings alone, staring at scratches on my tiles.”

Sophia pursed her lips, tears glimmering in her eyes. “Yes,” she said softly, then cleared her throat. “I felt very much the same way. My father would get angry, too, and my mother seemed not to care. It was so frustrating, but if I showed my emotions, I was suddenly…”

“Considered too emotional,” finished Loki.

Sophia nodded. “I was told I was overreacting. So I went to my room instead and tried to figure out how to deal with it. That’s why I didn’t want to spend time in my old room. If I look too closely at that wallpaper, there’s just...too much emotion. It’s overwhelming.”

Loki nodded. “I’ve covered mine with a carpet, but I can never forget they are there.” For a moment they shared a look of understanding.

Sophia stirred. “Want to see outside these boring walls?” she asked, a false cheerfulness behind her voice.

“You mean there’s a world outside of here?” Loki asked acerbically. “I thought this was the entirety of Midgard!”

“Stop it!” Sophia said, laughing.

She led him up a set of stairs, where she slipped her sock-clad feet into a pair of oversized boots before grabbing a coat. “It’s the middle of winter here,” she said, then pulled open the door. A wave of cold air blew in as they stepped out into the evening.

The sun was already past the horizon, tinging the clouds and the snow below with pink. The house was surrounded by forest on a hill, with the road leading to further houses that disappeared into the trees.

Not the most spectacular view, but after the past few days, it was a welcome one.

“Welcome to Midgard,” said Sophia, breathless at the cold. “Not as pretty as Asgard, but hey, it’s got its charm.”

Loki gave a smile. “It’s lovely.” He looked up at the stars instinctively before reminding himself he couldn’t figure out his position as he could on Vanaheim.

“Are you cold?” asked Sophia. “I was wondering if you’d feel it.”

“I feel it, but it’s not a problem for me,” said Loki. “You’re about to ice over, I think.”

Sophia nodded, jumping up and down briskly. “I should’ve put on a hat and gloves!” With that they ran back inside.

As Loki moved back to the couch, Sophia stopped by a side table and took a pill. “I needed to do that before I forgot,” she said, grabbing a blanket and wrapping it around herself before sitting down. “Now I’m good.”

“What was that for?” Loki asked curiously. “Sustenance? Pleasure?” Seeing her reaction, he stopped. “I suppose I shouldn’t have asked,” he said, a stab of worry going through him.

She pursed her lips. “It’s medicine.”

He should have guessed that. “I apologize, I’d forgotten that mortals need such things.”

“Yes, of course, it’s just a trivial thing,” she said sarcastically, rolling her eyes, then hesitated. “Although, since you’re connected to my soul - or brain, or mind - you should probably know.”

“Know what?” Loki felt Sophia’s shame conflicting with fear.

“I don’t know if you can feel it or not, but my mind’s not like the majority of humans’. There’s several things going on, but the primary issue is an illness called bipolar disorder. It’s part of the reason I was having such an emotional time when I met you. It’ll take my mind from very, very dark states of mind to blissful ones.”

“I’m trying to understand,” said Loki, frowning. “As you’ve probably surmised, we don’t deal with this issue. I wasn’t even aware there could be illnesses of the brain. If I recall correctly, when you were feeling ill, you believed your mind was playing tricks on you. What you’re describing, however, seems different.”

“Yes, it is different. As you probably know, emotions are chemically created in the brain.” Loki nodded. “This disorder affects your emotions, which influence your thoughts. So even though I don’t want to, my illness makes me feel deep sadness, which can bring up emotional pain. At times though, it can make me feel...ecstatic and I make irrational decisions.”

Loki squinted, crossing his arms. “Interesting. Then the medication cures it?”

Sophia smiled wryly. “I wish. No, it’s supposed to help regulate my emotions. It’s not working, so I think I’ll have to ask my doctor to find a different medication. Each person is different, so we just have to search for what works.” She met Loki’s gaze. “I hope it doesn’t affect you, I’d hate for anyone to feel this way.”

“I’ve just been feeling the emotions,” said Loki, “but they don’t last. I don’t think our connection has changed my perceptions in any way, so I don’t think I’m acting differently.”

“Good,” she said with a sigh.

“Thank you for telling me, though,” said Loki, “It’s important to examine everything possible related to this phenomena.”

“Well, it wasn’t simply for observational purposes,” Sophia said wryly. “I did, you know, want to make sure you were alright.”

Loki pretended to gasp dramatically, clasping his heart. “You...actually care...about me?”

Sophia gave him a playful whack on his arm. While it certainly broke protocol, Loki didn’t care. It was nice to have someone around. “Of course, silly,” Sophia said, laughing.

It felt good to see and feel her brief joys, particularly when he was causing them. She wasn’t afraid to laugh, at least, not in his company, a stark contrast to the seriousness held around his position. The only other person he could really joke with was his brother.

Loki excused himself for a moment, bringing his focus momentarily to Asgard. It had already gotten dark, and he hadn’t lit any lights or braziers in the room, which was ominously stark and still. He wanted to get back to Sophia as quickly as possible, so he forewent lighting anything to grab a pitcher of wine and goblets.

When he returned his focus to her, she was looking at him, amused. “What is that?”

“Asgardian wine,” said Loki simply. “I thought you might enjoy trying it.” He set the goblets on the table and began pouring the rich red-purple liquid out.

“I technically shouldn’t because of my meds,” said Sophia with a sigh.

Loki looked up at her, wide-eyed. “You’re joking.”

“Just because I’m not supposed to doesn’t mean I won’t,” she said, reaching over and taking a goblet. “One can’t just ignore the few pleasures of life we get, especially if they’re pleasures from another world.”

“That’s the spirit,” Loki said jovially, sitting back and savoring the first sip.

He felt a flicker of surprise from Sophia as she looked at her cup. “This tastes different than a typical red wine!” she said, pausing as she rolled the wine in her mouth. “I didn’t start drinking until after I got my master’s, so I’m in no way experienced, but this is...rich? And definitely more alcoholic.”

“It seems you have a low opinion of Midgardian wines.”

“I think it’s more of a lack of experience with any good wine,” Sophia replied. “Even when I was a diplomat, they didn’t serve the expensive wines except at the most prestigious parties. I only got to attend one of those.”

Loki looked at Sophia in surprise. This woman was living in a cellar with no funds; he could barely imagine her in such a prestigious position. “I must’ve heard you wrong, did you say you were a diplomat?”

Sophia nodded and took another sip. “For four years, yes.” She squinted at Loki. “Does Asgard have diplomats?”

“We don’t have formal diplomatic positions,” Loki said, trying to envision Sophia as an envoy. “If you were a diplomat, what are you doing here, with...nothing?”

“I don’t know how diplomacy works in Asgard, but here we serve in appointed positions as a job. I lost my job after - “ she hesitated. A wave of her fear and sorrow coursed through Loki as Sophia looked at her wine. “After some bad experiences in my assignment, I developed a different disorder. I struggled to continue working for another couple years, then I - I gave up and came home to try and get better. It’s not been working, clearly.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Loki. While he didn’t understand these illnesses and disorders, he could understand that the mind had a terrible, powerful sway over one’s experience. It certainly made his theory that she was their sibling more dubious. “A fall of status so significant must have been discouraging.”

Sophia looked at him in confusion. “No, no. Status doesn’t have anything to do with...anything. I don’t care about that. I don’t even really care about not working, or not having money.” She rolled the goblet in her hand, watching the wine shift inside. “I think what was most frustrating was not having the flexibility to keep my job while trying to manage my health. As a result, what was most discouraging was having to fight for myself while not having the strength.”

Loki looked down sadly. He knew too well what that was like, to fight, to lack the strength, to give up and give in to the demands of others. Remaining passive in an effort to preserve his sense of self. “I understand.”

“You do?” Sophia said bitterly. “You’re a prince of Asgard, the god of tricks and magic. With all of that at your disposal, how do you know what it’s like?”

“I fight for myself all the time,” said Loki, his anger rising. “I don’t know if you noticed I have a brother who chooses to do as he will and impose himself on others, and a father who demands what I cannot give. I learned long ago that if I was going to get what I wanted, I had to get it in other ways than asking for it from my family or even from others. I deceive and trick them because I otherwise don’t have respect or even love.” He caught himself before spilling anything further. Careful, Loki, don’t say too much. Information runs the court.

Sophia looked him up and down, undoubtedly feeling his response. “I - I didn’t realize. I’m sorry.”

Loki shook his head. “Don’t apologize, there’s nothing to apologize for. It makes you seem weak.” Immediately he chastised himself. You’re sounding like Father.

Finished, Sophia put the goblet down on the coffee table. “I’m still learning there’s a distinct difference from the stories I’ve heard and the person that you are. The same goes for your brother...and the rest of your family. I suppose I should have realized that earlier.”

As the evening waned onwards, discussed further the subject of the Odinsons’ findings regarding prophecies, Seers, and other topics of relevance. Sophia showed a keen curiosity and put ideas together quickly as he filled in the gaps of her knowledge.

Before long, their conversation was interrupted by the slam of the door and footsteps. Sophia shooed Loki off back to Asgard, where he slept more soundly than he expected that night.

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on https://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/website-traffic/what-to-blog-about-the-data-driven-guide-to-choosing-blog-topics/

What to Blog About: The Data-Driven Guide to Choosing Blog Topics

Let’s begin with a simple fact:

Anyone can start a blog, but not anyone can start a blog other people want to read.

In the throes of self-pity, you might be tempted to believe it’s because of the fickleness of human nature, a lack of influential connections, or perhaps the realization of how difficult building an engaged audience actually is.

And you would be partially correct. All those factors do play a part.

But what if I told you the primary cause of failure for bloggers is actually their choice of what to blog about? Not their connections, not their persistence, not their understanding of how blogging actually works, but the accidental, unfortunate decision to write about the wrong blog topics.

You might be skeptical, and rightfully so. The good news is, I’m about to prove that assertion to you right now. Even better, I’ll show you how to uncover exactly what to blog about, increasing your chances of success 100X.

Blog Topic Insights from Studying 13,360 Bloggers

Over the years, my team and I have mentored 13,360 bloggers in every imaginable niche, language, and style. Everyone from meteoric success stories like Laurel Bern to thousands of students who have struggled to break through the noise.

And we’ve noticed some patterns. Some very interesting patterns.

Data from students shows us that some blog topics get traffic quite easily while others are nearly impossible. For instance, you can blog about square-shaped tomatoes with as much vigor and persistence as you like, and you’re never going to take off, because… nobody cares.

In fact, the range of blog topics where you can expect to both get substantial traffic and monetize is relatively narrow. Some blog topics that seem plausible from the outset, such as freelancing, actually don’t have a prayer of success.

In other words, your choice of what to blog about is critical. If you make the wrong decision, you can execute every traffic and monetization technique flawlessly, and none of it will work, because having the right blog topic is critical.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding your blog topic:

Step 1: Choose a Popular Niche

Before you write a single post, it’s worth asking yourself a simple question:

Is anyone in your niche getting significant traffic?

If not, what makes you think you can be the first?

For some reason, people are happy to invest hundreds or even thousands of hours into publishing content without stopping to consider if anyone else has ever been successful. Worse, they believe that competition is bad. They take pride in being the first person to write about a topic and believe that’s an opportunity.

It makes me want to cry. Not only is that perspective flat-out wrong, it’s tragic because it leads you to invest time into projects that never had a prayer of success.

So, how can you tell if a niche is popular or not?

The easiest way is to reference a research library like the one we have in Freedom Machine. It does all the heavy lifting for you by giving you a list of successful blogs, their most popular posts, and examples of how they monetize.

But let’s say you don’t have that. What can you do?

There’s no exact science to it, but here’s the process I recommend:

Find a List of Popular Blogs in the Niche

This is trickier than it sounds.

Let’s say you’re blogging about how to trade stocks. Does that put you in the “stock trading” niche, the “investing” niche, or something else?

My advice: go to the broadest category that makes sense. In the case of trading stocks, that would actually be the “personal finance” niche, assuming you’re targeting people who want to trade stocks for themselves (more discussion about this later).

From there, just run a simple Google query like “best personal finance blogs”, and chances are, you’ll find several lists to browse through:

From there, you just need to dig a little deeper and find out how popular those blogs really are.

Plug the Blogs into Ahrefs to Uncover Their Traffic

One of my favorite things about Ahrefs (affiliate link) is it gives you both social and search data. Let’s go through an example, and you’ll see what I mean.

In their Site Explorer, you can type in any URL to pull a report on the site:

You’ll get back a report with an enormous amount of data. Going back to our trading stocks example, let’s say I found out that Mr. Money Mustache is one of the most popular personal finance sites, so I plug it into Ahrefs. Here’s what comes back:

And that’s just a sample. In the left sidebar, there are lots of additional reports where you can go even deeper.

If you want to look at social traffic, for example, you can click the “Top Content” link, and here’s what you get back:

There’s all the content on the site, sorted by total shares. As you can see, the top 10 posts all crossed 2,000 shares, so it looks like Mr. Money Mustache is doing well from a social traffic perspective.

Personally, I like to see at least five sites within the same niche with at least five posts above 1,000 shares. That’s usually enough to start guessing what readers in the space want to read more about. More on this later.

A Word of Warning about Popularity

Stop for a moment and think about another question:

What’s your end goal for building a blog?

I’m guessing it’s not just to get a bunch of traffic and feel good about yourself. You want to turn that traffic into money somehow, right?

Well, some niches are dramatically easier to monetize than others. You can get a lot of traffic writing about the daily activities of celebrities, for example, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make money blogging about it.

Some niches can only be monetized through advertising. A good example is the news. Every time you read an article on a news site, they get paid a few cents for an “impression.” That’s how they survive.

If you do the math though, it takes a lot of traffic to start earning enough from advertising to quit your job or do anything meaningful. Like… hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

For that reason, when my team evaluates popular niches, we also look at how the blogs are monetizing. Ideally, we want to see people selling some type of products and services because those genuinely have the highest ROI on blogs. If all we find are popular sites stuffed with ads, it’s a bad sign.

The bottom line?

Popularity is good, but it’s not enough. When you’re doing research, also pay attention to how blogs in the space are monetizing.

Step 2: Choose a Single Tribe That’s Hungry for Content

When you’re researching a niche, you’ll notice blogs seem to focus on different types of readers.

In the personal finance niche, for example, blogs like Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar focus on fundamentals like secure investments, living frugally, and so on. At the same time, there are other blogs like I Will Teach You to Be Rich and Mr. Money Mustache that focus much more on how to increase your income and improve your lifestyle.

If you feel like those sites are fundamentally different, you’re right. While they both occupy the personal finance niche, they serve different “tribes.”

Here’s what I mean by tribe:

A tribe is a group of people who congregate online around common interests.

In the personal finance space, the two biggest groups are “save and invest” people and “increase your income” people. Neither tribe is right, but they don’t really mix well with one another. You won’t find a blog focusing equally on both tribes.

So, how does this help you?

It allows you to narrow in on your target audience. Here’s what to do:

Name the Tribe for Each Popular Blog in Your Niche

Earlier, we talked about identifying at least five blogs with more than 1,000 shares on at least a few posts. Now let’s go back and figure out which tribe they are talking to.

For instance, here are the popular posts on Mr. Money Mustache:

Do you see the pattern?

Mr. Money Mustache is clearly positioning himself for getting rich and against extreme frugality in some of his most popular posts. In other words, he’s speaking primarily to the “increase your income” people.

So, go through your list of five blogs. Based on their most popular posts, who are they resonating with? If it’s not immediately clear, here’s how to figure it out:

Skim through their popular posts for patterns. Read at least a few of them to get a better idea of their philosophy. Based on what you’ve learned, assign the tribe a name.

When you’re finished, you should have a pretty good idea about who’s interested in reading what. From there, you’re ready to…

Choose the Tribe That’s the Best Fit for You

Not all decisions can be made with spreadsheets and numbers. To succeed at blogging, you also need to consider what you enjoy talking about. The sweet spot is the overlap between your interests and everyone else’s:

For instance, let’s say all of the blogs you studied were suddenly interested in having you take over as Editor-In-Chief. Ask yourself…

Based on your own approach and philosophy, which tribe would be most excited to have you as their leader? Which tribe do you feel like you could help grow and achieve their objectives?

In other words, you’re looking for an existing blog and tribe to serve as a model for what you want to build. It’s already built a following, so it’s clearly viable, and you feel like you could also contribute in a meaningful way.

That’s what I call the Zone of Magic. Ideally, it’s where you spend all your time.

What to Do It If You Don’t like Your Options

Before we move on, there’s one important question we need to address:

What if you’re not a good match for any of the existing tribes in your niche?

Approximately 60% of the students who go through our flagship course, Freedom Machine, find themselves in this exact situation. They have zero interest in writing about any of the topics they find on other popular sites in their niche. Even worse, they feel like those bloggers and their tribes just “don’t get it.”

If you find yourself in that situation, here’s a little tough love for you:

If there’s not an existing tribe who’s clearly interested in the same things you are, and you start a blog anyway, you’re essentially telling people they are wrong and need to change the way they think. In general, people don’t respond well to this. Not only will they refuse to share your posts or buy your products, but they might send you some hate mail as well.

The better, safer, and ultimately much more rewarding approach?

Go back to the drawing board and find a tribe whose interests align with yours. Instead of fighting them, just figure out where they want to go and show them how to get there.

Here’s how…

Step 3: Write About Their Proven Interests

Which would you rather write about: topics you think your readers might like, or ones you know will get traffic, because you have proof of those topics being popular in the past?

Obviously, it’s better to have the proof, right? You might as well invest your time where you have the best chances of success.

In this section, I’ll show you how to uncover those proven interests, as well as put your own spin on them. Let’s jump in.

Drill Deeper into the Site Stats

Earlier, we used Ahrefs (affiliate link) to examine the most shared posts on Mr. Money Mustache. Let’s go back to that:

In general, the highest-quality shares are the ones from Facebook, so I tend to sort posts that way instead of by overall shares. Save these for later by running a custom export of the first 20 rows and saving it to your computer.

The next step is to dig into the keywords driving the most search engine traffic. You can find those by clicking on “Organic keywords” in the left sidebar.

The default sorting by traffic is fine, but if you’re a beginning blogger, I would recommend eliminating all keywords with a keyword difficulty (KD) over 40. Again, do a custom export of the first 20 rows and save it to your computer.

You should go through the same process for all the most popular sites serving your tribe. By the time you’re finished, you’ll have a list of dozens or maybe hundreds of posts proven to be popular with your audience.

Choose Posts Where You Can Add Value

So… now you have a big list of popular posts on other sites serving your tribe. That’s obviously useful information, but here’s the big question:

How do you use that information without sounding like a copycat?

You didn’t get into this to regurgitate the ideas of other writers. You want to publish content that’s uniquely you.

Here’s how:

Copy the topic, not the advice.

For instance, one of Mr. Money Mustache’s most popular posts is Getting Rich: From Zero to Hero in One Blog Post. The topic is getting rich, and the advice is to live simply and frugally on half of what you make.

If I were to write a post on the same topic, I would talk about getting a remote job where you can live in a cheaper country like Mexico but continue making US dollars. In other words, I would give completely different advice on the same topic, and I would interweave my own story of moving to Mexico into it.

I’d also choose a different headline like, “How I Became a Millionaire from My Wheelchair.” Again, it’s the same topic, but an entirely unique headline. No one would accuse me of being a copycat.

You can follow the same approach with the most popular topics in your space. Scan through the list of posts you exported from Ahrefs (affiliate link) and choose the ones where you can write about the same topic but give your own unique advice.

Write a Better Version of That Post

Okay, you’re almost ready to write your post. Finally!

Before you start scribbling down your thoughts, consider two final questions:

What made the post you studied on the topic popular? What can you do to create an even better post?

It’s like the old saying, “Stand on the shoulders of giants.” When you find a popular posts model, you always want to know why it worked, and you want a good idea of how to improve upon it.

At some point, I’ll write a post detailing exactly how to do that, but here’s the short version. There are five ways to improve upon any post, and they all begin with the letter ‘D’:

Detail: make your post more detailed (or comprehensive). Design: include an infographic or organize your points in a more useful way. Data: include unique stats or examples to back up your points. Drama: amp up the emotion by infusing your post with personality and stories. Distinctions: give advice based on your unique perspective as an expert.

For instance, the Getting Rich post on Mr. Money Mustache is pretty short and lacks a lot of detail, so if I wanted to compete, I would probably write a much more comprehensive manual for getting rich, clocking in at 3000+ words. I might also add in my personal story, giving it extra drama.

Regardless of which method you choose, here’s the bottom line:

Your goal is to write the best post ever published on a proven, familiar topic.

Is it easy?

Hell no. Usually, it’s a lot of work.

But this is how you win.

You stop writing about whatever you want and limit yourself to proven topics. You study the competition. You create content so much better than theirs, that it makes them want to call their mommy.

‘nough said.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the CEO of Smart Blogger. Check out his new blog Unstoppable and read the launch post that went viral: 7 Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything but His Face.

The post What to Blog About: The Data-Driven Guide to Choosing Blog Topics appeared first on Smart Blogger.

Read more: smartblogger.com

[atrocitycl]

BTS - “Dead Leaves” Review

(Audio—unofficial upload)

BTS – Dead Leaves

Reviewed on February 27, 2016

Nevertheless, although many fans might desire to praise and cherish the song on the basis of it being unique—which, again, I do not disagree with nor do I find these “unworthy” qualities as it is important to have distinguishable songs from the hundreds of thousands (Korean) pop songs—I disagree with praising the song in this way. In fact, I struggle to praise the quality of the song in general; certainly the song is by no  means utterly weak, but I will argue that if we look beyond uniqueness we will find that “Dead Leaves” is a rather plain, negligible song.

Personal Message: First of all, thank you so much to the requester of this review for sending this in. It has been multiple weeks since I actually received the request, so my sincere apologies for this delay. Although the following is no way to excuse myself, I hope to clarify the delay is because I have been quite busy and not neglecting the request. For other news, if I am on track I hope to equally post another review request that also involves BTS. Afterwards, I plan to wrap up the shorter month of February with TWICE’s “Knock Knock”—a song that I am finding as my current favorite song of all-time and one that is excellently efficient and accommodating in its composition for TWICE’s weaker vocals. But we will save that discussion for when it is appropriate.

To address this current review’s link, I am using an unofficial YouTube upload. For basically what this means, for future readers reading this three years from now—which, now thinking of such, is definitely a bizarre yet intriguing thought—the link might no longer work because of copyright issues or because the uploader removed her/his video. As such, should this be the case—whether three years from now or somehow in a few months—then manually searching for the song will have to be done.

Addressing one last technical point, as mentioned earlier, due to also wanting to finish another request, this review will perhaps be shorter than usual and I might opt to skip over some details. (A prime example would be not discussing why I rated the lyrics as is—though this will not be the case for this particular review.) Moreover, I also plan to focus on key concepts rather than all of the minute details. I hope this all works out so that the review is brisk yet thought-provoking to read, and so that I can also review “Spring Day” in time.

Finally discussing the song itself, “Dead Leaves” is—in terms of its breakdown—incredibly different from a majority of other songs reviewed before. The song itself is not necessarily the strongest I have heard nor is its structural composition any better. However, in terms of its lyrics and its flow, both of these aspects are definitely unique compared to many other pop songs—and with the lyrics specifically, it scores incredibly well. Nevertheless, although many fans might desire to praise and cherish the song on the basis of it being unique—which, again, I do not disagree with nor do I find these “unworthy” qualities as it is important to have distinguishable songs from the hundreds of thousands (Korean) pop songs—I disagree with praising the song in this way. In fact, I struggle to praise the quality of the song in general; certainly the song is by no means utterly weak, but I will argue that if we look beyond uniqueness we will find that “Dead Leaves” is a rather plain, negligible song.

_______________________________________________________

Song Score: 6/10 (5.75/10 raw score) – “Slightly above average”

- Vocals: 6/10

- Sections: 5/10 (4.83/10 raw score)

Introduction, Verse, Rap, Chorus, Verse, Rap, Chorus, Bridge, Rap, Chorus, Conclusion

1.     Introduction: 5/10

2.     Verse: 5/10

3.     Rap: 6/10

4.     Chorus: 3/10

5.     Bridge: 4/10

6.     Conclusion: 6/10

- Instrumental: 4/10

- Lyrics: 8/10

[Instrumental introduction]

Like those dead leaves there that have fallen and are flying My love is collapsing without strength Your heart is only going further away I can’t grab you I can’t grab you any more, more, more I can’t hold on longer, yeah

Over there, the autumn leaves that look like they’re at stake It seems like they’re looking at us If our hands touch, even if it’s all at once it only seems like it’s going to be crumbs I just only looked with the winds of autumn The speech and facial expressions that have gotten colder all of a sudden I can only see our relationship withering Like the autumn sky, it’s empty between us An ambiguous difference that is different from before A night that’s much more quiet today A single autumn leaf that’s attached to the branch It’s breaking, I can see the thing called "the end" The dead leaves that are becoming shriveled The silence inside your aloof heart Please don’t fall Please don’t fall, the dead leaf that’s becoming crumbs

I want you who makes eye contact with me I want you who wants me again Please don’t fall Please don’t collapse Never never fall Don’t go far far away Baby you girl I can’t hold onto you Baby you girl I can’t give up on you Like the dead leaves that fell This love, like the dead leaves Never never fall It’s withering

As if every autumn leaf has fallen As if everything that seemed eternal is going further away You’re my fifth season Because even if I try to see you, I can’t Look, to me, you’re still green

Even if our hearts aren’t walking, it walks by itself Our foolishness, like laundry, is being hung piece by piece Only the bright memories are dirty It falls on me Even if I don’t shake my branch, it keeps falling That’s right, in order to raise my love, it falls Even if we’re close, my two eyes become further, spreads further Like this, being thrown out Inside my memories, I become young again

Never never fall yeah Never never fall yeah I want you who makes eye contact with me I want you who wants me again Please don’t fall Please don’t collapse Never never fall Don’t go far far away

Why, can I still not give up on you? I hold onto the withered memories Is it greed? The lost seasons I try to restore, I try to restore them

Blaze them brightly, flare It was all pretty, wasn’t it? Our pathroads But it all withered The dead leaves fall down like tears The wind blows and everything drifts apart all day The rain pours and shatters Until the last leaf You you you

I want you who makes eye contact with me I want you who wants me again Please don’t fall Please don’t collapse Never never fall Don’t go far far away Baby you girl I can’t hold onto you Baby you girl I can’t give up on you Like the dead leaves that fell This love, like the dead leaves Never never fall It’s withering

Never never fall Never never fall

_______________________________________________________

Analysis: To begin this review, we first need to understand the song’s current strengths. After all, it scores at a six which is quite decent despite my harsher, critical remarks that “Dead Leaves” is supposedly a plain and forgetful song.

As discussed earlier, the song’s uniqueness does help its ratings—and more specifically, that uniqueness exists in the lyrics of which I consider an appropriate category for a song to be judged in. For why the lyrics score incredibly well—and readers should realize an eight for lyrics is incredibly rare and only two other songs on this blog have earned such—the details are phenomenal. Even if the plot itself is nothing too spectacular as it is a romantic-related (or more accurately, a not-so-romantic one as it involves a breakup) topic and thus, is far from unique, the details truly make the song become a miniature story.

For example, with the first rap, we come into details that are not repeated or are cliché as oftentimes is the case with pop music. Unlike lyrics that follow extreme simplicity such as “Our love is going away / My heart hurts every day” (I made up these lines; if I end up quoting an actual song, it is by pure coincidence), the first rap instead brings out an entirely fleshed scenario and description of the protagonist’s feelings. This occurs at other moments in the song, and even the choruses are still building off the main story versus spewing lines that are not specifically rooted in an individual, creative plot. This incredible level of details in the lyrics is why I have given it an eight. It is like a story; and for me to be able to claim such—even if, yes, the story itself is not necessarily amazing in of itself—the very fact that it comes off as one versus “regular, generic pop lyrics” is praiseworthy.

Another aspect that is the song’s strength—though it is one that is not quite scored and thus unable to directly aid the song’s rating—is that the style involved is different from many other pop songs. Although many might disagree, I believe it is still important for songs—especially in pop as there are a plethora of songs existing—to have a distinguishing, creative style that is heard in either aurally or structurally (or even both). In “Dead Leaves,” what makes its style unique is how it flows: the song focuses on slower build up that, once it reaches its climax (the choruses—as is oftentimes the case), the release from there is orientated towards slower, wave-like progression versus the expected and typical style of merely streaming out the climax.

Let us use some examples since what I am discussing is incredibly abstract. In BTS’ “I Need U,” we find that the chorus flows out rather fluently and directly: the chorus occurs and it simply continues off the song. In fact, it is hardly thought that a song’s climactic piece would run anything but as a fluent stream. However, in “Dead Leaves,” this is not the case as the choruses is frequently chunked up and therefore carries subtle pauses, and furthermore the choruses are quite lengthy and dragged on versus occurring in a somewhat hastier fashion so that the song can easily “reset” back to its build up form. (And for another random note, pop songs run in what is called a “binary” form because of this very reason; there is oftentimes a “cycle” of going from “A” to “B” and back to “A” and the cycle begins again—and hence “binary” as there are two main portions. But this is getting far too technical and further abstract and is definitely not a part of the discussion for “Dead Leaves.”)

Returning to the main reason for all this lengthy explanation, I mention this all to explain that the song very much sounds unique. Seldom do pop songs follow this type of flow and, with the “binary” form of pop music (which I attempted to explain), it is definitely interesting to hear “Dead Leaves” have its own style to the binary format.

All that said, while creativity is welcomed and is arguably necessary for a group/soloist to survive—and by “survive” I merely mean “stay relevant” because I love being dramatic—in the K-Pop scene, this does not mean a song is automatically good. In other words, just because a song sounds different does not mean it is therefore a strong song; this will ultimately be the driving idea behind this current review. If a listener hears a very different song and then uses that as her claim for why the song is good, it is an incredibly weak argument. Equally said, it is also a weak argument to critique a song for “sounding generic” on the sole basis of that. For example, in the past I have claimed some songs sounded awfully generic and typical, but I then (or at least I hope) went on to explain why it sounds generic and why sounding generic in that song’s particular case is bad. If nothing else is gleaned from this review, I do hope readers understand these crucial points: never discuss and critique music quality purely on sounding “different” or “similar” to other songs. Instead—as I will do with TWICE’s “Knock Knock,” a very generic pop song—it is about looking at the composition and production involved and then deciding whether a song is good or not (and of which there is no right answer as music is all subjective).

With all that in mind, let us now discuss what I do find weak in “Dead Leaves.” To save time and to not bore readers with robotically breaking down each aspect to the song, I wish to instead hone in on one section: the choruses. As much as I admire the creativity involved in general but more specifically the choruses, I find that the composition sacrificed efficiency and even quality just for “Dead Leaves” to be deemed “creative” or “unique” within the context of its chorus and overall flow. What remains most troubling is how excessively dragged the choruses sound. For example, as already partially discussed above, the choruses do not just run through and carry on the song; rather, the choruses contain frequent pauses and, to describe its flow, it is akin to waves: pushing out hard, receding a little, and then pushing out hard once again and repeating this.

Now, this composition decision is not just for the sake of creativity and I do wish to clarify that. A musical benefit that comes from this approach is that the vocals are granted additional chances to showcase minimal beltings—this being a pleasing aspect to BTS’ vocals in this song. Nonetheless, this main benefit is still questionable: doing such comes at the expense at making the vocals and instrumental sound “stretched.” To explain what I mean, the choruses’ ending time should be much shorter than they currently are. Especially with considering the second half of the choruses, this portion of the choruses are not necessary per se and I argue this additionally, length-dragging aspect only creates a more rigid, awkward “recycling”—going back to the following verse’s calmer state—when in many ways the song have done that transition without needing the excessive dragging manner. And with this, besides structurally lowering the choruses’ ratings, this section’s instrumental is also in of itself poorly executed because it very much amplifies the problem and indeed, a lowering instrumental rating can be quite detrimental.

Ultimately, “Dead Leaves” does score decently but we have to be critical: is the decent rating because in an aesthetical sense the song is solid—in other words, gauging its lyrics and uniqueness—or is, despite the given rating, the song in a musical sense is actually slightly weaker? Readers can tell, I personally argue for the latter: “Dead Leaves” struggles with its composition and thus it renders as a bit too stretched during its choruses. Again, I do wish to highlight and praise the creativeness involved and for the risk taken with the song’s composition, but with being a critical, active listener I cannot help but bring up the song’s significant flaws.

But of course, readers have to be remember this is all my opinions; I do not state these points to bash BTS or their song, but I instead wish to begin a discussion that I hope fans and listeners can build upon whether through disagreeing with me, agreeing with me, or a combination of both. That is why music is reviewed: for the intellectual, mature, and respectful discussions. No one reads music reviews because they want a reviewer to form an opinion for them; after all, it only takes perhaps seven playbacks of a song for one to get a firm grasp on what their take is. Indeed, people read music reviews because they want to have various insights—perhaps even insights that would completely conflict with what they think of a song. That is the goal of my review, and I very much mention this as I understand there will be fans who are upset at my words even if statistically the song manages to score decently.

_______________________________________________________

I feel incredibly guilty for this request being delayed for so long. Since it is later at night that I am finishing this one, the request for BTS’ “Spring Day” will instead come out tomorrow or in a few more days. I am getting slightly less busy, but I do still have school tasks to handle and thus might be unexpectedly busy. (Examples include group projects, essays, and preparing my third lesson for seventh graders—the latter being something I am excited for.) But admittedly I have been spending much time watching TWICE videos instead of finishing up priorities, such as a theology essay, but that is beside the point—I mean, “So what?” as Momo says. And “so what” if the ladies are all incredibly gorgeous—physically and non-physically—and can still look flawless with minimal makeup on while if I do the same I still look like I have not slept in weeks.

Jokes and TWICE references aside, thank you to all for reading this review whether in full or skimmed. Thank you so much to the requester once again for sending this in and for being patient. “Spring Day” by BTS will be next for review, and afterwards, I will finish up the month with TWICE’s “Knock Knock” and begin March with another new review request. Make sure you “Don’t go far far away.”

[roseangelx]

Semi-Coherent Thoughts on “The Six Thatchers”

I won’t call this a review, because my thoughts are still a bit jumbled (not unlike the episode itself), but I thought I’d write something up while it’s still fresh in my mind. Under the cut to avoid spoilers (and also because it’s lengthy and I won’t bore anyone who isn’t interested). 

General Thoughts

Overall, I did like the episode. When I rewatched Series 1--3 this week, I noticed that there was a sort of dynamic-shift in Series 3. With the exception, perhaps, of HLV, it felt like Series 3 served a similar purpose to filler episodes in longer TV series - lots of character development, not a lot of plot, less of the case work that we became so familiar with in Series 1 and 2. Series 4 felt like we’d shifted back closer to the dynamic from the first two seasons, and I was glad for that. 

I do agree that the episode was a bit jumbled, like the writers had too many ideas that were squished into too short a period of time. The first 40 minutes or so, with the primary focus on the case that the episode is named after, ran smoothly, but once the AGRA flashdrive came into it, everything kind of fell apart. I still enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like there was so much in there that would have been better spread over a few episodes. 

I confess to being a little bit disappointed by the actual “six Thatchers” case, partially because I expected more from the apparently major case in the episode, and partially because “The Six Thatchers” is one of John Watson’s blog posts set during ASiB. What happened, did the writers run out of ideas and have to backtrack to use a version of a case that had already been solved on the official website? Perhaps that’s why John Watson’s blog is no longer being updated despite there being blog posts within the episode - the blog is no longer consistent with the series. 

Let’s Talk About Mary

The one big thing on the top of my Series 4 wishlist was for more backstory on Mary, and this episode did deliver, just not as much as I hoped. Her character is so complex and has so much potential, and there is undoubtedly so much more to her past that I wanted to explore. I find myself hoping (and in part expecting) to see more of her backstory in the coming episodes, even though her character is no longer in the picture. I still can’t shake the fact that the AGRA flashdrive thrown into the fire in HLV has a full stop after the R that is clearly not there on the flashdrive that was originally given to John, and if that turns out to be an editing mistake, I will be hugely disappointed. 

Mary’s death was, in a word, heartbreaking. I have seen criticisms of John Watson’s so-called “Chewbacca noises” during that scene, and I was surprised, because all I could think was that Martin Freeman was an extraordinary actor and it struck me as incredibly genuine. It hurt. I didn’t cry, but it was close enough, for me. I didn’t see it coming. I knew it was likely she would die in this series, because that much had been alluded to in interviews - we know that Mary Watson dies in the ACD stories - but I was sure it would be the big twist in episode 3. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon and I’m devastated that it happened in the same episode where we were finally getting to know her better. I can only hope that the decision to kill her in this episode was made because there are things that needed to happen after her death that they needed two episodes to deal with (things perhaps related to the “Miss Me?” video that I will talk about shortly), and not because they needed her out of the picture so that John and Sherlock could go back to being John and Sherlock. Anyone who knows me knows my hatred of female character deaths serving as no more than a plot device to further a man’s storyline (don’t get me started on Sleepy Hollow). 

Moving past Mary’s death, we have her “Miss Me?” video, of which I’m still not sure what to think. I won’t talk much about that little end-credit scene, because I have no idea what to make of that beyond the fact that it is reaffirming my suspicions that Mary was linked to Moriarty in some way. However, the rest of the video is still intriguing, particularly the wording. “Save John Watson”, she says. Not “protect him”. Not “look after him”. “Save him”. They’re words that you’d only expect her to use if she knew that there was something that he needed saving from. Is it because she knows that in the event of her death he’ll be heartbroken and need saving from himself, or because she has reason to believe that people from her past will hurt him? Or, am I just overthinking again?

Relationships

The interpersonal interactions between the characters are one of my favourite parts of this show, and in this episode relationships definitely deserve a mention. To my surprise, the most prominent relationship featured in this episode seemed to be that of Sherlock and Mary. I know he had seemed to forgive her for shooting him in HLV in the end of that very same episode, but I hadn’t realised how complete that forgiveness seemed to be. They were working together, and he made it clear that he really did care for her and wanted to protect her. Perhaps it’s a result of all the fanfiction I read, but previously I felt like the vow he made was primarily for John, that yes, of course he’d protect Mary, but he’d do that because of John. No, this episode seemed like he wanted to protect Mary as well as John, because he cared for them both. Makes her death a little more heartbreaking. I did enjoy their interactions, although I probably would have enjoyed them more if we’d had more time to trust her again. Sherlock might have forgiven her for shooting him, but I still didn’t trust her. I still don’t, even after her death. 

There was a sore lack of Sherlock and John interactions, which I know many people are disappointed about, though I imagine the next two episodes will make up for that. Whether you ship them romantically or not, I think we all know that their relationship is always going to be central to the show. We just have to push past the pain of John blaming Sherlock for Mary’s death first - which is heartbreaking, but when you consider the fact that John doesn’t know Mary sacrificed herself but instead believes that Sherlock failed to protect her, his reaction is exactly what I’d have expected. It doesn’t make it any less painful. You can only imagine how much pain Sherlock himself is in, blaming himself, grieving, and being unable to help the one person he cares about more than anything in this world. 

Then we have John and Mary’s relationship, which on the surface seemed surprisingly healthy given Mary’s background. It definitely seems like John forgave her for shooting Sherlock, too. It definitely seemed like John loved her. And then you have what appears to be an affair. 

This is the one thing I can’t get past, and the one thing that I’d be content to believe doesn’t exist. I can understand that John would want some sort of normality in his life - think of HLV, of “She wasn’t supposed to be like that”. Yet, the idea that the John Watson we know would have an affair, would cheat on his wife shortly after she had a baby - it seems out of character and wrong. It seems equally out of character that his wife, with her unique skill set, and his best friend, the most observant man in the world, wouldn’t know that he was having an affair. I don’t quite understand it, in truth. Why did the writers put that in there? Was it to serve the purpose of making him look like a less than perfect husband to match his imperfect wife? Was it to make her death more heartbreaking, knowing that she died believing that her husband was perfect and loyal when he was not? Was it to implant in our minds the suggestion that he didn’t actually love Mary that much, that he wasn’t actually that happy in his marriage with her? 

The affair itself was very glossed over, open to interpretation. For all we know, it wasn’t an affair at all - it could have been nothing more than a few texts and an innocent meeting or two. It’s the belief I want to hold onto, because I find cheating unforgiveable and I want to like John’s character, but I know it’s wishful thinking of me to try and pretend nothing happened there. He’s obviously feeling guilty over it, given he almost tells her, and undoubtedly would have had she not died. We know nothing of this woman, either, and I can’t shake the feeling that she’s going to be important, somehow. We haven’t seen the last of her yet. 

Final Thoughts

Overall, I enjoyed the episode. It’s certainly not one of my favourites, but it’s not my least favourite either. I adored the little interaction we saw between Sherlock and Rosie, and also the scene with the dog (someone please buy Sherlock a dog). The episode has left me craving more, wanting to see what happens next, especially when it comes to Mary’s video (and the end-credits bit), and to phone call Mycroft makes to “Sherrinford”. There’s a lot more coming in this season, and I’m excited for it, but at the same time, I’m terrified. This episode was painful enough, and I get the feeling it’s only going to get worse. We’ve all seen the trailer by now. There are demons waiting for us. 

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

The importance of email marketing

If content is king, email is the ace up the marketer’s sleeve. Just look at the facts:

For several years running, email marketing has been designated the most profitable content marketing channel.

More than 86 percent of organisations use email in B2C content marketing, according to The Content Marketing Institute.

Similarly, 74 percent of B2B content marketers say that email is the most successful marketing channel.

Email marketing clearly works, and businesses of all shapes and sizes have noticed.

The irony is that email predates social media and smartphones. In fact, it’s practically as old as the internet itself. The first email message was sent in 1971, just two years after the first data transmission was completed via ARPANET in 1969. The maiden message, the spark of a communication revolution, is believed to have said something to the effect of “QWERTYUIOP.”

Now, more than two decades later, email still matters. Not only that, somehow this dinosaur of the information age is the most powerful content marketing channel.

Why?

The key benefits of email

There are many reasons why email is so popular, and why it’s still the cornerstone of business communication. But we’re mainly concerned with why the messaging medium has garnered such tremendous utility as a marketing tool. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

(Almost) everyone uses it

The importance of email marketing stems at least in part from the sheer number of users. More than half the world’s population uses email, according to research from The Radicati Group. It’s estimated that more than 281 billion email messages were sent and received every day in 2018. By 2022, that figure will increase to 333 billion.

Chances are, you have an email account if you’re reading this blog. And if you don’t, we’d certainly be curious how you do anything at all on the internet. Email is universal across computing platforms, which is why so many service providers use it as the baseline for customer interaction and communication.

It’s as simple as this: If you’re going to go fishing, pick a pond with a lot of fish in it.

It’s cost effective

Cost effectiveness and email go hand in hand in several ways. Firstly, email is cheap. Sure, businesses need to pay email service providers, and they need to cover the monthly cost of their marketing automation platform.

But these costs are meager compared to expenses tied to other marketing channels. Direct mail, for instance, costs $600 per thousand pieces of mail, according to the Harvard Business Review, which is about 100 times more than it would cost for email marketing. In other words, you could send out 600,000 marketing emails for roughly the same price as 1,000 flyers.

Furthermore, email campaigns are highly profitable. The average return per dollar spent on email marketing is $44, according to research by Campaign Monitor. On paper at least, email appears to be among the most effective marketing channels. A 4,400 percent ROI sure is quite a bit of bang for the buck.

TL;DR: Email marketing works.

It’s mobile

The average internet user checks his or her smartphone 80 times a day as of 2017. It could be a lot more in 2020 given our increasing dependence on mobile devices. Either way, we know this for sure: Email goes everywhere a smartphone goes.

We also know that more computing is taking place on mobile devices as opposed to laptops and desktops, and email is no exception to this rule. In fact, research by Return Path found that more than half of all emails are checked on a mobile device.

And this makes perfect sense when you think about it. Smartphones let you check your email with a few swipes. Regardless of what you’re doing – waiting in the elevator, standing in line at the lunch counter – it’s just so easy to pull out your phone and see if you’ve gotten any new mail.

What does this mean for marketers? All they need is their audience’s emails to join them in the elevator, the line at the lunch counter or wherever else they may be. Email gives businesses a direct, reliable line to leads regardless of their location.

It’s personalised and precise

Email is the most direct way to reach a digital audience, which inherently boosts its personalisation potential. For instance, you can discern from the tag of an email address whether it’s associated with a business user or a personal user (@gmail.com versus @brafton.com).

Email addresses collected from opt-in forms are another great way to create segmented lists. You can use simple demographic information such as job title, location and age to get a general sense of who your audience is. If you follow a trail back to the specific blog post or gated asset that captured the email address, you can also get an idea of what that person is interested in.

Everything from previous customer engagements to prior purchases can help personalise your email marketing campaigns. And the thing about personalisation is that it works:

Email recipients are 75 percent more likely to open emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns.

Personalised email subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened.

As you send more emails, you also gather more data, such as open rates (number of emails opened) and click-through rates (percent of recipients who clicked on a URL or action item in the message) that can guide future efforts. For instance, research from Experian has identified Tuesday as the best day to send promotional emails. Your results may differ, but the point is that you can track metrics with precision, and pivot accordingly.

Few if any marketing channels are as precise as email.

It works at any stage of the sales funnel

Speaking of precision, email marketing campaigns can target recipients at different stages of the sales funnel. Did someone say, “email drip campaigns”?

In a drip campaign, email copy is written for specific recipients based on prior action or inaction. For instance, a contact might receive a welcome email after signing up for a newsletter. The next email will be based on the recipient’s action (opened the email, didn’t open the email, opened the email and clicked on the call to action, etc.). Here’s an example of very basic drip campaign fueled by open rates:

The goal is to lead the email recipient deeper into the sales funnel. After your welcome email, you might share high-level blog content or a link to the “about” page on your website. If they click through, your next step might be to share whitepapers, testimonials and case studies. The effort is leading up to direct marketing, such as inquiring about a product demo.

The beauty of drips and other email campaigns is that they put your existing content to work in a very deliberate, context-rich and precise manner. They can help you raise brand awareness at the top of the sales funnel by promoting blog content and how-to videos. They can be used to build trust in your brand through social proof such as case studies and video testimonials deeper into the consideration phase.

Think of email as a content distribution channel on steroids that’s also a direct marketing platform and a form of content marketing unto itself. No wonder marketers love email. It’s the linchpin of many a marketing strategy.

It’s an inroad to customer loyalty

An often overlooked benefit of email is its ability to build customer loyalty. On a very basic level, the channel is a way for brands to send transactional emails to consumers (for instance, a purchase confirmation), and it’s also a customer support touch point.

More importantly though, many of the same marketing tactics that precede a sale apply to post-sale marketing efforts. The cheapest customer to acquire is the one you already have, after all. If existing customers continue to receive emails that are relevant to them, they might take further action.

For instance, if you sold X customer Y item, they might also be interested in Z add-on item. We see this all the time in B2C marketing. Amazon notices you visited a page for duvet covers, and figures that you might also be interested in sheets and pillow cases, so they send an email to your inbox saying as much.

In B2B markets, the effort may need to be a little more involved, but the bedrock of the idea is the same. You can put existing customers in their own email segments. When they show interest in a product or service that complements the one they have, you pounce by sending relevant content. If they bite, then you’ve set a precedent to have the discussion about a possible upsell.

What the future holds for email marketing in 2019 and beyond

Email marketing is clearly at the center of digital marketing. It’s effective for brand awareness, content distribution, content promotion, enticing leads deeper into the sales funnel, direct marketing, building customer loyalty and much more.

On top of that, it’s incredibly popular, it’s mobile (there’s no shortage of responsive email templates out there) and perhaps most importantly, it generates ROI.

For all of these reasons, we firmly believe that email is here to stay, but with some changes:

More mobility: The world is trending toward mobile, and so is email. We’re slowly but surely moving from “mobile first” to “mobile only,” and this will inevitably affect how and when brands send out marketing emails.

Greater personalisation and performance through AI: This should come as no surprise. Email’s powers of personalisation will be vastly improved as analytics become more powerful, more predictive and ultimately more prescriptive. Artificial intelligence can help determine nuances in terms of the perfect time to send emails based on the audience. It can more accurately validate existing email lists, pruning away inactive or out-of-date contacts with uncanny precision. It can improve A/B testing to help generate more effective campaigns. It can make for more intelligent segmentation. It can even help influence the language that will drive the best results. The possibilities are endless with AI.

More text-based emails: Somehow, users have come to associate overly graphic-rich email content with spam. Why? Because the messages they receive from friends, family, direct business contacts and colleagues don’t usually have super lively, polished graphic design. That’s the type of thing you expect from spam, or at best, a Dominos Pizza deal. In 2019 and beyond, design elements will be more understated, and there will be a push toward authentic-looking plain text. Does this mean the content of that plain text will be extremely important? You betcha. It’ll need to be attention-grabbing, concise, personalised and actionable.

Increased interactivity: Email marketing is all about driving recipients toward a certain action. While shiny graphics sort of talk at users, simple quizzes, surveys, links to games and other interactive prompts can help get users to do something other than download an asset or click on a link.

There was certainly a time when you could be forgiven for thinking social media marketing would supplant email marketing. But today, email is still the “first online check of the day” for nearly 60 percent of people, and it’s leveraged at least once daily by 91 percent web users, which is well above Facebook’s 57 percent.

More importantly, the number of email account holders is expected to grow through 2022, when it will achieve a staggering 4.2 billion users. Whether you’re a small business or the world’s biggest enterprise, those numbers are impossible to ignore.

And to think, it all started with “something like QWERTYUIOP.”

from http://bit.ly/2T9jCFb

[siliconwebx]

How and When to use Nofollow Links and Follow Links

Everywhere you look online, there’s a link to click that leads you somewhere because we’ve been trained by Google to believe that links are necessary to rank our sites in search results. But that’s only partially true. If you really want to have good SEO and get that link juice from Google, you need to understand two things: nofollow links and follow links (sometimes referred to as dofollow links).

Nofollow and Follow Links: What’s the Difference?

It isn’t quite clear what they are to most people. After all, you click a link and follow it to where it points. So is a nofollow link just a link that you click and click and click, only for it to take you nowhere? No, though that would be a super funny prank to pull on your website visitors.

A nofollow link is actually a tag inside the HTML of the link (rel=”nofollow”) that tells search engines that you don’t want them to click the link, and therefore you will pass absolutely no link authority to the website you link to. A follow link then, or dofollow, is one without the rel=”nofollow” tag that tells search engines to follow it and let that site know you’re linking to it.

A nofollow link will look like this in your post or on your page:

<a href="https://elegantthemes.com/blog/" rel="nofollow">Elegant Themes Blog</a>

Here’s the question most people ask: isn’t telling search engines to ignore the link and not pass juice selfish? To which we answer: No, not at all. You’re really helping them out as much as yourself if you correctly set up your rel=”nofollow” strategy.

Google’s algorithm for page rank takes into account two things for links:

the number of links from/to any given website

the quality of the website linking/being linked to

So let’s look at the reasons you’d use nofollow links, how you put them into your site, and when you want to eschew them in favor of good ole, SEO building follow links.

When and Why to Use Nofollow Links

You will find a lot of reasons to use nofollow links throughout your website. They may all be in different spots, too. Let’s break down some of the most common places and why you’re going to keep search engines from using the link for SEO.

1. Links in comments

If people can post links in comments, they will abuse that privilege. Especially of those are follow links. They can post a link to wherever, and your site will pass along PageRank and link juice. That is basically you vouching for the website weareabadwebsiteandwillbreakyourcomputer.com whenever someone posts a link there. You don’t want to do that. So nofollow those links. WordPress does this by default, actually.

By making your comments contain nofollow links, you also help facilitate discussion because real people’s comments and threads don’t get interrupted by meaningless comments. Doing this is good for everyone.

2. Distancing Yourself from Undesirables

Every content creator has done it at some point or another. Linked to a site that we knew was bad news, but for one reason or another needed them for a reference. Maybe you linked an infographic from a news site that you don’t want to be associated with. Perhaps there’s a scam or hack or scandal, and you link to it as a warning to your users, but don’t want to give them any boost in Google’s eyes. So you link to them but nofollow it. They may still get a few visitors, but you aren’t providing them a permanent boost.

3. The Whole Page is Irrelevant to your Niche

Let’s say that you have a bicycling store. If, for some reason, you post a blog about how to bake a cake or have a page on your site advertising a local storytelling festival. You link to a ton of relevant, cool resources for that topic. However, Google may look at the overall website and assume that page has been put there against your knowledge because it’s so different from your normal content. The search engine would assume that those were part of a Black Hat link building campaign and then penalize you for that. In this kind of instance, you can add a nofollow meta tag to your header. Then all the links on the page would become nofollow.

Fun fact: this is what the nofollow attribute was originally for. It was later adapted to be applied to individual links for better control.

4. You Have Been Paid to Include the Link

If you include sponsored content on your blog, that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to monetize a blog. We do exist in an influencer culture, after all. However, your readers need to know that the content is sponsored — and so do the search engines. Any time you have a link that is only on your website because you have been sponsored to put it there, it should not be a follow link. You absolutely, 100% need to include rel=”nofollow” on it.

Even if your contract doesn’t say specifically that you have to link to any particular website, only create the content, you still need to make everything related to it a nofollow link. To a product page, to the company’s website, to a contest form, anything. They are paying for referral traffic based on your audience, not link juice based on your PageRank. By the way, this also includes affiliate links. So add rel=”nofollow” to those, too, since you’re profiting from them.

5. The Link Appears on Multiple Pages in the Same Spot

Basically, if you have links in your sidebar that appear on each and every page on your site, mark them to be nofollow links. Because each time you make a post or update, a new backlink is generated, and eventually you will appear as one of the undesirables to Google. Footer links also fall into this, and, for instance, you run a design agency that links back to your home page on each client site, you may want to think about nofollowing it. People can still click the links, but you avoid Google penalties at the same time.

Why You May Want Nofollow Links to Your Website

There are a few times when you may actually want nofollow links on your site. Well, maybe not want them, but prefer them to the alternatives.

For instance, if you have the low-quality website weareabadwebsiteandwillbreakyourcomputer.com linking to you 3,000 times, that makes your website look suspect. Or if you have 50,000 different websites linking to your site with sidebar links on every page, you look suspicious because most of those pages aren’t relevant to your content. Plus, they’re identical.

Google’s Matt Cutts says in no uncertain terms that nofollow links will not hurt your rankings. They can only do that if you’re working on a spam campaign on a massive scale. He gives a quick rundown of why and how nofollow works in this video.

Outside of just not hurting you, nofollow links can actually help you. Because of…

Referral Traffic

Either way, nofollow or follow links to your site are just that. Links. And people click links. Regardless of the algorithmic status of the links, people will click through to your site if it’s relevant to them. Which means that if someone links to you at all, you can get a huge increase in referral traffic. Just because they’re telling Google not to follow that link, they are telling their readers to do just the opposite. (Why else include the link?)

If you get linked on a major blog or news outlet or YouTube channel (all outbound links on YouTube are nofollow), they probably have themselves walled off against Google’s punishment by using nofollow across the board. But just because they aren’t passing along their massive volume of link juice doesn’t mean they aren’t helping you. Organic traffic is how you create an audience, engage with your users, and really establish yourself. Referral traffic from a major source, nofollow or not, is only going to help you.

How to Find Nofollow Links and Follow Links

If you want to find out if an individual page has follow links or not, it’s actually very simple to do so manually. Just right-click anywhere on the page that is not a link to bring up the context menu. Select View Page Source.

That will open up the page’s source code, and you can do a search by pressing CTRL/CMD – F and typing in nofollow. Any links that have the attribute will be highlighted for you.

This method works great if you happen to find a link to your site in a particular blog or article. It’s a quick and easy way to check for nofollow links. But unless you can manually scour every single page of the internet and look at their source code, you will need a tool specially designed for that.

Enter Moz Link Explorer

Moz’s Link Explorer is one of the best ways to check to see how many of your inbound links are tagged. While the Moz Pro service is premium, you can get 10 URL queries a month with a free account to check on your site.

Sign up and head to the Inbound Links tab in the left sidebar

Select nofollow from the Link Type dropdown

Look at the results repopulate with the nofollow flag

Check the spam score for the linking domain (the lower, the more legit)

Using a service like this (Ahrefs is another great one), you can keep track of who is pointing in your direction. Also, you can use the dropdown to see which are the most popular and useful follow links heading your way, too.

If, somehow, you find that you are being penalized because of a high amount of links from a few sites, you can always petition Google through the Google Search Console to simply discount those links. So if you think you should have nofollow links, you can essentially get them this way.

How to Use Nofollow Links

Setting up nofollow for individual links is pretty easy. In general, any page or post you create — regardless of platform — will give you the option to view/edit it as HTML. It may simply be called the Plain Text version or something similar. In WordPress, depending on your editor, it will either be called HTML (for Gutenberg) or Text (for the Classic Editor). Drupal, Joomla, etc. will all have similar functions.

When you see the code for the page or post, you just add rel=”nofollow” into the a flag as in #2 in the image below. No link juice would be passed to Moz. If, however, you look at #3, you have nothing impeding Ahrefs from getting the juice.

Adding the nofollow tag really is that simple. Just type it in.

If you prefer not to even mess with code that much, there are plugins and extensions to do this for you. On WordPress, you can add the attribute on a link-by-link basis with a plugin like Ultimate Nofollow. It’s a visual checkbox in the normal link-editing process.

On Drupal, you get the simply titled Link.

Joomla has meta NoFollow.

As you can see, it’s not hard to toss in the attribute to your follow links to turn them into something the engines ignore.

Follow Links: When, Why, and How

Now that we’ve covered the gamut of nofollow, let’s take a quick look at the dofollow links that will still likely make up the majority of your website.

How

To use follow links, all you have to do is not add nofollow. There is no follow attribute for HTML. They are all follow links by default. It takes something stepping in for it to become nofollow — such as WordPress defaulting comments to nofollow.

When

In general, you want follow links to be the norm. So you will want to use them the majority of the time. Keeping your links open like this will let search engines more accurately map your website and develop a sitemap — keep those internal links dofollow, remember. Also, most of the time you want to keep external links in the body of your content as dofollow. You would only want to mark them nofollow in the instances we discussed above.

Why

Because the internet is a social place, and we need to help each other out. That’s why Google prioritizes links into PageRank as highly as it does is. They want us to link out to other places. They just want us to link conscientiously and mindfully. Google wants us to share content that is relevant to readers and provides real value. If you’re creating content in a normal way, conscious of which sites you link to, and don’t try to game the system, follow links by default are definitely the way to go.

Conclusion

Links are the backbone of the internet. The whole web as we know it is based on hyperlinks, and we need to be sure that we’re treating them well so they treat us well. They increase your PageRank and provide juice to the target site. Links drive back-and-forth referral traffic. And your readers have content and resources that they will want to click on. When used the way they are meant to be used, both nofollow links and follow links are tools that serve specific purposes at specific times. And now you know what those are.

What is your nofollow strategy for your website?

Article thumbnail by astephan / shutterstock.com

The post How and When to use Nofollow Links and Follow Links appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

😉SiliconWebX | 🌐ElegantThemes