#twitter implosion maybe for real this time

[hussyknee]

Are the Tumblr journalists covering the Muskapocalypse 3.0 yet? Has anyone made edits of the Don't Tread On Me snake eating itself? Someone tag me I don't want to brave my dash to find it.

[hanzi83]

Not Much Better Than The Last But Who Cares

I really didn’t like the last blog I put out. You know it is a bad blog when I am cringing while writing because it felt like I was just fulfilling covering notes I jotted down of what I wanted to cover but I built the list so fucking long that it would not really have the best segues, and I know whenever I write or say some shit, the people with power are at least paying attention to me, even if the “masses” are not, and if they are, no one can really interact with me because I am not part of any specific clique or institution, but I can already envision how much they would make fun of my lack of writing skills and the lack of formatting, and probably the endless amounts of grammar errors. I can’t really converse with people about my thoughts and theories, and maybe it stems from the fact that it feels like I am the only one who truly doesn’t know where this shit is going. I feel many personalities online and in the political and celebrity world have advanced insider knowledge and everyone is just facilitating a role in the discourse because there is a concrete end goal to all of this but in the midst of it, there has to be this implosion that is on the rise, and some days it feels we are getting there faster than we think, and other days it feels like it is just the calm before the eventual storm. I don’t know where this overall sense comes from when it pertains to myself,  because I never viewed myself as smart in the traditional sense, but I often ponder when I am in my dream world, am I being given information and when I awake it feels like I can’t remember anything. So I worry and because I feel I have dealt with massive exploitation and will probably never be the same mentally, and then having to be told I should get help when I know this world is getting worse, how can I even be better when the world is moving in a direction that is gonna get 10 times uglier and it feels like everyone is crossing over to that far right wing side, and these people can’t even admit that they are doing it, they still want to maintain they are saner part of the left so they can prove they are fair to the right wing when most shit in this world has always had a more conservative trajectory than it leads on and more people want to redefine what a progressive or what being on the left is, while it feels you are sophisticating your talking points to lead them into a more right wing mindset while we fucking call out the most over the top and transparent racism, and because racism is a real problem, the minimal of the racist shit is what takes precedent so it gives far right wing personalities the need to then have to talk in circles and debate if this specific thing is racist, and even if it is debatable if that specific comment is racist or not, and trust me, it always is racist, but even then people are not paying attention that it isn’t the specific debatable racist comment, but it is coming from racist people who have ties to powerful far right groups and are normalizing fascism in other dangerous areas. So yes even if the comment might seem tame, it is still coming from people who are funding and investing in very bigoted policies and mindsets, like with Nina Turner, she had to deal with a shitty racist comment from the Libertarian Party twitter account, basically telling her to pick crops for free in response to her comment about how insulin should be free. Not really a controversial opinion, most decent people would agree. I am not saying the comment isn’t shitty but when TYT covers it to make it seem like they are appalled by the racism and want to call it out, and on the surface that seems great but they are using this story which could’ve been organized so they can make it seem like they are calling out racism and appalled by this, how are you appalled when you are an insider who sees how these people talk like and how they act like and you are kind of going in that direction in a more discrete fashion. You are palling around with right wing content creators, and all these content creators, despite their aesthetic, are probably funded to be a force in the discourse and get to control narratives, while acting like they are just lowly internet personalities. The internet is the establishment. So when they go off on fighting the system and doing vague shit that would’ve been revolutionary 10-20 years ago, now claiming yourself anti anti-establishment is the most establishment thing you can do in this 2020’s. There is more nuance to the entire system, and while the on surface aesthetic seems to be getting worse, the fucking online personas who take advantage of the shittiness will then basically set a limited narrative because by default the system is kind of shit. So I feel since TYT are palling around dangerous people who give them incentive to say the most pretentious shit on the planet while creating nonstop discourse so they can then go on their show and whenever there is right wing fascism being discussed, there has to be pot shots at the left and then equating them to the right when the left is trying to fight back. And yeah guess what, some of the personas online have to sports entertain, but that wouldn’t exist if the world itself was not on default set to be a sports entertainment circus. Look at how much this committees and hearings shit has become a fucking circus. So to me I have noticed that since TYT has waged war on leftist content creators, I noticed an influx of racist jerkoffs who show up in these chats now to make it seem like these leftist content creators harbor them when I feel they are at the behest of TYT types, because in my opinion, they are an institution and every institution is kind of above the law in some regard and they all partake in frat like shit, but they also organize cults to go on the attack, and I noticed an attack on one content creator in particular named Olay, who didn’t coddle TYT’s feelings because she knew what their grift is, while others in those circles wanted to play the naive pro wrestling babyface who wants to believe in the good. This is what happens when you dumb down your villains and tactics that are being done. Now these are just theories because I have theories on how Stern Show has organized this shit against me and even if it is too late for me to ever get vindication, and trust me the vindication would come a lot sooner if I did a right wing grift and attacked Howard like he is an actual liberal, which I don’t believe he really is. I have experienced firsthand how mafia people in the industry and in these institutions are, and now it feels like some of it has been seeping out with massive corruption and criminal and predatory behavior exists. Now like I have said, I will probably end up dying alone and never getting vindication, but as long as I am here, and I don’t look at myself as some fucking hero, but if I see people who are being targeted or people being exploited, I will call it out, especially if it is being done because someone spoke out, and I am not talking about the likes of RFK Jr who are marketed as people being censored and being the victim while they are being propped up for the online establishment to think they are rooting for an underdog from the underground. They do pay attention to my podcast, and are working underhandedly to get it to stop so I am forced to join a community where I am going to be put through the ringer with shitty people trying to socially climb to get at me because I am not anti woke like they want me to be, and not only do they want to be anti woke, they want to pretend that I am the one falling for agendas and propaganda, when this internet mindset has helped make people think that their opinions and the narratives set on there could never be a corporately sponsored operation. Again, just my fucking opinion. Again I am a shitty writer, should I break to create another paragraph. I feel I am kind of in the zone, and I end up just doing more run on sentences and never fucking stopping. Let me try to break for a bit, but I am trying to go from the top of my head instead of just crossing off the points I have jotted down and then it ends up not coming out naturally but now that I have been doing a decent job, for my level of writing etc, I feel this is where it will start to go to shit and it will end up worse as the last blog I did. You gotta remember a lot of my blogs are basically remixing shit from previous blogs and maybe 2 or 3 original points I make will seep through. If you read one blog of mine, you probably read them all. 

I really wish I didn’t have to pay attention to the shit that some of these alt media personalities are doing because there are so much more important shit that should get focus, so it feels by focusing on this, it feels like it just dissolves into the entertainment aspect while this entertainment shit that is happening is helping facilitating a more fascist mindset, and just a word of wise to Cenk, you can keep talking about how your book is getting positive coverage from the establishment considering you hammer at the establishment, maybe because you did it in the most status quo kind of way which would’ve been revolutionary in the 90’s but all you are doing is pretending that you are actually shaking shit up because all your program is catering to the notion that MSM is shit, it is like wrestling, other companies can just get credibility because they are anti WWE despite being their own propaganda outlets. It is the easiest thing to do is rail against the WWE, especially when it is in limited and dumbed down ways. How are you better than fucking the MSM when you and Ana are covering a fake viral story about Miranda Lambert being mad at people taking selfies at her concert, like these things are not designed to do a promotion for the concert. It is the same shit with the discourse around the fucking movies, either it is just a way to promote the movie via culture war shit, or maybe this is a battle because different factions with different political ideologies try to politic their mindset into the entertainment, and these pushbacks from conservatives is designed for their way of thinking to be incorporated into the entertainment, but I am just saying covering a fucking Miranda Lambert controversy on your not so MSM news program is not really the most enthralling shit and it just serves for shitty comedy banter from people who are soulless, because if you aren’t doing shit like that, you are finding ways to be more vitriolic toward the left. Then you have Cenk going on twitter talking about how the right and left should align to fuck the system, while you guys shut down any form of protest from the left and dictate how they can act, and then declare you won’t talk to anyone else from the left, not because you guys are sick of being used, but because you are now under the right’s control and they won’t allow you to get a genuine left position. They try to put people who have those intentions to bring more nuance to the convo in a click or an institution where it is gonna serve a more right leaning narrative, that if you genuinely push back they will make you seem like the trouble maker. Ana will claim she is afraid of talking to people outside her race to make the narrative seem like they are the most unreasonable, but if you actually interact with other people from different backgrounds and people who genuinely lean left, they are more forgiving and understanding if you have a decent discussion with them, sure you might have to deal with sports entertainer personalities who are trained to just be combative at times, but a lot of time when people with power are gaslighting communities, I don’t blame people for being on the edge when there are people sophisticating a more fascist mindset. All of you “anti establishment” are more propaganda like than the transparent establishment that you claim to hate. I wish when fucking liberals who scoff at the idea that the liberals are the same as the right wing etc, I wish they would explain without the kayfabed on surface shit, they would explain the insider shit of why it is different because apolitical people who take in the results, they see the same shit when both parties are in charge. Now the right wing gets to act like they are the ones calling out the system, and then more and more people who claim they are left, who know the world is moving into fascism, and when most people at this current stage of the world have made their decision of which side they truly are on, now you will have people like Jimmy Dore or and people at TYT, act like since the establishment is limited they can look like they are being reasonable by wanting to align with the fascists and labeling them the working class, I am sure there are genuine people from the working class who you could work with, but they will keep pointing to discredited figures who they make it seem like they are regular people when these individuals are designed to be propped up in the fucking system. And it must hurt for these turncoats of the left to realize that the new right wing base they are catering to don’t actually like your personality or think you are actually interesting at all. In fact the only times there seems to be hype about any personalities like that, is when they are trying to start shit with the left and because if you shit on the people who are trying to oppose fascism, the ones who want to embrace that shit will really prop up your shit. You can’t handle that you are compromised because a lot of you want to be seen as successful solely for the hard work you put in but not the fact that even if you work hard, like the Bob Dylan song says, you gotta serve somebody. That is why no one wants that idea out there  that there is control who can get their own blueprint for their path. I am a dumbed down guy so I might not understand all the technicalities of everything out there, I never pretend to, but I can look at patterns that have played out with people in the spotlight who then turn into bad guys. I can look at the overall manufactured consent entertainment has played in all of this, so much so that entertainment is seeping into the political shit. Regular people who have no idea what is going on, their fate in this world is being dictated by sports entertainment theatrics. Why would I want to be left on this planet with this kind of mindset? The system is so racist and dangerous that the discourse of DEI in companies will show the most over the top thing they present a black employee is going to do, like backfist a bunch of white woman 5 times a day, and then presenting it out there like “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW FAR THESE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO CLAIM THE RACIST IS SYSTEM” but because it is presented as a news story, people think this is some serious threat. They will sophisticate shit to look like there is more trouble in addressing the racism that you think opting for the default racism existing is probably the better option. If I was so stupid and I took some of these alt media people now kind of catering to the right by presenting the decriminalization of drugs actually not working out and fear mongering about naked homeless people running wild and then at last second mention the defunding of the program which is why the bad shit is going down, you give yourself carte blanche to say you mentioned it while the overall framing is to make it seem you are being fair to the other side. It is a lot more dangerous than pointing out the obvious corruption because eventually people will be joining that side of the overall corruption. 

There is this overall narrative that I used to fall for in the last 10 years when the internet was becoming more of a gimmick, even though I felt you were getting a bit more of an honest conversation and interaction etc, it feels like it has become so fucking gimmicked amongst the alt media who try to cater to the internet discourse to act like you are not allowed to call out the liberals or the democrats while everyone is literally calling out the liberals all the fucking time, they think because the discredited MSM legacy outlets don’t say much about the corruption or have compromised people on at times, that no one is calling it out because most of the voices are from propped up celebs, politicians, and alt media figures who make it their entire personality so it seems like you have woken up, but that is why people in the alt media have kept shit limited and want to be the arbiters of the narratives because if you are like me, and think a little more in a more conspiratorial fashion and actually do try to analyze all angles, which is including that personas online are funded to be online where a lot of people are consuming the information, people don’t have to consume the MSM to know the MSM is shit, every outlet via entertainment will tell them about shit that adds to the right wing agenda, so you think the establishment narratives from an official standpoint has any credibility to people who think they are consuming stuff we are not supposed to consume. If you weren’t allowed to call out the MSM or the democrats, no one online would be saying anything about them whatsoever. This is why “anti establishment” gimmicks are so destructive, because anyone who has a big time voice or has the backing, are not anti establishment, but they present themselves as the more credible ones because people who are more obvious part of the establishment have to limit what they can do and say and if real change is gonna happen, it will always be behind the scenes even if it has to have the aesthetic of it happening in some organic fashion. I would fall blindly for it because I knew 10-15 years ago that the mainstream establishment were no good and they are liars and they have had to do evil shit, so it is easier to get manipulated and brainwashed by these new anti establishment types, and what it has done is, because the democratic types are so fucking boring and they feel like the obvious status quo, it has let other people than give carte blanche to people who might have fascist aspirations, who might say some credible shit about the system in question, to the cultivate their own cult who will be lured into the far right wing mentality and they have different aesthetics for different political ideologies, races, ethnicities, genders, sex, fandom etc. We want the aesthetic of bringing back the 90’s and early 2000’s because “political correctness” has gotten so out of control. I am not saying don’t call out democrats for their shadiness etc, but a lot of the people with platforms who make their entire personalities “We are calling them out because no one else is” when literally everyone has been calling them out, they just want to disguise it so they can now be fair to the right wing and give them the benefit of the doubt. This is why limiting the J6 narrative is dangerous, because even if people are taking it seriously, I believe some of them are naive to think they are going after Trump because they are doing twists and turns to his many crimes being exposed, so if you are someone who hates the powerful, you should be happy someone is facing some consequences for shit. But is he really facing those consequences or are they making it look like he is so you think there is a target on him. If you think him and his ilk are dangerous you will get mocked online because there are other corrupt people that exist or have probably gotten away with shit, but if the overall direction is leading to a place where he will be the face of all that is wrong in the future, you are taking advantage of the system’s corruption and what other cogs had to do so you will soften up the new danger to the entire world. The establishment has dumbed down Trump into an America’s Dumbest Criminal, because we are supposed to be booing him, that it becomes the cool thing to get behind the obvious heel because the baby faces going at him are not that credible to a lot of the people who feel cynical about this world. Like if the right wing and prominent figures can be conspiratorial, why can’t I throw out the theory that the same people who are “after” Trump are not really after him. These guys don’t play by regular rules, they are allowed to still keep their jobs and wealth and do whatever they want while they are seemingly being investigated and when people try to ask about how these rules for these people are possible, because regular people would be doing time for just a 10th of what they have done, like you think anything will really happen to MTG for bringing revenge porn to a hearing about Biden’s corruption. They have managed to make that look like no one was talking about it even though this has been talked about since 2019 and it is being discussed on every platform, is it a cover up when the public is supposed to know about this? It is like I am watching a television show. It is like all the shit that was in the entertainment where in these political comedies the most absurd shit will go down but now it is like that is what is becoming. So whether shit is proven that there is corruption or whatever the right wing claim, it has been designed for them to be right. If you keep finding out about more corruption and it seems the walls are closing in for Trump then he and his base will then find justification for doing what they need to do so when TYT, who are insiders and know why this wasn’t just mostly disgruntled working class people. Sure there could be people like that exist and maybe they were there but most people who acted that day were funded to act, it isn’t just a case of random people being incited to do it. It feels like it was a testing ground so when you have Vivek, this new right wing token who is downplaying victims of systemic shit and doing whatever the right wing thinks is the most credible because it comes from one of their tokens, he can present the insurrection like it was people who are economically stressed etc then in the same breath promotes that there will be another one. They keep showing us what they are and we are debating if the things they say or do are racist and people continuously downplaying the threats. They put us in positions where we have to side with one or the other when it comes to fake right wing in fighting when I know these both a DeSantis and Trump are dangerous fucking figures that represent for the white supremacist system, but they have made the criticism of that come off like it is not cool because MSM are the ones who self preserve and state it, so then online you have to downplay it until then the MSM seems to capitulate like they are now being fair by giving the fascists the benefit of the doubt. Again these are just my theories, and some shit might be based off fact but me personally, I am just being conspiratorial. If what I am saying is dangerous, then I really have nothing to live for anyways. The people who have power have played a role in putting me in fucked up predicaments, see this would be considered not “taking accountability” so to people in the system, who never take accountability, they will then not take this seriously so my word shouldn’t really mean shit right? I am just saying when you have made me irrelevant and discredited me and I also play a part in that myself, but what would you expect from someone discredited? We can’t prove a lot of the shit that I am inferring but I can judge the patterns of people who now make their sole personalities about how they are against the vague system so you can justify why there needs to be a red-brown alliance, like when you are an alt media outlet and you are giving credit for someone who is a border control person “leaking” out what inhumane shit Abbot is cosigning at the border crossing etc, but then have disdain for people who push back against fascism because they are doing it in a way you don’t like. Like when I do a podcast and I cover shit like the Tracy Chapman discourse where someone claimed that her song fas car was never appreciated by the critics so people can push back against that narrative because it was nominated or won awards etc, those situations are designed for discourse so then people who cover this as a way to push back against claims of racism, like it is getting so ridiculous now. I would expect this form MSM types but alt media people buying into forced propped up discourse in favor of making it seem like people who claim racism are not to be trusted because you use the most sensationalist shit to help that take place. And when there is exposition of some of the fucked up practices in institutions or factions like Steven Crowder’s little outfit, the sexual harassment and hazing shit that goes on, people get shocked by this stuff but I am not because this is a requirement in this cesspool system, they have taken those things that go on and have created gimmicked ways to be presented so it can have regular people who go through this shit find it relatable when nothing behind the elements is relatable when this traumatic shit becomes another angle for the entertainment dollar and just more discourse. You think anything is gonna happen to Crowder or anyone who makes people go through this, this is why I have been trying to point out that in showbiz world and the political world, there are clubs and fucked up behavior going on and this is also how they help homophobia come to play as well, where people will turn others out and then people who are cogs in the system who deal with the predatory shit whether it is gay or straight etc, but the ones who deal with the gay predators within the system then don’t come out and specify what is going on, they normally turn to generalizing the entire community to get their message out and if you are from that community you will think this person is an asshole for thinking they are all like this, it is kind of like the fundamentalist system makes people go through that kind of abuse where the cogs then have to try and leave and then get lured into religion but it normally ends up joining the more fundamentalist side and if you present some of the shady shit happening in these places under the liberal Hollywood banner, you think opposing those fucked up things means you have to be more conservative. Showbiz to me feels like it is actually more conservative than people want you to believe, and now it is expanded to the social media shit and in the political circles and also people who are in the media, people who want to be the educators then have to do their shitty sports entertainment banner. But it is like all the initiations and all the fucked up practices that go on in these factions, institutions and industries is being used to put out there and it is designed to sell books and add to the 24/7 new cycles, podcasts, documentaries. When you have this kind of exploitation going on, how can anyone of us stand a chance to try and change shit in the system? You go through abuse and then you get vindicated so then you carry out the abuse because that is what the system requires. 

What makes a lot of shit more difficult now is that at least 10 years ago or so when I started realizing after the Iraq war lies and the invasion of Afghanistan, that we were not being told shit, and it did seem like there was a cultural shift to at least call out how dumb the invasion was even if it still gave the benefit of the doubt that it was an accident etc, they would at least let you kind of theorize on if 9/11 was designed to happen and allowed to happen, even if it was not the most popular take. It still existed but now if you are someone who goes to the left and are propped up, you have to act like that is a stupid theory, despite the shit that happened since to get us on the road of distrust for the establishment, and opened the gates for other countries being invaded etc and other ways to take away civil liberties. It didn’t become a problem until people who are conservative felt like that way when they didn’t give a shit about how many people from marginalized communities were being affected. But growing up and falling for the system’s obvious propaganda, it made me go the route of leaning toward the anti establishment types and it was easier to think I knew what the angles were because at least there were people in the alt media spaces and chat room message boards would point out the MSM’s corporate narrative, it became easier to at least know what to be aware of but if the last several years has proven anything is that the social media and the alt media types were also con people, because anyone who was anti Israeli apartheid and showed solidarity with Palestine I would trust a lot more than people who think calling out Israel is anti Semitic, and then you have public figures who claim that shit then also playing into the anti Semitic tropes of making it seem like they are the chosen people, and then also censoring people when people say that there are powerful Jewish people out there, and some of these people are doing it in bad faith so they can generalize, but when it seems there are consequences happening for talking about it, then of course people have no option but to converse with people online or other media outlets who can lure you in and then accept their fundamentalism of pretending they are anti Israeli apartheid but want everyone to also generalize everyone who lives there. Because now people who would call out last decade are still showing support to RFK Jr who is a staunch Israeli government supporter because he happens to say shit about vaccines and he is also anti Ukraine. And me not knowing much about the overall playbook being put out there, I am supposed to think that because they present it with country vs country aesthetic, it makes it hard to decipher who is telling the truth about portions of what they say. Like if I want to go off on the Russian government or China’s government, I have to regurgitate US imperialist talking points and people who call out the US Empire’s corrupt ways and their history that should be called out, they have to defend horrible leaders in other governments. I realize I am not too smart with the official narratives shit, so I am left with no choice but to look at the overall picture of far right wing elements all culminating into an inevitable implosion. I could just focus on specific governments doing corrupt shit but I know if I did that, then I would have to cosign something that isn’t on the up and up. Maybe I would be able to do that easily if I wanted to socially climb up and wanted protection from the most horrible people, but I don’t think mentally I can handle being here. People’s lives are at risk, people are in danger and we gotta play these social media caricatures game and nonstop battles of sports entertainment until we fucking go into a direction where there is no coming back from. Maybe if there weren’t secrecy the last 15 years and me feeling I am a cog that is caught up in a fucking conspiracy, maybe I could just move on and just join everyone else and become more soulless, but just seeing it happen to everyone else and the only time they care about your trauma and the exploited shit is when specific factions can get you to cosign their problematic shit. Like here is a small example if you were someone who just had a plain “anti US” bias, you would point out what fucked up shit they are embracing but if people who are alt media who use that as the sole personality trait for why they are credible, this is why they are going down the anti trans road and sophisticating the most sensationalist shit so you get people to think they are going too far and these people say they are anti war. You can just say you are anti war and we have to believe people, but since they are pro Putin, they won’t give a shit about the banning of gender affirming care for adults and the youth in Russia. Is this why certain “anti war” people are kind of leaning against the anti trans thing because if Russia is banning that stuff, it doesn’t mean the “anti war” are embracing another fascist leader? This is why cowards like TYT are going in that direction while pretending to do anti right wing shit but they will then believe that republicans are genuinely sick of the fundamentalism that the right wing has embraced. All they will do is say they helped it go that way but now that they are admitting it was a mistake, we still give them the benefit of the doubt that they are actually against it. They do promotion for the right wing endeavors like Jesse Waters show and actually think he could be a decent human being because his mother called into his show to shit on the right wing conspiracy theories. I don’t watch all the entertainment that exists, but are they still doing the Howard Stern trope of having the common sense mother kind of condemn what they do in a playful way so you don’t take the threat seriously? Sorry you guys are supposed to be a fucking news program, and I know by writing about it I am putting myself at risk, they are already, in my opinion using their right wing alliances to go at anyone who is calling them out for what they are doing while they continue to pretend they are the purist in the progressive spaces. They are complete and utter shit. Jimmy Dore who has helped put so much anti vaccine sentiment out there when it was the establishment’s goal to do it while the MSM is self preserving by promoting it or making it look like people are forcing you to fucking take it, now people don’t even trust the flu vaccines and now Jimmy is putting doubt about that out there with sensationalist stories. I hope you realize the actual content of what you say is what the establishment wants, they want people to claim they are anti establishment so their words have more weight to them. If they didn’t want us hearing from these people who are playing victim of censorship and lack of freedom of speech, we wouldn’t even know they fucking exist. Like even having to make your audience think that someone like Kari Lake is making sense because she is against AI being used for political ads, like you guys couldn’t find someone who is a decent human being who condemns the over use of AI shit, you have to give Kari Lake the fucking credit for saying shit other people have kind of said? 

You can keep promoting all the shit Trump is being guilty for but I think all parties who have inside knowledge and are tokens to the system have always known where we are fucking going and you promoted villains who you knew would not face any consequence so you greedy fucking pigs could make bank off fake narratives and I expect it from CNN, FOX News, MSNBC etc, but the supposed anti establishment who make their entire identity being against the MSM, are the ones also limiting the narratives because they are being permitted by the system to act like fucking purists and for people who are for the people, a lot of you shit heads become boring elitists who get mad at the people for questioning your intentions because you now have to play by a pretentious script and since you can’t derive from that script, it drives you crazy when someone who doesn’t play with one is bringing shit up because you continuously play by these kayfabe rules and knowing this shit is limited, you know people who counter you can’t go all out because it always favors the person who is promoting more of a conservative outlook. But if you expose or theorize that the system is always a right wing trajectory that let’s the heels in this pro wrestling storyline get all the excitement and get to have more range than the people who are supposed to be babyfaces, then it is always designed to always direct you into a right leaning mind state whether people realize it or not because it comes in all forms and as someone who has been dumbed down and fallen for many propaganda tools, I can tell what other people are falling for. They waste our time and play with emotion, now we have to wait until next year for the documents case to start when you know it is gonna be 10 times more chaotic from now until then. You expect me to buy into these rules you pretend exist when we all know that no one in the elite circles are playing by them. Like for example even if they encourage you to vote and I am not saying you shouldn’t vote, but this day and age where they have proclaimed it being the most important of elections so they can get people to mobilize and do the act of voting, the system knows that there are gonna be storylines of machines fucking up, or that there will be people protesting the results and votes getting lost etc, it is like yeah you technically voted but you are gonna find a gimmicked way to get it into the direction that it is going. So we then blame different factions for who they voted for when it is always going to go in the direction that it is supposed to go. I am supposed to trust people who are more invested in setting up pro wrestling angles for these politicians and these hearings are the pro wrestling matches where the storylines play out even more essentially. 

This is part of the blog where I am now kind of fulfilling the points I jotted down. I hate holding off these blogs because I build so much up and I want to incorporate it in there but I am not smart enough to pull it off so I have to kind of be honest about my process which helps me maybe not have to go through this process in the future because since I put it out there maybe me admitting that I am not the best at doing this, maybe it will by default make me better at doing this if that makes sense but it is fine if you don’t think it makes sense, in fact if you consider yourself a respectable human being because of your fancy aesthetic, you shouldn’t be reading my blogs anyways but how else can you feel more elitist knowing I am not the best person to write down his thoughts. But going through the list of things I wanted to write down since they are trying to get you to not take anything that is important in this world seriously but there is this controversy about Carlee Russell, who is a woman who may have faked her own kidnapping and if this was genuinely her idea or even people in her immediate family helping out etc, people in charge would be able to know right away and since abductions of women in general exists whether people want to believe it or not, they are pulling the Jussie Smolliet model of propping up an obvious staged one so you don’t take this shit seriously. People are even denying the mental illness aspect if this was just a situation where she acted alone, but wouldn’t doing that be from a mental illness in your head, no normal person would do that, but I don’t believe it was her just doing this, because these viral things are designed and can be organized, especially in the era where the entertainment dollar on social media is flourishing. If they can also make people distrust people who might make claims of racism, abuse, kidnappings, and overall bigotry, then people will not take it seriously. I don’t see the people who are propping up this sound of freedom movie bullshit putting resources for actual cases of trafficking and kidnapping going on but they are too busy acting like people are shutting down their movie. That right there is faking an incident to put hype to your narrative. People really think because this became revealed on social media that the establishment doesn’t want us to know, everything we know is supposed to be known, and it is promotion of what is to come, you think when we find out by some press release of DeSantis’s new state guard that claimed it was for hurricanes and to protect property didn’t have a militia vibe to it and now it is like we could’ve guessed that from the beginning but through some leak to the media it seems like it a lot more dangerous than they promoted, and nothing will be done to stop it from continuing so what we are finding out in slowly what their intentions are. I don’t know what the purpose of us knowing that Paul Bernardo was transferred to another prison, but it is clear it was designed to be put out there because for some reason we need that guy in the discourse every so fucking often. I always felt his shit was connected to the underworld of crime where he was allowed to get away with shit, but the last few years we have heard about this guy more often for some reason like they are getting us prepared for something to do with him. Who knows what the entertainment dollar will exploit from it, but you look at shit where we have true crime people charging money to see the autopsy of a fucking murdered kid. This is why I have always had disdain for a portion of the true crime shit because it feels like it is more about the personalities involved rather than the people who are victims and the highly promoted ones end up being into fucking scummy shit themselves. I just look at these random things that get established in the discourse and I wonder where all this shit is going to go because on a grand level I just see many pieces of things in different areas just getting more normalized. Between knowing about more deaths from child labor and those laws loosening and just knowing about these things is horrid enough but will anything actually be done to correct all of this horrible shit happening because at least 10 years ago it felt like we were moving in a more positive direction with the established corruption that was being exposed, and now it just feels all of it is being put out there because it is just gonna be a fabric of our society. We are promoting scumbags under the guise of them being canceled, Jason Aldean has a case of radio won’t even play his jam while everyone is playing it and defending it, it is hilarious that a bunch of conservatives are like “imagine being more offended at a song condemning violent protests more so than the violence itself” like it wasn’t a way to symbolize what side you are on where you are talking about wanting to gun down protestors and using clips that weren’t even from the US to illustrate your fucking point, and then also doing the song’s video where a black man who was falsely accused of attacking a white woman, where he was hanged and you don’t think that is a provocation to get people outraged or pissed off so you can sell another shitty human being as this victim of cancel culture while they play dumb about it so they can keep the conversation going in circles. This is why I keep pointing out the entertainers are now cogs being used for the purpose of manufacturing consent, but it always seems to be considered an agenda when it is liberals having some kind of socially conscious message even if the system limits the narrative so it constantly makes the embracing of edge lord shit feel much more anti establishment and against the grain but that is what the right wing portion of the system wants. They have made pushing back against racism seem so over the top and unreasonable, you won’t give 2 shits that they are trying to teach in Florida schools that there were pros to slavery and that doesn’t seem like the craziest shit ever to a lot of people, people really think the people on the left are the ones who have fucking gone crazy and losing their minds while people who want to socially climb higher and not lose their relevance in their “fame” will use their platform to act like there is a common ground with these kinds of people. It becomes scarier once you realize and look back at everything the last 30 years and how they were able to use entertainment and the internet to sway people’s opinions and all because we clamor for the anti establishment type who is gonna save it all and now that it exists, it feels like the Ruthless Aggression era of WWE where at one point the Steve Austin character was original and unique and then after that era died down we had a bunch of copy of attitude era tropes where some of the storylines were just low level trash and the storylines where talent would feud with the establishment didn’t come off as completely genuine and all it did was try to regress more and having justification for why it needed to happen and those tropes and the elements that went into convincing people of worked shoots etc and behind the scenes stuff made people think they were going against the system and what the establishment wants when the establishment wants that narrative normalized. I was gonna finish off with some wrestling discourse about women wrestling and how there is this constant need to justify why they don’t deserve more storylines because ratings get used as justification when nothing is gonna be an overnight success in that regard but right now they have had some momentum going. Nothing is perfect just yet but I am sure they will mess up and create more internet discourse  which will fuel me with how the shill accounts then blame the fans for not showing more support when the company doesn’t give you a reason to at times and yeah those kinds of people exist but it all starts and stops with the boss when they are capable of doing compelling shit. So I guess I kind of did talk about it. I know it might seem like a program or television show etc, but it is more about the overall discourse to justify suppressing the value in the overall sense because misogynists don’t want them getting more clout so they can afford to politic for better and it just represents that overall new conservative movement  of trying to eliminate any narrative that might be more progressive even if it comes with limits and has to seem like it is less than because the default of our society growing up has by nature had political messaging without us realizing it because we just assumed that is life, so wanting more for people in marginalized communities seems like a fucking threat and they don’t even care if they are wrong. All they have to do is just keep pretending to hammer it home until they get their way. Anyways. This shit has been gone on long enough, and I did this with a lot of start and stop breaks because sometimes I am in the zone and then a million other thoughts from my past accumulate. I think the mix of my issues and the future of this world just has my mind spinning and worrying where all of this goes. Thing is I better get used to writing blogs for my remaining days because with all these social media apps being such a fucking hassle, I am kind of glad I became irrelevant before twitter went to shit because I don’t think I am gonna have a following like I did 10 years ago so if I go into a new app, I won’t have to worry about a lot of people following me and keeping up with me anymore. So maybe it is better to just post blogs even if I am not as good at writing them. I just need to vent from time to time and there is just too much going on.

[heavyelectricity]

I know what rock bottom looks like, as far as my life goes. I’m not there. But also, the fact that I’m no longer coping has become undeniable, even for me.

Of course I’m not feeling great. How could I be? My dream holiday got cancelled, the mag got hate brigaded on Twitter, my aunt died, my office was closed permanently, my great uncle died, I moved back to a town I never wanted to return to, all in the last year. That’s not even counting the petty problems - the broken laptops, the implosion of a favourite group, sniping from both the usual suspects and unexpected sources. And still I can’t go outside, or meet my friends. I’m doing badly. Anyone would be.

That’s the sneaky thing with depression I guess. This time last year, I was decidedly on top of my mental health - I knew what was likely to send me on a bad one. Money worries, loneliness, work stress and political stress, those were the things to manage. I was doing so, and doing a pretty good job of it too. I was carving out a nice little life for myself. But when you’ve done so well at coping for so long, you trick yourself into thinking you’ll always be able to.

Maybe in normal times, I could. Maybe not, it’s been a real torrent of shit that’s been heaped on me. But these aren’t normal times and the weight of the ongoing public health emergency, combined with all the other shit, has pushed me to breaking point. On Monday I ended up plunging into full on despair after my body let me down again, and I worried a lot of people. My mum was thinking of calling my doctor. Someone else thought I was going to do something to myself. A third person messaged me to check that I was still alive.

I’m not at 2013’s lows, but I don’t think I am as far off that as I would like to believe. I’m seeking help, yet I don’t want people around me to be concerned. Not that I don’t appreciate it, I just don’t really believe I’m worth it. I especially don’t want them investing emotionally in me when there’s a fair chance I will let them down. I recognise that this in itself is A Problem.

All that’s left is to get back to the doctor. Maybe it’s medication time. Either way, being up at 5am probably isn’t helping.

[ollyarchive]

My son the global pop star? Olly Alexander's mum Vicki Thornton talks about growing up gay in Gloucestershire, Gogglebox and Glastonbury

Olly Alexander's mum speaks candidly about being mother of the flamboyant Years and Years frontman

Watching Vicki Thornton on the Celebrity Gogglebox sofa it would be easy to imagine that having a famous child is an easy passport to the good life.

Every Friday night for weeks the Forest of Dean mum-of-two has been on TV  sipping Prosecco while commenting on TV programmes with son Olly Alexander, the flamboyant frontman with the chart-topping band Years & Years.

On the face of it it’s been a charmed motherhood. First she watched the talented young man leave college to succeed as an actor, treading the boards as Peter Pan in a play with Judi Dench and appearing in movies such as Gulliver’s Travels, The Riot Club and Great Expectations.

Within a few years he appeared to seamlessly achieve global musical success with a chart-topping band and which led to a much applauded appearance on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury Festival 2019. This weekend he is appearing on the same stage as Ariana Grande at Manchester Pride.

Yet anybody who follows Olly knows it’s not all been red carpet premieres,  backstage passes and Gogglebox for Vicky, it’s also been about hearing uncomfortable truths about a son who has used his growing success as a platform to publicly campaign for LGBT rights.

Growing Up Gay

Not only has she had to listen to how he secretly self-harmed and developed bulimia as a closet gay teenager growing up in the Forest of Dean, but in 2017 she also bravely agreed to appear in an an emotional BBC Three documentary about how it can lead to mental health issues.

In Growing Up Gay Olly admitted that just driving home back to sleepy Coleford with the film crew stirred up such painful memories that it made him feel physically sick.

If that wasn’t difficult enough to hear, Vicki learned that Olly, who attended St  John’s Cof E Primary School in Coleford and Monmouth Comprehensive, had been unable to tell anyone that he was being bullied from a young age because he had long hair and seemed gay.

“When he asked if I would do the documentary, it was a bit of a decision to make because I knew it would mean digging up the past and going further into the reasons for the problem,”  said community artist Vicki.

“ I knew that having to face up to issues  I was not aware of at the time was going to be a very difficult process, but if it was going to help Olly and other people in similar situations I had to do it.

“I had to be  open and honest about everything which meant confronting my own feelings of guilt. You have to openly accept that you may have made some bad choices and decisions but you are human. It’s not about making excuses, it’s about learning from your mistakes.”

The documentary was so painful that the producers had Vicki assessed psychologically to make sure she could deal with the deeply personal issues it raised and arranged for her to have counselling beforehand.

Still a much watched video on iPlayer, it shows them sifting through photographs and videos of what his mum thought was a happy, innocent childhood on a beautiful part of the world.

“Going through the family history you see all these little happy, innocent little faces” said Vicky who also has an older son who has aspergers syndrome. “It’s terrible to think somebody could be hurting them.

“I think the bullying was mostly mental but when someone is full of joy and happiness and somebody else comes along and closes that down, it is the saddest thing.

“As parents you think you know what’s going on, you think that they are safe, they are happy, they are fed, all the boxes are ticked. But you don’t know the half of it.

“The  little things I heard about what happened to Olly that he and his brother have talked about, are awful.”

Everyone thinks their child is amazing but I knew Olly was special

Community artist Vicki said she knew “in her bones” even before Olly, 29, was born that he would go on do great things.

“Every mother thinks that, and every child is amazing, but I knew that this child was different, there was something there,” she said.

“Olly was always a bright, funny, happy child, full of life. He was such a bouncy, lovely little cherub  that I could never get cross with him,  ever.

“On the rare occasion that he would throw a tantrum I would find it funny and just laugh at him. He would just stand and scream blue murder and it was just hilarious.”

Life in the Forest of Dean

Their early days were spent living near theme parks that his father promoted but in 1997 the family moved to the Forest of Dean where his parents set about creating a model village tourist attraction.

It was a musical, creative, left leaning household and although he loves Rihanna, and famously met the singer on the Graham Norton show,  Olly, credits much of his influences to listening to his mother’s tapes of Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder. She was one of the founders of the local music festival where Olly cut his teeth.

“I used to be a puppeteer actor in an education travelling theatre company in the late 1980s," said Vicky when asked about her bohemian background.

“When I was younger I was also a backing singer in a band called Innamanna. We played the Marquee in London and did some recording but when we had to decide ‘do we stick with this or carry on with our careers?’ it folded.

"But I couldn’t stand on a stage in front of thousands of people like Olly does. I would die.”

Olly as a boy

It was clear that Olly had inherited her artistic streak and although a talented gymnast and able academic, he concentrated on music and drama, later saying it was because he felt at home with the weird kids.

Vicki remembers him being very driven, open minded and very focussed.

“Olly taught himself to play the piano and to sing and there was always a healthy competition with his best friend Joe to get the best parts in the school plays,” recalled Vicki

“He was always singing all over the house.  He loved Disney and he would get old song books full of the classics and teach himself on the piano.

“He did not want to be in musicals but loved the singing and performance side of it.”

I did not realise there was so much pain going on inside.

In the documentary the talented singer songwriter says that  he did not have the vocabulary to put how he was feeling into words and  felt too ashamed to admit it anybody he was gay. Even his mother. He desperately wanted to be straight so he never admitted it.

“On the surface he was a real high achiever so I  had no idea there was so much starting to bubble up as a young teenager,” said Vicki.

“I thought the sky was the limit for him. I thought he could do anything he could put his mind to but I did not realise there was so much pain going on inside.”

“Because he was always fun happy, smiley,  lovely child achieving lots of things at school, I thought things were fine.

“Probably my eye was  off the ball because I was going through a lot of life changes at the time and maybe I was in denial that there was something going wrong.”

Marriage split

In an interview last year with the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, Olly says his diaries show a clear link between his father leaving and creating a “family implosion” and his mental health health issues developing around he age of 13.

They are estranged but met up when his father contacted Olly through Twitter and in subsequent interviews it’s clear the singer was less than impressed with the reality as opposed to the imagined version of an aspiring musician father who he had always wanted to impress.

“Splitting up with their dad made life a lot harder, definitely financially, and so life was a big struggle,” said Vicki.

“That’s probably part of the reason why I had my eye off the ball. I was distracted doing other things, so we were a bit dysfunctional or a while, which I feel guilty about.

“But I don’t feel guilty about that relationship ending at all, both for the boys and myself.”

Coming out

She says although from the outside it looked like Olly was enjoying a glittering lifestyle after leaving sixth form college to travel abroad filming the movie Summerhill, he was often penniless and had to take jobs such as selling hot dogs on the South Bank in between the contracts. She wasn’t in a position to help pay the rent either.

He was 18 or 19 and involved in the gay party scene in London when he plucked up the courage to pick up the phone and tell her outright that he was gay.

Vicki said: “He had said to me once ‘I don’t think you are going to have any grandchildren’. Not taking the hint, I said ‘well never say never’.

“He obviously got to the point where he thought ‘I’d better actually say it to mum because she doesn’t get it’.

“He phoned me up and said ‘you do know I am gay don’t you?’ . I said ‘Are you? OK’ and that was it really. I suppose I had a feeling he might be but maybe I didn’t want to confirm that because of fear about what his life might become because of all the homophobia out there.”

Vicky told told her elderly mother,  who sang on Broadway with the D’ Oyly opera company before cutting her career short to get married and have a family.

“Her immediate reaction was ‘but he will not be able to go to Africa, it’s illegal in Africa’, laughed Vicky about her 89-year-old mother who follows her grandson avidly on social media and has even seen Years & Years in concert.

“Like me, she doesn’t want to see him marginalised because marginalised sections of society can  attract a lot of negative behaviour. Nobody wants to see their nearest and dearest suffer from that.”

I just hope kids today aren’t going through the same thing

From that moment on Vicky has worried about her son being the victim of homophobia and although she is intensely proud, she still fears that being a figurehead for equality could make him a target.

“I wish he felt he could have talked  to me and maybe I could have prevented all of that, but I understand that is very difficult for young people,” she said.

“I remember that feeling of not being able to talk to my parents  and I just hope kids today aren’t going through the same thing. They get more support at school than they did 15 years ago but bullying and social media trolling still happens.

“I do worry about him being exposed to bigotry and homophobia. it’s not nice to think about your child living in fear.”

In an interview last year Olly was asked if he ever wanted to confront the bullies who made his life miserable growing up but he said he doesn’t think about it much any more because his life had changed so much.

He said he still takes anti-depressants, has weekly therapy sessions and works out a lot to keep his mental and physical health on track.

While campaigning for more to be done to prevent male suicide after being named as GQ Man of the Year,  he admitted he still has occasional days when he doesn’t want to get out of bed because his life does not feel worth living and can be too frightened to go on stage, or cries when he comes off. He hides behind outlandish costumes and make up.

The fun side of having a famous son

It's clear that there is a close bond between mother and son and Olly likes her to share in his successes.

For instance in the early days the pop star  arranged for her to wear an expensive diamond necklace to the red carpet premiere of Great Expectations in which he played Herbert Pocket.

“It was insane,” said Vicki. “ We had taxi from where he lived to the red carpet and there was all these people at the barriers.

“I thought they are going to be so disappointed when I get out because I’m no-one. Somebody took me to one side while Olly went off to meet the paparazzi and because it was raining they put a brolly over my head.

“Then we went in and watched the film which was mind-blowing because I was sat next to some of the actor’s. When it was finished we went to the after-party which was all very very glam.”

Naturally shy, Vicky was overawed to meet the likes of Jeremy Irvine, who starred in War Horse.

“I was quite overwhelmed by it all at first but I have got more relaxed about being in that kind of environment,” she said.

“The whole thing is a bit surreal really. It’s a bit  like a film in itself. Once I was this close to Helen Bonham Carter who I think is fantastic, but you don’t want to go up to people saying ‘I love you’.

“Olly told me once, that when they started filming he actually said to her ‘I love you Helen Bonham Carter’ and and she said ‘I would love you too if I knew who you were’, but she later came to the stage door to congratulate him after Alice and Peter.”

More recently Vicky was overwhelmed when she was introduced the men from one of her favourite TV programmes, the Netflix series Queer Eye, at Radio One’s Big Weekend in Swansea.

“I love watching them but when Olly introduced me I didn’t know what to say and was stuck for words because I get so tongue tied,” she admitted.

Gogglebox

The star is protective of Vickyi who does not even like speaking on the stage at Coleford Music Festival but told her it was time for her to come out of her shell for Gogglebox.

“It’s different because there isn’t anybody else in the room and it’s all about Olly because that’s who they are interested in,” she said of the TV show.

“It feels really nice sitting there together eating snacks, drinking Prosecco and enjoying each other’s company, but I don’t think I have anything really  interesting to say.

“You are thinking ‘should I be on my best behaviour because I’m on tele or should I be like I am at home?’. There is a little conflict going on in your head but it’s really good fun.

“It’s weird watching yourself back,  seeing what you do, what you sound like and the faces you pull. I didn’t realise I pulled so many weird faces.”

Every week she has to decide on a comfortable top for sitting on the  sofa and says they did initially consider getting matching onesies and really mad slippers but decided against it.

She shares TV tastes with her son who loves programmes such as Killing Eve and Stranger Things and Fleabag. They also love Gogglebox, especially Rylan Clark Neal and his mother and Chris Eubank and his son. She was delighted when Rylan sent a lovely message to Olly about her.

“If Olly likes something I will give it a go because I know I will probably like it,” she says. “I would never have watched Love Island if Olly hadn’t watched it. “

Staying true to yourself

Before the Years and Years single Communion catapulted the band into into the charts, Vicky had another important phone call from the Shine singer.

“He said they didn’t want him to say he was gay and he was really cross about it because didn’t want to pretend to be something he wasn’t” she said.

“I told him to stick to his guns, that you have to be true to yourself for anything to be real. I have taught them that if they are kind, truthful and respectful to other people, everything else will follow.”

Olly took her advice and when she first went to Glastonbury to see him burst onto the John Peel stage in 2015 wearing a rainbow, Pride suit he was involved in a very public relationship with Neil Milan from Clean Bandit who were playing the Pyramid stage.

Although in  pop star mode he is happy to speak openly about his own sexuality and  ongoing struggles with anxiety, Olly also admits that the fairytale of fame and fortune has not proved the antidote to depression and he remains a leading advocate for mental health issues.

In fact Gay Times described him as one of the most influential gay pop stars of this generation and added: "All hail the King!”

Glastonbury 2019

Vicky was astounded by how big it has become since the days she used to go and got lost for hours on the first night after deciding to camp for the weekend.

On Sunday Olly arranged for Vicky, her partner Kev and Coleford Mayor Nick Penny to go backstage and then watch from the Pyramid Stage balcony as he gave a widely-applauded, eloquent moving speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

Many say the speech appealing for compassion and a society that does not leave anybody behind was the highlight of the festival.

“It’s not the best view because you cannot see what’s happening from the front, but just to be there looking  out from the stage and seeing all those thousands and thousands of people who are all there to see Years and Years and Olly, well it was just mesmerising,” she said.

“That whole feeling of emotion, the pride, It’s like when you see your child in a nativity play but  a million times over.

“I knew he was going to make a speech and I knew that knowing Olly it was going to be special, but I did not  did not know the content or when he was going to say it.

“I was just so proud and when I got home I had to watch it over and over again.”

“I cannot believe how brave and strong Olly is about what he believes in. I admire that in him so much and have so much respect for him to be able to do that.”

The feeling is mutual and Olly has repeatedly spoken about how proud he was of his mum to speak so openly about his childhood in the documentary even though she is not to blame for his troubles.

Olly takes care of his family

Although he spends long periods touring with the band, when he is in London Olly has a small set of friends from home who he has known since primary school which Vickis believes it is good for his sanity.

He recently spoke about how good it has been going from being too skint to go out to be able to help his family out financially and pay for the drinks on a night out.

Thanks to Olly buying her a new house Vicky has moved from the small cottage in the centre of Coleford where she would get the odd knock on the door from Years and Years fans pretending to be looking for a non existent neighbour.

Speaking to her it’s clear that have a famous child is not too much different than having any other. You always feel guilty, you are very proud of their achievements, you want them to happy, you worry about them being safe and you lose your name. At one festival she spotted a flag saying “Olly’s Mum”, something parents all over the world can identify with.

“As a parent I think you always feel guilty, but  I’m proud that Olly has grown into this amazing human being,” says Vicki who has been on a journey alongside her famous son.

“It’s such an amazing thing to have happened that to try and get your head around it all is impossible, so you don’t bother.

“Lots of people ask about him and say things like  – ‘your boy’s doing well’ and I think ‘just a bit’. On the whole though, life just carries on as normal.”

[madmaudlingoes]

Who wants to hear about mermaid phonation, a topic I spent two days researching after spitballing with @agnesmontague on twitter about something only tangentially related?

DISCLAIMER: Mermaids are not real and science doesn’t apply to them. Everything below the cut is me being a nerd and has no bearing on the “correct” or “accurate” way to write mermaids. They’re fish with tits, do whatever you fucking want with them, k?

The problems of mermaid phonation are two: the anatomy of the vocal tract, and the acoustics of water.

As to the first problem: if we assume that mermaids have human-like vocal anatomy, then they have lungs or some other means* of driving air through the vocal tract; a larynx, including the vocal folds; and the various tubes that serve as resonating chambers (throat, mouth, nasal cavity) for articulating sounds. This is the bare minimum necessary for letting mermaids talk to humans in some capacity.

*Toothed whales and dolphins don’t use their lungs for phonation, they have a separate set of air sacs in the nasal cavity. This distinction is ultimately trivial.

However, if mermaids live in water, they may also have gills -- highly vascular organs that absorb oxygen directly from the water. And the gill-lung relationship, poses some problems for whether mermaids would be able to phonate underwater.

1. Actual fish usually have a constant movement of water into the mouth and out the gills. That makes it challenging at best for a mermaid to switch between exhaling air from the lungs for speaking and inhaling water into the gills for breathing. She’d also run out of air for speaking eventually if she’s spending extended time periods deep underwater.

2. Or, y’know, just make the mermaids more like cetaceans than fish -- they don’t have gills but are VERY good at holding breath for long periods. Fine, cool, but it still makes extensive talking underwater impractical as they’d run out of air faster (this is why dolphins have the separate air sacs for making noise). 

 3. A single “gillung” that lets her inhale and exhale water and air through the same channel has some physiological weirdness, among which are the very different densities of water and air (see below). Also, the bellows-style in-and-out of air doesn’t work as well on water, which is damn near non-compressible, so a continuous outflow over gill slits would still be more practical; phonating on the inhale isn’t impossible (see: inward singing, most of Scandanavia) but it’s used pretty sparingly in human languages. 

The other problem, assuming you can cope with the weirdness of the anatomy, is that sound moves differently underwater vs. through air. Like, you’ve heard people talk after huffing sulfur hexafluoride? Well, water is even denser, and as a result, sound waves move even more slowly ... meaning a normal human vocal range drops past Darth Vader real fast, while anything that would sound normal underwater sounds like a weird high-pitched shriek in air. Like this scene in Star Trek IV, basically.

The pitch and range of your voice depend a lot on the physical characteristics of the vocal folds, mainly length and thickness. So if our mermaid is adapted to speaking in a normal register in air, her language has to accommodate ultra-bass pitches underwater ... or maybe she’s got another organ just for making underwater noises. (The dolphin thing, maybe?) 

However, ultra bass voices might be advantageous? For one thing, well, the flip side of phonation is hearing: human auditory anatomy depends on the ear drum jiggling a bunch of tiny bones when the air vibrates. Underwater, however, the density of human flesh is too close to water for an eardrum to work. When you hear something underwater, it’s usually because your skull is vibrating directly. This is, obviously, easier for lower sounds to do. 

The other thing is that low-pitched sounds propagate farther in water -- in fact, a low enough sound with the right vector can be heard for miles without any signal loss. Whale take advantage of this, so why not mermaids? 

One final problem that reaches the limits of my phonological training: remember I said you need the mouth and throat to act like a resonator? That’s because your vocal folds produce only a monotone buzz, what we call the “fundamental frequency” (thought I also like “meat kazoo”). Think of the difference between playing a properly trumpet versus just buzzing the mouthpiece. That resonance produces overtones you can see on a sound spectrogram, specific frequencies of high-energy sound that appear at predictable intervals higher the fundamental frequency. And almost all the information we use to decode speech is encoded in those higher-frequency resonances.

I just said though, that human flesh is basically indistinguishable from water for the purposes of sound waves. So I’m not sure how clearly our water-breathing mermaid would be able to enunciate, simply because the sound of the fundamental frequency would be transmitted more directly from larynx to skullbone, without the rest of the oral tract as a filter. No higher-frequency resonance, no way to distinguish articulations, no way to pick out most phonemes. Varying the fundamental frequency would be doable -- that’s literally why we call it whale song -- and some non-pulmonic sounds like clicks would probably still work fine? And we have models of human languages with as many as 14 vowel tones (maybe), and other languages with lots of clicks, lots of ejectives, or lots of implosives (though not all at once) ... so Mermish, at least in its underwater modality, would make a lot of human phonologists either very happy or very horrified, depending.

ALTERNATELY: Forget ALL THIS SHIT. Mermaids don’t even use oral language for most communication. They primarily sign, with a secondary sung register (like a cross between Silbo Gomero and the inverse of Signed Exact English) that complements the signs for use over long distances or in the dark. Your hands work the same underwater as above it, after all. But that puts a very different spin on the Little Mermaid losing her voice...

[kateayoung-blog]

Are social media platforms bad for democracy?

From revolutions to presidential elections, there is little doubt that the realm of Web 2.0 has real-world political consequences. Social media has long been heralded as a tool for liberation, giving a platform to those who had been excluded from the political arena, and affording them the ability to mobilise support (Tucker et al. 2017, p. 47). Likewise, official Facebook and Twitter accounts have become commonplace on the campaign trail, providing a forum for politicians to reach the masses and niche audiences alike (Young 2010, p. 221).

The events of the 2016 U.S. presidential election have raised serious questions over the capacity of such platforms to interfere with the democratic process. Previously, my biggest social-media-based election concerns might have been whether to unfollow my local member (and his incessant parking meter posts) on Facebook, or if I should post a picture of my ballot sheet that listed Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow as a candidate (I did). Now, they’re more along the lines of whether my accounts have (undoubtedly) been exposed to foreign interference and fake news. These concepts are not new but, like many others prior to 2016, I was still riding the optimistic high of social media’s democratic potential, unaware of the dark world of algorithms, data breaches, and filter bubbles that lurked beneath. As stated in a 2017 leading story in The Economist – “Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to improve politics. Something has gone very wrong” (The Economist 2017).

A couple of nights ago I went to see Hillary Clinton speak. When asked what she believed influenced the outcome of that November 2016 night, her response was clear – her fate was sealed by social media. In a presidential race that earned “fake news” and “alternative facts” places in our vernacular, the unsuspecting digital citizenry was bombarded with political bias, unprecedented vitriol, and highly unconventional campaign social strategies. Even Trump himself has declared that he probably wouldn’t be where he is had it not been for Twitter (Factba.se 2017). Circumventing traditional media outlets, Trump led a one-man Twitter campaign. Policy, attacks on other candidates, and self-praise came tumbling out in bizarre late night Twitter tirades, controlling the mainstream news of the day with perfectly timed distractions. When asked how he would change his social media behaviour upon being sworn in he responded "I'm going to do very restrained. If I use it at all, I’m going to be very restrained.” (Firozi 2016). I’ll just leave these here. 

The biggest threat, however, comes from the influence we cannot see. Facebook has admitted that between January 2015 and August 2017, 146m users may have been exposed to Russian backed misinformation across its platform (The Economist 2017). Additionally, the data of 87 users was accessed by big data firm Cambridge Analytica in an effort to deliver targeted political bias to Facebook users (Solon 2018). The danger lies in the fact that social media platforms are increasingly being treated as news sources (Tucker et al. 2017, p. 49), a trend that is particularly rampant amongst those who are “headline-checkers” (Young 2010, p. 218). The UI of social media platforms, combined with our “attention economy”, ensures that fake news travels fast and largely unchallenged (The Economist 2017; Tucker et al. 2017, p. 54), using so-called filter bubbles to keep us safe inside our like-minded microcosms. To step outside the filter bubble is to be confronted with an anger and moral outrage that seems to multiply on the internet, amplifying divisions that have long existed, and giving voice to partisans that were previously sidelined. Civilised discussion seems to have no home on our feeds - “Facebook is where you go to be outraged among people who are outraged by the same things; Twitter is where you take your outrage to the enemy” (Williams 2017). In the months surrounding November 2016, I witnessed many a post implosion, as people seemed to forget about general niceties, going straight for the throat at the first mention of politics. Magnified by this concept of everybody having a voice on social media, these disputes moved offline, making for many an awkward thanksgiving dinner in my own friendship circle.

Whilst the events of 2016 (unfortunately) cannot be undone, I at least hope that they serve as an example of how not to use the internet. The attention that has been brought to privacy and authenticity concerns on social media has offered an opportunity for individuals and corporations alike to take stock of their own practices – and maybe untick a few boxes in their Facebook settings. Perhaps if we spend as much time investigating sources as we do screaming at each other on the internet, there may be hope for us yet. As Hillary told us the other night - “we need to make social media work for democracy”.

References

Factba.se 2017, Fox News: Tucker Carlson Interviews Donald Trump - March 15, 2017, Factba.se, viewed 10 May 2018, <https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-fox-march-15-2017>.

Firozi, P 2016, 'Trump vows to be 'very restrained' with Twitter as president', The Hill, 11 December 2016, Available at <http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/305747-trump-vows-to-be-very-restrained-with-twitter-as> (Accessed 10 May 2016).

Solon, O 2018, 'Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gained 37m more users' data', The Guardian, 5 April 2018, Available at <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/04/facebook-cambridge-analytica-user-data-latest-more-than-thought> (Accessed 10 May 2018).

The Economist 2017, 'Do social media threaten democracy?', The Economist, Nov 4, Available at <https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21730871-facebook-google-and-twitter-were-supposed-save-politics-good-information-drove-out> (Accessed 4 May 2018).

Tucker, JA, Theocharis, Y, Roberts, ME & Barberá, P 2017, 'From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media and Democracy', Journal of Democracy, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 46-49.

Williams, Z 2017, 'We are all angry on social media - at least try to listen to the rage of others', The Guardian, 9 October 2017, Available at <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/09/angry-social-media-facebook-twitter-silicon-valley> (Accessed 10 May 2018).

Young, S 2010, How Australia Decides: Election Reporting and the Media, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.

Images and video

‘Bruce Plante Cartoon: Trump and Twitter’ 2017 [image], Bruce Plante, Tulsa World, viewed 10 May 2018, <http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/161817>.

‘How social media helped weaponise Donald Trump’s election campaign’ 2017 [video], Planet America, ABC News Australia, viewed 11 May 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VFTCwKLlgg>.

‘Outcome of political arguments meme’ 2016 [image], Me.me, viewed 10 May 2018, <https://me.me/i/outcome-of-political-arguments-on-facebook-you-change-your-mind-2911634>.

[junker-town]

The 9 dumbest mistakes from NFL Week 10, ranked

Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images

On a day of full of upsets, the Cowboys were TOO committed to running the ball, saving the Browns from being this week’s worst red zone team (barely).

So what the hell was that all about?

Every NFL game had some kind of out-of-nowhere upset this Sunday. The Saints lost as double-digit favorites at home by double digits. The Falcons remembered how to play football. Mitchell Trubisky looked, occasionally, like a real quarterback when the game wasn’t even in garbage time. The Dolphins are on a winning streak. The Jets scored more than 30 points. The Browns won a game in Cleveland. Kirk Cousins won a primetime game.

After everything that happened at the end of September, we thought it’d be hard to top the chaos that week brought. Week 10 proved us wrong, though.

Luckily, there’s one thing we can count on no matter what: The NFL will give us more dumb mistakes than we know what to do with. Here are our nine favorites from Week 10:

9. Maxx Williams got blinded by the sun on fourth down

This wasn’t entirely Maxx Williams’ fault. For one thing, the Cardinals tight end was probably still super pumped to see his alma mater, Minnesota, reach 9-0 for the first time since 1904.

For another, the Minnesota native who spent the first four years of his career in Baltimore is likely still learning what this “sun” thing is all about. And the sun was REALLY bright when he couldn’t haul in this Kyler Murray pass:

As bad a drop as you will ever see pic.twitter.com/gSKVT0ynOP

— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) November 10, 2019

On the other hand, it was fourth down and Williams’ drop gave the Bucs the ball back early in the third quarter. They went on to score a field goal on that possession — and ended up winning by, yup, a field goal.

8. Ryan Tannehill forgot you have to recover fumbles

The current Titans starting quarterback has fumbled plenty of times in his career — 56, to be exact. So you’d think he’d know at this point that it’s important to, ya know, actually recover a fumble, if possible.

Tannehill had an opportunity to get back the fumble forced by Chiefs defensive lineman Chris Jones, but he opted to casually rest his hand on top of the ball. That made it easy for Kansas City’s Tanoh Kpassagnon to steal it away.

GAME. WRECKER. @stonecoldjones_ pic.twitter.com/yQzBPAXIGd

— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) November 10, 2019

The CBS broadcast team — including former NFL official Gene Steratore — was surprised it wasn’t ruled a recovery for Tannehill. And while there’s certainly a point to be made for whether a hand on top of the ball constitutes possession, Tannehill could’ve avoided the question altogether by grabbing the ball with even a little gusto.

Instead, the Chiefs got the ball deep in Titans territory, setting up a 30-yard field goal for Harrison Butker.

7. The Bears asked Mitchell Trubisky to block Trey Flowers

Chicago had a chance to widen its lead over Detroit after a Jeff Driskel interception gave the Bears the ball deep in enemy territory. And with their offense uneven, head coach Matt Nagy dialed up a little trickeration to keep the Lions on their toes. The main problem was the only way his reverse would work was if his team could find a way to neutralize star defensive lineman Trey Flowers as wideout Taylor Gabriel turned upfield.

Flowers weighs 265 pounds and tosses 300+ linemen aside with regularity. And the only thing standing between him and a tackle for loss was 215-pound quarterback Trubisky, who missed two games earlier this season with a shoulder injury.

asking Mitchell Trubisky to block Trey Flowers was a mistake. pic.twitter.com/x0NL75yLH5

— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) November 10, 2019

Trubisky would earn redemption two plays later, turning third-and-long into his third touchdown pass of the day in a 20-13 home win.

6. Taylor Lewan blew a Titans drive with back-to-back penalties

It hasn’t been a stellar year for the Titans’ three-time Pro Bowl left tackle. His season started with a four-game suspension for performance-enhancing drugs. When he finally got on the field, he got in a Twitter beef with Bills players after the Titans struggled to keep Marcus Mariota upright against the Buffalo defense.

Lewan is giving up pressures and picking up penalties at a much higher rate than he did in 2018. Even after missing four games, he leads the Titans in penalties. Two of those flags made sure Tennessee’s first drive of the second half against the Chiefs ended with a punt.

The first was an unnecessary flag that came after Lewan did some shoving well after the whistle. The second was a holding penalty on a screen pass that would’ve resulted in a first down. The Titans were forced to punt deep in their own territory and the Chiefs took a 19-13 lead with a touchdown on the next possession.

He got another penalty before the game was over and wasted no time taking responsibility after the game.

"My penalties are a f---ing problem. ... I am completely screwing the team ..." —Titans OL Taylor Lewan went off on himself. pic.twitter.com/6hpFrs4jw3

— ESPN (@espn) November 11, 2019

Last week, former Titans running back Eddie George told a radio show that he doesn’t believe Lewan is very respected in the team’s locker room. If that’s true, Lewan’s lack of discipline is probably a significant reason why.

5. Brian Hoyer showed off some extremely “backup QB” decision-making

Hoyer’s first meaningful action of 2019 was promising. While he threw a pick-six in relief of Jacoby Brissett in a 26-24 loss to the Steelers last week, he also tossed three touchdown passes to his own players, creating hope the journeyman backup could keep the Colts’ better-than-expected season afloat.

This hope was misplaced. Hoyer struggled all afternoon as his offense turned a home game against the Dolphins — the NFL equivalent of a license to print your own money — into a 12-point implosion. The veteran understudy completed just 18 of his 39 passes and threw three interceptions against the league’s 32nd-ranked scoring defense.

He still had a chance to rally Indianapolis to victory with a last-gasp drive into Miami territory, only to undo any of that progress with a series of bad reads on his most important plays of the game. He passed up easy yardage in favor of prayers into double-coverage with regularity and overtaxed a receiving corps that was already without T.Y Hilton and Parris Campbell.

Brian Hoyer threw into the end zone and double coverage on consecutive plays in the final sequence. This was the third down play, with Nyheim Hines one on one. Maybe he makes a guy miss if you give him a chance. Hoyer instead threw a low percentage shot to Eric Ebron. pic.twitter.com/nvb2p6ub8P

— Stephen Holder (@HolderStephen) November 11, 2019

Hoyer eventually connected with his top target on fourth-and-10. It was a strike to tight end Eric Ebron — who had run an 8-yard route and was easily stopped before making the line to gain. And that’s how the Dolphins suddenly have a winning streak going.

4. The Panthers gave it to Christian McCaffrey too late

Sunday’s snowy Panthers-Packers game came down to the wire. In just over two minutes, Kyle Allen managed to get his offense from its own 11 down to the Packers’ 2-yard line, helped by an offsides and neutral zone infractions by Green Bay.

Inside the red zone, though, the Panthers didn’t use MVP candidate Christian McCaffrey nearly as much as they should’ve. And when they finally did, it was too late.

Allen threw four incompletions in the red zone, including two straight on third and fourth down before the offsides penalty gave the Panthers a first down. On first-and-goal with eight seconds left, Allen threw an incomplete pass to McCaffrey. With three seconds left on the last play, the Panthers finally gave it to McCaffrey, who was stopped short:

Greg Van Roten tried his best to drag Christian McCaffrey into the end zone almost pic.twitter.com/mkcWr3HFiU

— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) November 11, 2019

Look, we know it was snowing and the field was slick, but you at least have to give it to McCaffrey earlier than the last play of the game. He had 108 yards on Sunday! Come on, Norv Turner.

3. The Browns remained hilariously inept in the red zone

Yeah, so ... Freddie Kitchens is bad at this whole “calling plays” thing. We already knew that, but each week brings us a new layer of ineptitude. Early in the first quarter against the Bills, the Browns made it to the Buffalo 1-yard line with a first down. What followed was a series of idiotic decisions.

First, they tried to run it up the middle — which, fine. They have Nick Chubb. Try and punch it in. He lost a yard on first down, then they tried it again and he got the yard back. On third-and-goal, Baker Mayfield missed Odell Beckham Jr., but the Bills were called for pass interference. That gave Cleveland a new set of downs.

They went with the same play they ran earlier with Chubb and didn’t get it. Then Mayfield threw to Beckham, a forced pass that had no chance of making it. On third-and-goal, they tried another Chubb run, this one to the left side (all the others were to the right side), and he was stuffed.

So what did they try on fourth down? They went for it, with both Beckham AND Jarvis Landry on the sideline. Gee, I wonder what the play call would be?

A run — but not just any run, a slow-moving toss to the right side that lost the Browns 2 yards and turned the ball over on downs. We cannot fathom why they would toss it in that situation, but they did, and that sure went poorly.

To recap, eight plays inside the 1 and zero points:

Browns goal-to-go sequence from the 1-yard line: 1st & goal: Incomplete pass (penalty) 1st & G: Run for -1 yard 2nd & G: Run for 1 yards 3rd & G: Incomplete pass (penalty) 1st & G: Run for 0 yards 2nd & G: Incomplete pass 3rd & G: Run for 0 yards 4th & G: Run for -2 yards

— Field Yates (@FieldYates) November 10, 2019

It almost happened again later in the second quarter when the Browns couldn’t get in the end zone inside the Buffalo 3-yard line. Fortunately for the Browns, Chris Hubbard false started — on purpose? — and the Browns kicked the field goal.

They ended up winning by three points, but yeesh, it feels like Kitchens is getting worse at this, huh?

2. The Chiefs botched two different field goals to lose to the Titans

Kansas City looked to be in control in Nashville. The Chiefs led the Titans 32-27 with 1:27 left and were at the Tennessee 29-yard line. Harrison Butker — 4 of 4 on field goal attempts that afternoon — was lined up to boot a 47-yarder to pad the lead to eight points.

He never got the chance. Instead, the snap came too early for punter/holder Dustin Colquitt, who struggled to corral the ball and then had to throw it away before getting trounced in the backfield.

That led to a 10-yard intentional grounding penalty. A 61-yard drive later, the Titans were up 35-32 with just 23 seconds left on the clock.

But Butker and Colquitt would get a second chance! Patrick Mahomes did very Patrick Mahomes things to drive the Chiefs 28 yards in 20 seconds, setting up a game-tying 52-yard attempt with three seconds left on the clock. And while this one would get to Colquitt successfully, it would soon wind up careening past his head in the wrong direction:

the Titans get the FG block (!), beat the Chiefs (!!), and now the Raiders are a half-game away from the top of the AFC West (!!!) pic.twitter.com/cpuUpcgLl9

— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) November 10, 2019

Kansas City’s last two field goal attempts went 0 for 2, and the Chiefs fell to 2-3 in their last five games as a result.

1. The Cowboys stubbornly refused to score late against the Vikings

Dak Prescott had terrific game against the Vikings on Sunday night, throwing for nearly 400 yards and three touchdowns. Receivers Michael Gallup, Randall Cobb, and Amari Cooper all came up with highlight-reel catches, too. Meanwhile, the Minnesota’s defense was able to shut down Ezekiel Elliott all night long, holding him to just 47 yards on the ground.

So down 28-24 with under a minute left, why in the world did the Cowboys try to run the ball on the last few plays?

Cowboys penultimate drive: Dak pass: 20 yards Dak pass: 10 yards Dak pass: INC Dak pass: 13 yards Dak pass: 20 yards Zeke run: 4 yards Dak pass: 8 yards Dak pass: 8 yards Zeke run: 0 yards Zeke run: -3 yards Dak pass: INC Turn. on downs Ain't even analytics. It's common sense.

— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) November 11, 2019

Their explanation — to not leave too much time for the Vikings — makes no sense either.

Nevertheless, Dallas had all three of its timeouts at that point, and the defense forced a three-and-out. So the Cowboys had a second chance when Minnesota punted it back to the them with 24 seconds left.

Except the return man, Tavon Austin, fair caught it (as the coaching staff instructed him to). But take a look at how much space Austin had along the sideline:

Coaches must have told him not to return this. pic.twitter.com/ixtNFPYnBC

— Kent Somers (@kentsomers) November 11, 2019

There’s no guarantee Austin would’ve housed it — the Vikings could’ve closed in on him if they thought he was taking off. But at the very least, Austin could’ve given the Cowboys better field position for their final possession if his coaches had let him do what he’s out there to do.

On second thought, if that had happened, the Cowboys probably would’ve just tried to run the ball.

[ruthlessbookfish]

The Boxer By Piper Rayne

March 1

My Review

Tahlia and Lucas have a story with a mix of sweetness, hilarity and sexiness. 

The job Lucas takes over for his friend sets up a great story line. Tahlia has been put through the wringer with her ex, Lucas was the perfect man for her. He was fierce, funny and sexy as hell. I loved it.

 I’m so looking forward to meeting the man who can tame Lennon. I want to read that story so badly!

* I read an advanced reader’s copy of this book* 

Title: The Boxer

Series: Modern Love #2

Author: Piper Rayne

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Release Date: March 1, 2017

Blurb

“Who knew a bad boy could mend a broken heart." What does a girl do after she discovers her fiancé is a cheating bastard? In my case, I performed the ritual implosion of all scorned women. I drowned my sorrows in cases of white wine, wallowed in gallons of ice cream, and ignited a bonfire to burn away every damn remnant of his existence. Six months later, the only result was a permanent impression of my ass on the couch. Adventure Dating my friends dared.

A new and exciting opportunity they said.

I thought they were crazy, but I’m not one to back down from a challenge, so I signed up for the entire four-week deal. That’s where I saw HIM. Lucas Cummings. He isn’t the classic rich boy I usually end up with. The one whose idea of working up a sweat is waiting for his margarita to be served on the beach. Nope. He’s a rough and tough bad boy that all fathers warn their daughters about. You know the type. Cocky swagger, chiseled jaw—the ‘V’. SOLD, I said to myself, until I discovered he was so much more than just a BOXER. Left Hook. Right to the heart.

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Excerpt

My mouth waters as the guy who propositioned me a half hour ago strips off his robe, revealing a set of abs I’m quite positive could wash the panties I just soaked. Jesus, he’s hot, with not one ounce of fat on him. His black silk shorts have a white band of fabric around his waist that says Raging Bull. Lennon grabs my cup out of my hand. “Hey,” I say, reaching for it. “No, girl, you’re gonna want to be stone sober for this one. You don’t want to be like Whit the first night she and Cole got together.” She takes a sip, but I grab the cup back, knowing I need it more than I thought. Especially when he glances down and a perfect set of sparkling teeth emerge, revealing a smile that has me gripping Lennon’s arm for support. Then he bites his bottom lip for a second, and my fingernails dig into Lennon’s bicep. “Damn, I wish I saw him first.” Lennon’s voice sounds as dreamy as I feel. “You better ride him like you’re a fucking rodeo star, girl.” And there’s the Lennon I know and love. The vodka man, now known as Lucas Cummings, turns around, continuing to bounce on his toes. Sammie’s voice rings out once more, and another boxer enters with four bodyguards and a red silk robe. He weaves through the ropes and stares down Lucas. Lucas laughs, egging him on, and my gut twists. “The undefeated Brock ‘Lights Out’ Hayes,” Sammie announces, and the guy jumps around the ring, waving both fists in the air. Lucas turns back toward us, but his attention is focused solely on another guy. A small man rushes in the ring, putting Vaseline on his cheeks and forehead. “This is the real deal.” The excitement in Lennon’s voice increases. Lucas keeps peeking over at me, an uptick on his lips each time. Eventually, the guy who I assume is his manager glances over our way to see what’s distracting him. Whit tugs on my arm and leans in close. “Someone has caught the boxer’s attention,” she whispers and I wish my cheeks didn’t heat like they are. “Because he’s thinking of all the ways he’s going to fuck her later,” Lennon adds, turning her head for only a second. “What?” Whitney asks, in the dark on the whole situation. “I met him at the bar. He asked me to meet him after,” I say, and Whitney’s eyes crinkle as if she doesn’t think that’s a good idea. So thinks the girl who resorted to Tinder. “Like you’d do that,” she says confidently, and I bite my lower lip. The lip that is now a little tingly from what I assume is the Everclear. “Tahlia, don’t you think you should wait for your second one-night stand for someone of his…caliber?” Cole peeks over her shoulder. “I met him a few weeks ago when I came to watch the fights. Seems like an okay guy.” Whitney raises her hand, and it smacks Cole in the face. He grabs his nose. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She glances at him for a second before her eyes set on me again like a mother scolding her teenager. “No, babe, it’s my fault. I know better than to try to get in the middle of a conversation between you three.” Cole touches his nose a few times and wiggles it around. “Guess you’re not the kinda guy to jump in that ring then.” Lennon laughs and points at him. Cole raises his eyebrows in her direction. “Are you challenging me, Lennon?” Cole asks and the three of us laugh. Whitney waves her hands around. “Forget that. Tahlia, you can’t go have a one-night stand with someone like him.” I look past Whitney to Cole. “I think you need to go over the one-night stand rules. First one being, you don’t know the person. Second qualification, you pick the hottest guy.” Cole laughs, but Whitney only becomes more agitated. I’m not sure why she’s giving me trouble. She’s the one who brought me here tonight. “Tahl,” she sighs. “Whit,” I mimic her tone. “I’m a grown woman. I’ll be fine.” Lennon elbows me a few times. “The blood is about to spew,” she says and jumps up, screaming, “Go, black shorts!”

Lucas turns around to Lennon and then cocks an eyebrow in her direction. For a second, jealousy spikes within me, but when his gaze turns to me and he smirks, I melt. Unable to deal with the thought that the guy up in the ring could be inside of me in a few hours, I tip the rest of my Everclear and down it.

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Author Bio

Piper Rayne, or Piper and Rayne, whichever you prefer because we’re not one author, we’re two. Yep, you get two established authors for the price of one. You might be wondering if you know us? Maybe you’ll read our books and figure it out. Maybe you won’t. Does it really matter? We aren’t trying to stamp ourselves with a top-secret label. We wanted to write without apology. We wanted to not be pigeon holed into a specific outline. We wanted to give readers a story without them assuming how the story will flow. Everyone has their favorite authors, right? And when you pick up their books, you expect something from them. Whether it’s an alpha male, heavy angst, a happily ever after, there’s something you are absolutely certain the book will contain. Heck, we’re readers, too, we get it. What can we tell you about ourselves? We both have kindle’s full of one-clickable books. We're both married to husbands who drive us to drink. We're both chauffeurs to our kids. Most of all, we love hot heroes and quirky heroines that make us laugh, and we hope you do, too.

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[rokomobi]

Why Apps Are Not Dead And 10 Other Tech Predictions For 2017

2016 was a big year in tech. We saw chabots arrive onto the scene as well as driverless vehicles. We witnessed the explosion (and implosion) of certain apps and of certain smartphones. We’re only a few weeks into 2017, and it’s looking like this year will be a repeat of the last — only bigger. Here are our ten tech predictions of 2017. 

1. Chatbots are here to stay

2016 was the year of the chatbot. Early on in the year, they arrived in troves. Every tech publication released an article calling them something like “the next industrial revolution” or signaling the “death of the app.” They found their way into countless apps, namely those in the messaging space (Facebook, Kik, Telegram to name a few.) Though, as the year progressed, the hype seemed to flatline (as is the case with any new, hot tech.) This year, the real chatbot revolution will occur as they will become widely used by consumers all around. Chatbots will continue to proliferate the popular messaging apps that exist, but also different types of apps as well — with services like InstaBot. In 2016, chatbots arrived. In 2017, their potential will be fully realized.

2. Apps are back from the dead 

Last year, the app market took a tumble. Statistics showed that people were downloading less apps than ever before. Along with that, they were spending the bulk of their time on only a handful of apps. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that in 2017, we’ll see a reverse of these behaviors. New innovative app based services will arrive in 2017, which will spur new download behavior. Many believe that the arrival of chatbots has signaled the final days of the app (as mentioned above.) I believe that the arrival of chatbot will only enhance apps by offering new forms of text-based interactions that didn’t exist before. In 2017, we’ll see the release and widespread use of app based on-demand services. Along with that, meditation and mindfulness apps will see a huge breakout in 2017 — causing people to think about mental health in new ways. There will always be problems to solve. In 2017, we’ll see apps continue to solve many.

3. A Trove of Tech IPOs

Just a few weeks ago, Snap Inc. (Snapchat) filed for its IPO. The (hopefully) successful IPO of a tech company so early on in the year, will open the gates for many to follow. There are many high-valued Unicorns that are ripe for IPO, and it’s likely that we’ll see a few of them do just that. There is Airbnb, WeWork, Dropbox to name a few. Uber, the highest valued privately held company, will likely wait a few more years, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect that one to occur just yet. In 2016, there were a few tech IPOs. In June we saw Twilio go public, boldly just days after Brexit occurred. The following month, LINE filed for its IPO. Initially, both saw their shares jump, however, after a few months, they cooled off. This year it’ll be different — thanks to Snap Inc.’s early success (fingers crossed!)

4. It’s a(live)!

In 2015, live streaming was the hot technology on everyone’s radar. First came Meerkat out of SXSW. Next came Periscope, which was swooped up by Twitter even before it was launched to the public. The excitement around live streaming died off in 2016. Not everyone saw the point of it. Sure, it made sense for famous people with thousands of followers — but not so much for your average joe. In 2017, this will change. Just recently, Instagram added live streaming capabilities, giving its users an easy way to broadcast to their followers. We’ll likely see other popular messaging and photo sharing apps (and maybe entirely new apps) do the same.

5. Bitcoin blast off

Bitcoin had a big year in 2016. It ended the year over the $1,000 mark, which has historically been an important mark for the cryptocurrency. At the start of 2017, we saw a major dip, a major spike, another spike and are currently in minor dip. As the year progresses, I foresee the price continuing to rise (with dips here and there.) As bitcoin surges, other alternative cryptocurrencies will follow. By the end of the year, Bitcoin will have surpassed the $2,000 mark. Due to this, many will finally give it validation, which will also help pave the way for the widespread use of the underlying blockchain technology. Note: this is entirely speculation.

6. VR/AR sees the light 

There has been a lot of talk about AR and VR technology for years. New products are released every year with the promise that they will finally be the device that finally puts the technology in the hands of the average consumer — but it just hasn’t happened yet. This is the year. Read our recent blog post about why. In 2017, video games will lead the way. Consumers will use VR to experience their favorite games in a new, immersive way. New, innovative film experiences will follow. In 2016, we saw the release of the Oculus Rift, the Google Daydream, and Sony’s own VR headset. These devices, and others, will see more use in 2017 — with the release of more content. I don’t necessarily think visual augmented reality will catch on in 2017, as we’re relatively far off tech-wise. However, other types of augmentation will — such as Audio. This year, we’ll see the official release of Doppler Lab’s Here One, which will change the way humans interact with sound. Visual augmentation will come sooner or later.

7. Going Vocal 

2017 will be the year of the voice. In the home, we will use our voices to control devices through “personal assistants” such as Amazon Echo (through Alexa), Google Home and others. Siri will become more powerful, too. We will use our voices more within apps, too. Voice will become a new, social tool as apps like PUNTIT, Roger and Anchor grow in popularity. Get those vocal chords warmed up.

8. The (finally) connected home 

Many people are living in “connected” homes. But are they really connected? You might have three different smart devices that you can control in your home, but those three are controlled separately. There seems to be a thread that is missing that connects all devices. Your light bulbs, TV and kitchen appliances are smart, but controlled by different apps. In 2017, the thread, a sort of central app or device, that connects all smart “things” will exist. Who will make it? What exactly will it be? We’ll just have to wait to find out.

9. Smart Autos 

In 2017, you (or someone you know) will ride in a driverless car for the first time. In 2016, we saw major updates in the world of the smart auto. Tesla improved their cars, naturally. Uber began testing their self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh with actual customers. In 2017, Uber will likely expand their driverless fleet to new cities, as this method of expansion will mimic their initial expansion from San Francisco in 2009. Beyond being driverless, cars will also become smarter and more connected — with companies like Automatic paving the way.

10. Purposeful, Peaceful Protests 

The 2016 Election has left the country (and world) in a interesting place. 2017 has begun with tumultuous times. We’ve seen the largest gatherings (across the country) in United States history in the early weeks of the year. We will continue to see many protests like these as the year goes on. These protests will continue to be powered by technology. Facebook groups and events seem to be leading the way in terms of organization. New apps will pop up which will further help bring likeminded people together in protest. These will also help in curating events. Other apps will help individuals speak to their congressional members and connect with those in places of power. Technology will guide the protests and the people will lead it.

[adriennescomingbacktolife]

(VIII)

Seven hundred eighty-five dollars. Win or lose, that was the amount Adrienne Levi was guaranteed after every appearance with Carnage Wrestling.    And then the bonus during her four-match winning streak was four hundred eighteen dollars per.    Maybe two hundred dollars worth of sold merchandise each show, but then she had to subtract how much it cost even to get made--    Adrienne buried her face into the crook of her elbow. Her Clearwater apartment had become a little sparse as a result of a recent liquidation. Maybe that was done in haste. Someone would have paid something for that ridiculous belt even just to melt it down.    Spread across her kitchen counter, she stared at the pile of papers her mom usually helped with.    This was pathetic, she knew.    If she added this up all right, her pay and her expenses put her in the red: the plane trips, the Ubers, accommodations, bills, and a lease that was expiring very soon. Nathaniel Grant’s fun money had long dried up, and Levi had no one to blame except herself on that. She was a pretender. She was living it up in luxury hotels, wasting money on fancy dinners with her friends, and just really dumb purchases. Like the billboard ad near the Carnage Arena that had that doodle of Insidious with the caption Empire of Dorks.    Not to mention the exposed clandestine meeting between Christopher St. James and Stan Summers, where they discussed their intentions and measured her value as expendable.    With all of this mounting, it was becoming more apparent what she had to do. It was the logical choice. The realistic choice. The only choice.    Scrolling through her business cellphone’s contact list, she hovered over Carnage Wrestling Front Office. Hesitating and delaying the inevitable, Adrienne looked through all of the new friends she had made. All of the people who believed in her. This past summer had been one of the happiest ones of her life. Adrienne considered calling Silvio Leon, but he seemed to have his hands full with a new arrival: Axton Gunn. Oh, she was a huge fan. So huge that she almost cried when he followed her on Twitter. She had all three of his albums, including a signed copy of SKULLFRACTURES that she had sniped an eBay auction for. And yet, things seem complicated and pretty much none of her business. She didn’t want to pile on.    And Matt Knox was so buried in his hatred for Zane King that he was sort of scary these days. His propensity towards committing acts of violence wouldn’t solve this issue. Christopher St. James being in a body cast didn’t diminish his ownership of Carnage Wrestling. Not only that, but he’d also already done too much for her.    Mitch Heart seemed distant. Rumor had it that he was dealing with his own plethora of difficulties.    That left Kohaku Fujihara. They had conversed sparingly. Last month, he’d been dealing with these peculiar family issues, but he’d come out of it okay. Behind this charming exterior, he seemed to have this abundance of wisdom that was beyond his years.    She pressed Call.    “Hello?”    Adrienne almost considered hanging up. Her finger hovered over End Call.    “Moshi-moshi? Ade, that you? I see your name, so it’s either you or some creep who swiped her phone.”    Instead, she touched the Speaker icon, finally piping up. “Yeah, it’s me. Sorry. Is this a bad time?”    “No, not at all, I’m literally doing nothing but flipping through Netflix and wondering why nothing in thousands of options looks good. What’s up?”    Her eyes welled up at the thought of confessing to Kohaku. He didn’t seem his chipper self, but she had to tell someone. Trying her best to keep her tone neutral, she still wavered. “I have to leave Carnage.”    Silence on the other end.    “I have to leave because I can’t afford it anymore. And I don’t think the new person in charge likes me very much. I saw something with him and some other guy that scared me. I’m on some sort of list.”    Her words became disjointed and seemingly a million miles per hour as she choked back the tears.    “I tried. I really tried, but I guess it’s over. All of the offers I ever get are gross. And Carnage is the only place that gave me a chance but now that guy isn’t owner anymore. And all of my money is gone. And I wanted to move, but I can’t. I can’t just keep mooching off others. That’s all I’ve been doing. But my mom said I could probably be a receptionist at the clinic she works at. Just have to pass a drug test. I just have to move on from this--”    “Ade.”    The voice on the other end is gentle, understanding, and steady.    “First off, I want you to breathe, okay? Just take a few deep breaths.”    Kohaku paused, giving her time to do so before continuing.    “Alright. This is the part where a lot of people would freak out and start begging you not to go. I’m not going to do that. I’m not because, while of course, I want you to stay, this is something you have to decide for yourself.”    She reached for a tissue, wiping away the sobbing mess she had become.    “I don’t know what to do. These people depend on me or look up to me, but I’m not the person they think I am. You guys have been so nice to me, but maybe I’m the problem. I finally have a match that is actually for something and I don’t even have the means to make it.” Standing up, she hefted the cellphone in her hand. She spoke a little calmer now. “I promised my partner to meet her. If I lie to her, she’ll hate me forever and--”    “Okay. Tell you what. I know you don’t want to depend too much on charity, but is it alright if I spot you a plane ticket out here? I think we oughta be talking about this face to face. You can crash at my apartment. The place is practically a giant fancy cave. Is that okay?”    There she was, depending on another handout. But Silvio had said much the same thing. Knox, too. And here was another friend saying that she had to stand up for herself. There was a long pause from her as she stared at her wallet on the counter. The Queen of Swords card peeked out from the bifold.    “You still there?”    “Yeah.”    Adrienne considered his offer. It was the only way she’d make the next Chaos. She had already told her mom that she’d drop by the clinic later. Angie wasn’t a dream killer here. She promised her daughter that she could try again in a few years. Maybe find a closer company to work in.    That was the responsible thing to do.    Surveying her apartment, everything that was hers could fit in her backpack.    “Tonight?”    “Yeah, I can do that, should be able to find something. I’ve got you.”    “Okay.”    At 5:28 PM, Adrienne boarded a Southwest flight to Baltimore.    She’d never see Clearwater again.        Standing in front of a ginormous glass panel window, Adrienne admired the view of the Inner Harbor. She’d been all over this place the last few months but seeing it on such a grand scale put it into perspective. Everywhere Adrienne had been meant so much. Whether it was the spectacular victory at the MECU Pavilion or how Silvio Leon gave her that little glimmer of hope with a simple card, she would never forget. With her hands in her jeans pockets, she rocked gently back and forth on the heels of her bare feet.    “This is my first big chance.” Pausing, she considered the arrogance that could be attached to such a statement. Her back was to the camera, so her determined yet still soft voice was the only indicator of her tone. She continued much the same. “Not to say the others weren’t.”    Turning around, Adrienne leveled her gaze at the camera. Her normal cheery disposition was replaced by one that seemed to be more morose. The Starfox t-shirt she had on was a size too big, but she preferred it that way.    “A lot of folks here, they get their foot in the door and they’ve already staked claim to what they perceive is theirs. Almost like they’re entitled to it. Just because of who they are or what they’ve managed to achieve in the past.”    She crossed her arms over her chest, her expression lilting to contemplation.    “I could declare that I want to be the greatest champion this company has ever seen. I could say my name would ring through this vaunted hall of fame once I decide to hang up the boots.” Shaking her head, she followed up with a slight smile. “That just isn’t me. I don’t know what I’m going to accomplish here. Maybe all of the potential I have is just that. So I approach these opportunities a little differently. I see what is on the horizon. I see the allure of the gold.”    For a moment, Adrienne’s dark brown eyes seemed dazzled at the possibilities. Or perhaps it was just imagined.    “But right now, there is only the chance. One cobbled together with fragile partnerships with all intentions towards implosion if it meant that something more substantial was on the line. Seems common with this sport. My opponents are both well versed in being champions. They are consummate athletes. Perennial contenders. Always striving towards their next achievement.” She conceded to this with a slight shrug before continuing. “This is a competition, right?”    Her thoughts moved onto Steve Matthews. Carnage’s Ace. The Technical Master. He had come into this company with the same fire and fury every long time veteran managed to conjure until they learned a little humility or just evaporated when they realized that not many cared about that championship they won twelve years ago.    However, something irked Adrienne just a little, and so her voice became a little less friendly.    “Steve, maybe I should be happy that you finally saw the error of your ways. I had mentioned prior to our previous encounter that I found you lacking of any real convictions. I found you to be opportunistic. You stood by as your partner threatened to choke me with the caveat that I may like it. You quibbled and cringed at his tactics and put up a good argument after the victory slipped from your grasp, but it seemed to be a minor agitation. It was only until Alex Winter put you in a precarious situation that you truly realized what type of person he is. Alex is a little boy, angry at the world for his inadequacies, and he will always point the finger at those who are in his way. His toxic masculinity created this illusion of persecution, where he couldn’t just apologize and move on. His fragile ego blamed others for his athletic shortcomings. And at WAR, he concluded that through your suffering, he could embrace that he possessed no redeemable qualities and get ahead in this world,” She paused and then quipped. “Behold, the age-old tale of man.”    Her hands gestured vaguely into the air as if she were showing off a new wondrous invention. She wasn’t sure. She googled public speaking, and it said that hand gestures were cool to do. Or something like that.    “And so here you are. Good guy Steve. Flashing your pearly whites, bringing cookies for everyone. That was real sweet, so I want to believe you. I want to believe that maybe your personal struggles have made you turn a new leaf. However, it seemed rather easy for JC to get on your bad side because he didn’t, well, talk about you enough. He didn’t appeal to your mastery of this sport because he was too tied up in his own to care. He got into your head and nearly took it off with that huge boot of his.”    She held up two fingers.    “That should have been your second lesson in humility. I don’t have the track record of JC. And I’m sure not willing to do the things Alex did to secure a victory. However, judging by your partner’s words lately, maybe he would be if it meant … just one more shot.”    Pacing back and forth in front of the grand window, Adrienne now pondered about Eli Goode. An opponent she had just become familiar with, she knew that he hungered to recapture championship glory.    “Hey, Eli.” She said as she waved at him just like last time. “Other than some somber musings, you haven’t been on the radar much. Seems like you don’t have much going for you lately. You didn’t help Kyra by becoming Ultraviolent Champion. I didn’t become a small sacrifice for your latest ascension to champion’s row. And worst of all, your idol Jack Michaels stole your thunder by taking your World’s title shot and your chance to punish Ken Davison.”    She found Jack Michaels to be self-righteous and arrogant. The age-old tale of man and all. Eli was a terrific mimic.    “Punish him by becoming the world’s champion and then devaluing the title because he doesn’t care about silly things like that anymore. You’d never do that, would you, Eli?”    Adrienne let that question settle in just for a moment.    “And now you have to suffer the embarrassment of possibly competing for championships below your reproach. Maybe your attitude has changed, but if you look over your career at Carnage Wrestling, you have always been consistent. So what’s going on through your mind? May I venture a guess?”    Slightly exaggerating, she tapped a finger on her chin.    “All you gotta do is beat us. Then Steve. Then you’re champion again. After all of that, only three title defenses, and you can take that Highroad to a better championship. One that only you deserve.”    Putting a hand up towards the camera, she invited Eli to stop.    “I’ll be honest, getting the duke over you last show was really cool. We all question our abilities sometimes. I do it constantly. I probably annoy my friends and enemies alike. But for you, its like a vicious cycle. You can’t seemingly understand that everyone here is just as deserved of these opportunities as you are. But you’re still a world-class wrestler, so I know that you’re gonna make it hard for me to do it again. That goes the same for Steve. But I’m not alone.”    The Dragon Lady. Adrienne didn’t even know her real name, and she looked like she could have split Matt in two when he had even inquired about it. But well, she had her secrets, too.    “My partner is none other than The Dragon Lady. Have you two seen her in the ring? She’s tough as nails. She’s determined as ever because through some dubious circumstances, she has yet to taste victory. I’ve talked to her recently, and she’s ready as ever to make her mark. And how about me?”    She stared down at her feet. Adrienne wasn’t one to talk about herself. It wasn’t being humble or anything like, she just wasn’t sure what to say. She wasn’t any of the things that made a professional wrestler great.    “I don’t know. I should be happy. I’m starting to be recognized by my peers. I even had a feature in that newsletter thing. That was cool.”    Sighing, she wanted to level with the folks watching. She wanted to let them know not to place her so high.    “This was the biggest risk I’ve ever taken. Coming to a new city, for a profession I’ve never actually done, and most terrifyingly meeting new people I wasn’t sure would like me. And I know right now there is someone out there just like me. I’m guessing that you’ve been through the same conflicts. That you’ve hidden the same bruises I’ve had to. And maybe you’re at the cusp of making that very same decision. I … can’t tell you what to do. I’m no role model. I’m just me. But I can tell you that you do have a voice just like me. For so long, like even now, I’ve been afraid to use it.”    Adrienne stepped towards the camera.    “I don’t want to be afraid anymore. And you shouldn’t be either. Whatever is paralyzing you, it can’t hold you forever. I’ve been struggling my whole life just to get to his very moment. To have nothing. And it's the greatest feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”    And she left that one person, whoever they may be, one last question.    “What would it take for you to get there?”        Angie Straussler bundled up her daughter’s apartment steps with groceries in hand. There were more plastic bags in the trunk of the Oldsmobile. Setting one of the bundles of bags down at her feet, she knocked at the apartment door. After a minute, there was no answer. She knocked again. Ever since she was a little girl, Adrienne would almost run to the door to greet whoever was there. No such luck. Maybe she was out on a walk. It was a lovely warm evening after all, and she knew Adrienne was having a hard time leaving this place up in Baltimore behind.    Digging into her purse, she retrieved the spare key to Ade’s apartment. Letting herself in, she was immediately impressed. Every trace of that bastard was long gone.    However, something was strange. There was this air of finality about this she couldn’t put her finger on. She set aside the bags on the kitchen counter next to the stack of bills. Now it was time to figure this whole ordeal out.    Adrienne’s personal cellphone was on the coffee table. Sitting down on the dusty old couch that her one and only child saved from the curb nearly a decade ago, she picked up the phone with a yellow sticky note attached to it—1988, presumably her PIN. Ade had two now. One for work that she could probably just set aside … and this one. The personal one. The one that Angie paid for under her plan.    Entering the code, the screen immediately went to the recorder. Pressing play, Angie heard her daughter’s voice. Hi, mom. I’m gone, as you probably figured out by now. You know where I’m going.    There was a long pause in the recording. Angie could hear shuffling in the background, presumably her daughter hastily packing. You asked me to move on. But, I can’t if I’m still here. You know, I had this plan. I was going to do it the right way. I’d ask my friends to make a trip down here so you could finally meet them. Silvio, Ko, Matt, and maybe Mitch. Probably not him. Anyway, we would have all driven off into the sunset living happily ever after. That day would have never come. My whole life, I’ve been let around by the wishes of others, and whether the intentions were right or not, the choice was never mine. There is nothing here for me. I don’t want to check-in people for their appointments. I don’t want to follow in your footsteps. I know you were doing what you thought was best for me. We’ve always been a team ever since the divorce. You’ve always been there for me even when I probably haven’t been the best daughter. But I can tell you that this is the first choice I’m making with a clear head. I’m afraid, sure. I could fail, but it will be my failure to own. I want to be with my friends. I want to pursue the career that everyone, including you, thought I would never succeed in. I want to be me. There’s just stuff I’m not sure about, things I’ve always wondered about that I need to know about myself. So goodbye. Please just let me go. I love you, mom.    The recording stopped.    Angie listened to it a few more times. Her mind ran through a gambit of emotions and plans and conclusions.    Finally, she set the phone aside. Sighing, Angie resigned to the fact that her daughter would need to sink or swim.    “Love you, too, Adrienne.”

[thelmasirby32]

Increasing Time on Site

Changing User Intents

Google's search quality rater document highlights how the intent of searches can change over time for a specific keyword.

A generic search for [iPhone] is likely to be related to the most recent model. A search for [President Bush] likely was related to the 41st president until his son was elected & then it was most likely to be related to 43.

Faster Ranking Shifts

About 17 years ago when Google was young they did monthly updates where most of any ranking signal shift that would happen would get folded into the rankings. The web today is much faster in terms of the rate of change, amount of news consumption, increasing political polarization, social media channels that amplify outrage and how quickly any cultural snippet can be taken out of context.

Yesterday President Trump had some interesting stuff to say about bleach. In spite of there being an anime series by the same name, news coverage of the presser has driven great interest in the topic.

And that interest is already folded into the organic search results through Google News insertion, Twitter tweet insertion, and the query deserves freshness (QDF) algorithm driving insertion of news stories in other organic search ranking slots.

If a lot of people are searching for something and many trusted news organizations are publishing information about a topic then there is little risk in folding fresh information into the result set.

Temporary Versus Permanent Change

When the intent of a keyword changes sometimes the change is transitory & sometimes it is not.

One of the most common ad-driven business models online is to take something that was once paid, make it free, and then layer ads or some other premium features on top to monetize a different part of the value chain. TripAdvisor democratized hotel reviews. Zillow made foreclosure information easily accessible for free, etc.

The success of remote working & communication services like Skype, Zoom, Basecamp, Slack, Trello, and the ongoing remote work experiment the world is going through will permanently change some consumer behaviors & how businesses operate.

A Pew survey mentioned 43% of Americans stated someone in their house recently lost their job, had their hours reduced, and/or took pay cuts. Hundreds of thousands of people are applying to work in Amazon's grueling fulfillment centers.

To many of these people a lone wolf online job would be a dream come true.

If you had a two hour daily commute and were just as efficient working at home most days would you be in a rush to head back to the office?

How many former fulltime employees are going to become freelancers building their own small businesses they work on directly while augmenting it with platform work on other services like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Upwork, Fiverr, 99 Designs, or even influencer platforms like Intellifluence?

If big publishers are getting disintermediated by monopoly platforms & ad networks are offering crumbs of crumbs there's no harm in selling custom ads directly or having your early publishing efforts subsidized through custom side deals as you build market awareness and invest into building other products and services to sell.

Wordpress keeps adding more features. Many technology services like Shopify, Stripe & Twilio are making most parts of the tech stack outside of marketing cheaper & easier to scale.

Some universities are preparing for the fall semester being entirely online. As technology improves, we spend more time online, more activities happen online, and more work becomes remote. All this leads to the distinction between online and offline losing meaning other than perhaps in terms of cost structure & likelihood of bankruptcy.

Before Panda / After Panda

Before the Panda update each additional page which was created was another lotto ticket and a chance to win. If users had a crappy user experience on a page or site maybe you didn't make the sale, but if the goal of the page was to have the content so crappy that ads were more appealing that could lead to fantastic monetization while it lasted.

That strategy worked well for eHow, fueling the pump-n-dump Demand Media IPO.

Demand Media had to analyze eHow and pay to delete over a million articles which they deemed to have a negative economic value in the post-Panda world.

After the Panda update having many thin pages laying around and creating more thin pages was layering risk on top of risk. It made sense to shift to a smaller, tighter, deeper & more differentiated publishing model.

Entropy & Decay

The web goes through a constant state of reinvention.

Old YouTube Flash embeds break.

HTTP content calls in sites that were upgraded to HTTPS break.

Software which is not updated has security exploits.

If you have a large website and do not regularly update where you are linking to your site is almost certainly linking to porn and malware sites somewhere.

As users shifted to mobile websites that ignored mobile interfaces became relatively less appealing.

Changing web browser behaviors can break website logins and how data is shared across websites dependent on third party services.

Competition improves.

Algorithms change.

Ads eat a growing share of real estate on dominant platforms while organic reach slides.

Everything on the web is constantly dying as competition improves, technology changes and language gets redefined.

Staying Relevant

Even if a change in user intent is transitory, in some cases it can make sense to re-work a page to address a sudden surge of interest to improve time on site, user engagement metrics & make the content on your page more citation-worthy. If news writers are still chasing a trend then having an in-depth background piece of content with more depth gives them something they may want to link at.

Since the Covid-19 implosion of the global economy came into effect I've seen two different clients have a sort of sudden surge in traffic which would make little to no sense unless one considered currently spreading news stories.

News coverage creates interest in topics, shapes perspectives of topics, and creates demand for solutions.

If you read the right people on Twitter sometimes you can be days, weeks or even months ahead of the broader news narrative. Some people are great at spotting the second, third and fourth order effects of changes. You can spot stories bubbling up and participate in the trends.

An Accelerating Rate of Change

When the web was slower & easier you could find an affiliate niche and succeed in it sometimes for years before solid competition would arrive. One of the things I was most floored about this year from a marketing perspective was how quickly spammers ramped up a full court press amplifying the fear the news media was pitching. I think I get something like a hundred spam emails a day pitching facemasks and other COVID-19 solutions. I probably see 50+ other daily ads from services like Outbrain & similar.

The web moves so much faster that the SEC is already taking COVID-19 related actions against dozens of companies. Google banned advertising protective masks and recently announced they are rolling out advertiser ID verification to increase transparency.

If Google is looking at their advertisers with a greater degree of suspicion even into an economic downturn when Expedia is pulling $4 billion from their ad budget & Amazon is cutting back on their Google ad budget and Google decides to freeze hiring then it makes far more sense to keep reinvesting into improving any page which is getting a solid stream of organic search traffic.

Company Town

After Amazon cut their Google ad budget in March Google decided to expand Google Shopping to include free listings. When any of the platforms is losing badly they can afford to subsidize that area and operate it at a loss to try to gain marketshare while making the dominant player in that category look more extreme.

When a player is dominant in a category they can squeeze down on partners. Amazon once again cut affiliate payouts and the Wall Street Journal published an article citing 20 current and former Amazon insiders who stated Amazon uses third party merchant sales data to determine which products to clone:

Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. The information included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Amazon’s private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers. ... Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beam furniture. Amazon says those brands account for 1% of its $158 billion in annual retail sales, not counting Amazon’s devices such as its Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers and Ring doorbell cameras.

Amazon does not even need to sell their private label products to shift their economics. As Amazon clones products they force the branded ad buy for a company to show up for their own branded terms, taking another bite out of the partner: "Fortem spends as much as $60,000 a month on Amazon advertisements for its items to come up at the top of searches, said Mr. Maslakou."

Amazon has grown so dominant they've not only cut their affiliate & search advertising while hiring hundreds of thousands of employees, but they've also dramatically slowed down shipping times while pulling back on their on-site people also purchase promotions to get users to order less.

While they are growing stronger department stores and other legacy retailers are careening toward bankruptcy.

Multiple Ways to Improve

If you have a page which is ranking that gets a sudden spike in traffic it makes a lot of sense to consider current news & try to consider if the intent of the searcher has changed. If it has, address it as best you can in the most relevant way possible, even if the change is temporary, then consider switching back to the old version of the page or reorganizing your content if/when/as the trend has passed.

One of the pages mentioned above was a pre-Panda "me too" type page which was suddenly flooded with thousands of user visitors. A quality inbound link can easily cost $100 to multiples of that. If a page is already getting thousands of visitors, why not invest a couple hundred dollars into dramatically improving it, knowing that some of those drive by users will likely eventually share it? Make the page an in-depth guide with great graphics and some of those 10,000's of visitors will eventually link to it, as they were already interested in the topic, the page already gets a great stream of traffic, and the content quality is solid.

Last week a client had a big spike from a news topic that changed the intent of a keyword. Their time on site from those visitors was under a minute. After the page was re-created to reflect changing consumer intent their time on site jumped to over 3 minutes for users entering that page. Those users had a far lower bounce rate, a far better user experience, are going to be more likely to trust the site enough to seek it out again, and this sends a signal to Google that the site is still maintained & relevant to the modern search market.

There are many ways to chase the traffic stream

create new content on new pages

gut the old page & publish entirely new content

re-arrange the old page while publishing new relevant breaking news at the top

In general I think the third option is often the best approach because you are aligning the page which already sees the traffic stream with the content they are looking for, while also ensuring any users from the prior intent can still access what they are looking for.

If the trend is huge, or the change in intent is permanent then you could also move the old content to a legacy URL archived page while making the high-traffic page focus on the spiking news topic.

The above advice applies to pages which rank for keywords that change in intent, but it can also apply to any web page which has a strong flow of user traffic. Keep improving the things people see most because improvements there have the biggest returns. How can you make a page deeper, better, more differentiated from the rest of the web?

Does Usage Data Matter?

Objectively, if people visit your website and do not find what they were looking for they are going to click the back button and be done with you.

Outdated content that has become irrelevant due to changing user tastes is only marginally better than outright spam.

While Google suggests they largely do not use bounce rate or user data in their rankings, they have also claimed end user data was the best way they could determine if the user was satisfied with a particular search result. Five years ago Bill Slawski wrote a blog post about long clicks which quoted Steven Levy's In The Plex book:

"On the most basic level, Google could see how satisfied users were. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy users were all the same. The best sign of their happiness was the "Long Click" — This occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query."

Think of how many people use the Chrome web browser or have Android tracking devices on them all hours of the day. There is no way Google would be able to track those billions of users every single day without finding a whole lot of signal in the noise.

Categories: 

publishing & media

from Digital Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/increasing-time-site

[oselatra]

NOT ME!

I never groped a woman or did any of those other things that are flashing across the news outlets every day.  True enough, I never had a "real" job, at least not one in an office environment, but the idea of invading a person's privacy in such a manner is just foreign to me.  I mean, it's not like I'm constantly fighting off the urge to grope, like an alcoholic fighting off the urge to knock back a bottle of Schnapps.

NOT ME!

I never groped a woman or did any of those other things that are flashing across the news outlets every day.  True enough, I never had a "real" job, at least not one in an office environment, but the idea of invading a person's privacy in such a manner is just foreign to me.  I mean, it's not like I'm constantly fighting off the urge to grope, like an alcoholic fighting off the urge to knock back a bottle of Schnapps.  

And what about the other men in the workplace, the non-gropers? Why don't they explain to the gropers that what they are doing is just not acceptable?

We need two things here. We need all the non-gropers to stand up and say, "NOT ME." Then we need them to take the gropers aside and enlighten those Neanderthals.

David Rose

Hot Springs

From the web

In response to the Nov. 6 Arkansas Blog post, "Supreme Court refuses to hear Mike Maggio's appeal":

It's a shame he only got 10 years. I wonder what the parole possibilities are? He won't serve enough time, in my opinion, for the incredible abuse of trust given a judge. He's contributed to the downfall of the entire justice system. Here's hoping that his income is attached for the rest of his life to pay off the civil case.

Perplexed

Shouldn't he have to serve extra time for showing what an a-hole he is? Remember geaux tigers?

Maxifer

There is no parole in the federal system, Perplexed, so he will serve all of his time, less a little bit (matter of a few months at most) off of that if he behaves himself. This is what is so great about federal sentencing vis-a-vis state ones. In the federal cases, you know how much time a person is going to serve, whereas in state sentencing, you have to divide the sentence handed down by either one-sixth, one-third, one-half or 70 percent, depending on the severity of the crime.

plainjim

In response to the Nov. 5 Arkansas Blog post, "More than 20 dead in mass shooting in Texas church":

Dear Sutherland, how are those thoughts and prayers working for y'all?

Vanessa

Vanessa, what a heartless comment.

Downtowner

Eagerly anticipating the athleticism from the usual sources as they bend, twist and turn to keep from calling this, like the Vegas massacre, an act of terrorism, yet speak with such rapid assurance when the perp is identified as having one of those funny names.

During the interregnum, before such is revealed, it's "thoughts & prayers" down the line from the blowhards and puffers.

tsallernarng

For those who disliked Vanessa's earlier post, explain to me, precisely, what benefit has ever accrued to the victims, as opposed to the self-indulgently thoughtful and prayerful, from thoughts and prayers.

Silverback66

Ho hum. Just part of the daily price of no coherent gun policy in the good old U.S.A. No amount of prayer will change that reality. Gotta wonder if our elected leaders see such mass shooting events as entertainment because they sure as hell aren't lifting so much as a little finger to do anything to change the status quo.

Damn shame, too. Maybe one of us on this blog will be in the next batch of mass victims. We can call it U.S.A. Roulette, just with more firepower and far more dead and wounded.

Oh, and where were the good guys with the guns we always hear will stop a bad guy with a gun like this? Or did Texas confiscate all the guns, and that news just hasn't percolated across the border yet?

Sound Policy

Just decided to buy a gun this week. Guess this is not the place for a recommendation on what kind to get.

Screen name taken

What makes me most sad about any of the mass shootings is that they even happen to begin with and that none of the perpetrators are being captured alive. The last mass shooting I can remember where the shooter was captured alive was the during the Planned Parenthood murders in Colorado Springs in 2015. Something is deeply wrong in our U.S.A. I believe in the right to bear arms, but I also believe that gun-worship is empowering the mentally ill to commit mass murder. So many hateful paranoid men thinking an assault rifle is going to right all the imaginary wrongs they feel have been done against them.

Artificial Intelligence

In defense of Vanessa, some version of the point she was trying to make has been all over Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere all afternoon and this evening. Maybe she was the first one to "go there" on the blog, but she is definitely not the first to say it. It was out there well before it showed up here. People are tired of hearing "thoughts and prayers" and then that's the end of it. Anyone can say that. It's beginning to ring hollow and I cringe whenever I hear it now. If "thoughts and prayers" help in any way, how could this have happened in the most holy of places?

 Something evil has been unleashed and is running amok in the U.S.A. I have no idea how we are going to find our way back to civilization, but I'm sure it will take more than a catch phrase to fix this mess.

mountaingirl

Thoughts and prayers never solved any crimes. It is just an excuse, a damned cover-up for insensitive politicians who don't want to solve what is one of the biggest — if not the single biggest — dangers of our modern society: the uninhibited access to weapons capable of mass killings. Politicians hide behind their thoughts and prayers while people are being killed. This same thing could happen at my church. We don't take any security measures because everyone should be welcomed to the house of the Lord. Speaking of "thoughts and prayers," how many of us really believe that the politicians are sincere in their offering them up?

plainjim

In response to the Nov. 5 Arkansas Blog post, "Honeymoon's over for Sarah Huckabee Sanders":

Dear Media, please keep it up. Sarah Huckabee upstaging her boss will simply shorten her time in the spotlight, and the administration will have to reach even lower for a spokesperson.

Vanessa

Better yet, Vanessa, if our world ever regains it sanity then maybe she'll never have a decent job again.

wannabee conservative

I notice lately she's taken to occasional attempted humor. Her jokes fall flat just like her dad's ... but without the outhouse flavor.

JB

Do you Kool-Aid drinkers ever get tired of tearing down successful people just because you oppose their political views? Guess they are OK as long as they agree with your views but look out if they do not. What a collective bunch of phonies.

Razorblade

So, the willingness to lie to the nation on a daily basis meets the description of "successful"? The ability to ignore the voice inside yourself that whispers "you're not telling the truth" is admirable? 

Such is the thought process of a party-before-country Republican.  The blog members can expect to be chastised by Mr. Razorblade for criticizing Manafort, Gates, Flynn and Flynn Jr., when their chances to lie in the spotlight come along, soon.

Emersum Biggins

Prediction: Barring total implosion, she keeps this gig up just long enough to declare for Boozman's seat when he formally announces he's not running for re-election.

Pygface

In response to the Nov. 3 Arkansas Blog post "State tourism official warns of economic damage from 'bathroom bill' ":

Unfortunately, the political atmosphere is one reason we've decided to move back to our home state. Won't miss the regression of women's rights, the push for more religion interference in public schools and the narrow-minded views of LGBTQ citizens. What ever happened to the Arkansas of David Pryor and Dale Bumpers? Instead we get Rutledge, Rapert and Mr. Re-Homing Harris. Truly sad.

Irishgirl2012

I just moved back to Arkansas from the bluest city in one of the bluest states in these united. To those of you bemoaning the present political climate in Arkansas, oh, and let me add J. William Fulbright and William J. Clinton, let me offer this nugget of consolation: The people and policies that so bedevil you in the present day will be swept away by the inevitable tide of progress. The past that the others are trying to regain is not coming back. The present, such as it is, will be transformed into the future that is evident in the more progressive societies in our country and world.

Inequities persist, but many of those prejudices of our past have been eroded in ways that may not be appreciated. Mixed race families might be a bit odd in some corners of Arkansas, but are not illegal and for the most part do not attract all that much attention. The public persons who formerly hid in the closet who have come out, well, that does not attract all that much attention, really no big deal, at least if they stick to consenting adults.

Yes, a rational, educated and thoughtful people should not take so long to do the right thing, but if you are smart enough to realize things should be better, you should be smart enough to realize that most of our fellow Americans, perhaps especially Arkansans, are not. Take some solace in the fact that Jeff Sessions, Donny Trump and Harvey Weinstein, among others, are not from Arkansas. We begat Johnny Cash, Jim Jones, Douglas Blackmon and Jeff Nichols. Take some pride in their works, and don't take any crap from others, and surely don't crap all over yourself.

Get to work, register, think and vote. Go get 'em.

deadseasquirrel

In response to a Nov. 1 Arkansas Blog post about Sarah Huckabee Sanders' defense of the weird characterization of the Civil War by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly:

Sarah may be dishonest, but she is not dumb, as many here try to portray her. She is an expert in the mechanics and the machinations of a political campaign. As White House press secretary, she is still running a political campaign. She did a good job managing John Boozman's 2010 campaign for the Senate, as well as her daddy's go-nowhere presidential campaign in 2012. She is politically savvy, and knows that politicians are rarely punished for lying. She also knows how to avoid critics. She simply quit communicating with the Arkansas Times, took the Times off the list of media receiving notices and never returned Max's phone calls, according to what he has posted previously. Politics is a duplicitous game at its best. She knows how to practice duplicity very well.

plainjim

NOT ME!

[jeannette-marshall-optioneerjm]

It’s not just about “data” ::…. numbers tell a story

NOW, I remember what I started to do before being sidetracked sideways for a few hours ::… * mon dieu * [my dear] …. maybe I am losing my mind? by Jeannette Marshall @optioneerJM

A storyteller is someone who is imaginative evoking empathy, intellectual connection with a highly *involved crew.  Not always YUPPIES as my egocentric alter ego YUPPYdom on Word Press has developed a pulse.  Thank you for that.  That is the start of how we would define a storyteller, by traditions, teachings, assumptions.   In my mind’s eye I see a storyteller as someone who can write a story, encouraging the absorption of the tale, definition solely by you. A storyteller can and often does evoke reaction. Some positive, others not so. Tears of sadness that comes with empathy, chuckles or giggles that express joy and humor [key to our Mental Health]. Intrigue, mystery, literature or entertainment the writer’s gift to the world. A bond that is established. A loyalty. A tribe. You see, I study the numbers, absorb them, roll them around in my head.  Then an eruption of ideas explode from an implosion from within.  A strong desire to develop writing, a following,  a brand. I’m always testing things consciously or subconsciously.  Perhaps that is why my tribe is really very, tres coolio [ translation:  my vibe ].  I had decided from the start to be who I am, be truest to myself.  Cherish my mental wellbeing above all else.  Sometimes failing, sometimes melancholy, other times a fear of despair.   Have I been spirally downward and only just now realizing it?  Or, in the utter pit of despair, clambering to stay as far away from depression as possible, as I read and absorb that topic:  Mental Health.   A fascination that compliments my life long love of numbers, hatched at the ripe age of 25.  Yes, the parent of a few Millennials of my own.  Offspring of my heart, soul and love.  Who would have imagined a YUPPIE being able to exude that much love, give up attention, recognition, so yield pride and ego to the exit door.  That should in essence describe the boon of the aging YUPPIES.  The champion of so many things, discoverers of wondrous wisdom, leaders of free worlds, emblematic of racial acceptance and waivers of discourse.  Fashionable statement is the championship of a YUPPIE.  In the 80s or ever since.  Bred of a generation in which appearance meant everything::… if you appeared the cleanest, purest, honest, intellectual, polished, fashionable young lady or man who surfed their way through the 1980s, hitting your 20s in practically, direct unison with the Millennial implosion of population, attitude, aptitude, striving, able, strong hipsters [ born in the 90s when their parents had done a little adulting before diving into parenthood ]. Lucky for me, when someone was showing me and teaching me something in my 20s, it snapped in to my brain, and hasn’t really let go.  I think that sales was a science with numbers if I think back on it now.  A way to set up your own intellectual (golf-like) game of improving your own score. If you are driven with south doubt, there is nothing more soothing than a love story of numbers ::… the characters evolving and changing, the plot rotating, the cast of characters alternating.  What stays true, is the numbers. There is corruption in numbers. But far more poetic and entertaining for sure. I’ve been hinting at forecasting being critical over the past number of posts.  Where many of my most devoted readers merge with me, hang out with me virtually, so to speak.  What’s appealing to me or something worth a expulsion of thought.  Some pass on.  Others pick up.   The ones that pick up are part of my crew. How else could they not be (wow, what a bunch of bad grammar eh?)  meaning they must be my crew, if the followers are attributed to me.  Right? Let me show you what I mean while I tell you a story with numbers. My own numbers.   No one else. Derived by really smart people developing algorithms that pops with artificial intelligence of a different kind. My perception of AI or what is catching on as “artificial intelligence”. Just recently, Facebook announced  setting up shop in Montreal. As its “Artificial Intelligence” Headquarters. Facebook has really fallen by the wayside when it comes to my interpretation of “Artificial Intelligence” (theory posted without research other than casual reading and dissemination of information available on the web for free) this Monday, September 25, 2017 at 10:30 pm MST Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Before I started reading up or noticing clips on television about artificial intelligence, I truly thought that how I defined it in my mind to mean to be the right interpretation:  AI for simplicity sake of typing as I’ve ranted about ACRONYM HELL before (maybe one of my more entertaining rants). I thought and think that AI is the absorption of personalized information (or aka also known as “data” ) stored to the “cloud” [ which is not an Apple creation as in Xerox still is to photocopiers].  

It makes sense.   The more faithful I am with certain social media platforms, the more forthcoming they are starting to bring me my numbers.  I commented about Linked In’s more intuitive dance that they are experimenting with what I would think is mostly my crew:  the early adopters of online culture and earliest users of Social Media platforms like Twitter and Facebook before getting a special invite to be able to be the first to sign up to Google Plus or G+ as it is affectionately known. By reading the numbers, I can tell who is my crew. It’s a vibe that resonates and seems to bounce around like an uplifting game of toss the ball, virtually meaning a rallying of support from those who get to know you by your message, your consistent messaging and vibe. I did go on a rant today, which I really try to avoid. Nothing destroys a social media following  more than a rant. Since people are used to the SPAM and self-promotional garbage, they’re able to tune out that noise and grasp real important stuff. BUT they avoid rants like a rampant virus. Toxic and toxicity avoided so most people run away from toxicity yet ironically rally around violence or catastrophe. [You don’t have to think that far back glued to Twitter feeds and 24 hour news about hurricanes and earthquakes as most were.] Nothing deafens your voice faster than a rant. A misuse of power or a disuse of trust. That is what I’ve tried to uphold as an online motto and a heartfelt belief. To use the information at your disposal to uplift educate, elevate anything worthy of a rallying assembly of really smart, gifted, talented, successful, financially stable and morally sound folks.

Those are my PEEPs, TWEEPS, TRIBE, FRIENDS, FAMILY, and FAVORITES. Looking at the numbers, just defines the spirit of who they are.  See if you can see the story?

Let me float this out one more time:  this is a very telling page of numbers.  I’m wondering if you see what I see?

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2wPLMLr

from It’s not just about “data” ::…. numbers tell a story

[mavwrekmarketing]

Image: Shutterstock / Andrey_Popov

At some point, the internet became a get-rich-quick scheme.

There’s a simple formula to it: Smart people with good ideas receive millions of dollars to build something. If that something generates billions of dollars, it is a success. If it does not, it is a failure.

Such “failures” include: Twitter, Soundcloud, Vine, Reddit.

At varying times, each of these companies had the hallmarks of “success”millions of engaged users, venture capital money, a good brand. Now, Twitter is limping along, Soundcloud is in a death spiral, Vine is gone, and Reddit is still trying to figure things out.

They suffer from the same problem as the other community-driven websites on the internetthey just aren’t great at making money. This might be fine if not for the sad reality that these are some of the best things on the internet. These are the platforms that have fostered creativity, given birth to internet-native humor and music, and, with regard to Twitter, changed the world.

Not that you’d know it from the way Twitter is covered. Donald Trump’s favorite microblogging service announced that, yet again, user growth has stalled. Meanwhile, the company is having trouble making any real money from advertising, which in the growth-obsessed, free-by-default world of the internet remains the dominant model.

This is Twitter’s problem, but it’s also everyone’s problem. The internet, once a decentralized mess of weirdness, is now well on its way to being an oligopoly in which anything that’s not Facebook, Google, or Amazon can’t compete. It’s a situation that conjures up the famous scene from “Glenngarry Glen Ross” first prize is a Cadillac, second prize is steak knives, third prize is you’re fired.

By some measure, this is life. Call it late-stage capitalism or natural selection. The strong eating the week isn’t new, it’s just more efficient on the internet. The optimists about the situation see this as creative destruction that pushes forward humanity.

That all sounds good but it’s hard to square with what’s happening to the most creative and impactful platforms on the internet. Tumblr, a bastion of internet community if there ever was one, was so hard to monetize that Yahoo ended up declaring $700 million in loses related to its acquisition.

Tumblr’s struggles are matched only by Soundcloud’s ongoing implosion. Once a bright spot in the internet’s otherwise dark history with music, the platform took a turn once it tried to start making money.

Maybe it’ll survive, with a little help from Chance the Rapper, who blew up on Soundcloud.

Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. @SoundCloud is here to stay.

Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) July 14, 2017

Even Google has had trouble with this. YouTube is arguably the best creator-driven platform on the internet, yet even Googlemaybe the best company in the world at selling adshas struggled to really make it work. YouTube has been pushing into high-end content, subscriptions, and even a TV bundle.

Reddit is probably the most engaged community in the history of the internet. And nobody can figure out how to make money without ruining it.

Then there’s Vine. RIP. Its creative class still resonates through the internet. In its heyday, no platform fostered a more ridiculous and original scene.

The grandaddy of them all is Wikipedia, still the internet’s crowning achievement. Its community-based information aggregation stands out as an accomplishment for humanity, arguably one of the wonders of the worldand it makes no money.

That’s the key here. Wikipedia is and has always been a nonprofit. From its start, there was never any sort of bend toward figuring out how to make money. Certainly Wikipedia needs some money to remain in operation, which is raised by the Wikimedia Foundation

Of course, Wikipedia could have been monetized. Its cofounder Jimmy Wales still gets asked why he didn’t. Who knows what it would look like if he had. We should all be thankful that he didn’t.

The dark side of this issue is, of course, that people are terrible. Twitter and Reddit and all of these platforms have plenty of value, but they’re also rife with the ugliest parts of humanity. This is part of the reasons they are terrible at making money. Advertisers quite understandably don’t want their valuable brands next to hate speech.

And advertisers dictate much of what is and is not a success on the internet. Ads remain the dominant form of business on the internet, though subscriptions are gaining ground. Facebook and Google dominate this ad market, and the scraps they leave behind aren’t terribly appealing.

“Upon further reflection, its clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesnt serve people. In fact, its not designed to,” wrote Ev Williams, cofounder of Twitter and Medium, in a post announcing layoffs at Medium.

Williams has long been an advocate that quality and depth on the internet will win out. He may still be proven right, but for now, Medium has been forced to pivot toward a subscription model.

There’s some reasons to hope. The growth in donation-based programsmost notably Patreonpoints to a future in which the internet might be able to eschew the trappings of big money and big profits. Other platforms have begun to see success with similar programs, most notably Reddit with its Gold.

Maybe this is the start of the internet’s answer to the question of how it can create sustainable platforms that exist to serve communities rather than provide the same services as before. Facebook is well on its way to becoming TV (despite recent talk about community). Amazon sells us stuff. Netflix is, again, more TV. They’re great, but they’re just a better version of what we had before.

If that’s all the internet is to be, well then that’s very sad. There’s been a ton of great things on the internet, and people are just getting started. What’s going to matter going forward is that it doesn’t devolve into a giant pyramid scheme. Money is important, but it can’t be everything.

And until a better way comes along (if it ever does), the best things on the internet are going to suck at making money. Turns out it’s a feature, not a bug.

WATCH: This team is helping to save the rainforest with audio technology

Read more: http://ift.tt/2uHMub1

The post All the best things on the internet are terrible at making money appeared first on MavWrek Marketing by Jason

http://ift.tt/2viMgIC

[sociamediaonsocialmedia325]

Jillian - Us vs. Ads - How do we know what to buy?

    We've all seen it, scrolling through Instagram and twitter, when watching videos on YouTube, really browsing any social media site - #ads. Any person with even a small amount of fame capitalizes on companies' willingness to pay them for social media product promotion for anything from 'detox teas', teeth whiteners, supplements, clothing lines, apps, and so much more. These promotions are even posed and posted in a way that it's often hard to know what is real honest content and what is someone trying to sell us something.   This almost exactly what Baudrillard was talking about in "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media". We are meant to invest our desires in what we are told to want, by people we are told to trust, because they're 'just like us'.  Baudrillard talks about uncertainty, “not from the lack of information, but from information itself and even from an excess of information.” (580) We are faced with an excess of information at every turn. How can we be certain a product is worth our money, or if the reviews are true or coerced? But, according to Baudrillard this is what we want - to be told what we desire, and be left without having to make any choices or be conscious.   We make our choices based on what we see and hear, most of the time without even knowing it. Instagram had become the new marketing platform, workshops are run and 'experts' are hired to manage corporate Instagram accounts. There are whole departments dedicated to finding celebrities to endorse products on Instagram, to choosing the best time to post, and even to figure out what hashtags to use, just to get people to buy their product. Companies and consumers alike thrive on the opinions of 'influencers' when it comes to what we should buy, and when the product is sold the influencer gets their cut. This cyclical relationship leads to a consumer paying twice for the product - once for the product, and again for the recommendation. A whole new level of public relations has begun in the world, this is no longer movie stars and models using products in commercials, this is real people using real products in their everyday life - isn't it? Everyone wants to look as good as some of these celebrities on Instagram, who doesn't want to post a selfie like Kim Kardashian, or have the hair of a Victoria's Secret model, well when Kim or a model shows us a product to use to help us achieve it, we have to try it. The reliability of the product is already show to us, because if Kim really uses it, it must be good, and that takes all the decision making away from us.   We no longer have to use our own thinking to decide what to buy, we already know what works because Instagram told us so, and now we can shop in peace. Maybe Baudrillard was on to something, maybe we do crave freedom from decision making. It is easier to let someone else tell us what works instead of having to figure it out ourselves, but I think spending our money shouldn't be that easy. We work hard for it, so maybe before we let it go we should do some digging ourselves.

[ldh-posts-blog]

A Manifesto.

 It is a dark time for the rebellion. Or at least, for the political left. 

 It’s hard to know how to face up to the current, dizzying rightwards swing that western society is undergoing. In Britain, the reaction seems to be infighting and the occasional bout of tutting. In America, shell shocked impotence still seems to great President Trump’s every edict. 

 There is still some fight left in the left wing - at least in everyone who isn’t Jeremy Corbyn - but it’s hard to know what will make an impact. For all Trump’s thin-skinned paranoia, mockery won’t be enough.

 There’s no doubt that the left is funnier - Obama managed to be genuinely funny at every White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Even if his material was written for him, he still delivered it with masterful comic timing. Trump is too stuck up - and afraid - to even show his face.

 Laughter is, however, a sticking plaster on a broken bone, at best. What can the left do to make a real impact?

 The answer may come from a recent New Statesman column by Helen Lewis on the implosion of Milo Yiannopoulos, which points out that figures like Yiannopoulos are cynically exploited by the right as a way of dragging the conversational ball into their half of the pitch.

 Most American conservatives are probably nowhere near as extreme in their views as Yiannopoulos, a preening, fascist, bile spewing pederasty apologist, pretends to be. But by allowing him a voice*, other positions - those which are unpleasant but not outright disgusting - can seem normal by comparison, and so the whole political spectrum shifts slightly in their direction. 

 In essence, to confirm Godwin’s law, scumbags like Yiannopoulos scream “Let’s burn the Jews!”, and his handlers can safely say “Nobody’s agreeing we should BURN the Jews - just, maybe keep an eye on them for now.” In comparison, they get to sound reasonable. 

 As Helen Lewis points out, agitators like Yiannopoulos will eventually cross a line from which there is no coming back. In his case, it was when people realised he was arguing that priests should be allowed to fuck little boys. However, by the time he was thrown onto the slag heap, he had already served his purpose. He had been so grotesquely right-wing as to normalise less strident opinions.

 Perhaps in this way, the left can learn a lesson. We need someone to start making crazy demands, and we need it now. 

 It’s about time somebody began clamouring for the nationalisation of every public service, the legalisation of all drugs, and the seizing by force of every penny belonging to banking executives.

 We should also be calling for Nigel Farage to be kicked repeatedly in the balls by an immigrant on national television, and for Boris Johnson to be flogged. Separate incidents, obviously, because the pay-per-view revenues from each event would be enough to prop up the NHS for another five years.

 We should demand an end to Trident, with all the missiles being personally dismantled by Michael Gove using nothing but an IKEA allen key. He’s sick of experts, after all. If he gets radiation poisoning, our newly regenerated health service will be able to patch him up so that he can continue.

 The fight against Islamic fundamentalists will now be carried out by the lads from The Grand Tour, which will be amusing and accomplish about as much as we’ve managed to do with the proper army, anyway.

 Piers Morgan and Katie Hopkins will be deposited in a soundproof bunker with food and water, where nobody will be able to hear anything they say, ever again. 

 Twitter - which will be nationalised by the United Socialist States of America - will be made to ban Donald Trump and he will have a conniption fit thirty eight seconds later. It will go un-noticed as everyone is busy lining up for free abortions or to surrender their guns. Anyone not surrendering their guns will be killed by drone strike, viable now that all drones have been recalled due to the bumbling antics of Clarkson, Hammond and May constituting the West’s entire foreign policy.

 Women and people of colour will be paid 30% more than white men, just for the lulz. Old white men will be forced to retire at sixty, no exceptions.  

  Immigrant detention centres and Guantanamo Bay will be used to hold members of the previous Conservative and Republican governments, respectively. Hillary Clinton will get an apology, a parade, and then she and her husband will be arrested. She might have been hard done by, but she is still a fucking criminal. 

 Tony Blair will be made to resume his job as Middle East Peace envoy, but he will be working from an office in downtown Baghdad and allowed to start with nothing but a pencil, a notepad and a Bible.

 Two days after that, he will be denied a state funeral. 

 The Thatcher Memorial Dance Floor, formerly her grave, will be open on weekends and free to enter before midnight. Shots £2. 

 Of course, nobody is seriously suggesting any of these things. Except me, obviously. I’m absolutely saying we should do all of the above. 

 The point is, someone with a wider reach than me should start calling for them pretty soon, and maybe by being as ridiculous as the right, we can put politics back somewhere near the middle ground, again. 

 *Stand up, Bill Maher, you dumb, attention whore fuck.