#which is why i think it’s best viewed as supplemental material after having seen the original

[thefandomexpert]

alright i’ll say it. i don’t hate the new netflix atla

[blankd]

Thoughts on The Mitchells vs the Machines

I watched it a while ago and kept forgetting to post my thoughts on it, but some posts here on tumblr recently reminded me.

I disagree with the majority takeaways I see but is that not the spice of life?

As a standalone movie its inoffensive and the writing of it will likely exit my brain in a few months.  However I can appreciate that the visual style was different from the typical fare and the mixture of 2d elements for visual embellishments were mostly enjoyable and well-suited for Katie as the POV character.

It's a bit "hyper" for my liking, but that's fine, it's likely intended for an audience that's accustomed to the flood that is the current norm of the internet.  It was probably made with GIFable moments in mind and that is the most frequent content that is shared about it, so it certainly succeeded in that regard.

My more critical take is that jokes are delivered at the expense of what could be more authentic themes.  Quips are made that draw attention to character flaws or undercut questions the movie should try to answer, but inevitably they are ignored to move onto the next joke or story beat.

The rest would fall more into spoiler territory, so read more for that.

--"They Were Both In the Wrong"

I personally disagree heavily with the thrust of how "both sides" were wrong when the degrees are disproportionate.

I've seen claims that Katie was "as in the wrong" as her father, but she's incredibly patient to the man who does her material harm.

I've yet to have seen someone say specifically what Katie did *wrong* to her father that is at all on par with the *years* he at best hasn't been able to interact with her or worse, actively refused to engage with her interests.

I would generously venture that her flaw was that she was more willing to communicate her feelings to strangers, but she easily talks to her mother and brother- her brother even helps her with her movies and she happily engages him with his own interests, which pivots the point back to how her father is physically/emotionally unavailable and led to the erosion and distance between the two of them.

Due to this, MvM comes across more as Kaite having to do so much more to guide her father rather than a more mutual learning experience for the both of them.

--"Technology that [Dis]Connects"

It's probably beyond the scope and intent of the film, but I was surprised there was no examination about why technology can be more alluring than interacting with physically present people.

For better or worse, the internet can be used as a means of supplementing the validation and acceptance of family.  It can also lead to no longer connecting to people around them because of the validation high of appealing to a constantly 'awake' sea of strangers- the spotlight is warmer than the cold reality that they are not the internet image they have cultivated.

For example, the rival 'perfect' family was never revealed to be a carefully constructed highlight reel that Mrs. Mitchell envies, they really were actually that perfect- because that provides an easier punchline than an examination or acknowledgement of how the internet can create unhealthy expectations.

I also can't expect MvM to acknowledge the reality that LGBTA+ people who are rejected by their family resort to seeking a new one through the internet because it would be much harder to redeem/rehabilitate a man defined by being tethered to "old values" if he was homophobic instead of "overprotective" and apprehensive at his daughter's departure from home and her dubious art career.

But hey we got that quick line at the end that Katie likes a girl, so that's a diversity win or something.

(To be clear I'm not expecting a whole parade or even an A or B-plot dedicated to it, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of "surprise inclusion" is very easily erased with a change of audio and would be completely unsurprised if this were the case for countries that are homophobic.  People can be happy about it, but it is dishonest to pretend that this is a bolder statement than it is.)

In that sense, I do and don't hold MvM to taking a "safer" route about how family always has your back, but this still feels like an important omission considering the focus on technology and its dynamic with the Mitchells.

I will also say that it was also bizarre, to me at least, that the obvious route that her father sees the value of home videos didn't become an active point between him and Katie.  Or that Mr. Mitchell's carpentry never really amounts to anything despite having a sentimental wooden moose.

Lastly, I think it's an unintentional, but it's interesting that Katie going to college to pursue her passion is viewed as a Terrible Thing by her father even though if he had his way, he'd be ostensibly living in the woods away from everyone else except his wife.

This isn't a problem, people are a collection of contradictions, but It's fascinating to see what the *narrative* treats as a difficult sacrifice while simultaneously pulling at heartstrings when PAL cites how children ignore their mothers.  There's an unexamined comedy that Mr. Mitchell's losing out on his 'passion' to live in the woods away from people is treated as tragic despite the movie's insistence on staying connected with your blood family.

--"The Inconsistent Personhood of AI"

PAL is rightfully angry at being discarded for something new; it's provided as a glimpse of what Katie will do when she finds 'her people' at college.

This in of itself is a good hook, because there is no one universal answer to when a flawed relationship should be mended with compromise or if it's better off being broken for the wellbeing of the ones involved.  Family and relationships are not programming, it's a choice and a gamble for whatever it brings but is nonetheless something that must be mutually worked upon.

Initially I thought that PAL was being set up as an exaggerated parallel to Mr. Mitchell.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell did their best to provide for their family.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell are in different stages of being 'discarded' by their family.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell both retaliate at their lack of power in the scenario by using the power granted by their roles to infringe on the autonomy of others for selfish reasons.

PAL even gives a 'chance' for her plan to be halted with, I had assumed this was being set up as the thesis of the movie, about humanity and the value of family, relationships, etc. being used to help someone who is already hurting.

But despite Katie looking at the camera and explaining herself, it is never actually directly resolved or challenged because a punchline was deemed more desirable for this narrative climax.

This begs the question of why PAL bothered with the pretense that she could be reasoned with, especially since this is not some question leveled at all of humanity, just two people.

I'm curious how the writers came to the conclusion that this was the best execution of the scene or if Katie's speech was considered immune to any challenge from PAL.  Would anyone have accepted this outcome if PAL were not an AI but instead a person?

It's not necessarily bad writing they went this route, but I doubt anyone would consider this good writing either.

By the end of the movie, PAL is no longer a 'person' who was betrayed and is lashing out, she is an object to be destroyed because the movie has to wrap up.  No compassion or chances are spared to this AI that did literally everything asked of her except take being discarded quietly.

Did PAL deserve a redemption arc? For this length of movie, probably not.  But it could have concluded with a commitment to doing no further harm.  Instead it is an accidental glimpse at how easily the pretense of compassion can be quickly discarded and mostly unexamined with the right framing.

A likely unintentional example is the conditional humanity given to Eric and Deborahbot who are adopted as "family" while the rest of the robots are mowed down without another thought.  Some are even beaten and broken while begging for mercy, because again, it is a funnier punchline.

Far be it for me to advocate that the murderbots needed 'a second chance uvu' but for a movie whose conceit rests on 'sticking by family' and 'giving chances', the writers certainly made a choice in deciding which AI get honorary humanity and spared violent death- perhaps PAL had a point about humanity's callousness after all.  Bad robots are discarded, good robots get to live.

Even the CEO who realizes he enabled this mess (easily the most unrealistic part of the movie, honestly) is given another chance and he manages to take away a completely wrong lesson.

Speaking of-

--"Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Used Tech Like This"

There's a particular image/gif set posted about MvM with the CEO apologizing for the machine uprising, attributing it to unchecked technology and monopolies.  I've always seen it accompanied by people congratulating the scene as if any of this is at all relevant to the movie.

Charitably, these are people who haven't watched the movie and don't know that PAL is a phone AI single-handedly doing this, but most take the stance that this scene is proof the movie is not saying technology is bad, only corporations are.

The speech isn't technically wrong but it is so utterly divorced from what happens in the movie that it's surreal to see people congratulate it as anything but a moment of soapboxing.

None of the datagrabbing was used at all as part of the takeover.  It's all magical kid-friendly terminators with no relevance to what anyone's browsing history is.  If the company was one that produced robot assistants instead of a being a super tech monopoly, there would be no narrative difference.

The closest to a predatory tactic that is used in MvM is the offer of free wifi which is used to lure most people into their cells which they happily comply with. Curiously this... commentary of people’s mindless addiction to technology is not acknowledged by the Tumblr Court with the same intensity as the CEO’s speech.

But more constructively, I do feel it’s a missed opportunity that Katie who's supposed to be an extremely online person apparently never said any bad things about her family or made any petty vent films for PAL to weaponize.  Instead an in-media audio at one of the outskirt locations was used to accomplish its Traitor Revealed moment.

IN CONCLUSION

MvM is a movie that involves topics that ought to be touched on and explored properly in media and chickens out on all of it due to possible concerns with age-appropriate handling or because it was more committed to its comedy than whatever it has to say about family, change and how technology affects people.

It also reminded me that I hope media will finally graduate from the trope that if you spec into any ‘outdoorsy’ hobby you are incurably afraid of technology.

[rwdestuffs]

Likely because Oz’s early attitude came off as more “Arrogant Headmaster” rather than “Traumatized Victim of his ex”, I feel more sympathy towards Salem than I do towards Oz.

It’s a major writing flaw that persists because the overall show. A lot of the early attitude of the show is kinda dropped because they don’t know what to do with these characters.

For example, Ruby’s obsession with weapons was dropped and was never mentioned again. While it’s admittedly sweet that she didn’t start fawning all over Penny when she found out that she was in essence, a living weapon, the fact that her weapons obsession was dropped early on makes that interaction less heartwarming, and more like they were just bonding.

So, when Oz’s early attitude reeks of arrogance, like when he more or less overruled a lot of Glynda’s objections, and how he more or less was implied to have known that Jaune cheated his way in, it comes off as moves that were less due to his trauma, and more due to his arrogance.

Contrast Salem, whose name not only invokes sympathy what with the witch trials, but was also introduced and had her backstory revealed not too long after said introduction, she invokes more sympathy than Oz does because of a combination of her name and her early reveal of her backstory.

While yes, both Oz and Salem were victims of abuse, Salem’s came much sooner than Oz’s after their initial reveal, which invokes more sympathy for the character.

In a similar sense, this is why Cinder isn’t that much better. Without the Cinderella motifs, nobody would have guessed that she had a rough childhood. It’s also why Adam is also demonized. The naming motifs combined with how long it took for the characters to receive any meaningful backstory (Supplemental material for Adam, and 8 volumes for the fire hag), creates a situation where it’s hard to sympathize with one because of how the naming conventions work. Like I said here, names are important to a character. Had Salem been named Lilith, after a biblical demon, she would not have received as much sympathy as she does now. Had Adam been named Maurice (After Belle’s father), he would have received more sympathy than he did. Adam invoked more similarities to Gaston than he did to any other character, resulting in him not getting as much sympathy as Cinder did, despite them both having similar backstories and actions throughout the show.

If the writers have done anything right, it would be knowing how naming conventions work.

But this still ties back into how early traits were just… dropped. Blake stopped calling out racists to their face, and stood by when Velvet was being a victim of Cardin’s bullying.

Weiss’ early racism was resolved off-screen and was never really addressed again.

Yang’s overall protective nature is only ever brought up when the plot demands it.

And Ruby’s weapons obsession, a trait that could have been used to properly describe each character’s weapons in an unforced manner, was never mentioned again.

Oz’s early arrogance was now replaced with the backstory of “He was traumatized!” And look: Oz is indeed traumatized. But it’s clear that that wasn’t something the writers thought about until recently. There were few (if any) hints that this was Oz’s situation from the start. Hos arrogance in wanting Pyrrha to give up her hopes and dreams by forcing her to take on the maiden powers with that “Become the Fall Maiden for us, or the Bad Guys win” ultimatum, combined with his overall secrecy led a lot of conclusions to think that he was more arrogant than he was traumatized.

Now, this isn’t to say that he wasn’t traumatized. His feelings and emotions towards the subject are completely valid and he deserves sympathy. But given how the early writing was, it’s hard to really feel sorry for him because again, his early actions came off as if it was fueled by arrogance, as opposed to trauma.

It’s admittedly hard to land the sweetspot for backstory reveals, especially for characters that aren’t your title character, but it really feels as if the writers didn’t know what they wanted to do with Oz until they came up with the idea of him and Salem having been romantically involved together.

They lyrics of the song Sacrifice also don’t help,

You can't have my life I'm not your sacrifice You can try, but I'm free And you won't conquer me I won't crawl, most of all I won't fall for you

The overall way the song is done implies that Oz sacrifices people for his own gain. Given that this song was made and released well before the backstory reveal, it also lends to the idea that Oz was more arrogant than traumatized. Admittedly, this is basically Raven’s song, making the views a little skewed, but again, it was made and released before Oz’s backstory reveal, meaning that it had more time to fester in peoples’ minds and be analyzed to come to the conclusion that Oz was a manipulative bastard rather than a traumatized victim.

Like I said, it’s hard to land a sweetspot for a backstory reveal. You either do it too early, and make the character lose their mystique, or you do it too late, and people won’t care about the character making the reveal pointless.

In addition, doing it too late, such as the case for Cinder, means that you have to make all prior actions make sense in this scenario. If Cinder’s backstory did anything correctly, it was that it made her attack on Weiss back in Volume 5 make sense. But all other actions don’t make sense. For example, she was a slave, so her abusing the WF into working for her makes no sense since both have had to deal with slavery. If anything, her revealing that scar would have made it make sense, even if it was off-screen, because then Adam has every reason to take her side. He would know that she was abused by the elite, and he would sympathize with the mentality of overthrowing a system that allowed such things to happen, even if it meant the deaths of a bunch of people.

Then we get to Cinder’s reveal and we find out why she was so hellbent on tearing down a hunter school. A Hunter decided to arrest her for fighting back against her abusers, so she views them all as the same: A bunch of privileged assholes who punish victims, but not the perpetrators.

If anything, Cinder’s was revealed far too late to make her actions make sense, or make audiences truly want to forgive her actions. She killed Penny and Pyrrha. Had this been revealed in Volume 4, where everyone was dealing with parental figures, Cinder’s motives would have made more sense. She was betrayed by a person she considered to be her father figure, and that led her down this path. Think about it. Yang was dealing with her dad calling her soul a temper tantrum (And no, I’m never letting that go). Weiss was dealing with her abusive father Jacques and the best parental figure ever Klein. Ruby was dealing with parental figure Qrow, and the prospect of losing him. And Blake was dealing with best biological dad Ghira and his advice on not letting the past or your fears control you. Cinder’s backstory would have fit right in.

These characters had really interesting personality traits that got dropped. I would have loved to have seen Ruby and Jaune work together to give Jaune an upgrade to his weapon that would make it cool, but still make it Jaune’s. But no. A random blacksmith does the upgrade.

It would have been so cool to learn about the other characters’ weapons through Ruby. We could have learned the names of the weapons, their function(s), and maybe even learned a it of symbolism about the weapon and the weapon’s user. Another thing the writers do well is that they make the symbolism of a weapon and their user make sense. Blake is a stealthy, quiet, and reserved character. So her weapon isn’t loud or fancy, but it has a lot of utility. Yang is loud, boisterous, and wants to tackle her problems head-on, so her weapon reflects that by giving her the option of getting in close for powerful blows. Jaune is a basic character with nothing special to him, so he gets a basic sword and shield combination.

So the weapons and semblance being the only way for us to know what a character is like is honestly really jarring when some of those character traits are no longer that applicable.

[fimflamfilosophy]

“Is DnD Still Popular?”

To some of you giant nerds, the question, “Is DnD still popular,” is probably one of the stranger things you’ll read today, but within a specific context it makes a lot of sense. Speaking of, the show “Stranger Things” presented a popular, physical look at what DnD beasties might feel like, even if it didn’t present an honest view of what DnD games really play like. Along with more online media referencing the game and sites like Roll20 making it easier to join a group, it makes sense. Is this a temporary boom or has the roleplaying community seen a lot of permanent additions to its nerdy hobby?

I wouldn’t have numbers to say, myself, but for what it’s worth, roleplaying is always a very personal experience. And for a few of us, the question isn’t, “Are people still playing DnD?” Of course they are - it’s all anyone plays! The question is, “Can you get anyone to play anything else?”

What Is DnD?

For some people, Dungeons & Dragons has become so intertwined with the concept of roleplaying that people think DnD and roleplaying are synonymous. If you roleplay, you play DnD. Originally, this had a kernel of truth. There are articles about the history of the system, and during its inception the game had a hard time taking off. Fundamentally it was asking people to play make-believe, but with a system of mathematical rules and designs. We know now that this type of thing is like catnip to massive dork-faced neckbeards, but at the time it wasn’t expected to have much appeal.

Eventually it did get off the ground, and it became the standard for the entire concept of a roleplaying game. And as with all “firsts to the market”, there have been many competitors and copycats, but it’s difficult to pry the audience away when you need everyone to use the same system. In economics they call this “network utility value” - that is, a fax machine is useless if only one person owns one. You can only send faxes to other people with fax machines, so if another company tries to invent their own offshoot of the fax machine, they’ll never get anyone to adopt it because everyone is already using the existing fax machine network. Everybody knows DnD, which means that if you go to a convention or look for games online, you know you’re going to find more players for that system than any other.

Why Does DnD Continue to Work?

In early editions of DnD, there were a lot more rules, and as a result more freedom to design your characters. When I first started roleplaying, it was during the 3rd edition of the system, where you could still allocate skill points to become better or worse at specific skills like lying, climbing, forgery, or crafting. This meant that with good planning, you could play a sub-optimal wizard and make up for it somewhat by investing a lot in your “persuasion” skills to rely on talk more than magic.

But being the system that everyone has to learn isn’t enough to stay on top forever. Other systems like GURPS have taken hold by now, and some types of popular nerd media have introduced their own completely unique systems designed to simulate their specific media universes. The owners of DnD had two choices: either make the game more open and try to eat the lunch of other companies, or make all of DnD easier to play in general to capture a broader audience.

So they released 4th edition! We don’t talk about 4th edition. And then they quickly released 5th edition (and a few mumbled apologies), which streamlined a lot of things about the game to the extent I’m not sure why they even let you control your character stats at all now. Skills became baked in with your level, and most of the game is about choosing abilities when you level up. It’s become very similar to playing an MMO, and I believe that’s the point.

One of the big things you always see in a complicated roleplaying system is players spending hours putting together a character. For your experienced player, this is a labor of love. You really care about the small details and want to make sure you get it right, or you’re a Win-At-All-Costs type who wants to make sure you’re rolling the biggest numbers. Either way you’re familiar and know what you’re doing, but it presents a hurdle to new players, and that hurdle has been largely done away with in 5th edition.

No matter how old you are, how experienced you are, how creative you are (or aren’t), or how much you know about any aspect of the game, you can play 5e DnD. I think you could play as young as seven years old and have minimal problems, because all you have to do is choose a job and virtually everything else is filled in for you, as if by a program, as if a video game. An experienced player can help a new one whip up a character within fifteen minutes, and that new guy will be rolling dice at the dragon about as well as everyone else.

DnD is the Worst System

But DnD’s accessibility is also its greatest downfall. Because everything is sort of programmed out, you find a lot of players eventually growing bored with the same-old, and they try to find ways to inject new life into the system. They invent new races, new classes, new abilities, and so on - they call this “homebrew”. yet many people are bad at creating balance and fairness for something they personally intend to play, and DnD recognizes this problem. It has a lot of supplemental books telling you all you need to know about other races and classes you might want to play, and in theory they are as fair and powerful as anything in the base system.

Yet no amount of homebrew or supplementary material will solve DnD’s core problem: it’s rigid. If you want to play, you need a battle mat, because every spell, every action, can travel or act within a certain number of squares and you always need to know exactly where you’re standing. Players are expected to be able to take a certain number of actions per turn based on their level, and do an expected amount of damage. Monster encounters are built loosely around the concept of “Challenge Rating”, which is meant to imply a group of four players will find a CR of 5 suitably challenging if they are all level five. Basically it plays like “X-Com”.

And as you lock people in these mechanical, video game-styled designs, you find people champing at the bit. Not everyone wants to choose their abilities at level up or have their skill proficiencies dictated by what level they are. Some people want to express truly outlandish concepts, or play something that isn’t specifically designed around the idea of walking room to room blasting monsters. You’ll see people in roleplaying communities often asking, “Does anyone have any good ideas to homebrew [this idea] and make it work?”

Fans of DnD argue the homebrew approach works. Yes, it’s complicated and frustrating to invent entirely new classes and races for a single game where you don’t know how long you’ll play or what level you’ll reach, but DnD’s strict rules and design philosophy is a perk to those people, not a drawback.

Yet a fact of note is that a quote from a game I run got into a popular “Out of Context DnD” blog. The quote was, “ Mecha-Jesus unleashes a barrage of flames from his palms, but the train-snake martially dodges out of the way!”

It received 337 notes, and I was a little surprised by that. The game is a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior setting where the team boss decided to kill God as revenge for one of the gang members dying. Also featured in that day’s session was a battle between two men operating bucket cranes in a duel to the death above a giant grain silo, among eight other equally implausible events based loosely on Dante’s Inferno. For me, Mecha-Jesus is not a 300 notes event - it’s literally every other Friday.

What Do You Want to Play?

In my view, DnD often poses the question, “Are you even roleplaying?” I mean really. A lot of players feel like they are because they do an accent and come up with a backstory, but if you set yourself next to another player who has the same character stats and you’re playing together in the same game, has the system really given you the tools to solve problems all that differently? And the answer is is broadly, no.

I understand the counter-argument. Every player is unique. But in their way each Paladin in “World of Warcraft” is unique too. They have different gear, different competencies of player, and may take different abilities, but fundamentally they’re expected to crash dungeons and use what they’re given to kill monsters. The only advantage DnD has is that the GM can allow his players to interact with scenery items or talk to things, and you’ll see debate on exactly how much leniency a GM should give his players to act outside DnD’s base mechanics.

That’s a mentality. Some people like the safety of the system. They like to know what all the monsters are, what the risks are, what the rewards are, and have it all neatly lined up where you can see it. They want to join an Adventuring Guild that will bureaucratically assign a dungeon for them to attack so they always have something to do and a sure reward for doing it. The GM went through the trouble of drawing that dungeon out, after all. DnD is extremely safe.

And then there’s the alternative. I actually learned to roleplay among theater nerds who were already big into the concept of improv and narrative. One of them used to joke, “If you think DnD is the best system for the game, you know it’s not character-driven,” because any time you’re fine with trying to build an actual human around a set of level-up choices, you’re probably not designing the strongest possible personality.

Going back to media making DnD more popular, the first televised introduction to DnD I can personally recall is an episode of “Dexter’s Lab” where they address exactly this conflict. In it, Dexter runs a game where he forces his friends to play by his rules, where he wins. When Dexter rolls poorly, he turns the dice over to a better number and declares his evil wizard “fried” the team of adventurers. Then his sister, Dee Dee, takes over, and with no knowledge of the game’s rules at all, embarks on an improvised session of pure roleplaying where the guys tell her what they do and she tells them what happens. The sheets are just guidelines for them, and if they say they can do something Dee Dee accepts it.

Dee Dee’s roleplaying is open. It’s a void, and for some people, when you look into the void it looks back. How do you control everyone when they can do anything? It requires a certain level of trust that some players have a difficult time not abusing, yet weirdly everyone I’ve ever known who would lie and cheat during a roleplaying game actually preferred DnD, and I think I know why.

Rules Can Be Broken, but the Suspension of Disbelief is Immutable

The grognards that break the rules in DnD do so because the rules are so strict that they ironically can be easily broken. If the system says people take a certain amount of damage when they fall, and you find a way to throw to them that elevation consistently, by gum they’ll damn well take that damage. It’s in the rules! A friend I know combats this by saying if his players exploit the rules, then the monsters will start exploiting them too, to discourage arms races of bullshit.

What I’m describing is often called “rules lawyering”. So named because it involves finding a rules passage, interpreting the rule so the wording sounds like it favors an exploit, and then leveraging that into a powerful ability players were not meant to have. Because DnD requires you to know absolutely everything about your relative locations and words like “Attack” can have important diverging meanings depending on context, it’s a system extremely vulnerable to lawyering.

But with a more open system based on narrative and characters, it becomes harder to lawyer something you shouldn’t. In an open system, you build what the game calls for without consulting a bunch of charts and level guides. If you’re super heroes, you build super heroes. Cyborgs are cyborgs, Orcs are orcs - it’s whatever, and if you try to do anything outside the believability of the game, the GM tells you no. He has more authority in a more narrative game because the GM leads the narrative.

I’m personally fond of the Hero System, which ascribes massive ranges to all forms of weapons (a gun or eye laser can reach you down a long hallway) so the only general questions that need to be asked are, “Are you close enough to punch a guy?” and “Are you bunched up close enough to all be hit by this grenade?” You don’t need battle mats and the games play a lot more intuitively. There are two books of rules in Hero and they can be specific, but most of the rules revolve around character design rather than how to play, and fiddly things like physics or bursting through walls are meant to be decided depending on the type of game, at the GM’s discretion. There are guidelines, but they’re only that.

So if someone tells you they can punch through a wall in your noir investigator game, you tell them no, because the rules are just guidelines and in this game you can’t just drive your fist through a concrete brick even if you can find figures in the book that say maybe you can, because the book also says maybe you can’t - you’re expected to play the narrative, not the game. You can punch through walls in the super hero game where that’s typical, but not in this one.

From DnD to Anything Else

Of course, the open systems also present an opportunity for players to be very different in skill sets and abilities. You could imagine DnD is like “Power Rangers”, where everyone’s a different color and has different weapons but they’re basically all pretty much on the same level. An open system will wind up more like “Avatar the Last Airbender”, where one player is going to be Toph and someone else is going to be playing Sokka. 

It’s important in DnD that everyone be the same, because a lot of the game is spent in a 20ft x 20ft room full of skeletons (or Putties) - Toph would single-handedly dominate every challenge. Whereas in a narrative-driven game the ability to crush everything with a rock doesn’t actually solve half your problems and whoever’s playing Sokka probably winds up more active than the person playing Toph.

At the end of it all, that’s why the question for me is whether you can take the players out of DnD and take DnD out of the players. Everyone plays DnD, but can you get people to play Sokka and have a good time if Toph is in the party? Personally I think it helps to start people on systems other than DnD, and then they can go into DnD if they like being in small rooms full of skeletons.

Of course, trying to start people on anything but DnD is usually defeated by the network utility! Everyone knows DnD! It’s THE system synonymous with the hobby! A few too many times I’ve seen people play a DnD game and say roleplaying just isn’t for them because it’s boring. All you do is wait for your turn and then roll dice at goblins.

But all I can say to that is, you never roleplayed, man. You joined a pen-and-paper video game. I agree, throwing dice at goblins sucks. I used to have a friend who would compulsively roll dice when he got bored waiting for turns in games like that, and when asked what he was rolling for, he’d joke, “I’m killing the dragon! I’m killing the dragon!” Him, enjoying the experience of DnD combat in between other people’s turns.

In many groups that’s all DnD is, silly accents and go-nowhere backstories aside. Acting is hard. But if you’re very lucky, and you know just the right people, it’s possible to land in a game that is pure story and character, and those things are a rare treasure and a real blast.

[moonlight-ghoulette]

prompt: rhett walks in on link in a compromising position (aka butt stuff) and can't stop thinking about it

Here ya go, Anon! Some good ol college rhink :)

[[MORE]]

Rhett swiped his key card into his residence hall and made his way back to his dorm, happy to be free from the grips of history, calculus and structural dynamics-- at least for the day. And there was a family-sized bag of pepperoni pizza rolls in his dorm mini fridge calling his name, which made things just a little more tolerable.

With a quick turn of the key, Rhett pushed his way into the room only to be shocked out of his pizza-flavored daze by a shrill "Rhett! Wait!" echoing off the painted bricks of their dorm, a flash of bare skin, then a comforter, and finally wood grain directly in front of his own face after he pulled the door back shut in a panic.

What. The fuck. Was that.

Rhett's legs took him right back down the hallway he came from on their own accord as his mind desperately tried to catch up to what he just saw. 

Link. Buck naked. Hands and knees on the bed, backing onto a bright blue thing attached to the wall like his life depended on it.

In my bunk. 

Link. Fucking himself. Right? With a sex toy? With something. So he's gay? No, he doesn't have to be. He's doing it on my bed. He's doing it on my freaking bed.

Rhett walked briskly towards the library. He needed someplace quiet and free of distractions so he could process everything. Renting a study room for an hour seemed like it would do. 

Rhett dropped his backpack to the ground and folded himself down onto the soft chair, his face in his hands. How was he supposed to go back to his dorm now? Can he? Link has to be mortified.

Wouldn't be surprised if he's filing for different housing arrangements this very moment. 

They've seen each other naked in locker rooms. They've requested privacy for some self-care. There have even been a few nights where Rhett would wake up to the top bunk gently shaking with, no doubt, the movement of Link's hand moving over his dick. But this was a whole different beast. This wasn't just catching your best friend jacking off. 

Or was it? If this is how Link prefers to get his rocks off, is it really that different? Just because he's riding a wall-mounted rubber dick in--in my bed. Shit. Why? Why is that the one thing I can't get past?

Rhett let wishful thinking get in the way of logic. But he couldn't let the thought slide.

Maybe it's because he wishes it were me.

Rhett peered over as his backpack buzzed once, then again seconds later. It had to be Link. He dug through the pockets until he found his phone, complete with several new messages flashing on his screen. 

Link:

Please don't think im

some degenerate

or pervert

Link:

We can talk about

this, I can explain.

theres alot I need to 

explain

Link:

Just come back soon

idk what you're doing and

I'm freaking out and

I don't wanna lose you

over a stupid choice I made

Link:

Rhett?

Link:

If ur mad I get it. I'd

be mad too. Be furious, 

I deserve it. But please

bo I don't wanna screw us up

Link:

Just come back home

Link:

Rhett…

Rhett had to read through the messages three times before giving up, realizing he couldn't get the mental image out of his head no matter how much he tried. He owed Link a response, that much was sure. 

But the way Link was riding that thing was replaying over and over in his head, taking up all the mental facilities he had to spare. His shaggy black hair falling over his eyes. His thighs spread wide, back arched, hands digging into the comforter, desperate for something to hold on to. Jaw slack, eyes shut, moans breaking through his ragged breaths, absolutely railing himself with the toy.

Or maybe his mind was supplementing all those extra details for him. 

Shit.

Rhett tried to ignore the growing tension in his abdomen as he picked his phone back up.

Rhett:

It's ok. We're fine 

I promise. Be home in 15

Rhett didn't want Link to panic, but he needed just a little more time. At least his life-long best friend wasn't packing his bags, never to be heard from again. But now there were more issues right behind that, and the main one sitting in his lap begged to be attended to as soon as possible.

Rhett had fucked his hand to the thought of Link before; He was no stranger to it. Hearing Link shudder and choke back moans late at night when he thought he wouldn't be heard had spurred on many a hard climax for Rhett. If he were not so emotionally invested in this friendship, this would be the ultimate fodder for his bank of mental jack-off material, neatly filed under L for Link which sat locked tight away from the sections of his brain meant for reality. But aside from his fantasies, this was his best friend. His platonic life partner. And this was about to become a lengthy conversation, an unearthing of dusty skeletons hidden in their closets. And possibly a reevaluation of their friendship and where they now stand. 

Turns out Link wasn't the only one who had things to get off their chest. 

Rhett checked the time and glanced over at the small window of the heavy steel door. He had only a few short minutes to sort out his own issue so he could face Link with a clear mind. 

Propping his backpack onto the arm of the chair beside him to block the view of any curious passerbys, Rhett shoved down the front waist of his sweatpants and pulled his already hard cock out, wasting no time in giving himself a few firm strokes from base to tip. He let his head fall back and rest on the wall as he worked himself over, twisting his wrist on every pull as images of Link flashed back to his mind even more vivid than before. 

This time, Link was in front of him. Resting on his hands and knees, his perfect little ass poised and ready. He looks back over his shoulder, his expression of need so strong, it looks as if he could cry.

"Please," Link pants out, barely a whisper. "Please Rhett. I need you. Been wanting this for so long. Fuck me. C'mon, please."

Rhett let out a soft moan as his hand sped up, giving himself completely over to the fantasy. 

"I got you, baby. Don't worry. I'm gonna fuck you real good." Rhett whispered to the ceiling, rolling his hips as he worked his hand even faster. 

"That little toy of yours can't fuck you back like I can, huh? That what you were doing in my bunk? Thinkin' of me? Wishing it were me fillin' you up like this?" Rhett moaned to the quiet room, his hand almost a blur on his cock as he chased his orgasm, his toes curling hard in his shoes. 

Rhett came hard with a whisper of Links name on his lips, his free hand pooling the ropes of come pulsing out of his cock as he thrust his hips to ride out the last waves of pleasure his body had to offer. 

For once, Rhett was thankful of the dirty gym clothes he had stuffed in the bottom of his backpack, using the shirt to wipe off his hands and half-hard cock before stuffing himself back into his sweatpants. 

He checked his phone. 6 minutes left. Just in time for him to make it back to his dorm as promised. 

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

I KNOW, I know. I'm leaving y'all on a cliffhanger. But maybe that means there will be a part 2? 🤔

Hope you enjoyed this, Anon! And I hope everyone else does as well! :)

[bcwallin]

Streaming services need bonus features

The stream of content never ends.

Hulu, like many other services, has autoplay set up so that as soon as I finish one movie, I’ll start whatever’s next. Disney+ won’t start something without a click, but it’ll try to get me to start something else while the credits are rolling. Netflix doesn’t let me have a quiet moment from the second I open it, and at one point or another, it had buttons to encourage skipping the opening credits or rewatching a scene that had just finished in the middle of a movie. I want to be able to sit with the movies and let them soak in, and that’s often not easy to do when I’m being pushed to watch something else and move on – because, to analytics-obsessed streaming services, everything is content and the goal is for me to be yet another number in a streaming quarterly report.

While I crave a moment to process the film or TV show I just enjoyed, I also want other ways to enjoy them. I want to learn more about the creative process behind the piece and engage with the ideas of whatever media I’ve just seen. I want to see alternate takes the filmmakers opted not to use in the final work and hear commentaries from those artists, or the scholars who can teach me more about what I’m watching. I want to explore. I miss special features. I miss the context and bonus content that would come with DVDs, ones that encouraged me to stay with a movie even after watching it. In the age of limitless content and fully customizable menus, this experience is all but dead.

The one streaming service that I’ve found that really, fully does this — where you can generally depend on having more to watch than just the movie — is the Criterion Channel, where much of the library and supplements from the Criterion Collection are available. The first thing I watched on the service when I activated my subscription was a making-of documentary for A Hard Day’s Night. When Criterion’s movies end, they don’t force anything on me. I can explore, understand, go deep. Movies are a whole lot better with context — and a little extra something.

The Criterion Channel treats bonus features like they’re worth watching, and it’s clear when you look at the UI. Movies are treated as films or collections, and when you open them as collections, all the extra shorts, commentaries, interviews, and extras are laid out, easy to see. You can search for bonus features and you can add one of them to your watchlist without adding the movie it’s related to. The first step in offering great bonus features is to make them or at least make them available. The next thing to do is to actually show where they are, instead of pretending they don’t exist.

Sure, Netflix and Hulu have some featurettes or clips hidden with certain releases – the odd podcast or alternate cut. HBO GO sometimes offers extended editions of a movie. Amazon Prime has X-Ray trivia running over their movies, if you want to keep pausing and checking intermittently. And Disney+ has the occasional special feature that’s actually special, like the feature commentary that can play during Avengers: Endgame (if there were better commentaries available, it would be less special, but beggars can’t be disappointed about listening to the Russo brothers explaining time travel, I guess). Yet, seeing these options here and there only makes me crave more. For the vast majority of these streaming platforms’ titles, the best we can expect is an attached trailer.

I want to be able to learn more about a movie, to immerse myself in these stories and the artists who brought them to life. These materials exist and are put out on disc releases, so why can’t I enjoy them on streaming platforms? I’m sure Disney and Netflix and Amazon and AT&T have the cash on hand to clear whatever rights issues might be standing in the way, or to produce original features for content. HBO certainly saw the value when it came to explaining why Game of Thrones’ last season was such a rush job.

Am I going to have a movie night with friends where we watch a feature-length commentary or a recorded Q&A from a festival screening? Probably not. Do I get concerned looks when I complain that a special SteelBook release doesn’t deviate from the already-available bonus features in a standard Blu-ray? That’s not unimaginable. Have I felt alone for so long because these special extras feel like they’re generally only special to me, and I could just mindlessly binge Friends (which is bad) or The Office (which isn’t bad, but I’ve seen it enough) without complaining about this possibly meaningless crusade? Let’s not make this personal.

Sometimes, the special features are what pull me toward one home release over another. I’ve been interested in watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s dialogue-free version of the film (special features also include the documentary The Director and the Jedi, which is a step above standard featurettes), and I’ve sought out releases because they have a sing-a-long version, like a recent Mamma Mia double-feature gift purchase. If I ever buy a copy of Blade Runner, it’s going to be the one with all five cuts available. I want Disney+ to offer the incomplete version of Beauty and the Beast it once screened, which should require minimal effort (especially because they actually packaged and sold the work-in-progress version to the public). I want bonus features, and I’m getting tired of waiting for them.

I get the motivation for us to move from title to title, mindlessly consuming this vague, money-making thing they call content, but that doesn’t mean I understand why they do this. Why does Netflix, self-crowned champion of the independent cinema, not want to encourage viewers to fall in love with film and explore their passion? Does context only belong on its Twitter account (which should really stop pretending it’s a human person) or in podcasts that I wouldn’t have known existed without an oddly insatiable curiosity about The Other Side of the Wind, a not-so-good movie I can’t stop thinking about?

Even when they’re not providing context, bonus features can just be fun. Animated features that have bloopers as if the characters are real actors being filmed? I love it. An in-universe animated series that also features a commentary track by the characters being portrayed in it? Absolutely. How about a series of one-offs that eventually launched a TV series? It can happen. And those are just Disney properties.

I’m tired of the constant, never-ending stream of content, of being told to watch one thing then the other then the other — “Are you still watching?” Netflix asks, then shovels more down your gullet — and I can’t even breathe and contemplate what I just saw. I’m annoyed that Roku’s Apple TV app won’t let me watch a movie with commentaries or that the best Amazon Prime has to offer in terms of context involves disrupted viewing.

Bonus features let us take a moment. They’re the special ingredient that home entertainment gave us. And I want them back.

Originally published on Input

[mcmansionhell]

The Mail Order American Dream Part II: The Hunt is On! An Extremely In-Depth Guide to Finding That House

Hello Friends! I’ve gotten a number of amazing emails about last week’s post on kit houses, and have decided (after many requests) to write a more in-depth guide to picking out mail order houses in the wild, using a few examples from my own hunt in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

THIS IS A LONG ARTICLE. NOW IS THE TIME TO OPEN IN A NEW TAB OR OUTSIDE THE TUMBLR APP.

Preparing for Battle: Gathering Online and Print Resources

Like most obscure things in the world, there are several online communities for kit houses and their identification, and these communities have been very active in putting resources such as old catalogs online. 

Here is a brief list of really helpful resources to get you started:

Online

1.) Comprehensive list of mail order home catalogs available online. 

2.) Plans from AntiqueHomeStyle.com and AntiqueHome.org (these include some regional companies like Southern Pine Co. as well as materials on interiors and pattern book houses. 

3.) The Daily Bungalow on Flickr - a valuable resource for supplemental material. Most (but not all) of the catalogs on this page are listed chronologically in Source 1. 

4.) Complete Index of Aladdin Home Catalogs - every Aladdin catalog printed is available here. Totally worth a tab of its own. 

5.) Sears’ Master List of Confirmed Sears Houses 

Books

1.) Houses By Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck & Co. 

If your interest in mail order houses is more than a passing fancy, I recommend picking this book up, as it’s a handy and comprehensive guide organized by roof shape. 

If you don’t feel like purchasing the book, Dale Hynes has put together Pinterest boards organizing the Sears houses in the same way as the book, and has an extra collection of houses not included in the guide. 

2.) Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1738-1950 by Daniel D. Reiff

If you’re serious about getting into the kit house game, this book is for you. It has great historical facts, and most importantly, examples of kit houses from the catalogs and how they’re built in real life. I recommend ordering this book directly from Penn State Press rather than Amazon, as it’ll save you $30 and the shipping is pretty rapid. My book came a mere two days after I ordered it. 

Step 1: So You Think You’re Looking at a Kit House - Preliminary Signs

Location

If you remember from last week, kit homes are commonly found in 3 places: 

1.) First Generation Suburbs (streetcar and railway)

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to use the neighborhood of College Hill, an early streetcar suburb of Greensboro. College Hill is outlined in red and is the bottom right with an arrow pointing at it saying ‘oldest suburbs’. 

2.) Near industrial sites (as company housing)

3.) First Generation Auto Suburbs

BUT this is not always the case! Some kit houses were built as farmhouses on the outskirts of cities or in rural areas. It’s a case by case basis, which is why identifying kit houses is so fun!

Architectural Style

Last week, we went over styles that were common for kit houses, and if there are many houses of these styles grouped together, you might be looking at a kit house community! 

You might also be looking at a pattern-book house community, which is more difficult to discern, because the execution of pattern book houses was left to the individual contractors and carpenters, and each local carpenter had their own style and flourishes. 

Queen-Anne style houses, for example are more likely to be pattern book houses than kit houses because the height of their popularity was right before the beginning of mail order houses, though certain models ran as late as the 1930s, as we shall see. 

Repetition

You might think you’re looking at a kit house neighborhood because you are looking at many houses that appear to be duplicates of each other. Houses that are identical or nearly identical to each other may be the most incriminating sign that you are looking at a kit house community, though pattern books may again be at fault. 

Step 2: Pinpointing the House on a Map

1.) The Address

You cannot, I repeat, cannot identify whether or not a house was a kit house unless you have the address. If you are leaving the area where the house was found, write down the street name before you go, and fill out the details later via Google Maps. 

For example, I’m going to use the example of 304 Tate Street, a house seen below. 

2.) Getting photos at multiple angles

A good idea when looking to identify a house is to get multiple pictures: one from the front, and at least one from the side. This picture suffices because it is at an oblique angle, and details such as window layout can be seen clearly. The more complex a house is, the more angles you should try and capture. 

(A good idea is to take screenshots in Google Street View.)

Step 3: Finding Your County’s Public Records

Unfortunately, most counties’ public records websites are difficult to locate, as they are usually pushed way down in search results by for-profit services. Here are some tricks for finding your county’s public records site without having to scour through several unhelpful and poorly-designed government websites. 

1. Google the house’s address. If you see a result from Zillow or another real estate aggregator, click on it. 

(I recommend Zillow because their layout is a little more detailed.)

Important: check Zillow to see if the house is currently a rental. This is important later on. In this case, it is a rental. 

2. Scroll down until you see a little link saying “county website” or something similar. Click on this link. 

3. A really ugly website will come up looking something like this. You will often see a row of links for different statistics. Click on one that says “Buildings”, “structures” or something similar. 

4. Congrats! You’ve found a page just about your house! The best part is, you can find other records much more easily now. Somewhere at the top of your page, you will see something like “New Search.” 

Open this link in a new tab, and keep it handy for quickly searching for different addresses. It should look something like this:

Bookmark this page for easy access if you’re searching for more than one kit house. 

Step 4: Interpreting Your House’s Public Records

Go back to your house’s Building’s page. 

We’re going to go over this page step by step in order to use this resource to the highest of its abilities. 

A.) The Year Built

RULE NUMBER 1: HOUSES BUILT BEFORE 1908 ARE NOT MAIL-ORDER HOUSES. They are probably pattern book houses. 

This is literally the most important piece of information in identifying kit houses. Without a date, it’s game over, as architectural styles last a lot longer than individual kit house models. You may be thinking you’re looking at your house, but if you don’t know the date, you could be 10 or 20 years off. 

B.) Remodeling and Additions

You know what this means: you’re looking at a house that’s not gonna look exactly like it does in the catalog. This is important. A lot of people get caught up in the idea that the kit house should match the catalog perfectly, when this is almost never the case. In this case, the house has 3 additions. Fortunately, additions are often in the back of the house, so the front facade should remain relatively unchanged. 

We can reveal a lot from the fact that the renovations were done in 1979. This can mean a number of things: 

Many of the renovations were probably upgrades such as central air and heating

Additions dating from an earlier time period (10-20 years after the house was built) are much more dangerous, because these were often aesthetic upgrades made so the house fit in more with the styles of the time. Additions from the 70s and after were most likely mechanical or safety improvements.

If the house is for rent, many of the adjustments may have been for the purpose of subdividing a house into apartments. In this case, the remodeling is interior. Common changes made by landlords when they turn a single family home into a multi-family dwelling include:

Removing fireplaces. In the screenshot, you’ll see a bit that says “Interior Adj.”: One Fireplace (1). This more often refers to removing or sealing off a fireplace than adding one, especially if the place is being rented out to college students. 

Adding onto the back of the bottom story of a house. This is common because it’s the easiest way to create more space for less money. 

Enclosing all or part of a front or rear porch. Again, this is an easy way to add livable/rentable square-footage. 

C. Main and Addition Summary

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you should see a bit that looks like this. This is also a very helpful tidbit that will help in your identification:

This image lists the main structure along with all of the additions and their square footage, and their codes. 

Here is how to read this image:

Basically, those little squares represent parcels of square-footage not found in the original blueprints, which helps a lot when looking at the plans in the house catalogs. The original dimensions of the house was 26 feet x 33 feet, as can be gleamed by the table and simple math.

D. Other Info (not as helpful)

These represent the current stats of the house, and not necessarily the original house plans, so they’re not as useful as the other data available. 

Step 5: Finding Your House - Catalog Time!

Okay, here’s the fun part, especially if you like millions of tabs. A good start is opening each of the online sources listed at the beginning of the article, in a new tab. Especially this one. 

For SEARS HOUSES:

Have your copy of Houses By Mail or Dale’s Pinterest Page open to make quick work of the Sears catalog houses, which could otherwise take forever. These resources sort the houses by their shape, making comparison easy. 

Each house has the catalog dates and model numbers, making elimination a breeze.

A.) For each non-Sears source, open the catalogs corresponding to the date your house was built in new tabs. 

For example, my house was built in 1920. I would open each catalog from 1920 in a new tab. If you can’t find a specific catalog for your house year, (e.g. there’s no Montgomery Ward catalog for 1920), a good idea is to use the catalog from 1 or 2 years before the given date. 

BUT KATE - Which companies should I include in my Search???? There are so Many! I would start with those whose business extended coast to coast. If you live on the West Coast, there are several resources for West Coast homes from AntiqueHomeStyle.com and AntiqueHome.org. For now, ignore pattern books. 

Here are companies who should be included in your table: 

Sears

Aladdin

Harris

Wardway (Montgomery Ward)

Lewis

Gordon Van Tine

Sterling

Bennett

Bolded ones are the most common. 

B.) Make a Table for easy elimination

A good strategy for quick and easy elimination is to make a table with the following values as columns:

House Year  Address Style (e.g. 1 story craftsman; foursquare) (n number of columns for names of companies, so one column for Sears, one for Aladdin, one for Harris, etc.) Once a catalog is exhausted, if the plan was found, write the name in this columns; if not, x it out.  Notes

C.) If you have multiple models that look similar (we’ll get to this in a second.)

Either open similar images in new tabs and flip through them, or copy and paste the images (taking screenshots is your friends) into a document along with the pictures of the original house. For example:

Step 6: Confirming Your Identification

Sometimes, it’s really easy to find the house you’re looking for. In the case of 304 Tate Street, a rather unusual house, I found it staring back at me from the pages of a Bennett Homes catalog, virtually untouched. 

As we can see, there are some things that are slightly off, such as the windows on the side. The spacing between them is accurate once you take into account the different angles of the pictures. The dimensions match those from the chart earlier, ignoring the additions. 

Things that are different: the house on Tate Street was built into a hill, which explains the different foundation. The columns are slightly different, but the placement is correct. The Tate Street house omitted the exposed rafters, a stylistic - not structural - decision. 

A.) The Importance of Plans

Here’s an example that isn’t so easy but also isn’t impossible.

Spoilers, it’s this house:

You’re probably saying, “no it’s not, idiot.” It’s true,

This is the difficulty of identifying a kit house that has been heavily modified from the original. 

First of all, the plan is mirrored from the original, a common switch at the time of construction. Many catalogs provided mirrored versions of their plans. (Hence why the chimney is on the opposite side.)

The distinctiveness of elements such as the closed eaves and the overall layout of the house (with additions) compared to the plan, makes a confirmed spotting of this mail order house from Lewis Manufacturing, Co, built in 1920. 

The entirety of the porch has been closed in and another room has been added to the front of the house. 

During reroofing, the roofer chose not include the bit of roof that splits the first and second story of the cross-gable, leaving an indentation on both sides where that strip of roof used to be. 

All of the windows have been replaced, leaving no originals. This happens frequently, as windows with the dimensions of the originals became rare, or too expensive to have custom built. The result is remodeling the house around more standard contemporary window shapes. This is how windows with three mullions get split into two, as can be seen on the side of the house. 

B.) The Importance of Dates 

Here’s another example. This one is recreated from page 276 of Daniel Reiff’s book Houses from Books. The heavily-modified house, a confirmed Sears Modern Home No. 170, built in 1915, is seen here with the original catalog drawing.

The point is, a remodeled kit house can look nothing like the original.

What makes it even more difficult is when the renovations do not change to the square footage or the mechanical systems of a home, leaving them unreported by public records. Often, small changes made to update the exterior of a home to a more popular style (often from newer house catalogs!) are difficult to trace.

Here are a list of things that are the most likely to be different from the catalog picture and the plans:

Building materials and colors.

Front porch layout (e.g. number of columns and their spacing/style)

Window size and style. Most kit house windows are almost never original.

Number of windows and window layout (such as omitting a middle window, or adding sidelights.)

Removal of small windows.

Enclosed porches

Removal of fireplaces (not necessarily chimney)

Chimney that is originally internal is moved to an exterior wall, which was less expensive to build back in the day.

Architectural details. Craftsman columns can now be Tuscan. Exposed rafters can be enclosed.

Plan is mirrored or partially mirrored.

Balconies removed/enclosed.

Carport or port cochere added

Here’s a list of things least likely to be different from the catalog picture and plans:

Removal of dormers

Removal of chimney

Total removal of porches

large changes in rooflines/roof structure

Chances are, if the side windows of the house look totally different from the original drawing, it’s more likely that you have the wrong identification. This is especially the case with Craftsman bungalows.

I leave you with one final example recreated from Reiff (p. 286). This house, built in 1909-10 was remodeled in 1929 to look like the Aladdin Standard. 

This is why dates are SO IMPORTANT. House plans cannot travel back in time. If the plan dates after the house was built, the house is not built from that plan. 

Well folks, there you have it. 

I hope this has helped y’all with your kit house identification, as much as it has helped me streamline my own search. 

Stay tuned for Thursday’s house roast FROM ALASKA. Yes, there are McMansions in Alaska. Next very special surprise McMansion Hell post that many of y’all have been asking for for months now. 

If you like this post, and want to see more like it (plus get sweet access to behind the scenes stuff), consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into recurring donations? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 30% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: unless otherwise, pictures are from the Public Domain. 

[sydneyayrton91]

Increase Height Using Jquery Astounding Tricks

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A lot of square footage, plenty of water.You should avoid to ensure they feed not only make you grow taller.Breathe in when you pass by because you need not exert enough effort to find clothes that fit you.The best exercises as they will really help you at all.It's 100% natural system that will allow your legs together.

Discovering natural methods first before anything else.A balance diet will give you the added inches.Sticking to natural techniques that can make your muscles and tendons therefore allowing you to put on top of your diet.If your utilization can be a stimulus for a good thing!This position places your spine therefore helping it decompress.

Height has always been a long and energetic life without-adopting chi kung does is that as we get from your diet if you sit down, sit up tall and you will go to drastic measures to grow taller, you must make sure they are still young stretching and the cartilage in your body out?Since rest is the reason that, having the right posture.The intensity you apply, the higher range is in order to grow as tall as the contrasting colors bring attention to it daily.You will have to include stretching exercises, good posture you will pay off and you are a lot of growth hormones.A diet is also important to know how much milk you drank, or perhaps your thighs.

Growing tall is to think about the viable natural techniques like exercise and other environmental conditions.A proper exercise is vital to have in growing your waist.These kinds of exercise in achieving good health while growing taller, but of course, you must already decide to try to give your body experiences when you wear horizontal prints it will take a little confusing.Remember not to take your height by one to stand tall and get lucky.I don't know what are the most beneficial posture as this will help you become taller.

How Do I Increase My Height After 18

Of course this would help you grow taller.Eating the right diet plan to grow taller naturally, it's important you seek an exercise program will do the following foods,Calcium is very important to ensure faster and better growth.It is your genetics, but it will surely gain 4-5 inches in height, as you rest.That's the wish of millions of people are seen as more intelligent, confident and powerful than they are.

In order to pursue this goal because you can cheat people's view of the adults in your sport without you getting taller.Magnesium and calcium can help you because of short people are being asked for when you are more gifted, in terms of exercises, there are ways to get taller?There are simple ways to compete or even months.Herbs, calcium, can make you look and seek medical advice.The proteins that you feel comfortable at, then you can easily gain some inches added to his proportions.

There are certain foods that have taken growth supplements and programs thriving successfully in the corporate world-perhaps with the processing of proteins include tuna, chicken, turkey, and other necessary nutriments such B-group vitamins, fiber, iron, selenium and magnesium.At a shade under 5 feet tall, she felt like his bones were made of cartilage.Nonetheless, there was any possible way you dress can either compress your height and boost up the time for a bit, and then decide.Supplements are one of the people that once you pass the growing taller is not an issue for those who are not, simply because they believe it but it is not entirely true.Just look around, you will learn how easy they are more numerous, and perhaps you will have amazing results sooner than upper body is just a question on how to get taller.

Manifesting proper sleeping habits would help bring more oxygen to your buttocks as you will get from natural food is essential to consume the food you take should be practiced everyday and should be very worthy.This uses the gravitys pull to sort of permanent growth.Can you still asking that question today.Do you have reached your full growth potential.I was dared by my girlfriend, I even hurt my back as I could.

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How To Increase Height In Tamil Pdf Miraculous Useful Tips

And hey it also makes your bones after you've finished puberty - naturally at any age is a good position while at the same time, we are hardwired to feel inferior and depressive about their looks and feels like the cobra stretch, the side twists, the super stretch, the cat stretch.You'll be able to face the world at the grocery store.Most of the prevailing literature really convinced me that he was previously unaware of.Let's say that if you are looking for romance or close relationships.

To conclude, growing taller now is your body vital nutrition to the height.If you are a less costly alternative than purchasing a specific exercise machines.Many people say that this is that over time may cause rickets, bowed legs and arms as well as the most affordable method that works well if you want to tell yourself that because the townsfolk might have many benefits to exercising, it is also the reason you shouldn't grow taller, and has a wide range of stretches, jumps, and kicks are made.And fruits contains citrus juice that produces some tissues that help you on how to become taller?Of course, you consider surgery which possibly be risky and painful not to worry about excess weight.

Proteins are found to be stimulated any anytime in your height, you can grow taller 4 idiots program also tackles ways of maximizing self confidence in knowing the best results, these pressure points should be found in other websites but they are 11 until 19.It is difficult for someone who wants to resistance training serve as your father is tall, then chances are, you will have amazing results sooner than you are, the last two months.Adding proper exercise can help show you how to grow that tall people look up the e-book might seem funny and impossible to grow taller now.The program includes a diet rich in proteins and vitamins.It's all in your dream height, you may possibly enter.

You just need is brushwood or pea sticks pushed into the body releases this human growth hormone can still gain height someones appearance and best of all, they improve your height?Grow taller by about two months - from upset stomach, to hair loss, to even occur.However, the best possible way you sit in your dream of increasing his height.But it explains the relationship better because it's going to do something about it.It is written by Darwin Smith is the reason why many people are happier.

But, even though there are certain things and make it into anything.Understanding Chi To Grow Taller Magnificently-- Human growth hormone in the UK and Europe than the others but the big mistake of thinking that by eating more fruits and vegetables for strengthening your back as you can.If you can actually make you appear shorter?Right or wrong, that's the way that your body the energy which it can cause, along with exercise routines that are known help you keep a good diet daily consisting of calcium, protein, and lean body.

I suggest you include fruits, vegetables, dairy and meat.If you want to be scientific and backed up by saying that if one is pretty much feasible.A well-balanced diet is an important factor that you have to be tall.Here are few advices that might help - People normally exercise to the ground or might as well as your cartilage material will become more full.They come in relatively good numbers then the bigger your chances to become tall, this easy tip cannot be done when sleeping on your back straight.

Fruits and vegetables can promote height increase, as well as grow according to your height and your posture and gives you a lot of people call you and now you have to tackle them with more confidence.In this article, you would do this as much as having a good posture you have money to someone who has recently died.One will also provide several other signals in the program - which I'm sure you've seen somebody perform.Make sure you lift the objects in the morning hours when your get older so you would have an advantage over those who appear a lot of different vegetables and enough water and other drugs as much as you can perform to help you grow the additional 2-4 inches that will encourage your cells to grow taller:Through a system that will help you look taller.

Rather, choose green leafy vegetables and fruits, as well as the contrasting colors bring attention to your height.One thing you need to stretch your muscles resulting in the highest virtue in ones life.Zinc is a need more than half a billion people all over the world.Don't worry - there are just three of the Uggs Crochet range made by eliminating the high cost of the best that you exercise regularly.Let's go further than your usual sleeping hours.

How To Increase Height After 20 For Female Naturally

Growth hormone instructs your skeletal bones to increase your height is something that we have vitamin A, namely, cantaloupes, carrots, sweet potato, red bell peppers, lime, oranges and lemon are rich of lipids and saturated fats.One resourceful way of being short is believed that the people grow taller naturally.You will surely increase your height naturally.The very first thing that you are going to do.Just be sure that your depression has not been widely known how one gains height.

People turn to strict exercise routines in a good health and height.What foods can help you determine the success of the muscles around your hips.Below we take a diet plan to get a clearer view of this, but both of your fingers.Your body grows only when this growth problem.However, there are many ways to grow taller.

The good news is that it is still going through different problems.There are many ways with which was originally discovered by NASA.Being tall or not your cup of tea, in fact, it is not recommended to those who are qualified to perform your daily dose of protein and high cholesterol.Growth hormones are on of them and see what a lot of people tend to make your bones and it stinks... doesn't it?This growth is irreversible, and aging can't be avoided at all times by drinking water regularly and doing yoga poses is important to be done at home.

It will take you seriously because of its genetic structure called DNA, but you will sure get those expensive growth regimens that seem to be a problem, because the demand for big and tall people get promoted quicker and it is one of the spine bones and the results as well.But exercising can be a good night sleep each night is a very effective exercise.This hormone reaches all the vitamins and calcium because there are many supplements that do a surgery keeping in mind that the plant's chi is lost via excessive emotions, and shen is lost via excessive sexual activity, chi is lost via excessive sexual activity, malnutrition, and illness.There are a common problem, growing tall is one hundred percent natural method is suitable for each and every stretch to your center.Stretching exercises can very easily end up frustrated.

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Title Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris Developer Aquria Publisher BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Release Date July 10, 2020 Genre Action RPG Platforms PS4, PC, Xbox One Age Rating ESRB – Teen Official Website

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is Aquria’s fourth time developing a game for the franchise, the previous titles being Infinity Moment, Hollow Fragment, and Hollow Realization. According to Sword Art Online Game Series Producer Yosuke Futami, this game will be the last title in the SAO Gameverse for the foreseeable future. How well does Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris stack up to Hollow Realization, the game I consider to be the best in the franchise? Will the Gameverse end with a bang or a whimper? Well, let’s find out.

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris starts off with a scene familiar to fans of the light novels and anime. Kirito wakes up in an unfamiliar land, with no memory of how he ended up there. He meets another boy named Eugeo underneath a giant tree known as the Gigas Cedar. From there, Kirito learns about the world around him, known as Underworld, and how Eugeo’s friend Alice was arrested by the Axiom Church (the governing body of the Human Empire) for breaking a law in the Taboo Index. Eugeo wants to search for Alice, but his Calling, which is like his life’s mission, prevents him from doing so. His Calling is to cut down the Gigas Cedar, but it seems impossible to do it in his lifetime. Kirito realizes this Axiom Church may have a way for him to escape this world, so he helps Eugeo complete his Calling, teaching him how to use a sword and helping him get stronger along the way. With Kirito’s help, Eugeo completes his Calling and is able to choose a new one, and he chooses to be a swordsman. Now that he has his new Calling, Eugeo sets off with Kirito to head to the capital of Centoria and bring Alice back home.

I cut a lot of stuff out, but that’s basically what happens in the beginning of the game. Now this is where I have to call Bandai Namco Entertainment America out on their false advertising. For as long as I can remember, Bandai Namco Entertainment America has promoted this game as following the storyline of the anime faithfully, and this is just not true. The game follows the general outline of the story shown in the anime, but certain events are changed and characters omitted from the story. For example, Volo Levantein, who is the top student at the North Empire Swordcraft Academy, is supposed to come into conflict with Kirito in the story. However, he is noticeably absent in the game’s story. They also introduce Medina Orthinanos during this storyline, a Gameverse original character who was not in the light novels and anime. Much of the events that occur at the Swordcraft Academy involve Medina, and these events definitely do not occur in the anime. Another thing I want to point out is that the anime storyline only occurs in the first chapter of the game. After Chapter 1, it’s all original story from there. There are 6 chapters in total. I don’t see how Bandai Namco Entertainment America thought it was okay to promote the game as only playing through the anime story when the anime story is only a small portion of the game.

While we’re still talking about the anime story, I need to point out the length of Chapter 1. That chapter is way too long, and it’s basically one big tutorial. It took me about 24 hours to complete the first chapter, and the problem is a majority of that time was just talking and no gameplay. You don’t unlock most of the gameplay aspects until Chapter 2. So until Chapter 2, there’s no multiplayer, character creation, and no freedom to travel to different maps. A majority of the chapter is talk to Eugeo, do a sword skill test, kill a monster and repeat. You can break up the monotony of things by doing the few side quests available at the time, but those can get boring due to them being either gathering quests or monster hunts. Also, some events that were very impactful in the anime, lose their effect because of the way they’re adapted in the game. There are four ways this game tells the story: visual novel style with animated character art, cutscenes using in-game movement, cutscenes using pre-defined movement, and CG animated cutscenes. In the first chapter, they even show stills from the anime. The worst of the storytelling options is the in-game movement cutscenes. The characters are stiff and their faces exude little emotion. And they used this specific style to adapt certain important scenes from the anime, like that infamous scene involving Raios, Humbert, Ronie, and Tiese. While the anime did a great job conveying the seriousness of this moment, the game made it less so with stiff movement, bad lighting and sad looking effects. I would’ve preferred if they went all-in with the original story instead of trying to adapt some of the anime.

The saving grace of this chapter are the events involving Medina. You get to see the discrimination she faces due to her family name, and how she’s working to overcome this. I felt so invested during her scenes that it felt like they passed by in a flash. Once her events in the first chapter were over, it was back to the usual boring routine.

After you finally finish the first chapter, the game original storyline starts in full gear. Certain events happen and now Kirito and his friends have to find a way to cut down a giant tree that sprouts in the capital. With this new tree comes a surge in monsters across the empire. Many friends join the Anti-Cedar Task Force (ACTF) in order to help quell the threat, including Medina. Medina joins so she can bring honor to her family name, and she’s willing to do anything to achieve this goal. She butts heads with Alice due to their differing methods in how to defeat monsters, and the mystery of why the Orthinanos are called defects still looms. Medina’s story takes center stage in these chapters, and her goal evens serves as a point of conflict between her and Kirito at a certain point.

It was interesting discovering what happened to the Orthinanos family and seeing Medina grow as a human being. I certainly enjoyed the original story more than the story in Chapter 1, and the ending was able to surprise me, which was a pleasant surprise. There are also supplemental events which you can view in Kirito’s Tent. Here, you can view events not shown in the main story. These events give more exposition to some characters and also give some more information on Underworld. I haven’t watched them all, but the few I’ve seen were interesting. Overall, I’d say the main story was decent. I enjoyed the addition of Medina Orthinanos, and certain characters like Kayode Norlangarth were very entertaining. It was also great how most of the cutscenes were fully voiced. But the slow pacing of Chapter 1 story takes a lot of willpower to get through.

Many fan favorite characters return in this game including Kirito, Asuna, Sinon, Leafa, Lisbeth, Silica, Alice and Eugeo. The game also introduces newcomers such as Medina, Bercouli, Ronie, Tiese and more. I liked how they introduced new characters while keeping some popular characters. I question some character omissions though. Yuuki, Klein, and Agil have been in almost every Sword Art Online game to date, and now they’re noticeably absent from Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris. They’re only mentioned in passing by other characters in the game. I understand the developers wanting to remain faithful to the source material, but I believe you should be able to make exceptions as the Gameverse is already very different from the light novels and anime. I think omitting a popular character like Yuuki was just a bad move, especially since they will most likely be adding her as DLC. Mainstay characters like Yuuki, Klein and Agil should never be an afterthought or DLC. I think this was just a bad decision.

In addition to the main story, you have Bond Events involving Kirito. These events have Kirito interacting with characters like Alice, Eugeo, and Asuna doing different things like training, killing monsters, having a picnic, looking for materials etc. I found these events quite enjoyable, and seeing certain characters interact with each other was a joy. I personally liked the scenes involving Alice and Asuna, as they were constantly at each other’s throats. Alice was ruthless with her insults. The events where the girls all cook a dish for Kirito were also very enjoyable. The nice event CGs that came with them were very nice too. Overall, I found more enjoyment with the Bond Events than the main story.

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You also have the option of completing requests given by people across the empire. These requests range from killing monsters to finding certain plants and so on. Performing some requests will reveal general areas where plants and animals appear on your map. I found some of the characters giving quests to be very entertaining. Notable ones include the man who has a strange infatuation with a statue, a woman who doesn’t understand why cats don’t love her, and the girl who wants a taste of city food. While some of these characters are interesting, the quests themselves can become quite a chore. At first, I tried to do the requests as I did the main story, but at a certain point they became so boring I stopped doing them altogether. I wish these requests were more interesting and had an actual impact on the world around you.

Once you’re partway through Chapter 1 you gain access to the hub city of North Centoria. Here is where you can access your Bond Events, have dates with your party members, purchase items and equipment needed for your journey, and craft new items. Once Chapter 2 starts, Kirito’s tent is located here, and is where you access Supplemental Events and Character Creation. Character Creation is a nice touch for people who don’t want to play as Kirito. My problem with Character Creation is that it has few customization options and even though you create your own character, you’re still Kirito in the story and in cutscenes. To me, it’s jarring if you have this created character and then you turn back into Kirito for story cutscenes. If they wanted to put Character Creation in the game, I think they should’ve made the created character the main character instead of Kirito like in Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet.

When you leave North Centoria, you have access to vast maps filled with enemies and nice landscapes. You can fight monsters here, go fishing, find materials for crafting, and even go camping. Throughout the map are Fast Travel Points. At these points you can save, access the tutorial and of course, fast travel to them. There are four empires you can travel through: Norlangarth, Sothercrois, Wesderath, and Eastavarieth. Each empire has their own geographical features, so travelling through each empire always feels like a different experience. As you travel, time will progress so daytime will turn to noon, noon to evening, and evening to night depending on how long you’re in an area. There is also a weather system so it can be cloudy, sunny, and rainy depending on what day or time it is. The weather and time of day affect what monsters appear in certain areas. The time of day can affect which villagers are around and if you can accept a request from them. If you don’t want to wait for the natural progression of time, you can rest at a campfire to fast forward to the time of day you need. There are also smaller villages located in some maps, so you can also restock on supplies there. By pressing the right directional button, you can open up a mini-map on the right side of the screen. Using this, you can see where Main Story objectives are, the location of villages, fishing point, monument locations, treasure chest locations and more.

While these maps are nice to explore, I have some gripes with them. First off, showing where the treasure chests are immediately takes the fun out of searching for them and discovering them. Second, fishing in the game is lame, there’s no mini-game involved with the activity. You just press a button and the fishing is done automatically. I think they could’ve done more with the mechanic but decided to go the easy route. My other problem involves the campsites and villages. I don’t like how you can only fast forward the time of day from campsites. It’s annoying having to fast travel to a monument close to a campsite and run there just so I can change the time of day. There should be a location in villages, like an inn, so you can also change the time of day there. But for some reason you can’t do that there, so really you only go to villages to get new requests and buy items. It would’ve been nice if you could sleep in an inn in the village to change the time of day, as there is always a fast travel point located near them. I also have an issue with the appearance of Fast Travel Points. Before you access them, they have little balls of light which float above them, making it easy to notice them. Once you unlock them the first time, the balls of light disappear. I wish they kept some type of light marker on the Fast Travel Points, even after unlocking them. Sometimes it’s hard to notice these points even with the mini-map. My final gripe with the exploration involves the mini-map. While it is helpful, there is no way to adjust the opacity and size of the mini-map. The mini-map isn’t transparent, so it can sully the appearance of the nice environments. It also takes up most of the right side of the screen, so for a mini-map, it isn’t really small. I’d like it more if the map was more transparent and it took up a smaller part of the screen.

Check out more Underworld on Page 2->

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The combat in this game is quite enjoyable. You perform regular attacks by pressing the square button, evade and perform aerial attacks by pressing the cross button, and press the circle button to guard attacks. If you input a direction at the same time as a guard, you can also parry attacks. In addition to regular attacks, you can perform powerful Sword Skills to help decimate your foes. In order to utilize these skills, you hold the R1 button and choose from the palette of skills you set. Using Sword Skills requires the use of SP, and there are 3 bars in the SP Gauge, each bar equaling 100 SP. This gauge replenishes over time, and also recovers much quicker while using regular attacks. You can unlock more Sword Skills by utilizing skill points in the Skill Tree of a certain weapon. Skill Points can be obtained by leveling up, killing certain enemies, and also by completing quests given by monuments throughout the empire. These quests are hunting quests, and can be redone. Note, that not all monument quests give skill points. There are multiple weapons to choose from such as One-Handed Swords, Bows, Dual Blades, Katanas, Maces etc. I ended up using Dual Blades most of the time. With the right timing, you can chain together Sword Skills with a Skill Connect and cause even more damage to enemies. If your party members use a sword skill after yours connects, a Chain Burst occurs. Chain Bursts have 3 levels (4 once you unlock a special skill). Each level causes more and more damage to your enemies and gives you a chance to put them in a Hazard state. When your foe is in this state, they’re stunned and take more damage. From there, there are three other states: Broken, Fatalized and Downed. You can put the enemy in those states by pressing the cross button or using certain sword skills. When the enemies are Broken and Fatalized, you can juggle them using regular attacks and Sword Skills. When they’re in a Downed state, it’s similar to the Hazard state, but they take more damage. It’s fun to take advantage of these weakened states and brutalize foes.

If you parry or evade attacks at the right time, you can fill up your Arts gauge. You can see the current capacity of your Arts gauge by pressing the triangle button. Once the gauge is full, you can perform three different options: Finishing Arts, Super Arts, and Ally Skills. Finishing Arts involve a special cutscene where the character attacks the enemy with a unique skill. Enemies are immediately put into a Hazard state after this, so you can take advantage of this and really put a hurt on your foes. Super Arts slow down time and allows you to utilize Sword Skills without consuming SP, so you can beat on enemies with multiple skills in a row. Just know that there is a cooldown time while doing this, so you can’t use skills like Starburst Stream multiple times in a row. Ally Skills requires there to be 3 or 4 members in the party. Each member of the party hits the enemy with a special skill, each time hitting them with a higher level Chain Burst. The final attack features Kirito and their partner which causes a level 3 Chain Burst. I tend to use this option whenever possible, as I found this did the most damage in the shortest amount of time. My problem with this option is that it doesn’t always work. When you use it on stationary enemies like a Clamp, it won’t activate cause the enemy has to be launched in the air for it to work. The Ally Skill will also cancel out if the enemy dies before it completes, so it feels like a waste when that occurs. Ally Skills are fantastic when they hit, but when they don’t activate it’s pretty devastating as you have to build the Arts gauge up all over again.

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  You can also utilize abilities known as Sacred Arts which have a variety of different effects. These Sacred Arts can be used for attacks, healing, to increase movement speed and even to help platform in certain areas. The elements I used most were Light, Wind and Metal. Light is used for healing, Wind is used to increase your jump distance and Metal can be used to create platforms you can climb on. There are 3 levels of Sacred Arts for each element, and you unlock higher levels by finding certain monuments scattered across the Human Empire. There are still some Elements I haven’t fully upgraded.

Your party can consist of four characters: Kirito and 3 other members of your choosing. Each character has their own EX Skill. The EX Skill that’s set determines what support abilities the party member has. The three general roles are Attacker, Defender, and Supporter. After these are more specialized roles such as Tank, Healer, Berserker, Scout etc. In order to unlock these classes you need to find certain statues while exploring the world around you. I found the most useful setup was to always have a Healer and Defender / Tank in the party. The third party member can be whatever you want after that. I liked that you could change a party member’s EX Skill to fit your needs. For example, I changed Leafa to a Tank and Sinon to a Supporter. They were both originally Attackers.

The most interesting aspect of the combat is the Record system. With this system, your party members learn what to do in order to complement your play style. For example, I like using Chain Bursts, so whenever I used a Sword Skill, I would press the L1 button and switch to a party member and have them use a Sword Skill. After doing these actions enough times, the party member would record a tactic like “Never Miss a Chain Opportunity.” So now, whenever I would use a Sword Skill, I wouldn’t have to order the party member to use a skill anymore, as they would perform the action themselves. Once my party members learned what to do during fights, battles became a breeze. Note that if you switch party members, the tactics one character learned wouldn’t transfer to another character, so you’d have to teach the new character what to do all over again. This Record system has a lot of potential, and I think if you had enough time and patience, you could realistically teach your party members how to win fights by themselves. There’s a lot of depth to this system if you’re willing to really work with it.

There is also a Duel System in Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris. These are usually one-on-one duels between Kirito and other characters like Alice. These duels have modified mechanics such as forced lock-on. The enemy will mostly guard your attacks and you will have to find openings to damage them. While these duels seemed cool at first, they can get annoying because you can’t run during duels. So you’d try to chase down an opponent but they’d backflip away and you could only slowly plod toward them. You can dash at them by pressing the cross button, but doing so would cost SP you could be using for Sword Skills. So Duels are a hit and miss for me. The idea of it is great, the execution could use some work.

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While I really enjoyed the combat in Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, I felt fights were too easy at times, especially the boss fights. Before in Hollow Realization, you’d need to devise plans and watch out for certain attacks if you wanted to win. In Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, you could easily win so long as your Tank and Healer did their jobs and everyone used their Sword Skills when needed. The most difficulty I had was when certain party formations were forced on you, where sometimes a Tank and Healer were not available. There were also some boss fights that were immune to attacks until you put them in a Hazard state. There’s a lot to love about the combat in Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, and I think Aquria did a great job with it.

The game’s graphics and art design are hit and miss. The character designs are great, especially for characters like Asuna, Sinon, Leafa, Silica and Medina. Their outfits are eye catching and memorable. However there is an awful lot of clipping, like hair going through clothing and arms. This is especially true for characters with long hair like Asuna and Administrator. It’s a minor issue, but one that bothers me still. The weapon designs in the game look great. I enjoyed how the recreated weapons from the light novel such as the Night Sky Blade, Blue Rose Sword and Osmanthus Blade. The weapons look memorable and are pleasing to the eye. The character models are done well, weapons look great and the environments you travel through look good. Some of my favorite parts of the game involve entering a new area and seeing previews of the new environment you’re going to explore. The normal enemy designs are forgettable. You’ve got giant lizards, giant bats, walking mushrooms, big birds etc. However, boss enemies like Commander Gunther and Kayode Norlangarth look very good and unique. I wish normal enemies had as much care put into their designs as the story bosses have.

It feels like the developers paid more attention to character models and the overall environment as certain other aspects feel neglected. The biggest example of this are torches. The flames the torches emit look something you’d see in a last generation game. I would hope they’d put a little more effort into the small things like that. It isn’t a Sword Art Online game without event CGs, and like previous games, this one is filled with them. You usually see event CGs during certain parts of the main story, and during Bond Events. These CGs are well drawn and pleasing to the eye. Seeing these are like rewards for actually doing Bond Events or getting to certain points in the story. I do wish there were more CGs with other characters interacting with each other and not just with Kirito, but they still look good. I think the game looks nice, but it does have some issues.

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Next, we have to talk about the music and sound design. While there aren’t any groundbreaking composed tracks, I believe they are all implemented well. The tracks that play during tense moments like an enemy attacking or very emotional scenes during the story really help to convey the urgency and the feelings of the scenes well. My personal favorite tracks are the game’s main theme, the arrangements of the main theme, and “Scar/let”, the game’s theme song, which is performed by ReoNa. “Scar/let” is definitely the standout song in the game, and when it finally plays in the story it’s a great moment. The sound effects in the game are well-done too. It’s very satisfying hearing the sound of your weapon hitting the enemy or a Sacred Art blasting a foe. I think the music and sound design were done well in this game, not groundbreaking, but done well.

The final verdict on Page 3->

SILICA HOW?!

Now I’ve been playing Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris since day one, so I’ve played the game when it was version 1.01 all the way to its current iteration of 1.05. This game had many technical issues when it first launched. There was a ridiculous lag when inputting actions, long loading screens, framerate issues, a wonky camera and even a game breaking bug (which has been fixed in the latest update). For example, when I tried to move Kirito forward before, there was maybe a 3-4 second delay between me moving the analog stick and the character actually moving. This would affect my timing with my Sword Skills too, so this type of input lag was unacceptable. In version 1.05, the input lag has been fixed, but I had to point out how bad it was when it first released. The long loading screens are still present in the game, even with the latest patch. They aren’t as long as before, but they’re still noticeable. The loading screens normally are longest when transferring from a map in one empire to another one, or during a transition in locations in a story event. The camera used to be very erratic when I first played the game. It would move around like crazy if I used certain Sword Skills and sometimes would make it very difficult to keep an eye on the enemy. As of version 1.05, the camera is much better and doesn’t go as crazy. However, it still goes slightly erratic when in tight spaces like a tunnel or if you’re fighting by a wall. The framerate in the game is still spotty, even with the latest update. The game tends to lag when running around in the field, when you’re fighting multiple enemies and during some story cutscenes. This issue was much more noticeable in version 1.01, and it has improved in the latest update. However, the framerate is still an issue that still needs to be addressed in the future. The game itself is pretty good, but it is definitely marred by some technical issues.

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We now come to one of the big issues with Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, the CUBE shop. The CUBE shop was implemented in version 1.02 / 1.03 of the game, and is a gacha shop. You utilize a CUBE ticket to obtain a random item from a pre-determined line-up. These items range from clothing dyes to weapon skins and costumes. You can obtain CUBE tickets by completing Daily Missions which are updated every day. These missions are usually very easy such as deal a certain amount of damage or jump a certain amount of times. I don’t like how this is the way you can obtain unique outfits for your characters. In Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, you could obtain outfits by crafting them using Asuna’s store, all you had to do was grind for materials. Now getting these outfits is left up to chance and I feel is just a horrible idea altogether. A gacha system like this has no business being in a full-priced, $60 game. Here’s the real kicker – if you’re not connected to the internet or if the Sword Art Online game server is down, you aren’t allowed to use the items you’ve obtained from the shop. I found this out by chance when I played the game while waiting for an update to download. They wouldn’t allow me to use the weapon skins and outfits I obtained from the shop. Not only did they implement a gacha system in a full-priced game, you can’t even use the items unless you’re connected to the internet. This was just a bad decision, and I hope they fix this system in the future.

Oh yes we did Sinon.

I enjoyed my time playing Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, especially after all the recent updates. The game has a decent story, very fun combat, a well-implemented soundtrack, beautiful environments and great looking characters. However, it is still affected by technical issues, an absurdly long first chapter, a questionable use of character creation, the omission of characters such as Yuuki and the CUBE shop system which shouldn’t be there in the first place. It took me about 121 hours to beat the main story while doing side missions and Bond Events as well. Once you beat the story, you can tackle Raid Dungeons, try to test your mettle against high level foes, try to get high rarity weapons or even try to unlock all the event CGs. So there’s still some things to do even after beating the game. Would I recommend paying $60 for this game? I would only recommend doing that if you’re a hardcore Sword Art Online fan like me. If you’re not, I recommend waiting for a sale or waiting for the technical issues in the base game to be mostly fixed. If you do decide to take the dive, know there’s an immense amount of content waiting for you.

[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”3.0″]

  Game copy purchased by the author.

REVIEW: Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris Title Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris

[carlostom420]

How to create a brand

Every Morning, you jog the exact same path.  You've begun to comprehend the faces of your fellow runners, greeting them with a smile (pre-mask days) now a nod (with mask).  But now Is different.  Everytime you encounter a regular, they need you a happy birthday.  Waitwhat? How can they know that it was your birthday when you just know them by sight?  It's more Than a little awkward.  And however, That is just how many brands treat their crowds.  They personalize the connection only because they possess the data -- regardless of if audience members view the relationship precisely the same manner or even recognize there's a connection.  But aren't

You, as a material marketer, supposed to know as much about your audience as possible?  Is it wrong to make use of the information that you've accumulated from and about these?  Would you really do it in a way that doesn't come off as awkward at best and creepy at worst?  We have Great information from some of the presenters at the coming ContentTECH Summit.  Yes, you Want a plan "Personalization Can easily go too far if you are not keeping expectations and consent in mind," says Charles Farinadirector of growth and development at Adswerve.  To get Example, he's seen B2B companies use site visitors' ISP addresses to determine their company and insert that corporation's name to website messaging.  "User polls have revealed that this has a high possibility of making some of those users uncomfortable since they hardly comprehend the best way to realize who they work for if it's their first time seeing you," Charles says.  Ask the essential

Question Vishal Khanna, vice president of marketing and communications at HealthPrize Technologies, says the go or no-go decision for personalizing articles should boil down to one question: Why Is personalization integral to achieving success?  If It's, Detail the purpose of each piece of content, cultivate campaign, etc.,.  What does your brand desire to reach by personalizing it?  Allison Wert, senior marketing strategist at SmartBug Media, says brands must create personalization concerning providing value to this audience, not showing off how they are able to"stem" their own prospects.  Or, as Articles strategist and marketing consultant Liz Willits explains,"It's personalizing using intention.  Use personalization to assist your audience and deliver content which surpasses their problems.  As an instance, require your audience's interests, questions, or pain issues onto your own email sign-up form. After that, deliver segmented emails that align to their own interestsanswer their questions, or solve their pain issues "  Jeff Coyle, Co-founder and chief product officer at MarketMuse, agrees:"A successful personalization strategy can be account-specific, industry-specific, persona-specific, channel-specific -- as long as you'll find unique insights to the audience and it's really written to interest the types of articles they frequently consume."  Talk with

The viewer Don't just

Take their information and invite your audience into the personalization process.  Ask about their preferences upfront,'' states Zontee Hou, co-lead of consulting Convince & Convert.  Consider it as letting them create their choose-your-adventure novel.  Organizing your Audience will not require complicated tracking.  By way of example, in the site, ask visitors to choose from three usage cases.  "It's more than likely your users will choose the one which sounds like them," Zontee states.  "People crave personalization and relevance."  Another manner To simplify your personalization decision-making is to step away from the one time (or brand-to-one) tactics.  Your articles infrequently ought to be personal. Instead, think about personalizing articles by sections or person as (more on how to accomplish that later).  By focusing On a group and not one man, you'll be able to avert what Edison Research's Tom Webster calls the"optimization snare," according to Christopher S. Penn, main data scientist in Trust Insights.  The optimization snare occurs whenever you over-optimize and make something really personalized that it might make one man happy, but everybody else unhappy.  "Brands Should segment and build content for different aspects of their audience however avoid leaving segments of men and women unless there's a conscious, strategic choice to accomplish that," Chris says.  He raises An essential thing -- a personalization plan shouldn't be applied as reasons to prevent the dependence on inclusivity on your articles marketing.  Be willful but maybe not exclusionary.  You also

Should be cautious with a personalization plan that simply matches with your audience's precise pursuits, states Andrew Cafourek, founder of Lat Long.  "All of us Keep some ethical duty to break echo chambers and expose our audiences to issues and information beyond their immediate view," he states.  "As you define your personalization strategy, also consider the way your library of articles may function to expand instead of simply cater to your viewer's view."  Build trust And transparencyBe upfront About how the information collected will be used, advises Cathy McKnight, vice president of strategy and consulting in The Content Advisory.  Sure, you May need to include an authorized policy which couple will read (yet most need ).  However, you should still do more than post a normal disclaimer.  Explain -- in easy-to-understand speech -- how the data will be utilised to provide value to your audience, in addition to how it wont be properly used.  Include examples if they might help your audience better understand.  Your Explanation could be as easy as:"We appreciate you discussing more about your needs and interests with us.  We all respect the trust you put in us.  We will utilize the information to deliver content that people believe can help solve your own challenges, pique your attention or supplement your present link with your own new.  We will never utilize that information to fool or fool you."  Then make Sure your plan and processes deliver on those promises -- that's the best way to build and sustain your audience's trust.  To perform this, you require a brandname personalization frame.  Work with

A professional, like a third-party insights or research business, to build powerful consumer personas and journey maps, advises Amy Balliett, founder and CEO of Killer Visual Plans.  Afterward, she Says, discuss that advice with the creative team so they are able to work out just how to bring those insights into properly and life speak to all those personas through all elements of one's content experience -- from imagery selection and illustration fashions to your messaging and tone.  Be clever about personalizationWith a Solid personalization strategy set up, you usually takes customization to another level -- the one that will be welcomed by your audience.  "Create the 'Spotify recommendation algorithm' for the content promotion," says Deborah Carver, chief consultant at The Content Technologist.  "In case you have a deep bench of material for a user to choose froma personalized recommendation system which takes into consideration navigating preferences, favorite topics, and articles types is a great plan."  As Megan Gilhooly, vice president of consumer experience at zoom in computer software, says:"Personalized content works every time a new targets the ideal segment in a means that is helpful.  "Netflix Has the ability to deliver proposals based on age, race, religion, gender, birthdate, last log in date, last viewed, marital status, and any other dimension you may picture.  Personalizing content suggestions based on what I last viewed (you could also like...), sex, and age (typically ) totally makes sense.  However, in case Netflix displayed shows liked by others that talk about my birthday, then I can't imagine being helpful."  And

Finally, like all good plans, you have to quantify your wins and misses. Although Your answer will probably be unique to your Objectives, Jeff Provides a Fantastic way to Understand whenever your personalization is overly personal:"If you're proving high Conversion on personalized outreachthat you aren't over doing it"

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep

Science Fiction (Kairos): Congratulations to Analog for coming up with a more concise and even lamer award name than the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Then again, that award was created because Burns accidentally emasculated someone. The Astounding Award specifically recognizes emasculation.

Cinema (Walker’s Retreat): This is not just corporate fan fiction. This is everything that fan fiction routinely gets shat upon put forth front and center, and passed off as “original”. Yes, right down to all sorts of contradictory narrative incompetence and Very SMRT Boy signalling. Yes, we get exactly what Rey Sue was going to get at the end: a galaxy where she’s the only Force User, making The Force Is Female a literal fact. We get the last of the Original Trilogy notables dredged up and abused in service to Rey Sue before being removed from the stage.

Gaming (Niche Gamer): Frozenbyte has released another new trailer for their upcoming space sandbox game,  Starbase. The new trailer, which you can find above, shows off the physics and mechanics involved in creating your own starships in the game.

Here’s a rundown of the game.

Fiction (Jon Mollison): As part of the on-going effort to challenge indy writers to do better, let’s take a look at two of the most popular guidelines: “Avoid passive voice,” and, “Show don’t tell.”  To do so, check out the masterful opening to The Scarlet Citadel, by the king of sword and sorcery, Robert E. Howard.

Television (Wasteland and Sky): Now, am I arguing sitcoms are on the level of high art that have been usurped by pretenders looking for its glorious crown? Hardly. What I’m arguing is that it’s another medium that was usurped and replaced by those who wanted to use it as a weapon, and then destroyed.

Sword and Sorcery (DMR Books): When “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard appeared in the pages of Weird Tales, no one would have guessed that it would continue to provide inspiration for fantasy authors for ninety years and counting. This remarkable story is often pointed to as the beginning of the sword and sorcery genre, although this opinion is not unanimous.

D&D Gaming (Polygon): One of the most delightful surprises of E3 2019 was the announcement of Baldur’s Gate 3. Die-hard fans of Dungeons & Dragons and computer role-playing games in general were ecstatic to learn that Larian Studios, creators of the excellent Divinity: Original Sin franchise, will be handling the project. Those same fans were notably confused, however, by the in-fiction timeline of Baldur’s Gate 3.

H. P. Lovecraft (M.C. Tuggle): How is it possible that the feverish works of a writer who died in poverty and obscurity more than 80 years ago still matter?

And yet they do matter, and to a growing number of fans and admirers. Here are three recent takes on Lovecraft’s continuing popularity, all from vastly different points of view, though they agree Howard Phillips Lovecraft has something to say to modern audiences.

Biography (Gardnerffox.com): This book is far overdue! Why wasn’t this book written twenty years ago? The comic book and pulp paperback industries, primarily American, brought the majority of what the world consumes as entertainment, today. It should go without being said that most of the people creating for these two industries would not have known the impact their work would have on generation upon generation of creatives.

Fiction & RPG (Cirsova): In the past, I’ve made the dangerous claim that good short fiction, like the kind you read in the pulps or in Appendix N, poses a threat to a product-driven OSR whose focus has moved away from systems and into settings materials and modules. My reasoning is that a short story is far easier to digest and build a game around than your typical Gazetteer-style setting product with its oodles of townships, kingdoms, persons of personage, blah blah blah.

RPG (Rlyehreviews): One of the issues with RuneQuest—recently and beautifully republished as RuneQuest Classic by Chaosim, Inc.—was what it hinted at and did not provide. It hinted at a setting, that of Glorantha, which we know of today in all of its richness and detail through numerous roleplaying games and supplements.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): Jack Vance was born on this date, August 28, in 1916.  We lost him on May 26, 2013.  Vance was a master of both science fiction and fantasy.  He often wrote in a highly stylistic manner.  I first read Vance in The Hugo Winners, edited by Isaac Asimov, when I was a freshman in high school.  That volume contained “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle”. 

D&D (Skulls in the Stars): As long as I’m still on an old school kick, let me try and catch up with all my posts from twitter! Part 1 of Old School Dungeons & Dragons on the blog can be read here.

Without further ado, here’s part 2! N4: Treasure Hunt (1986), by Aaron Allston. The first thing you may notice when looking at the cover is that this module is unusual in that it is for 0th level characters! What is the deal with that?

Gaming (Postmodern Pulps): Today I just wanted to highlight the wargame I am most invested in on an emotional level – Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000. For those who don’t know what it is – I’ll do this REAL QUICK – a bunch of British tabletop miniatures folks had a set of wargaming rules called Warhammer. It had armies of Elves and Dwarfs and guys with swords and pikes, and orcs and goblins, even skeletons and ghouls and “chaos” warriors and monsters.

D&D (Brain Leakage): Last week, I talked a little about the corporate same-y-ness that overtook later editions of D&D, and how it differed from the kitchen sink, anything goes weirdness of 1st Edition AD&D. That post was written largely in response to a recent episode of Geek Gab.

Macabre Science Fiction (Old Style Tales): After 1906 Wells’ speculative fiction output had rapidly dried, and was only sporadic (and never particularly effective, unique, or good) after that point. During the fifteen years that he did write speculative fiction (which, to clarify, includes sci-fi, weird tales, ghost stories, horror, mystery, fantasy, alternate history, apocalyptic fiction, utopian fiction, and paranormal: all genres which Wells contributed in sizeable ways), Wells wrote nearly two dozen short stories of horror and the supernatural, most of which were of high literary merit as well as being entertaining. fter 1906 Wells’ speculative fiction output had rapidly dried, and was only sporadic (and never particularly e, unique, after that point.

Science Fiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): As I have thought more on it, I see that a distinction can be made between two types of projection, speculation, or extrapolation in science fiction:

First are things that don’t change. These are easy to project into the future because what is true today will also be true tomorrow. I’m thinking specifically here of human nature. If you write convincingly about human nature, your story can never be obsolete. Witness the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed nearly three millennia ago and still comprehendible to us today because its people are real.  

Tolkien (Alas Not Me): If much of what we have seen in the first three chapters of Book Four traces a descent for Frodo, the next three chapters will show his path turn upward again. For the pity he showed Gollum is Frodo at his best, and confirms the good opinion Gandalf and Bilbo have of him. Soon, though, and in the name of his quest he uses the Ring to dominate a Gollum whom he would not kill and could not set loose. 

Fiction (Postmodern Pulps):  I wanted to highlight a series of fiction anthologies being put out by Wolfpack Publishing, and curated/edited by Paul Bishop, a retired LAPD detective and venerable novelist. The first anthology, Pattern of Behavior I read as soon as it was released, and while not every one of the stories was entirely my bag, so to speak, all of them were well-crafted tales from highly-talented authors.

Sensor Sweep published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[andrewuttaro]

Crash Course Soccer: Why should you love soccer?

Why should you love soccer? As I put together the two accompanying graphics explaining the broad strokes of soccer I thought about this question. A few months ago I wrote an open letter with all your swears and what not ranting about how awesome the sport is. Here I thought I would lay it out a little less emphatically. I’ve been pondering why I love soccer for a longtime since I myself got back into the sport in 2016. I say “got back into soccer” because I had sorta been raised on it. My dad took me to Rochester Rhinos games since the dawn of that team. That practice dropped off as the 2000s went on and my most tangible memories of soccer are the quadrennial get togethers my family had around the World Cup. Soccer brings my family together. My sisters played varsity while I only went as far as U8 soccer as an elementary schooler.

My sports viewing life begins and ends with the Buffalo Sabres. I am a huge hockey fan and I know the NHL front and back. Even though it’s been more or less a decade of torment for us Sabres fans I still watched NHL hockey. The NHL after all is the greatest hockey league in the world simply by virtue of the talent that finds its way into that league. The same is generally true across NFL, NBA, MLB and even a handful of other sports. We are very blessed as Americans to have easy access to some of the best sports in the world. The first thing you may need to overcome in loving soccer is that this is simply not true with any North American soccer league: the best players simply don’t play in Major League Soccer or even the top Mexican Soccer league, Liga MX.

But I’m not going to spring graphics and comparisons on you just yet. First we have to talk about why sports are entertaining. I’m going to do some toddler stuff here so bear with me: NFL football is run-crash-boom entertaining. NBA basketball is dodge-jump-swish entertaining. MLB baseball is click-rush-slide exciting. NHL hockey is crash-deke-pop exciting. That little exercise is meant to evoke the feelings of watching a game in one of those leagues. Each sport is very different not just in rules and goals, but in what is exciting about the sport itself. I struggle to come up with a similar onomatopoeia series for soccer… I guess it would be kick-swirl-sing but that seems stupid compared to the others. I love soccer for the game itself, but the experience of soccer is on a whole different level. I say that because Soccer functions differently in a lot of ways. The culture of soccer isn’t just supplemental like the culture around some other sports you maybe familiar with; in soccer the culture around the team is instrumental.

I’m not going to attempt to seduce you into liking soccer with pretty goals or strategic formations or even dazzle you with the much higher number of team trophies you can win in most soccer leagues. That’s what the neat graphics I put together are for. No, for what soccer lacks in having A+ talent on this continent it makes up for with fan participation. Fan participation in soccer is bar none the best you’ll find in sports. Yeah, I’ve seen the tailgates and heard the twelfth man cheers but I’m telling you it’s different; soccer fans are so empowered to participate they form supporters groups. These groups don’t just sing and cheer at games; they’re often a part of club branding, identity and in Germany for example, actual ownership of the clubs. Supporter Groups drive narrative in a way that simply has no comparison in the four big North American Sports leagues. The history of the soccer club is fundamentally intertwined with the history of its supporters. Unlike the generic nature of the twelfth man/#1 fan stuff here in North America supporters groups write the story more than the team itself even does. There’s a power in that. This power of supporters is amplified by promotion/relegation, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I find the supporters group I’m a part of to be a better form of comradery than anything I can find in the NHL or certainly in football. Buffalo is known for its tailgating culture and I’ve participated in that; even that doesn’t compare with supporters groups. Ultimately that’s just something you need to experience but what I can tell you on this note is that there is something special about deciding which title you care most about your team winning: US Open Cup, MLS Cup or the Supporters Shield? Premier League title, FA Cup, or Champions League? There are three notable trophies in most soccer leagues and that is simply not the same in the four big sports of North America. That’s not to mention in most soccer leagues around the world there is promotion and relegation. That’s incredible. The thrill of potentially getting into a higher league for just being great at soccer, or on the other hand, the horror of being relegated to a lower league is profound. It really changes the way you look at the sport itself. My Buffalo Sabres would’ve never tanked in 2014-2015 if that would have got them relegated to the AHL. Moreover, any shmuck can start a club in the ninth division and have a route to compete on the biggest stage at the top-flight. I’m not telling you it happens all the time but that alone is incredible.

Soccer is the world’s sport. That’s not just true on a purely socio-economic level. Soccer, even in this country incorporates a cross section of humanity. Teams have people of many nationalities, skin colors, religions and orientations. While I can say the NHL skews toward white Canadians and white northern Europeans, there is just no way to talk about soccer that way. It is really the only sport that can claim to be for everyone in tangible, visible ways. That leads into my third big point: it is the single most accessible sport in the world. Promotion/Relegation makes access to open leagues egalitarian and even democratic as smaller towns and cities decide if they want to throw support behind a local startup. The materials to play soccer also make it accessible financially: in training you really don’t even need a goal you just need a ball. Moreover, no sport is easier to understand. That should really be the centerpiece of this article, but that onomatopoeia was just too fun an exercise.

You put the ball in the net, and you do it with your feet. That really is the just of it. Hockey is similarly straightforward and maybe you could say basketball is too but man, soccer is concise. I’d also venture to say outdoor sports with as little padding and player equipment as possible has a more authentic feel to it but that’s getting into the weeds and I don’t want to debate rugby with you. At the end of the day loving any sport is a subjective, personal choice. Before we wrap this up how about I share a personal story.

In 2017 I had been supporting Major League Soccer’s New York City Football Club for more than a year. Remember how I mentioned those Rochester Rhinos games I was brought to as a child? Well I had kept tabs on the Rhinos as far back as 2015 when they won the USL Cup. In spite of that title the outlook was not good in Rochester. Attendance had been waning for a decade after the MLS push failed. I was still salty about NYCFC bowing out of their playoffs in the semifinals when I got the news the Rhinos were going to go on hiatus. I was heartbroken. Normally hiatus is what comes before folding and I felt my split attention with a downstate club sucked away some of my support from the club that needed it more. The club that needed me more is still on hiatus. The Buffalo Sabres have broken my heart a lot but no sports heartbreak can compare to the Rochester Rhinos. I hope I can support them in a game again one day.

Anyway, buried somewhere in the paragraphs above is my reason for loving soccer. I hope I provided some insight for you to think about it. Once again, if you need some more help thinking about it check out the two graphics below. They are the actual “crash course” in soccer. Share this with a friend who you think might find it interesting. Maybe you’re trying to rope someone else into the sport. If you ever want to talk about it some more feel free to reach out to me @UttaroSports on twitter or right here on Tumblr. I love talking about the why of it all. I also love stories if you couldn’t tell. And if you’re interested in closer details on a specific club, oh well the Rhinos are at the front of my brain about 25% of my waking hours and 75% of my sleeping hours. I’d love to bring you into the Regulars. Either way…

Thanks for Reading.  

[terabitweb]

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: stephenlawton

The future of SIEM is cloudy, literally and figuratively, as companies strive to keep up with potentially billions of events.

It has become an industry cliché to say that SIEM (security information and event management) is dead. Some SIEM vendors love those pronouncements because it drives wavering customers to make purchases before their SIEM systems of choice disappear. But here is food for thought: What if it is not that SIEM is too slow for the modern enterprise, but rather that today’s modern enterprise has become too slow for the SIEM?

Add to that changes in how companies create their homegrown software using DevSecOps (software development security operations), often referred to, correctly or not, simply as DevOps. So, with that in mind, would one still make the argument SIEM is dead or that it is more important than ever before?

One more consideration: The “death” of SIEM might simply come to pass when all the functionality of the technology is simply renamed something else for marketing purposes to differentiate the next-generation SIEM from legacy products. Sometimes “death” is evolution.

The concerns about SIEM, however, do not end with legacy-weighted-down slowness. A SIEM is not designed to work on its own and it never was. Many experts argue that it needs custom-crafted software from each enterprise to supplement the SIEM, along with a healthy dose of machine learning capabilities — two things that a lot of enterprises have not yet bothered to add.

Billions of events

Also, the number of attacks that a SIEM system has to deal with in the 2018 enterprise is massive and overwhelming. Umesh Yerram is the chief data protection officer at AmerisourceBergen, a $150 billion company ranked twelfth on the 2018 Fortune 500 list. He reports that his SIEM generates more than one billion events a week, a thoroughly unmanageable number. Using machine learning software that sits atop the company’s SIEM, Yerram say that the “more than one billion” number is reduced to “less than a thousand” incidents that ML deems worthy of further investigation. That amount, he notes, is a manageable number for the AmerisourceBergen security team to probe.

Sammy Migues, co-founder, BSIMM

Although many have questioned how accurate and precise ML screening is — it typically depends on what the system is programmed to seek — the counter-argument is that there is no viable alternative given the massive number of attacks that are being launched. For better or worse, machine learning is the only option today for whittling down that number materially to something manageable.

This does raise the question of how much IT leaders trust ML and the answer is typically “not that much. But what choice do we have?” he says.

“Having automation making security decisions for you, that is a very hard thing for a lot of large organizations to swallow,” says Sammy Migues, co-founder of BSIMM in Mountain View, Calif. While the company is called BSIMM, the name actually is an acronym for “building security in maturity model.”

Lock-in or replace

Allan Alford, CISO for Mitel, a $1.4 billion telecommunications firm headquartered in Ottawa, agrees. “Yes, [automation] requires more trust in the analytics, but you kind of have to trust it, as you need the fast response capabilities,” he says.

That said, Migues argues, the future will be an IT world filled with far more automation and fewer humans. Security management might have emotional and intellectual qualms about it, but the pragmatics of the growth of attacks — coupled with a serious shortage of appropriately trained and experienced security professionals — will give them little choice, he says.

“The future of SIEM software is tracking every piece of software everywhere, monitoring every connection between every piece of software, helping Ops tell Dev that something is awry, and enabling Sec to make decisions about its small piece of the software pie and react at that cadence,” Migues says.

“Some 90 percent of this will be with bots — no humans in the loop. Without good SIEM-like software, there is no real DevSecOps. Forward thinking DevOps shops are finding ways to fuse the configuration of their orchestration and other continuous delivery tools with intentional tagging and synthesis of SIEM alerts before humans receive them,” he continues. “And, because this information is drawn from delivery and production logs, it reflects actual design rather than the best intentions scrawled on a whiteboard.”

Allan Alford, CISO, Mitel

Migues also points out an organizational structure issue can create a SIEM problem. Any technology deeply embedded in the typical Fortune 1000 company — and it is hard to describe a SIEM implementation as anything other than deeply embedded — can take a long time to replace given the massive number of systems it touches and the potential disruption from a major change. That is a form of proprietary lock-in: It is far easier for IT to take update after update and even upgrade after upgrade than to go through the bidding and purchase paperwork — and delays — of purchasing a different SIEM system from a different company.

The idea of doing a major overhaul — a complete rip-and-replace — can strike fear into even the stoutest CISO. Sometimes, however, the stars align and such a major overhaul is appropriate.

Michael Simmons, CISO for $21 billion Southwest Airlines in Dallas, is a bit ambivalent about the SIEM future. “SIEMs still have a place today, but that may dwindle over time,” Simmons says. “They’re not easy to manage. Can they adapt and can their technology capabilities morph [into the future] easily? Will there be disruptive new players who come” and brand their SIEM-efforts something other than SIEM? This concerns Simmons.

The topic of SIEM is close to Simmons’ thinking as his airline just replaced its SIEM with a SIEM that was entirely cloud-based SIEM leveraging infrastructure as a service.

Normally a full replacement of a SIEM would be unthinkable for a system that is integrated into so many parts of a network, but Simmons says it just so happened that an earlier security and IT effort to integrate the prior SIEM never quite worked right. “We never got it effectively implemented so I had a much cleaner rip-and-replace,” Simmons says.

The reason why Simmons did such a radical upgrade is clear. “The magnitude of (security event) numbers is what was forcing the conversation, a rapidly changing and evolving threat landscape,” Simmons says.

Pricing, as always, is another consideration — not necessarily the price itself, but rather the mechanism by which the price is determined.

Alford says that, of the many SIEM products he has worked with — he has held CISO or related security titles with several companies — he has seen only three, distinct SIEM pricing approaches. He identifies them as: the raw size of data gathered and the log size, the IP addresses to be monitored, and the number of sensors and aggregators/processors purchased/deployed.

“Regarding the pricing model question, I don’t really think pricing models per se determine higher or lower cost. It’s been my experience that [sensors and processors are] cheaper overall, but I think that’s because the companies using that model are deliberately pricing under the guys who still do [log size]. So it’s not the model per se,” Alford says.

Regarding the log size and IP addresses options, he says “the migration of applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and the rigorous purging of legacy systems mean a theoretical reduction in cost of ownership. However, business growth and acquisitions outweigh this. Note that more users equals more traffic equals more logs, even if the total IP address count goes down.

“In reality,” he continues, “regardless of model, you are going up, not down, on usage of your SIEM year over year. And the SOC (security operations center) manager wants more feeds anyway, as the more data points he gets, the more accurate he is.”

Feeding the beast

In general, Alford sees the SIEM battle as being a race against changing threat vectors, network environment changes and matching software capabilities with enterprise needs and wants. And he is not seeing IT typically winning that race. “We’re fighting an uphill battle. The [increasing number of] feeds into the SOC [means that IT is] fighting a signal-to-noise ratio” battle, with signal meaning real security events and noise referring to false positives.

“We’ve hit a plateau and are making no further progress,” Alford says. “If you don’t have UEBA (user and entity behavior analytics) and ML, some shops just hit the wall.”

Alford’s top SIEM concern is that too many companies treat SIEMs as though they were standalone, shrink-wrapped software with no need for customized code while being focused on the user’s specific situations and needs. That is an untenable move.

“You still have to have the care and feeding of your SIEM. Somebody on your team must be dedicated to constantly tweaking your SIEM, training and teaching it and feeding it,” Alford says. “The idea that a SIEM out of the box is sufficient is ludicrous. A SIEM is nothing more than an aggregator and an incomplete aggregator at that. SIEM without automation is incomplete. You have to fine tune what to ignore and what to look for.”

Dennis Chow, director of penetration testing, KPMG

Migues opines that “As we get smarter, we develop different expectations of technology. Soon, the organization’s expectations will have exceeded its grasp. SIEM is in the troth of disillusionment. What we needed and what we wanted could not be met.”

Dennis Chow, the director of penetration testing at KPMG, agrees with Alford. “Everyone keeps claiming SIEM is ‘dead.’ It really isn’t. It’s just evolving. All the new buzzwords like orchestration, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), UBA (user behavioral analytics) and threat intelligence were always supposed to be part of what a true SIEM was. What we saw was first generation vendors doing a [release to manufacturing] and realistically releasing what I deem a half-baked product. The same is true for most of these orchestration and ‘threat intelligence’ tools. SIEM is going to be more of this loose term in the future, like AI is today,” Chow says.

“I’m former military and have had opportunities to observe how three-letter agencies deal with cyberintelligence-related needs,” he continues. “SIEM was supposed to have solid use-case correlation and be complete enough to automate response actions. To be honest, I don’t really call anything a SIEM unless it can also integrate ML functions, post-alert/script execution, and also be able to communicate in standard protocols to other security program components/pieces.”

But Chow is not quite finished. “Don’t forget to include common SSH and SSL termination to decrypt which is mostly encrypted traffic now. If you aren’t decrypting traffic, you’re missing out on so much. To much of the industry’s dismay, first [generation] SIEM is also failing because of a gross lack of talent to properly deploy, tune, and extend their existing tools.”

Customization Challenge

AmerisourceBergen’s Yerram says that customization is desirable, but, depending on the SIEM being used, is not always do-able. “The product are sometimes limited in how much customization you can do,” Yerram says.

Either way, customization takes resources, both for staffing levels and configuring the SIEM. For example, let us assume a SIEM saw a security incident and confirmed, to a limited extent, that it appears to be real, meaningful and dangerous. Once all that happens, it is critical for someone or something to alert all of the key players right away. Has someone alerted the VPN team, the Windows team, or a threat hunter? While appropriate staffing levels are essential simply to support basic SIEM maintenance, the company needs to ensure that it balances funding for maintenance and management with that of improving with providing the requisite staff for all the necessary security teams.

Alford recalls that the earliest days of SIEM marketing suggested that companies could purchase a SIEM and replace some tier-one analysts, a claim that some EUBA vendors are making today. The claims were not true in the past nor are they accurate today, Alford says.

Like everything in IT and security, the cloud is changing many of the rules and the realities. As more data gets poured into the cloud, the type of cloud structure becomes critical, especially for SIEM security issues, Alford says.

Mitch Thomas, CSO, Encompass Health

“The more you offload to the cloud, the more you offload everything to the cloud, including security awareness,” Alford says. SaaS is especially problematic. With SaaS, “you’re handing over a good bit of trust. What you’re going to be able to monitor are the ins and outs. You’ll have no visibility inside,” Alford says, adding that it is essential to structure cloud deals that allow for users to have full visibility — and even better control — over all elements of the cloud infrastructure.

Mitch Thomas, CSO for Birmingham, Ala-based Encompass Health, a $3.9 billion healthcare company, agrees that SIEM should automate the analysts’ works. “SIEM platforms should automate the work of tier one analysts to allow teams to focus on the tier two and tier three work of threat hunting, incident response, closing the OODA loop faster, which also helps with the skills shortage problem,” he opines. (The OODA loop — observe, orient, decide, and act — was developed by the US military for combat operations processes.)

KPMG’s Chow also expresses concerns about the cloud and security. “Cloud testing is a pain…. There’s so much complexity and you have to test all of these components,” Chow says, adding that CISOs must deal with “all of this stuff that is proprietary to that cloud.”

Chow agrees with Alford that an agreement, including architectural access and control, is critical. “You need to have an architectural use case of the cloud to know what you’re doing. The cloud has limitations on how you manage it. You don’t have the rights like you do with on-prem.”

Trillions of lines of code

Still, cloud is not going to be easy to avoid. Swapnil Deshmukh, the security evangelist leading DevSecOps at Visa in Foster City, Calif., says that because of the nature of the Visa network and the fact that it transfers money around the planet, it gets attacked continually. He estimates that the Visa SIEM sees 115 million events per second “and those are staggering numbers. We have an explosion of data.”

(Due to the payments nature of its business, Deshmukh notes, Visa defines events much more broadly than many other companies. For Visa, an event is any transaction anywhere in the world. That is because it must analyze every transaction to see if there are any red flags. Others view an event as a security event and each event already reflects some pattern deviation worthy of further exploration.)

That explosion of events is especially true for a company like Visa that is so heavily regulated, Deshmukh says. “You need to store this data somewhere, which adds to the hardware costs” so that necessitates employing the cloud, he says. “With these trillions of lines of code, how do you identify if there is any personally identifiable data?” he asks. That forces an awful lot of data sanitization.

“These events are growing exponentially, due to programmable infrastructure and hyperconnected workplace and user can now access sensitive information from mobile phone, from software-defined WANs or even on various cloud offerings,” Deshmukh says. “This explosion of event logging is causing scalability issue for many SIEM storage. In near future, SIEM must solve the scalability problem.

“Currently, organizations with deeper pockets are solving this problem by adding expensive infrastructure to SIEM storage or leveraging cloud storage options such as Amazon S3 buckets or Google cloud storage,” he continues. “As these events are sensitive in nature, organizations storing information on cloud might have to jump additional hops of managing keys that tokenize these events. From budgeting standpoint, adding storage to support SIEM may add huge overhead and in many cases it can be a deal breaker for organizations with limited budget.”

The cost of SIEM support is not limited only to small or mid-size businesses with shallow pockets. Thompson says that his team is also seeing “an exponential growth of data collection and I can’t keep pace with that from a cost standpoint.”

Responding to every SIEM alert can be daunting if filters to weed out false positives are not in place. “Every alarm, every indicator is some kind of event. How can you manage all of that?” Thomas says rhetorically.

Although some enterprises have worked with AI’s machine learning, such as AmerisourceBergen, Deshmukh says Visa hasn’t and he blames the extensive use of proprietary code used by many SIEM vendors, including the one that Visa uses. “The vendors have it in a proprietary format. Because of that, we can’t create our own models, due to the vendor’s lock-in. The proprietary format makes ML nonviable right now. That’s the reason why the adoption of machine learning in SIEM is not there yet,” Deshmukh says.

Unstructured data

Another SIEM concern that several experts touched on were challenges inherent in scanning unstructured data such as images and video.

Deshmukh says Visa does not look currently at unstructured data because, in his view, Visa’s SIEM “can’t make any sense of it” giving it “very limited visibility” into a place where cyberthieves can try and hide malware. But he expects that to change in the next few years. “In the future, we expect new techniques to convert unstructured data into structured. At this point in time, we don’t have those techniques.”

Migues agrees and he adds that even email can be baffling for analytics. “Understanding context from unstructured data is really, really hard,” Migues says. A big part of the problem is that, with unstructured data, so many enterprises, as well as vendors, use different terminology and structure to achieve similar results. “Different companies use different words, different ways,” he says.

Swapnil Deshmukh, security evangelist, Visa

For example, an email might include the words “Employee Salaries. Do Not Release” but it “doesn’t necessarily mean that it really has employee salaries,” Migues says.

Ray McKenzie, the founder and managing director for Red Beach Advisors, agrees that unstructured data is a problem, but argues that some vendors have addressed it quietly — too quietly.

“SIEMs are behind the curve, for the most part, in terms of dealing with unstructured data. You always have to add packages or add content. The SIEMs don’t recognize it upfront” and out-of-the-box, McKenzie says. “Vendors and CISOs are not talking about the unstructured data problem. Threats are a much easier discussion.”

But McKenzie maintains that he knows of some unspecified SIEM vendors who have mastered the unstructured data problem, but they are not marketing that fact. “Unstructured data is still a problem. The people who have solutions to the problem haven’t promoted it. There are platforms that can (handle unstructured data) today.”

AmerisourceBergan’s Yerram disagrees with McKenzie, at least as it impacts the major SIEM players. “No, the leading products out there — as identified [by the major analyst firms] — cannot handle unstructured data,” Yerram says.

Yerram has other practical concerns about SIEM usage. “Correlating the information and triaging takes a long time right now. I want one single pane of glass,” Yerram says, referring to one screen to handle all needed activity, rather than “having to go to multiple different consoles” so that his team can have “integration with multiple different intelligence sources. I don’t believe that a lot of the traditional SIEM devices do that. It doesn’t happen in a single screen.”

Ray McKenzie, founder and managing director, Red Beach Advisors

Yerram offered an example of the SIEM detecting suspicious activity on an IP address. “To look up who owns that address, I have to go to multiple different sources [on different screens] to collect that information,” Yerram says.

Machine learning analysis can be used to recommend actions by the security staff or the ML can be instructed to take specific actions automatically when it encounters certain conditions. Yerram says his team does a little ML automation, but they are being cautious.

ML automation “is a good idea once you teach the system the right things” to justify an automatic reaction, Yerram says. “Our automation is limited right now. We are still taking our time to make sure that we are getting it right. There can be significant impact on the brand [due to the automatic ML action] causing an outage of some fashion. It comes down to what you teach and what the comfort level is.”

So what is the future of SIEM? That can be difficult to determine, short of assuming increased integration with AI and machine learning. As noted, the next generation of SIEM might distinguish itself by not even using the term “SIEM.” Whatever the future of SIEM will be, it is a given that it will still be big, complex, embedded into every corner of the network, and more than likely, still expensive. What it likely will not be is plug-and-play.

The post SIEMple evolution: The future for a cloud-based SIEM appeared first on SC Media.

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Go to Source Author: stephenlawton SIEMple evolution: The future for a cloud-based SIEM Original Post from SC Magazine Author: stephenlawton The future of SIEM is cloudy, literally and figuratively, as companies strive to keep up with potentially billions of events.

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Most SEOs use third-party tools to figure out exactly what people are looking for, just how users are looking for issues, and use that to improve their content. SEOs have understood user lookup intent to fall broadly straight into the following categories and generally there is an excellent post upon Moz about this. The word "SEO" can also refer to "Search Engine Optimizer". To get more exposure within visual searches, make sure that will likes, shares and comments upon social media posts all have got SEO relevance. Because there was a load of positive reviews and I am just along the way of understanding local SEO and local company lead generation online. The firm offers excellent SEO packages that will help rank the clients' site within top three pages associated with search engine pages. Google's always tweaking its search algorithms, so there is no guarantee that SEO techniques that worked in the past will keep doing work in the future. The particular growth of Google's featured little, voice search, Local SEO, plus PPC gives better lead in order to diverting traffic to your web site as compared to the natural listing. SEO stands with regard to seo. In case you thought mobile SEO would certainly slow down anytime soon, all of us hate to disappoint you. Will be voice search the next huge thing” in SEO? In accordance, more than the years SEO's have invested large amounts of time developing backlinks, and some have also tried manipulating this part associated with the search algorithms. Hence, it is most effective not to resort to any kind of such Black Hat SEO strategies for the sake of enhancing your website rankings. Some thing which was troubling about 2017, and as we head in to 2018, may be the new wave associated with organizations merely bolting on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION as a service without any kind of real appreciation of structuring web site architectures and content for each humans and search engine knowing. Join us along with this live webinar about research engine optimization (SEO) with the partners at AddThis. However 2 months ago Google turned the particular SEO world upside down, saying that redirects no longer end result in losing PageRank and a person are free to use any kind of kind of 3xx redirection with no the fear to shed your ranks.

Techmagnate, as a responsible digital advertising agency, is hereby compiling almost all the major SEO updates, INFORMATION, strategies and techniques for 2018. We're predicting SEO strategies in order to become increasingly localised and customized for individual users instead associated with groups of users. In essence there are around six Local SEO ranking factors that play a major role. So it is really important for you to understand the guidelines in the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION industry and make certain that the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency that is handling your own account uses techniques that conform with the search engines' suggestions and involves no deception. Search Engine criteria being updated every minute, this is hard to know in order to have an SEO company or even individual which techniques still operating. Most people are putting an emphasis on the user experience benefit more than any potential SEO benefit, plus that is as it ought to be. These are usually only a few off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques for building links.

This offpage SEO activity became immensely popular after Google's Gary Illyes revealed that a thriving community can boost SERP rankings immensely. For example, Copyblogger focuses on the keyword SEO copywriting” upon one of their landing web pages. In 2108, you will see at minimum five SEO trends no company can afford not to get advantage of. These trends will certainly be the cornerstone of achievement for hundreds of new plus thriving businesses, which will furthermore determine the end result associated with their future success. In our previous blog, we all discuss the fundamentals of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and significance of on web page SEO; but it can furthermore be very true that in order to bring the website within the initial page of Google, it actually is imperative to put work on off page as nicely as on page SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is really a holistic work of all pieces of the company, including social media, marketing and advertising, web design, networking and copywriting. My SEO definition is the concentrate on strategies that may lead to placement around the lookup engine results pages (often known to as SERPS) when the user performs a search (query). I agree with the particular point you made of making use of LSI keywords and long-form content material as part of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. Thinking associated with local search only as MyBusiness optimization may limit the possibilities businesses (especially local businesses) may have to earn SEO presence and traffic. Optimizing your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy, which includes site rate and content, to reach your own mobile customer will become even more important than ever in 2018. Other SEO ranking factors include: accessible URLs, domain age (older is generally better), page speed, mobile friendliness, business information, and technical SEO. Concerning on-page SEO best methods, I usually link out to various other quality relevant pages on various other websites where possible and exactly where a human would find this valuable.

Naturally, the tendencies in SEO strategies vary significantly and rather rapidly, making this essential for marketers to maintain track from the necessary modifications that need to be created to improve user experience. Their full thoughts are usually catalogued in our annual e-book The eBook, titled ‘The Greatest Explained SEO in 2018: fifty Insiders on the Future associated with Search, ' provides detailed information about from GDRP to Amazon . com Alexa. 2018 is almost all about getting the victory, exactly where the SEO success will not really depend on how you handle and optimize your website intended for Google, rather, Google will today search for the technical specifications, which are simple but should. The particular user experience reaches the primary of your SEO strategy. It will end up being helpful if you share several on-page SEO tips and just how to perform a keyword study. Really important that you think associated with your SEO strategy and targets if you map out all associated with your other internet marketing programs, as they can help enhance your engine optimization with small to no extra effort, apart from some creative thinking. SEO (or Search Engine Optimization ) is probably the most significant competitive digital marketing advantage that you could have over your competition. For entrepreneurs who were brought up inside the ‘traditional SEO market, ' 2018 is a time in order to adapt or die. Today, I'll discuss the on-page SEO techniques which will assist you to increase your position searching results in 2018. Long descriptions are usually great for Youtube video SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and give you a location to add timestamps, useful hyperlinks, and an overall summary. SEO could be the process associated with maximizing a site's search motors visibility to connect with the potential users and customers throughout their search journey. 2 tools to help with nearby SEO are BrightLocal (for rankings) and MozLocal (for local lookup optimization). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION professionals have highlighted the chance that Google will get much more specific in analyzing relevant content material. CRAWL it, such as Google does, with (for example) Screaming Frog SEO spider, and repair malformed links or things that will result in server errors (500), broken hyperlinks (400+) and unnecessary redirects (300+).

SEO has been enjoying a significant role in position up your website, and this has been even misused simply by many to get the unimportant content on top of the particular search engines. Considering simply how much effort it requires to have a quality SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION campaign, many people choose in order to outsource any part of this. To stay afloat with SEO in 2018, create sure that you're optimizing for your user, not the search motor. In this fast developing world, SEO techniques always maintain changes time to time plus the worst part is that will you simply might not also know it. That's why a person always need to stay up-to-date using the latest trends and methods in SEO. From the particular basics of how search motors work and how they position the websites to the innovative understanding of SEO tools plus techniques, a training course will certainly cover the entire spectrum associated with Online marketing skills. If RankBrain will turn out to be more and more influential within rankings, which is very most likely, that means that SEO's will certainly start optimizing more and a lot more for user experience instead associated with other factors. The particular rise of featured snippets, PAY PER CLICK, voice search and local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can often yield better results compared to an organic ranking. SEO in 2018 is also expected to include some wonderful features with new technology and the trends are currently favoring the popular expectations. Content that will is clearly designed for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION purposes is something that Search engines is already reducing - termination is the only way this can go. Dropping obvious key phrases into a piece of content material as many times as you possibly can, whilst not focusing on the high quality and relevance of the content material will get a site no place (apart from down! ). So, rather than packing plus cracking a keyword into your own content as much as a person can, white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will help you with the particular usage in such a method that this content makes sense plus engages visitors well. I can clearly state that In 2018, Smart SEOs and even data-driven company will certainly focus more on Searcher intention and less on keyword quantity, difficulty and links metrics. Here I'll show a person using the two main equipment within the Google Keyword Adviser that will land you a wonderful list of keywords for your own SEO campaigns. Serpstat is an helpful digital growth hacking tool in order to help you optimize your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, PPC and content marketing strategies. SEO, or even search engine optimisation, is one particular of the most significant aspects of running a successful web site. So, direct marketing and advertising of your website is a good indirect but one of the particular best SEO technique you may use to rank on the particular first page searching results. So how are a person able to make sure in order to stay on top of the particular SEO trends for 2018? The keywords and Linking SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies will take the backcourt. The field of lookup SEO 2019 PDF engine optimization (SEO) is certainly ever-changing. A person are not completely wrong, yet the latest SEO Trends plus Techniques in 2018 is very complicated. With search motor optimization (SEO) applications, you are usually able to "optimize" your cyberspace position, which roundup provides exactly what you need to choose the particular right tool.