#which obviously lead us to think one ep = one property and that is how they started as well | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rappaccini · 4 years ago

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tua 1x07 rewatch

twitter thread.

ok. so, this title is “the day that was.” which, obviously, is to do with this day’s contents not being erased.

0:00: the last episode ended on “who’s harold jenkins?” and this episode leaps into an answer: here he is. here’s his birth, and his childhood, and his father.

harold jenkins was born at 7am on 10/1/89

“one” by three dog night. about being alone. honestly, i think this song might be a better fit for luther’s episode (given that it’s about being ‘one’ and being alone after everyone else left, which is what his intro in ep 4 is about), but sure. it works for harold.

i like that the narrator returns, and assures us that everything is perfectly normal about this child.

harold’s birth leads to his mother’s death.

1:15: harold, age 11-13, is an academy fan.

harold mentions “doctor terminal” who’s either a real villain (one from the comics) or one made up for the ua toy line.

harold lives now in the same house he grew up in as a little boy.

harold’s dad is revealed to be an alcoholic in a very... on the nose way.

1:30: the reginald figurine he never got as a child; stealing the figure as an adult was a way of completing his collection (also, stealing a literal father figure? topical)

also, a tua breakfast cereal in the background.

1:50: harold’s dad hits him, and he, teary-eyed, sews a tua mask and uniform, and runs away to ‘join the academy’.

there are dozens of children gathered around the mansion-- a thing that doesn’t happen at all anymore-- and many of them are in handmade costumes.

also notable are the names of the characters-- ‘seance, spaceboy’-- another set of nicknames, one from the comics, that are used here.

2:40: harold jumps the line with a suitcase, and grabs allison, declaring he’s her biggest fan. luther pulls him off her, which, if a total stranger leaps out of the crowd and grabs your sistergirlfriend, fuck yeah you’d do the same.

harold’s little admission here breaks my heart. he thinks he’s like them, and hasn’t figured his power yet.

“you have no power. you never will have power... not everyone can be powerful.”--fucking harsh reginald holy fuck.

“chasing something unattainable is a recipe for a lifetime of disappointment and resentment.” --... so what reginald’s doing with the kids, then.

also, reg’s monocle is on. in the comics, it has special properties that help him detect powers. maybe the case in the show is the same, maybe it isn’t.

and reginald literally tossing harold into the street with a crowd of onlookers jeering... ouch.

3:57: the show... wants us to hate harold because He Killed His Father but... are you fucking kidding me? he’s a scared little boy who leans heavily into fandom and escapism to get away from his abusive environment, and after he’s rejected by all his heroes, and realizes he’s really trapped there, he decides that the only way to feel safe is to kill his dad.

i think the implication with him wearing his homemade ua costume is that he’s trying to be a ‘hero.’ and that the intended interpretation is that he was Too Evil to understand how to be a True Hero Like The Hargreeves Kids... rather than, say, the ua just being full of shit from day 1. that or they were just dogshit at executing it.

writers, what the fuck. no really: this whole show has held off of good victim-bad victim blaming, but now all of a sudden harold is an evil Bad Victim who is Just Like His Dad.

the problem is... this backstory fills me with sympathy for him and i feel nothing but sadness about what happens to him. honestly, they should’ve just leaned more into harold being an Obsessive Fan who becomes convinced that he owns the academy and furious when they do things he disapproves of, and decides to take revenge on them for that.

“he got twelve years” - blunt title card. like that.

5:04: harold leaves state corrections with a ua comic and paper mask. i get that this is supposed to be ~ooh scary~ but i don’t feel that way at all. he had a hobby when he was locked up, and good on him for that.

5:29: i think the implication is that harold Just Got Out before the events of ep 1 but that doesn’t work. he had at least a few years to open his business, establish himself, and participate in that charity auction. he clearly got his life together after he got out, before he just inexplicably decided to tear into things.

i wish they’d changed his revenge plot. why on earth is he targeting the academy. ‘oh but i followed their example and killed my dad and was punished for it’ is flimsy, and so is ‘they rejected me so i had to kill my dad.’

and changing your name... makes sense. harold jenkins was an abused little boy with a record. leonard peabody is a new start.

i do really like seeing klaus hurrying off to dump the book from a new perspective. that i really enjoy.

but i think it’s... odd that leonard would just... after everything he accomplished after he got out... decide to fuck up the academy. like, what triggered this? he’s clearly fine?

6:15: “conjuring incident 06/16/01: i found that number four was simply not progressing in his ability to conjure the non-living. he seems to not want to embrace this power. i sped up that ability tonight by locking him in the mausoleum overnight, hypothetically he is seeing gore and death, but to be effective he must become desensitized to this. notes from incident: klaus resistant. more fearful than i’ve ever seen him. trying to squeeze himself through gated bars. appears to be seeing if he has another superpower he doesn’t know about. 0:36: appears to have made first contact with dead spirits.”

and on the opposite page, obstructed, it seems like reginald ranked the kids on ten different skills: two obstructed, curiosity, adaptability, c[???], trustworthiness, trustingness, organization, c[???], and intelligence. the kid on the opposite page ranks a 9 in curiosity, a 10 in adaptability, a 4 in what i’m guessing is commitment, a 6 in trustworthiness, a 3 in trustingness, a 7 in organization, an 8 in c[???], and a 10 in intelligence. my guess is, this is number five’s stat page.

6:30: there’s a space left for ben over allison’s shoulder.

also, harold learning that he’s responsible for the apocalypse when he sneaks back to get the reg figure... idk. feel like he doesn’t need to know that, just that they’re after him.

but the thing that changes is, now he hears the academy mention they need to hunt him down. so he’s changing his behavior accordingly.

wouldn’t it have been neat if we didn’t know who harold jenkins was yet.

6:50: vanya’s street-twisting happens no matter what.

“oh yeah, the ones that attacked us while you were getting drunk” -- diego, to klaus about hazel and cha-cha. he’s right. and that’s why no one realized klaus was missing-- they assumed he was off getting loaded and he basically was. and they’re right to be pissed; they all could have died and he didn’t bother to help them.

the commission = the temps commission

8:04: “wHaT dO yOu MeAn tImE aNd SpAcE”

diego, allison and luther, in black, white and gray. that’s our power threesome.

luther’s coat is shorter; not the big green trench he was wearing earlier-- he’s starting to come around to his body. he’s not there yet, but it’s a bit less than he had before.

“everything about us is insane. it always has been. we didn’t choose this life, we’re just living it.” -- wish the fucking fandom knew that and weren’t convinced they were good, wholesome ~literal siblingssss~ who do nothing wrong ever and live pure, perfect lives while they hold hands and sing around a campfire.

8:40: allison’s first impulse is still to go be with her child; five convinces her to throw her lot in with him with the promise that they’ll save her.

five wants to meet his niece. soft shit.

diego was in when five pointed him in a direction and showed him who to kill. literally, that’s it.

9:10: again. luther was right to bring up the moon. it will matter, just not in the way anyone thinks it does. and this luther is still hooked on dad. and he still thinks the mission meant something, because dad told him to “watch for threats”

diego calls on klaus to accompany him, but he declines.

9:46: the alluther dance piano theme plays when they part ways.

10:07: at the fortune smiles motel, we see the hazel v cha-cha plot begin, from hazel’s side. i really like this aspect of the dual episodes.

interesting weather note: the clouds are heavy overhead.

11:03: diego is convinced jenkins has to have a record. he has no evidence, but he just thinks that. he’s lucky that he’s right.

also, five/allison/diego is a teamup with a lot of fun. i love seeing the hargs break off into different pairs and duos and trios and foursomes and fivesomes. it’s great to see their personalities interact in different ways. hopefully s2 will be full of that and it’ll make sense given the characters s1 has set up.

it probably won’t, huh.

11:39: “that’s what a leader does. he leads.” diego is still obsessed with becoming the leader. and honestly i think he could really use an extended arc where he gets exactly that, and we see why he never, ever should have been the leader.

11:44: i love diego just lurking in the alley for no reason. he probably practices that.

beeman tells diego he needs to leave town, because he’s going to be blamed for eudora’s murder. which... well. on the cops’ part, it isn’t a bad conclusion. his prints are all over the crime scene. and on her body. and they did have a lot of arguments, and he did invade her workplace and disrespect her there on at least a few occasions, and he is a disgruntled ex-police academy member who disagrees with her methods. it does look really fucking bad.

12:44: i love this shot, between five and allison. i love the space between them with the steam rising. i love five leaning sulkily against the wall while allison uses the payphone.

and i like the contrast: allison using the phone to call vanya and worry about her, while in ep 2 vanya did the same. wish this moment were built up to, rather than just par for the course with allison since episode 3.

“all i ever wanted was to be a good sister to you” ... did you though

idk man five being... present in the background of this scene is an interesting choice. almost like he’s meant to be part of that conversation about failing vanya, and wanting to do better by her somehow.

13:26: “harold jenkins is leonard peabody” i wish this weren’t filmed like an afterthought; this is a significant discovery and shouldn’t be filmed like that. i wish they’d kept off on the reveal that leonard’s a creep until this moment.

also... do any of the brothers know who leonard is? vanya brings leonard to the house, but doesn’t introduce him, and only allison has met him.

13:39: luther still discovers that dad didn’t look at them, that the whole mission was a farce.

in this continuity, allison isn’t there to comfort him, so he goes on a bender and starts drinking up the bar.

and in this continuity, klaus doesn’t have diego to tie him up, so he encounters drunk luther, who wants to conjure dad so he can beat his ass.

14:20: mandatory luther-abuses-someone response: yep. in this case (the first one) he genuinely does a shitty, harmful thing. the thing you actually care about of course is that he does the thing to klaus, the handsome skinny white gay guy you and all the other straight girls in this fandom decided to fetishize.

it’s worth mentioning that luther’s drunk, and angry. it doesn’t justify what he does, but it isn’t a calculated move, it’s an expression of anger from someone who doesn’t know what to do. and surprise-surprise, people get mad and do crappy things.

yeah, luther throttling klaus is shitty. people do shitty things when they’re angry and upset and adrift. big shocker.

luther, without allison, and under the influence of all that booze, is feeling a lot of things: anger, confusion, betrayal, despair. he did everything right, followed every rule, sincerely believed in every mission. he turned down a career, friends, a home of his own. he lost his siblings and a future with allison, and it was all for nothing. of course he’s angry. of course he’s spiraling.

15:39: klaus starts clumsily mediating, appealing to luther’s feelings, asking if he needs allison-- side note: oh look, your pure fave klaus is cool with alluther. oop.

“you know i’d just hold them back. what they’re doing is too important.”

16:40: luther, inhibitions loose, and looking fro a new way to live, immediately latches onto klaus. the two were opposites for so long, what with luther clinging to every rule and klaus tripping over them all, so he thinks the best way to get over it is to swing all the way to the other side. luther desperately wants to be “carefree” and probably has for a while.

and klaus finally gets that the way he’s been living isn’t good, and initially discourages him. it’s a great contrast and a great reversal.

16:50: luther shoving klaus and sending him sliding? yeah. shitty thing to do. oh look, we’ve got two now. better set luther on fire.

18:00: neat seeing the forest scene from hazel’s perspective. neat knowing this is a standoff where both back down.

hazel mentioning birds, specifically birds who mate for life. he’s been listening to agnes a lot.

hazel wants a simple life with a partner.

i’m not sure if cha-cha’s meant to have feelings for hazel, or if she just likes him as a partner. i’m not sure if it’s meant to be this ambiguous.

20:00: i think hagnes are adorable. i also think that agnes’s whole personality is ‘redeeming love interest for bad man’ and the reason why i give it a pass is that she’s such an unconventional love interest that she makes it fresh. i still don’t... love that.

20:20: i love the tracking shot of d/a/f walking up to peabody’s porch. i love the snarky banter. i love five just chomping at the bit to kill the guy he knows is vanya’s boyfriend.

20:30: diego loves to think of himself as this big ruler guy, but he can’t keep the group together. allison immediately sneaks off, and five jumps away. he can’t keep the group together.

and his plan is to literally yeet himself through the unlocked door.

beyond that, it’s just “spread out. yell if you’re in trouble.”

writers give diego the leadership arc. make the academy schism, and diego take control, and utterly fuck it up in a massive way, and realize that he’s not a good leader, and that all of his desire to be one is wrapped up in obsession with his artificial rivalry with luther.

i love allison and five’s snark. they’re very, very similar in a lot of ways (both left home with ambitions that turned to dust, both are self-absorbed and egotistical, both left behind quieter, more anxious partners, both worry they’re unloveable)

21:22: vanya’s a member of the st. pluvium chamber orchestra. (pluvium = rain = “when evil rains”). and she’s going to make her debut as the orchestra’s principal violin. that’s probably an old photo of her they mocked up.

... was five checking out the couch where vanya and leonard screwed?

21:37: finding the ua shrine. aside from everything being scratched off, there are newspaper clippings: at some point, the academy gets the key to the city from the mayor, and they also rescue the eiffel tower (this was their debut mission in the comic, which was probably swapped with the bank heist for budgetary reasons).

“this was never about vanya. this was about us.” of course allison’s the first one to make something about her. and aside from that, the cruelty of the guy who vanya thinks adores her, secretly being interested in her family only is great. but god i wish this was a surprise and not a thing we’ve known for like three episodes now.

22:00: five passes out from blood loss (from a wound we know he has- nice touch there).... before he can fully process that vanya’s dating a guy who’s obsessed with harming the academy.

five refuses to let the siblings take care of his literal shrapnel wound, yet he was totally fine with letting vanya tend to him in the pilot. oh gee. I Wonder What The Difference Is.

also. no one seems to find helen’s corpse. did leonard get rid of it already, or did the writers Kinda Forget.

22:30: leonard has a vacation cabin, which was his grandmother’s. shit, he’s actually kind of a catch. a guy who looks exactly like the adult version of your long-lost brothercrush appears, validates you, appears to not care at all about your family, and on top of that, he gives you dick, and has a thriving business, a nice house and a cabin? i understand why she’s moving fast. i’d be going for it too.

he takes her here in this continuity bc he knows that the academy are looking for him.

“you spend your whole life trying to forget about the crap that was done to you as a kid. and then the second you step back in, you feel just as insignificant” -- so, exactly what happened to vanya in episode 1 when she went home. and i think leonard’s being totally genuine here.

vanya wardrobe note: her hair’s fully down. her makeup isn’t as subtle. her white-streaked scarf is out.

23:00: leonard doesn’t tell vanya what they’re here for until they’re at the cabin. she probably assumed they were leaving for a romantic day out.

but... he does have a point. she does need to practice. and she does owe it to herself to learn about her power.

and she still doesn’t totally get that she has powers. like with tdtw, she still slips back into denial.

24:10: hazel wanting to run away with agnes is sweet. not that unique, but sweet. i like that they are able to bond over feeling restricted by their jobs and wanting a life of their own. that plus the chemistry makes them as a relationship work.

theme: “life is short. if you want something, just go for it” alluther gave it to us in tdtw, now hagnes are doing it in this ep.

i love how this relationship is played as totally genuine, and no one says shit about her being so much older than him.

also... i keep saying this, but. a career commission man who hates his job and wants to leave it, to have a life with a much older woman.

look. hazel and cha-cha in the comics are totally different. changes were made for a reason, and it sure is telling that hazel’s plot has to do with that. the vibe keeps snowballing.

27:00: klaus walking through ben is a neat touch. can ben walk through walls?

... if ben ever goes corporeal or gets resurrected, please make his first action to absolutely pulverize himself by sprinting into a wall bc he forgets he can’t walk through it.

ben died “violently at a young age.” i get that tua is shit with continuity, so him being in a hoodie may not mean that he wasn’t on a mission (where he’d be wearing the jumpsuit) when he died. but for now, i’ll pretend that it isn’t a fuckup, and assume that ben didn’t die on a mission.

what other way can someone die ‘violently’ at a young age, factoring in that ben’s terrified of his powers and hates using them, that he’s following klaus in particular (when we know that hazel and cha-cha are followed by their victims), that he’s especially insistent about klaus getting clean.... my guess is suicide or accidental overdose via klaus’s drugs.

28:15: the family’s first impulse is to go home when they’re hurt, not the hospital.

diego meets grace. calls her mom; he seems to go back and forth.

grace’s voice is deeper, again, and her hair is down.

again... diego needed to realize that had he just waited, it’d work out. again, he doesn’t realize this. writers oop.

29:00: i like that luther, trying to Be Like Klaus, heads straight for a rave. and that klaus finds him pretty quickly bc... yeah. that’s what he’d do. it’s also worth mentioning that klaus needs to be goaded into helping luther by ben.

29:50: luther, shirtless, dopily dancing. he baby.

30:20: i find it hilarious that luther picks up a furry girl.

and i think the slow-mo catch on the pill as it flies is a great touch.

31:00: and klaus’s impulse, when he’s around substances, is to break down and go for it. makes sense.

and i love the low tracking zoom on the pill, and the pov of klaus literally crawling for it. great way to show how hooked klaus is. and the soldiers running mixed in with the ravers’ light-up shoes, and the pill being swapped out with dave’s corpse. it’s a great way to show how devastated he is about dave’s loss.

and closing on klaus, clutching the pill.

33:00: it seems like vanya works as a contractor for a music school; she has a receptionist who seems to track her lessons, but she gives them in her apartment.

and, vanya’s whipped enough to go awol on her job.

..... the writers fucked up the date, so it’s a wednesday in the show, but this date, 3 days from the 1st, is the 29th. which was a friday irl. which makes more sense: they left for a weekend together.

allison insists they need five when they go for vanya, but diego’s impulse is ‘fuck it, we’ll do it on our own.’ leader diego’s first impulse is to to leave behind wounded members of the team.

and five is unconscious, probably because if he were conscious, he’d process that vanya’s boyfriend is obsessed with the academy and dangerous, and he’d have gone with allison to help her. and if he’d have been there, everything would’ve gone differently.

the cabin is on jackpine road.

34:40: diego getting arrested, having his arm wrenched out of a sling to handcuff it. probably not procedure, but knowing cops, seems about right.

diego and rodriguez were pals, but rodriguez turns on him on the suspicion that he killed a cop. sounds about right. probably unintentionally so.

35:47: vanya and leonard practice on the pond outside the cabin.

“i watched everything my brothers and sister do ruin their lives” -- vanya’s worried her powers will do the same to her, and she’s right.

and leonard’s trying to appeal to her desire to be a hero (she’s a hargreeves, raised with the academy. she does.)

vanya’s little gestures when she snarks about being confused about how to gesture, and her giggling at her failure is... hilarious. it’s so cute.

vanya’s first alarm bells ring at leonard being eerily invested in teaching her to handle her powers. but she dismisses them when he backs off.

38:00: ... if cha-cha did fall for hazel, i’ll bet it was the Only One Bed. that shit’s powerful.

and cha-cha burning the note, only for it to be found and deciphered by hazel is a nice touch. i like seeing how he goes about tricking her.

hazel, realizing cha-cha changed her mind again and still decided to kill him, from his perspective? fun.

40:00: luther getting a fight with bowler guy over the furry girl he only vaguely is interested in is funny.

and klaus’s attack of choice is leaping onto a guy’s back- it’s something he did in the vet bar too.

40:54: klaus’s hit on the head literally killed him. i love that purgatory/the afterlife/??? is all in grayscale, and that his shirt is this explosion of gaudy color against it.

looks like god in this adaptation is a little girl. in the comics, he’s a cowboy.

klaus is agnostic. makes sense.

and god doesn’t like klaus so she sends him back to life so she doesn’t have to deal with his ass.

did god make klaus? saying “i made everything else so i must’ve made you” isn’t an answer.

she sends klaus to reginald, not telling him he’s headed to reginald. he thinks he’s running to dave.

43:12: the nite owl barbershop (watchmen ref?), with images of dave, and his brothers and reginald hanging on the walls.

“barber banter may offend.” boy will it, given that this barber’s his dad.

i like all the odd, kooky angles. it really suits the weirdness of the situation.

and reginald getting pissed at klaus for not conjuring him is on brand.

reginald, like diego, thinks of klaus’s addiction as “weakness.” diego probably got it from him.

reg shaving him gives a little bit of tension; you’re never quite sure if he’ll cut him or not.

“i just wanted you to live up to your potential.”-- a thing that shitty parents use to justify the awful things they do to their kids. ‘i wanted the best for you.’

“you especially. you were my greatest disappointment... you only scratched the surface of what you were truly capable of.” when it comes to the latter, reg is right. klaus hasn’t conjured anyone in a long time, and if he has levitation and telekinetic powers like in the comics, show klaus hasn’t even realized he has them.

“you pump yourself full of poison because you’re afraid” -- he does.

reginald admitting he should’ve burned luther’s reports instead of shoving them away. classic.

“everything i put you through, it was to prepare you for something bigger than yourselves.” i think reginald definitely had some bigger ambition for the academy, since they were “meant to save the world,” but it doesn’t justify anything he did. maybe that was what he meant for them to do, but that’s not what he did with them. he abused them, isolated them, and traumatized them, and then he sent them on missions that didn’t really accomplish anything other than racking up civilian casualties and property damage, and selling their faces to make money off of them.

“we were just kids” -- yep. boy were they.

46:45: reginald reveals that he intended to get the family together through his suicide. and well. it did work.

lol of course it fucking cuts out right as reginald gets to what he actually has to tell klaus.

47:44: good on those ravers for resuscitating klaus.

also, still not sure if kenny’s mom is intended to be the same as the woman on the bus or the woman in the bank heist, or the woman in this rave. neat if so.

48:15: vanya and leonard, after heading out for dinner, running into three cartoonish Bad Guys with beers and baseball caps. it being kinda generic af works once you realize what it’s for, but for now it’s still kinda ‘... really. okay i guess.’

the dog barking in the background = meant to make you feel nervous. add that to the deep strings.

i like that vanya’s response to the guys implying that they want to gang rape her is ‘... anyway. please fuck off.’ she is not phased at all.

the cheesiness of the whole encounter, the ‘give us the girl and we’ll give you your car,’ the ass slap, leonard playing hero-- it works because it’s a performance.

48:30: right before leonard gets punched, it starts raining. vanya’s upset.

and her response when he gets hit is to lunge at the guy and start snarling, and squirm against the guy holding her back. i feel like the fandom forgets that vanya, despite her lack of confidence, is very protective.

49:30: the way the rain explodes in a bubble of light and water around vanya, making her power visible when it’s otherwise just a ripple. it’s gorgeous.

.... but where’d she draw the power from? what noise did she use? writers, do you know how vanya’s powers work?

49:45: hazel handcuffing cha-cha to a radiator, because he won’t kill her? love it.

cha-cha calling agnes a ‘dried up doughnut whore’ is... a killer insult.

and i do like that hazel and cha-cha’s difference ultimately comes down to cha-cha being a corporate shill and hazel wanting a life outside of his shitty job that doesn’t care about his well-being.

hazel still unable to kill cha-cha, despite her vowing to murder agnes in front of him, and then him? hazel breaking down in tears because he hates that things had to come to this? love that.

52:27: and then radiohead’s ‘exit music for a film’ plays. i think that it’s a little overplayed (black mirror, westworld, person of interest, the 100... can we give this song a break?), so i’m not too fond of this choice.

even though i do like that this song always plays when shit goes down, and that’s definitely what’s happening here.

but sure, i’ll bite, and it’s a big meal for my tinhat ass:

some context: the song was written for baz luhrmann’s romeo + juliet, but it was cut. thom yorke wondered for years why the two didn’t just run off and elope and the song’s essentially romeo and juliet, doing so: packing their bags hurriedly, and leaving before dad hears them, urging each other to not lose their nerve, telling their parents that they hope they choke on the awful things they believe. and... possibly dying anyway or getting married (depending on how you interpret the line) devolving into anger and resentment at their parents for trying to prevent them from being together, and for perpetuating that violence.

it starts playing over hazel, literally escaping cha-cha, who he leaves to stew in how her commitment to a toxic organization that don’t care for her at all will lead to her death, as he basically ‘elopes’ with agnes.

53:00: (... do you think allison got her driver’s license honestly? i doubt it. and this is honestly a nitpick, but i’d have liked if we’d see her just skidding along the road because she doesn’t know how to drive. it’s a simple way to show how dependent she is on her rumor for everything, how unskilled she is, and how unstable she feels)

the line “before your father hears us” plays as allison, who packed and left the house without her love, drives off towards the cabin.

“before all hell...” as klaus, who just went to heaven/the afterlife, goes wandering with ben.

“breaks loose” as luther cuts loose and has drunk, high, inebrited sex with the furry girl who’s fetishizing him for his body.

the line as a whole, referring to romeo or juliet’s father preventing their escape violently fits pretty well with reginald.

53:22: i’m pretty sure them keeping diego in a cell like that is illegal, but it’s the cops, so i think it’s unintentionally on-brand. “you can laugh, a spineless laugh” -- well. it’s real vague, but i’ll try it: diego loves to think he’s so over the academy, but he’s full of shit. he likes to disown dad and look down on everyone, especially luther, but he’s no better than them.

53:38: five, unconscious (which is so he can’t accompany allison to the cabin), with a focus on the glass eye leonard’s about to receive. and an immediate cut to vanya, worrying in the hospital and having flashbacks to her outburst in the parking lot.

with “we hope your rules and wisdom choke you” playing overhead; and well, aside from reginald fitting that to an absolute t, five’s way of handling the apocalypse is going to blow up in his face in a terrible way, leonard’s outlook on what vanya should do with her powers will as well, and vanya’s sickened by what she can do with her powers.

also... vanleo, also kinda sorta ‘escape’ before her family can violently prevent them. and i’m sure leonard wants them all to suffer for what he perceives they did to him (god they needed to redo the revenge motivation).

(and as a fiveya tinhatter, knowing that if vanya left with five in a similar sort of symbolic-i-guess elopement, they’d have just bounced into ordinary 2019 and there would have been no apocalypse. everything would have been fine, if they had stayed together. and that thread keeps. popping. up. either the writers were genuinely That Stupid [...possible] or they were building towards something.)

“now we are one in everlasting peace”-- playing over vanya thinking about her powers. it’s difficult to tell if the show intends for vanya’s powers to be a separate entity from her or not, but i’m guessing that at least, in that moment, when she was protecting leonard, they were totally unified.

“we hope that you choke” closing on leonard’s eye being gone, and us realizing that he’s the one the glass eye is meant for. it’s a good oh shit moment, i’ll grant it that. a lot of the audience probably forgot about the eye, so to suddenly see it and remember what it means? oof.

54:33: and the last image is allison, crying, driving into the storm, all alone on a dark road, with one last “we hope that you choke” dissolving into, according to the subtitles “distorted voices”-- we’ll hear them again next episode, and learn that allison’s being overcome with guilt. she’s also about to choke on her own blood. topical!

great way to end, given that the next episode’s ‘i heard a rumor.’ good carryover.

and a great contrast to the day that wasn’t; everything that can go wrong does go wrong. and it’s all downhill from here. these are great to watch back-to-back.

this episode was... okay. lots of decent pieces, fantastic character interactions, and an ending i love. klaus and luther’s plot was really good and fitting, as was vanya’s and leonard’s, and hazel’s was fine. i loved seeing allison, five and diego butt heads. diego’s plot was weak as it always is, with a lot of potential and no attention to what it needs to fulfill, ben got nothing as usual, and five was knocked out early; he got the most focus in 6, so he can take a backseat for 7 but more importantly, if he’s awake when they find out where leonard probably took vanya, he’d have gone with allison to find them, and if he’d been there, things would’ve been fine. after a point it just gets kind of funny to see the ways the writers juggle five and vanya to keep them apart.

and allison’s... god. she needed to be bitchy to vanya in the first six episodes so when she decides to risk it all to go get her, it actually feels like development. as it stands, allison’s just coasting on that plateau. she skipped ahead to her end-of-season characterization in episode 3 and has been lingering there ever since. it’s a massive shame. especially given that all that guilt’s about to spill over next episode and it’s not gonna feel like the gut punch that it should.

but leonard’s reveal is the biggest point in the episode. and it falls flat. because we already. know. he’s. a. bad. dude. and his revenge motivation makes little sense-- sorry? are we supposed to hate leonard for killing his abusive dad when he was a kid? and didn’t leonard... move on with his life after he got out? why’d he suddenly decide to go after the academy now?

first off, no to the bad victiming. that should’ve been tossed. harold jenkins being a disgruntled fan who gets possessive over the academy, thinks he ~knows~ them and idealizes them into these false versions of themselves in his head, and then getting furious when they don’t do exactly what he wants them to and deciding to destroy them all makes far more sense.

and beyond that if the show had made more of an effort to make leonard seem... well, not clearly-shady, or cast allison’s suspicion of him in a more negative light that’s more in line with what she’s actually doing, then i could see this being an episode crammed with Oh Shit Moments. but... it’s so. fucking. obvious that we’re all just twiddling our thumbs waiting to be told what kind of bad guy leonard is.

so... a lot of high highs, but the cracks are really starting to show.

101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | x | 108 | 109 | 110 | overall | looking forward

#tua s1 rewatch #tua #tua s1 liveblog #tua tv

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steve0discusses · 6 years ago

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Yugioh S3 Ep 2: The VR Zone Has a Hell Ton of Trees

Alright guys I am regretting the hell out of this teriyaki ramen bowl I just ate, so it’s a better time than ever to go back into this VR arc. Now that the Big 5 have made their speech, all of them quite fat and one with a cane although he doesn’t even have a body anymore, they are ready to send everyone down a series of...plot-shaped holes.

Like they were JUST in some sort of tropic zone, to go back to here and then go somewhere else and so like--this is still VR I think? Like I’m assuming they went VR the moment they entered this room but it is quite vague at what point they were officially in VR. Was it when their vision went fwisssh and everyone split into RGB layers or was it that they got knocked out with gas quite a long time ago and were just unaware that it happened? Probably a bunch of these things.

With this announcement we find out that everyone--and I mean everyone--has to play cards now, although I’m pretty sure half of them have duel disks and the other’s are like...not equipped? I mean it’s VR, so hypothetically no one at all needs a duel disk anymore but you gotta sell toys, so no matter what, Yugi’s going to be lugging this heavy sharp thing on his wrist, even when he knows he will soon be shot down a wacky hole.

The title of last episode, ps was “VR Nightmare,” but like, it’s actually fairly pleasant, compared to the blimp hell we were dealing with just a few episodes back. I mean I guess people are actively trying to kill us here but when are they not?

The audacity of this show. Every state in the US has huge ass fake castles in it leftover from the Rockefeller era. Where else are our Moms supposed to drag us on Day Trips so we can get our history credit for Girl Scouts?

Americans are hella good at creating fake historical sites--all you need is a 50+ year old house and some turret work possibly made by a reasonably well known architect and it’s like “yeah that’s a good enough castle for me! Can we say it’s haunted, too? It’s hella haunted! Come to my castle B+B!”

(read more under the cut)

Tea landed in some concept art that kind of looks like the underside of a mushroom. I dunno how I’d classify this rock structure.

And then Kaiba landed in his worst nightmare which was being in a normal park with one single straight road but somehow still completely lost. At least Mokuba managed to fall into the same hole as his brother to ensure that Seto wouldn't be lost for like the rest of this arc. Which was actually kind of an unintentionally hilarious animation.

*rare shot of the Kaibas actually taking a break*

Man, this is the closest they’ve gotten to a real hug in kind of a while. Like when was the last time these bros hugged? Pegasus’ castle?

Meanwhile, Noah is admiring his work from this throne room and it would be a whole lot more intimidating if he wasn’t in calf-high black socks.

His outfit is like a white school uniform so what gives with the black socks? Like of all the things to complain about on Yugioh (especially since I see Yugi’s hair looking right at me in the next cap) those socks though. Those are pretty inappropriate with this outfit, Noah. Especially matched with this God Throne you’ve got going on. Did not see socks like that matched with a chair like this.

Meanwhile Yugi is all by himself but that doesn’t matter at all because he is 2 (3) people. This strategy to isolate everyone only really worked on Serenity and Joey, TBH, since Tea is also accompanied by slightlylessevil!Marik (who hasn’t really said anything since the VR started).

I knew Bakura would be out for a while, but I didn’t realize it meant everyone else wasn’t even going to once acknowledge it, it is baffling. I mean I get they’re super distracted right now but your friend is DEAD.

Honestly I would not mind if the big 5 succeeded and we had to see some old men try and work with Yugi’s hair and alt rock clothing, deal with Pharaoh sassing them from a brain labyrinth, go to Yugi’s school where people get savagely beat up like every other day, deal with Bakura and Marik trying to body snatch and other magic assholery during class breaks, and through all that watching the Big 5 attempt to take over the world with their megacorp that no longer sells guns but actually sells like...children’s entertainment supplies which include the dueling roombas from S1. How on Earth do they actually think that getting a body would help them at this point? They would be Yugi Muto and that is the last face anyone would ever take seriously.

Pharaoh pops up and is like “I guess we’re doing this right now? Really wish we weren’t doing this right now.”

Anyway, because they don’t physically exist in this digital world, neither do God Cards, or any other card in their deck. So, now they have to make new decks out of a pool. Very convenient for the writing team, bad news for Kaiba’s intense and vaguely romantic relationship with his Blue Eyes. Really glad we spent a full season talking about how much these cards meant to all these people, from the magicians, to Joey’s Red Eyes, and then that one card that was Mako Tsunami’s Dad or something--really glad we learned all of that to just completely erase it this arc.

I sounded sarcastic just now, I actually wasn’t for once, I am so glad to just purge my mind of all those card memories for a little while. Just allow myself to forget. Ah. My mind is already so much clearer. It feels so good. I am very much ok with this soft reset, I kinda needed it.

Since Yugi is supposed to choose a Deck Master from his set of cards for this particular type of duel monsters duel, he goes right for the dark magician--since that’s his MO, but for some reason Kuriboh chose himself? Like this greasy thing just hopped out of the card and played himself.

Anyway Kuriboh is now their new Pikachu and well...this show has done worse cute-character-that-does-literally-nothing-else type things to me, speaking of, lets see what Serenity is up to.

This is a digital hellscape, Serenity.

Serenity, you are going to die here.

Serenity.

So because I just realized just now in Season 3 that Duke’s necklace is a hot, over designed disaster (much like Duke himself) I figured I should like...see what this necklace is supposed to look like. So I typed into Google “duke devlin necklace” and guys, turns out there is a LOT of Yugioh jewelry--and I don’t mean like fanart (which there is also a lot), I mean like officially, a lot of people in this show wear a lot of jewelry and so it was sort of hard to find a good pic of a Duke Devlin specific necklace--especially since it feels like most people just go for the dice earring because that’s way easier.

But what’s interesting about the Duke Devlin necklace, at least from my quick search, is that when we bring it to the real world, it gets a little lost, like a game of telephone.

Cuz I assumed that was a clown on his necklace--and there’s quite a few clown necklaces, but I’m also seeing skulls, I’m seeing gothic crosses, I’m seeing spikes and knives instead of crosses. Bro thought it was a flower for some reason--I kinda blew his mind just now when I pointed out it was a clown. Some people think it’s made of silver, other people think it’s sort of painted? (I assumed the cross was entirely blinged out with rhinestones--my honest assumption) No one can actually agree. Especially since Duke apparently changed his necklace for the movie. I know that because it looks a lot like the Legend of Zelda emblem, and some people had the actual Legend of Zelda emblem mis-tagged as Duke Devlin. Which sucks a whole lot for their SEO, and sucked a whole lot for me in my search to find a real actual Duke Devlin necklace.

Like, feel free to attach a link to a reply -- is there an official physical Duke Devlin necklace that Yugioh inc sells? Like I just want to know--officially--what the hell I’m looking at.

Anyway, back to the show, much like everyone else, these two are hopelessly lost.

Kaiba seems to keep forgetting that his Dad is clearly behind all this and would obviously have his old tech but like...Kaiba forgets so much I can forgive him this.

So, faced with roads that lead no where, Tristan decides to do his tried and true method of solving all of his problems.

And at the other end of the VR zone Tea is getting kidnapped after...being kidnapped by Noah while she was already kidnapped by Marik. This is three levels of kidnap, yes?

OH SHOOT IS THAT A ONCE DOOR. DID SOMEONE DO WHAT I HOPE THEY DID? OH SHOOT.

I will read their fanfiction start to end I swear to you I will do it if it exists and I will report back to you who dates Captain Hook and who is related to Henry Mills.

OMG It didn’t exist.

You have got to be kidding me.

I am beside myself, this is the only property known to man that has not been turned into a OUAT fanfiction.

Incredible.

That or I’m just really bad at searching for fanfics since I haven’t actually read any since my LiveJournal days. Like, when you’re basically immune to shipping, as I am, you just really lose the desire to read about 90% of fanfiction.

Anyway, the closest we have to a OUAT Yugioh fanfiction, to my knowledge, is that cap I made just now right there. Your welcome, Once community.

This is absolutely made of load-bearing drywall. Why do none of the sets of windows line up with each other and how many stories is this? Like 2.5? And you can stand on the roof I guess because it has handrails? It’s super weird.

Anyway, I just made a OUAT joke and maybe it’s because I knew shortly after we were gonna get--that’s right--an orphanage flashback. OUAT was basically 6 seasons of effed up orphan flashbacks so I feel pretty well prepared. Like bro was worried how I’d handle this filler but y’all, I watched the Lily arc in OUAT. I can do anything.

*slaps hands together*

Totes ready for these boys to have been given up for adoption via a magical tree and a memory curse, only to find out their real parents are 3 years younger than them because of a time loop. Make it weird, Yugioh!

Anyway, as always, if you want a link to read these from the beginning in Chrono order and without any comments and all that jazz here’s a link

#Yugioh #photo recap #recap #S3 Ep2 #yugi muto #seto kaiba #big 5 #Noah #joey wheeler #tea gardner #duke devlin #tristan taylor #mokuba #Anyways I'm gonna go make cookies at 9 PM #because I have a headache and I feel like this will fix it somehow.

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100-yardstare · 5 years ago

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I guess I know how George R* Mart*n feels because I can never finish any of my fics anymore!

I started writing this fic when SW EP 7 came out... in 2015. I never touched it again. It was about my OC Sarai and Steven. Since I’m probably never going to finish it I wanted to at least post it here for archival reasons. Feel free to read if you like!

Summary: The son of a deceased Resistance pilot, Steven Weatfield seeks refuge on the moon of Pantora with his living father in an attempt to escape the horrors of war and participation with the Resistance against the First Order. However, balance and fate seem to follow them when a Jedi, lost among the corridors of time for unknown circumstances, reminds him of his mission, and his mothers sacrifice.

Word Count: 2,962

Chapter 1

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

STAR WARS

War never ends. It has been twenty-seven years since the rebellion’s triumphant victory over the Death Star, and likewise, the end of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader. However, the New Republic’s struggles are not yet over. The First Order has risen, and again, is spreading disorder upon the galaxy, forcing General Leia to build up a Resistance to push back further destruction. Casualties are always a factor, and even for the Resistance, the death toll and injured have recently reached peaks that were unforeseen. The sudden and dramatic losses have frightened large numbers of surviving resistance soldiers.

Steven Wheatfield, former trainee of the Resistance, has since resigned by desire of his surviving father. They are attempting to stay out of the conflict at all costs, currently residing in a small rural settlement on the moon of Pantora…

. . . . . . .

“In a world covered by endless water… the people of the Republic were driven to create artificial solders for war. This war was spreading through quickly— so quickly, it was soon leaving no portion of the galaxy untouched by its strife! But these two forces were not equal by all means. Yes, droid and clone were similar as fierce soldiers, each having their own distinct advantages, and likewise Sith leaders Count Dooku, and other such foes provided their means within the Separatists army. But! Leading the Republic’s armies, among the thousands of brilliant clone soldiers, was the Jedi!”

A series of sarcastic beeps came from a R6 unit after the long introduction, whose small chirps seemed to bounce off the snowy field and into the tall toupee colored grasses surrounding. A couple of crunchy footsteps would cease at that moment, as Steven stopped walking, and telling his story for that matter.

“What are you talking about, Wheatles?!” Steven cried, who so abruptly turned around at the moment of his R6 units bickering. “Of course the Jedi were important! Now would you please let me continue my story? The Jedi lead the Republic’s armies; they carried the torch that spread throughout the galaxy, and pushed back the dark, and those who came their way.”

The droid spat out another set of beeps, carrying with it the most unpleasant of sounds, which in return caused Steven’s face to blush pink.

“Y-You moof-milker!” Steven yelled. “The history of the Clone Wars is not useless! In fact, it just goes to show you why the Republic failed in the first place. From the corruption in the senate all the way to the very battles themselves that took place—they all were important!”

Steven paused for a moment to gather himself, soon his flush of color leaving his face. “I’ll bet if Jedi were still around…” His face relaxed, a little too much even, as his eyebrows rose up in a loathsome furrow. With this, his voice fell in depth, sending even more of his hot breath into the icy Pantoran air.

“If the Jedi were here, like they were then, maybe this war would already be over. Maybe… maybe Mum would be…”

A sudden gust pushed through the field, sending a dust of snow off the ground and into the air like powder. After the gust settled, a soft wave of snow began to fall—so soft that you barely noticed the moment it fell upon your lashes.

“The Jedi fought alongside the clone army for three years… And they would have done it too. They would have won. But… they’re gone now.” Steven paused, only shortly to express a gentle sigh. “You don’t think… those kinds of things are myths, do you?”

The R6 unit softly spoke up with a simple, long beep, which was by far significantly calmer than any of its other comments were beforehand. The droid’s head centered itself as his back legs lowered a tad. This caused Steven to stare down at his droid companion, soon his sorrowful look diminishing from the droid’s obvious apology.

“Thank you, Wheatles,” Steven remarked. He sighed deeply before saying, “come on. We better get you home before it starts snowing any harder. I know how much you hate walking through the stuff.”

Steven turned around to start walking his droid along the path they had been traveling down for some time. In the far distance a small village and a distribution of independent properties could be seen. From their chimneys, smoke from fires within all of the homes scattered about the landmass reached high into the skies like fingers stretching from a cloudy palm. This scenery, although lovely in its own way, still was strange to Steven. It wasn’t particularly the cold landscape, or the smallness of it all, but more rather how quiet it was. Steven was used to busy bustling of resistance soldiers, the sound of engines starting from all varieties of ships, and sometimes even the occasional laser shooting practice. Steven was used to getting his hands dirty in engine oil and grime, and the strain in his arms from piloting ships. To say the least, it was like he was out of his element. It wasn’t the same.

Steven first anticipated turning around and staying out in the field longer. That or he figured he’d might as well go off the trail and see what he could find out in the tall grasses of Pantora. Who knows? Maybe he would find some parts lying around or something interesting at least. He’d rather spend his time out in the cold then going back. Sitting around, doing nothing? No, that wasn’t his thing. Especially since sitting around or doing even simple chores required him to listen to his father mumble under his breath all the time; he made the sheer air in the room feel heavy. There wasn’t a day that went by that wasn’t quite otherwise.

Steven suddenly grumbled to himself, which wasn’t like him. He liked keeping a positive attitude, but this—this feeling—was getting redundant.

“I could just take my ship and fly off somewhere, ya know, Wheatles?” Steven spoke aloud. “We could fly right out of here and somewhere out there. Ya, that would be brilliant, wouldn’t it? But he says otherwise.”

Wheatles gave off a sigh sound in response. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get Steven to cheer up some. Agreeing with Steven always seemed to help.

“Ya! That’s right! Can you imagine it? Steven and his loyal droid, Sir Wheatles, off into the galaxy! We need a team name though. Wheatles, maybe you should write this down—”

Before Steven could continue, his eye caught a glimpse of something in the sky at the opposite end of the field from where the village was. At first he figured it was a mere speck of floating black dust that just looked like something, but it was indeed something this time.

Steven focused more sternly on the object in the sky now, realizing that it was ablaze as it fell through the planets atmosphere. As it drew closer to the ground, he was beginning to realize it was a ship. He didn’t react until the ship plummeted into the ground some two-miles away. After its obvious crash, was when he had a delayed response.

“Hell!” Steven yelled. “Did you see that? Did you see the ship fall from the bloody sky?!”

His droid was quiet as Steven began fanning his face uncontrollably. This was unbelievable. Well—it was believable in the sense that it happened all the time, but not here. Not for them.

“We gotta go check it out!” was Steven’s next bright idea. His droid beeped a few times, indicating its own distress, but this didn’t seem to give Steven any second thoughts. “Who knows what that was? It could be a resistance ship for all we know! Somebody needs our help!”

Steven started running. He started running for so far and so long that Wheatles was a good few paces behind him by the time they crawled over the little hill that lead them to the crash site.

The landscape from one side of the hill, and to the other, was quite drastic. A decent sized indention had been marked in the ground on the other side from impact. The trail that the fallen ship had left from hitting the ground, and then having skated across the dried tan grasses, was black and covered in soot. Some of the stalks of grass further to the side that had not been completely crushed had some traces of embers, whose glow, thankfully, did not increase in size for the time being.

To say the least, Steven was ecstatic. But he was also cautious. The ship didn’t look resistance, at least a type that he was used to seeing. It seemed to have an old design, from what parts he could distinguish what was left of it. The ship overall was so jumbled that it was hard to tell. The metal was obviously still hot on the outside, which caused a steam to escape from its structure and into the cold air.

“Should we check it out?” Steven asked his droid, who had just a second earlier made it beside him to join him in his stare at the crashed space ship.

Steven seemed to answer himself rather quickly. “Yeah, let’s check it out!” he exclaimed excitedly, and rushed down the little hill and up towards the ship. He stopped only when he was close enough to feel the warmth from the crash site. With narrowed eyes he tried to look through the rising dust and soot through his glasses, scanning the area before him as much and as diligently as he could to make sure there was nobody about.

But even with his careful eye, he could see nothing.

“Whoa, Wheatles, you don’t suppose… anyone survived this?” Steven asked out loud. From the outward diagnostics of the ship, it seemed someone could have survived. It was wrecked, sure, but it wasn’t so wrecked that anyone within couldn’t have found a way to take cover to land. But still, he couldn’t be too careful.

R6 beeped a few times, which caused Steven’s attention to fall back onto his droid.

“Tell Dad? Are you joking?” Steven scoffed. “The first sign of any sort of ship crashing on Pantora, especially around him, is just asking for us to be relocated. We can’t tell him.”

The metal creaked then, causing what sounded like movement from the inside of the ship. Steven’s head seemed to snap back upward once the sound hit his ears, realizing then from his prior suspicions that someone must be in there. He wasn’t sure what to do, in all honesty. Someone’s life was very much on the line potentially, and he felt the need to be there for them once they stepped out of that ship. But another thought crossed his mind: what if they weren’t friendly? What if this ship was First Order, and he didn’t even realize it?

The odds seemed slim that it was First Order, based on the ships design, but the thought came to him regardless. He hunkered down, only a bit, but soon realized that doing so wasn’t going to stop him from being spotted. Instead, he kept his stance firm, waited, and listened.

Creaks and paces were heard for a few seconds longer until the door was triggered to open. At first, nothing walked out of the crumpled ship. Inside there was only darkness, which indicated that the vessel had lost power just as it had crashed. A few sparks from deep inside the ship could be seen, but sill, he waited…

Staring wide-eyed by then, Steven watched as a figure walked limply out of the doorway. As it came into the Pantoran light, he saw it was a togruta female. Instantly, he became relieved of a First Order threat, but from this a new question arose. Her outfit was strange, and almost foreign to him. It wasn’t anything togruta typically wore. Instead, it was a grey and white tunic. The first thing that slid into his train of thought then, was…

“No, it couldn’t be,” Steven muttered to himself. He had read many of Republic documents of the Jedi Knights. Their attire seemed to match what this woman was wearing, but… it seemed too coincidental. Seemingly, his thoughts of fairytales diminished once he saw her fall to her knees, and collapse backwards onto the icy grasses.

R6 spilled out a series of worried beeps the second she hit the ground. Steven, on the other hand, rushed up towards her as quickly as his legs could take him. Once he was next to her, he kneeled down by her side, and lifted her head into his lap. He immediately checked for any signs that she wasn’t breathing, her pulse, and her overall state. But, she was fine.

Steven sighed again once he noticed she was still alive. “Thank God. She’s all right. Wheatles, no need to worry. I’m sure she’s just shaken from the crash. Although I’d suggest we try and get her somewhere to rest.”

R6 responded positively to Steven’s suggestions, and came by Steven once again to further inspect the togruta woman. The both of them didn’t really know what to do at that moment. It had been a long while since they had come into contact with any other races besides the Pantoran’s and the occasional human that passed by in order to get to the Pantoran Capital. Should they even ask questions? Should they still treat her as if she was a threat?

Out of habit from his resistance training, Steven looked over the woman further. Her purple skin tone seemed to clash with the idea of all, or at least a vast majority, of togruta being of rustic, orange-like tones. Her head tails and montrals were also relatively grown in, indicating she couldn’t have been older than in her mid-twenties. Alike all other togruta, or those who have at least proven themselves as warriors to their people, she bore a Akul Tooth headdress, made of a black band with the golden, triangular shaped teeth attached to it. Her robe itself, on the other hand, seemed to bring more surprises. Steven looked down at her beltline, realizing that attached, was…

“A lightsaber?” Steven’s blue eyes seemed to lighten up with a sparkle. “No, it couldn’t be…”

Steven looked back at the woman’s face, noticing her eyes were still closed, and then back down at the lightsaber. If it was actually a lightsaber, he wasn’t 100% sure, but it looked like one, and certainly mimicked every detail he had ever read about them in the Jedi lore and Republic history text he had indulged in so much growing up.

Almost like a child, his hands reached down towards the mysterious weapon, his fingers only delicately touching the carved metal of gold and silver before he was suddenly struck across the cheek.

Instant alert spilled from R6, as the both of them realized she had awoken. The togruta pushed Steven violently away from her, and then came to a stand, one of her hands clutching the weapon at her beltline tightly as she glared at both of them.

“Who are you!?” she yelled.

“Look, we mean you no harm! I was just—” Steven attempted to explain, sending his arms in the air as if to say he was unarmed, and very much of no danger.

“I said, who are you!?” the girl fussed again. The situation was growing tenser by the minute, and so Steven realized attempting to prove his innocence wasn’t nearly as important as saying who he was.

“I’m Steven Wheatfield! This is my R6 until, Wheatles! We’re just settlers on Pantora…”

“Pantora?” The girl’s voice rose significantly in her question. It was as if she was baffled she was even there. “The Empire then… are they in this area?”

“Empire?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Steven. The Empire has taken control of all previous Republic systems. Tell me where the Empire establishments are located on this planet!”

“I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about because the Empire hasn’t existed for… well over two decades.”

The togruta girl’s dark eyes widened, as if replacing a physical gasp. Again, she was baffled, in a state of disbelief and confusion. Her legs looked like they wanted to stumble, but her strong stance caught her.

“The Empire hasn’t existed in over two decades?” she repeated, as if saying it out loud would help her bring it to reality. “Then what of the Inquisitors? The Stormtrooper armies? Darth Vader? The purge?”

“What are you talking about?” Steven’s panicked emotions were escaping him now, and he was starting to become more empathetic to the stranger in front of him. “What’s an inquisitor? The Stormtroopers… we’ll they aren’t exactly Empire anymore. And Darth Vader is…” he paused, his calmed worried eyes settling into her distraught gaze. “Darth Vader is dead.”

“What?” Her words fell out of her, softly, as if everything she knew was suddenly gone. By looking at her, everything was gone. She seemed scared, isolated, and without a clue as to what to do.

Steven remained on the ground, realizing the situation had taken a complex turn. He eyed her first, head to toe, taking in her features as if it was yet again the first time he had seen her before.

“…Who are you?” Steven asked softly.

The girl looked to the ground, and then to her hands. Her eyes would shut tightly for a split second, as if her mind had taken her elsewhere; searching, wondering…

“My name is Sarai Daan. I am a Jedi.”

#tumblr will probably destroy the layout but ohhh welll #kailey writes #sarai daan #steven wheatfield #star wars fic

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aceyugiohdreamer · 6 years ago

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Hey! (I'm the anon dude who asked about your Judai hatred) So I'm currently gradually catching up in my watch on VRAINS, and I just finished EP34. The whole badly animated episode made me quite uncomfortable because of its more blatant fanservice that sucked the episode's obviously weak budget. But when I reached the end to see Aoi's persona violently crushed head first on the ground, it made the feminist within me feel REALLY uncomfortable watching this. (1/2 or 3, I dunno)

Hey again! Thanks for coming back! I’m putting the rest under a cut because I ended up having quite a bit to say lol …

I know what I’m watching, a kid showtarget towards nippon boys and mostly otaku, and even the original mangacommitted the original Dark Magician Girl sin first, but now that the show ispurely a TCG commercial, I guess there’s not much moral left. I vigorously hatethe previous two shows but actually surprised myself enjoying VRAINS, knowingwhat it is, as I usually don’t watch anime. But after reading about somedragging Japanese idol assault case on my feed today, (2/3)

this episode really strikes me… Idon’t see many YGO fans that I relate too online, and I only found your blogrecently, but I wondered what you opinion on this would be (?) , what yourreaction at the time of the ep’s broadcast was (?) , being a queer duelist too- if I may label you as such without intended offense. Maybe I’m just gettingtoo old for anime as a mid-20s guy, but this Blue Angel character’s fucked,whilst the Aoi side is the most decent female since early Aki.. Opinion? (3/3)

(I’m definitely not offended by“queer”, I like the word, so you are more than welcome to use it with me ^^)

Ughhhh what a topic. Frankly, Ican’t really name anything about yugioh that has ever felt feminist to me, andvrains is no exception. I had some hopes in the very beginning that Aoi wasgoing to be a respectable (and respected, by the narrative) character, but those hopes were dashed pretty quickly and it’s only gottenworse as the show has gone on. She was set up to be a strong duelist, but thenquickly got demoted to damsel who’s not allowed to be on par with the amazingprotagonist. She gets lip service from characters who say she’s good, but wedon’t get to see it on screen, which is a problem.

And I don’t understand idol culture,so that whole persona of hers really turned me off. It’s not just that Ipersonally don’t like that kind of hyper-feminine aesthetic, it was also thatthey directly tied that aesthetic with a character that the writers seemeddeliberately determined to weaken and fetishize. She’s only allowed to havecute, frilly female monsters, and in any duel that matters to the plot, sheloses most of the time, which just continues this association betweenfemininity and weakness. Aoi/her Blue avatars are mostly meant to be eye candyand waifus, and it’s so fucking frustrating.

To be honest, I tend to forget a lotof details from vrains after I’ve watched an episode because I’m just not incrediblyinvested in it, so I don’t put much effort into trying to remember it. I justremember what happens to stick, and I don’t think about it much. I’m mostlyonly watching out of some kind of nostalgic love for the original, not out of agenuine love for vrains itself, even though I do enjoy it on some level.

So I had to google which episodenumber 34 was to remember the scene you mentioned. And yeah, I feel you, thephysical abuse Aoi endures in this show comes across as brutal in a way thatfeels different from the trauma Yusaku went through. What he went through wasfucked up too, but it’s been presented as the catalyst for him becoming strongand focused and justice-oriented. With Aoi, her defeats are spectacles,sometimes given lavish attention, and they don’t seem to lead to anysubstantial development for her. She gets a few superficial changes, but thenarrative still treats her as second-class and expendable, because ultimatelyher development doesn’t have much impact on the overall story.

I don’t really remember how I feltat the time I first saw the episode, but I’m pretty sure it was something alongthe lines of an annoyed sigh, because it was just so disappointing andpredictable at the same time. Of course she lost. It’s just Blue Angel afterall, why would she be important enough to defeat an enemy? (At least a maleone. She does win against the one other female character in the enemy camp,because THAT’S allowed apparently.)

I don’t think the violent manner ofher defeat struck me at the time, but seeing it again and in that context ofactual idols getting assaulted, it does feel pretty gross. It’s always felt tome like idols are presented as public property and not human beings deservingof dignity and agency, and they perform specifically to draw out love fromtheir fans to encourage them to obsess and feel possessive of them. So when yousee a fictional idol getting physically hurt like that, it does smack of thatidea that idols exist for the emotions of their fans. If Blue Angel gets hurt,it’s because the writers are hoping to get an emotional reaction, not becausethey plan on using it for any substantial purpose. So yeah, anything having todo with Aoi makes the feminist in me cringe, but I went through that with Akitoo and I’ll still never forgive the writers for how they ruined her.

I wanted to like Aoi, but they justcouldn’t resist making a mockery of her and dropping any potential she had tobe a character that actually mattered.

And I totally agree that the show feelslike an ongoing TCG commercial. That’s why I only half payattention to the duels because I can’t keep up with them anymore. I don’t remember the originalfeeling this way, and maybe that was because a lot of the monsters felt likecharacters themselves and actually played an emotional role in the players’ lives, whereaswith vrains, there’s no relationship between players and their monsters. It’sall about their relationship with vrains and the AIs. The cards have become simple tools now with no heart and soul and meaning to them.

(and if you want to keep talking about this, you’re more than welcome to message me on chat, or keep sending anons, whatever works for you, it’s all good ^^)

#asked #Ky says

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georgecmatthews · 4 years ago

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US dollar weakness should reinforce the blossoming rally in cyclical stocks

We were recently joined by clients for a discussion about global investment opportunities, in the context of technically overbought conditions in US stocks. In this blog, we share our views regarding where we see risks and opportunities in international markets.

From a valuation perspective, in which regions and countries do you see the most risk and opportunity? Where do the US and Canada fit into that valuation spectrum?

Following a high-velocity selloff and subsequent v-shaped rebound, US stocks have surprisingly clung to their status as one of, if not the most overvalued market segments of the developed world. Indeed, US and developed market price-to-sales (P/S) ratios are trading at notable premia relative to the global benchmark and history. In our view, unprecedented policy support has encouraged extreme risk taking by investors, a consequence of which has been frothy valuations in US stocks.

At the other end of the valuation spectrum, structural underperformance from Chinese and emerging market (EM) stocks – until recently – has compressed their P/S ratios to deep discounts compared to the world-wide stock market and history. Clearly, Europe and Canada are developed economic regions. However, European and Canadian stocks currently trade at discounts like those of Chinese and EM stocks.

While valuation is a good starting point for an investment thesis, it isn’t enough on its own. Indeed, cheap valuations require catalysts to unleash the potential opportunities embedded in share prices. On that score, leading indicators of business activity across the emerging world – China and South Korea in particular – have been proving more resilient than those of the developed world, including the US, Europe, Japan and Canada.

We believe compelling opportunities exist for investors in EM stocks at a time when many emerging economies – especially Asia excluding Japan – are recovering from the virus-related “sudden stop” in activity. Attractive valuations and improving economic growth may be the right combination for unlocking the potential rewards presented by EM stocks. So far, so good.

Figures 1 & 2. Not all regions and countries are made equal. For selectivity, we prefer targeting low valuations and faster growth over high valuations and slower growth both across and within regions.

Source: Bloomberg L.P., Haver, Invesco, 07/01/20. Notes: Circled indices represent low valuations and faster growth. P/S = Price-to-sales ratio. Ranked from left to right—from highest premium to lowest discount. ACWI = All Country World Index. EU = European Union. EU Excluding UK Composite PMI = France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Diffusion indices have the properties of leading indicators, and are convenient summary measures showing the prevailing direction and scope of change*. An investment cannot be made in an index. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

US companies are highly exposed to international markets. Don’t US stocks provide investors with enough international diversification?

Contrary to popular belief, US companies aren’t the most globally exposed. In fact, they have the lowest international exposure – capturing 39% of total revenues – of all the major developed markets that we follow. Some may be surprised to learn that French companies’ international revenues represent a whopping 82% of their total revenues!1

Admittedly, it’s difficult to determine how much international exposure an investor should have without knowing several things about them, including their risk tolerance, goals, life stage, and planned retirement date.

That said, there’s a simple way of assessing whether investors own enough international stocks. In our view, the weight of the MSCI USA Index in the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) is a good starting point for benchmarking your international diversification. US stocks capture 58% of the global equity benchmark, which means that non-US stocks capture 42% of the worldwide stock market.2

Many investors are surprised to learn that non-US equities represent almost half of a passively indexed global equity portfolio, represented by the MSCI ACWI. Moreover, what they thought was a generous allocation to international stocks – typically 25% – is far below the entire universe of stocks.

As aggressive as it may seem, in our view, setting international equity allocations equal to their weight in the global benchmark would express a neutral stance on the asset class.

Figures 3 & 4. US companies have the lowest international exposure of all the major developed markets

Source: FactSet, Invesco, 07/17/20. Notes: An investment cannot be made in an index. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Looking back, what was the cost of the shutdown, and how might it have impacted second-quarter S&P 500 earnings?

While it may seem like a daunting task to quantify the earnings impact of COVID-19 and the related cost of the shutdown, we think it’s possible.

First, we need a baseline for second-quarter 2020 S&P 500 trailing 12-month operating earnings per share (EPS), which we assume to be $121. Next, we require a weekly earnings number ($121/52 = $2.32).

Then, we must guess how many companies were shut down. Obviously, all companies weren’t idle during the virus-related shutdown. In fact, some firms benefitted tremendously in the health care, consumer staples, technology, and communications sectors. We naively assume half of firms were idle ($2.32/2 = $1.16).

For the final step, we erode the baseline by the lost earnings of those companies over a 12-week shutdown ($1.16*12 = $14). In other words, we suspect second-quarter 2020 S&P 500 earnings may have been $14 lower than analysts believe, which would equate to $107 or a 31% decline from year-ago levels.

Figure 5. We suspect 2Q20 S&P 500 earnings may have been $14 lower than analysts believe

Source: Standard & Poor’s, Invesco, 07/17/20. Notes: Operating earnings per share = Income from product (goods and services), excluding corporate (M&A, financing and layoffs) and unusual items, divided by total shares outstanding. Earnings are priced in US dollars. An investment cannot be made in an index.

While this approach is simplistic, it’s worth noting second-quarter 2020 S&P 500 operating EPS settled at $139 or -9% year-over-year, just $3 below our simulation of $142 or -7% year-over-over. As we anticipated, it seems a broad market earnings recession began in 1Q20, which we expect to be followed by much deeper decreases in coming quarters.3

Despite the popularity of earnings, we underscore that they’re quarterly, lagging variables whereas stocks are real-time financial market variables and leading economic indicators that get ahead of fundamentals by a good 3-6 months. Said differently, scrutinizing second quarter earnings – when we’re already in the third quarter – is akin to driving a car forward while looking in the rearview mirror.

Where do you see materials and commodities going during these COVID-19 times?

We expect materials stocks to outperform the broader market, given synchronized central bank support. For example, the Federal Reserve (Fed) has embarked on a seemingly open-ended commitment to continue buying securities until the economic and labor market outlooks improve substantially.

An important consequence of the Fed’s unprecedented balance sheet expansion is the weakness of the US dollar, which should reinforce the blossoming rally in cyclical stocks through foreign exposure/sales, Rest of the World (RoW) profits, positive translation effects and increased competitiveness. In other words, US goods and services become cheaper when the currency depreciates.

If quantitative easing (QE) represents a choice between interest rates and the US dollar, the Fed has opted to save growth and jobs by loosening the monetary screws and inflating the money supply at the expense of the currency. From that perspective, it’s reasonable to expect the US dollar to weaken further if the Fed keeps such an abundant supply of currency in circulation.

In turn, the US dollar is inversely related to the relative performance of the materials sector, the fundamental link being foreign exposure. According to Standard & Poor’s, materials companies relied on foreigners for 57% of their total sales in 2018, second only to information technology at 58%.

US dollar weakness helps US-based materials companies be more competitive on the world economic stage. Dollar depreciation augments the value of foreign sales (denominated in strengthening currencies) when they’re translated to the home currency.

The flipside of US dollar weakness is commodity price strength. Indeed, early-stage commodities have been on an upward track, supporting a positive view of the materials sector. Commodity prices – barometers of materials companies’ input and/or output prices – are key drivers of materials stocks. The CRB BLS Raw Industrials Sub-Index is a good gauge of basic commodities close to the early stages of the production process. As such, they’re among the first to respond to changes in global economic activity.

Our positive view of materials stocks depends on whether the global economic recovery gathers pace. Should the economy suffer a relapse, it would likely be difficult for materials stocks to continue outperforming. If the US dollar keeps weakening alongside forceful blasts of QE from the major central banks, materials stocks should continue to benefit. Indeed, standing in the way of size buyers like the Fed has been an unprofitable strategy in the past.

Figures 6 & 7. The flipside of policy-induced currency weakness is commodities and materials strength.

Source: Bloomberg L.P., Invesco, 07/17/20. Notes: USD = US dollar. The broad currency index is a weighted average of the foreign exchange value of the US dollar against the currencies of a broad group of major US trading partners. CRB = Commodity Research Bureau. BLS = Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CRB BLS Raw Industrials Sub-Index measures the prices of burlap, copper scrap, cotton, hides, lead scrap, print cloth, rosin, rubber, steel scrap, tallow, tin, wool tops and zinc. Commodities and stocks are priced in USD. An investment cannot be made in an index. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Footnotes

1. FactSet, 07/17/20

2. MSCI, 07/17/20.

3. Standard & Poor’s, 07/17/20.

Definitions

A P/S ratio is the market capitalization of a given country or region divided by its total revenues.

The MSCI USA Index is designed to measure large and mid market capitalization stocks in the United States.

The MSCI ACWI is designed to measure large and mid market capitalization stocks in the developed and emerging markets.

QE is a form of unconventional monetary policy where a central bank makes large scale asset purchases in order to increase the money supply and encourage lending and investment.

The CRB BLS Raw Industrials Sub-Index measures the prices of burlap, copper scrap, cotton, hides, lead scrap, print cloth, rosin, rubber, steel scrap, tallow, tin, wool tops and zinc.

Important Information

Blog Header Image: Javier Garcia / Unsplash

The risks of investing in securities of foreign issuers, including emerging market issuers, can include fluctuations in foreign currencies, political and economic instability, and foreign taxation issues.

To the extent the fund invests a greater amount in any one sector or industry, there is increased risk to the fund if conditions adversely affect that sector or industry.

Commodities may subject an investor to greater volatility than traditional securities such as stocks and bonds and can fluctuate significantly based on weather, political, tax, and other regulatory and market developments.

All investing involves risk, including risk of loss.

A decision as to whether, when and how to use options involves the exercise of skill and judgment and even a well conceived option transaction may be unsuccessful because of market behavior or unexpected events. The prices of options can be highly volatile and the use of options can lower total returns.

In general, stock values fluctuate, sometimes widely, in response to activities specific to the company as well as general market, economic and political conditions.

The opinions referenced above are those of the authors as of August 3, 2020. These comments should not be construed as recommendations, but as an illustration of broader themes. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions; there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from expectations. This does not constitute a recommendation of any investment strategy or product for a particular investor. The opinions expressed are those of the authors, are based on current market conditions and are subject to change without notice. These opinions may differ from those of other Invesco investment professionals.

from Expert Investment Views: Invesco Blog https://www.blog.invesco.us.com/us-dollar-weakness-should-reinforce-the-blossoming-rally-in-cyclical-stocks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=us-dollar-weakness-should-reinforce-the-blossoming-rally-in-cyclical-stocks

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buttonholedlife · 5 years ago

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10 Anthems From System, Hamburg's Notorious Early- '90s Techno Temple-- Telekom Electronic Pounds

When the initial Device club opened in Hamburg in 1989, it was actually embraced as a choice to various other places that worked on tighter time limits and also frequented much less main sites. Unlike Face, the pioneering nightclub that introduced property popular music to Germany-- and also probably multinational dancing floorings--, the 1st Unit at Talstrasse corrected at the center of some of among Europe's most significant amusement places, notorious red illumination area around Reeperbahn, and also as a result of this its own parties can last much longer.

At initially, the popular music at Unit was no different to what was actually participated in somewhere else around town-- a common post-acid residence boom mix. Soon however, the resident DJs like Gary D, Tobias Lampe and also Holly, and guide nationwide and also international guest DJs, switched towards techno and later hypnotic trance, as well as Unit became a leading lighting in developing and pressing these noises more along with various other nationwide pillars in Berlin and also Frankfurt.

The 1st System room needed to approach 1994 as a result of improved criminal activity in the area, yet it resumed the very same year as Unit II in a brief area likewise near to Reeperbahn, prior to System III resolved in an outdated manufacturing facility area in one more area. As the club increased much bigger in size and aspiration, the groups performed certainly not observe match, and Unit shut for really good in 1999. Our experts inquired DJ Tobias Lampe for a checklist of reports that made the very first System manifestation and also his and Henry's residency, phoned Pure Power, such an enduring mind.

A Homeboy, A Hippie & & A Funki Dredd, "Complete Complication (Heavenly Mix)" (Tam Tam Records 1990)

"This is one of the early anthems at the nightclub, which I think was actually additionally presently greatly played due to the initial Unit DJs Pari D and Dual UMF. The very early years were really quite open minded. They participated in a blend of property, hip hop, techno, even downtempo beats and a style contacted hip home. And it represents basically exactly how it was actually functioning in the UK also, this period when no person at the rave possessed tensions regarding having 808 State, Pop, Frankie Bones, Orbital and Guru Josh all on the very same stage."

Foremost Artists, "Extended Attraction Variation (Foresight Model)" (Nu Groove 1990)

"I guess I to begin with heard this magic piece when Boris Dlugosch played it at the Front club. Tough to clarify why, but it surely always made this enchanting, extreme ambience, both at Front and at Pure Electricity on Fridays, where Holly as well as me played this keep track of nearly each week. Few various other tracks may record the feeling of the time therefore strongly-- at that time it was led through residence and also techno songs coming from London, Nyc Metropolitan Area, Chicago and also Detroit. Front nightclub was hugely important, along with the Friday purchasing journey to the Container Records establishment, which imported all the songs directly. As Boris Dlugosch played much less and also much less techno at Face, our company tried to play and work with all factors of it at Pure Power, and also specifically techno from Detroit."

Psychological Trouble, "Joey's Riot" (Ambience Records 1990)

"Especially in The Big Apple Area, designates like Nu Gouge as well as others were actually launching music that appeared like each home as well as techno. Our experts commemorated specifically these hybrid appears and also in knowledge this might possess been what Hamburg was constantly approximately. Regularly open-minded as well as somehow in between. Our team were actually obviously trying all kinds of noises at that time. We participated in pretty tough thumping techno and also very early hypnotic trance, however at the primary of what we participated in was always what our company phoned tech-house. This prime goose bump example of the tech-house noise our company loved was actually produced by Joey Beltram, that for our team was actually one of the leading Nyc producers in this field."

Format, "Solid Treatment" (ESP Records 1991)

"This Orlando Voorn one was a what we called a Voll-Brett. Brett indicates plank, it's a term utilized for especially reliable flooring fillers-- we embraced this language from the Frankfurt setting. It's a certain shot that consistently contents skins in the nightclub. It was actually one of the noticeable anthems, at the very least for our nights."

The Hypnotherapist, "Pioneers Of The Warped Canal" (Increasing Higher 1991)

"We managed bus journeys from Hamburg to the first Mayday event and Love Parades. I still remember our experts invested 3 times preparing up the 1st Breather The Limitations Go Crazy at Kasematten/Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, and after our company were actually performed partying, we removed whatever and then moved towards Berlin for Mayday in a bus packed with Hamburg ravers.

Henry and also I were actually therefore run through that our experts must cancel our Pure Power gig there, as well as instead our company partied on as most effectively as our experts still could. And then, eventually, The Hypnotist jumped on phase, and they threw hundreds of green radiance sticks into the crowd. The lightings and also fog carried out the remainder.

The surroundings at Halle Weissensee was actually magical, and then the songs began. It simply blew me away how a lot of music effects they might combine. Trance was actually certainly not a musical condition for our company then, yet if you use it to a mood The Therapist probably was the act that toenailed it down best, particularly at that job. Obviously, our team could not help it, and really felt need to celebrate these keep tracks of at System, preferably from 4 a.m. onwards."

Ramirez, "Los Angeles Musika Tremenda (La Tormenta Mix)" (DFC 1991)

"Ramirez created a minimum of pair of masterpieces of very early tech-trance (which is what we eventually called this type), as well as this is one of them. I carry out not understand just how to define it exactly, yet the monitor had this subliminal dirty contact, as well as when I hear it, I am going to permanently consider sweat-drenched ravers, trembling blinking light, solid smog and the experience of strolling out into vast daytime after partying. This keep track of was always the one to activate the final reserves."

Golden Girls, "Dynamic (Frank De Wulf Remix)" (R&S Records 1992)

"In this listing, I am actually also making an effort to show how a considerable amount of different scenes and circles from various components of the planet produced this magical universe of sound our team enjoyed back then. This is actually a perfect example of the effect of the Belgian audio. I still think that Belgian as well as Dutch songs's influence has regularly been actually under rated. This was a significant and also surefire sausage at Unit."

Vainqueur, "Lyot (Maurizio Mix)" (Maurizio 1992)

"This keep track of is actually characteristic of the impacts of Berlin and also Detroit to our noise. The Berlin/Detroit axis remained in early progress during that time, and also our company took trips to Berlin to discover this noise at Hard Wax as well as Ecstasy. We partied to it at Tresor, Teknozid as well as Earth, however also at Hamburg's Front nightclub, before the first Unit opened up. For us, Basic Stations's discography offered the first major releases coming from Berlin, even in relations to techno. I think we additionally believed Maurizio was actually a person from Detroit. The minimalistic, dubbed out as well as darker parts of techno, tinted with some references to EBM, played a significant role at Device. Actually my very first night at System got on a Wednesday as well as it was actually called Tekkno Nightclub, with 2 k, of training program. It was actually even more devoted to EBM, Dark Surge as well as Acid, as well as then it opened to the impacts from over the garden pond, UK, Berlin as well as Frankfurt."

Vapourspace, "Gravitational Arch Of 10" (Plus 8 Records 1993)

"I may not remember where I initially heard this, however I keep in mind just how surprised I was. Ever since, I intended to share this feeling, as well as it was actually played at least twice an evening. I likewise remember we experimented with switching out the strike out and also blasting the haze machine prior to the kick drum was available in, and it regularly brought about incredible screams from the dance flooring. Not considerably eventually, Henry and also I marketed the Plus 8 night with Vapourspace stay together with DJ collections by Richie Hawtin as well as John Acquaviva. Our experts were pretty impressed through his analogue reside specified pageants."

Marmion, "Schöneberg" (Superstition 1993)

"Holly and I were actually doing the Pure Electricity night every Friday at System. Our experts threw probably all the pertinent names back then, from Derrick Might to Sven Väth. It was actually such a small act in a handful of German urban areas in those days that our team all felt a little like loved ones. Early buddies from our go crazy trips to Berlin, Frankfurt as well as Munich were actually, for instance, Mijk vehicle Dijk and also Marcos Lopez, that provided me this Berlin development as a demo a few times after a job at Unit. This EP and also track actually turned into one of the breakthroughs of Fear Recordings, the label I just had established three launches back. Specifically this fourth release gained the label as well as both manufacturers a significant international following. And the keep track of is what I phone a perfect mix of residence as well as techno components; it's a real techno house standard."

This content was originally published here.

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drink-n-watch · 5 years ago

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Do you ever get lost in a show so much that you actually refuse to believe a full episode has passed when the end credits start rolling. Tower of God has some sensational production values and some really striking visuals but it’s more than that. Something about the story just sucks me in to the point that I loose track of time. I haven’t quite put my finger on it yet.

Let me tell you what I did manage to notice about this second episode.

One thing’s absolutely for sure, this show has exceptional pacing. It never lingers on a scene for too long and it never wastes exposition. It gives you exactly what you need to follow along and grab your curiosity but fills in the rest with quick pace action and little seeds of mysteries. This type of masterful pacing tends to get really though towards the middle of a story once too much has been revealed to be able to count on your audience just wanting to figure out what’s going on but they’re not so fully vested or informed to you can just coast on those visuals and some fun fights. Hopefully Tower of God can keep this up, and the story is just cryptic enough to have a good shot at it.

One of the side effects of this efficient exposition is that we really don’t know that much about the characters. I know it’s only been two episodes but still, I can’t really tell you much about anyone beyond appearance and the most superficial personality traits. I have no clue how anyone would react. Which means everyone can surprise me! For instance: Rachel.

We essentially know nothing about Rachel but I have years of built up story assumptions and tropes that filled in the blanks in my head. A sweet girl who saved a boy and took selfishly took care of him. A motherly type I assume. A pretty blonde lady that Bam know has to save. A damsel in distress and a trophy all in one. Obviously she is a good kind soul and there was some terrible wrong she had to right. That’s why she was pushed by necessity to climb the tower and didn’t want to put her beloved Bam in harm’s way. That could still be her.

Burt this episode threw a little wrench in the works when it comes to Rachel. Now I already was a little perplexed about why Rachel decided to climb the Tower in the first place. Was she chosen? Is she also an irregular? Either way, she said that she just couldn’t stand it underground anymore. It seemed a bit more like a personal wish but you know, living in isolation can be though, maybe she was just at the end of her rope. Maybe she only left Bam behind because he wasn’t chosen and she didn’t think he could follow.

However, in this week’s flashback, Rachel is explaining the notion of conflict to Bam. She tells him it’s to fight with someone and want to hurt them. When he doesn’t understand, she immediately gives the example that if someone was mean or insulted her, then Bam would want to fight them, right? She didn’t use self defence as an example, nor did she suggest that fighting or violence were in any way bad or to be avoided. It seemed like a forgone conclusion that Bam would immediately defend her honour, no questions asked. When you add in the fact that Bam considers himself property of Rachel and suddenly, the character becomes much more complex. Not quite so easy to understand. My current feeling is that Rachel is a very selfish girl. Not necessarily bad or anything but fairly uninterested in others. And I love that. Adding some grey to the established personified ideal is so much more interesting in my opinion.

Look at that, I wrote like 3 paragraphs on a character that’s barely even present in the episode. Fine, let’s move to the closest thing we had to a lead character this week and talk a bit about Khun. Or as the very last frame tells us: Khun Aguero Agnis.

It’s no surprise that I would enjoy this character. He’s set up as a classic troll smart arse foil to our overly earnest protagonist and is already being established as someone to be weary of. In a series that tends to play it close to the vest and has not gone to any lengths to spoon feed us information, in episode two it has a likeable character directly explain that Khun is not to be trusted. That is the most blatant piece of exposition so far and it is there for a reason. I’m going to say misdirection. Or rather, Khun may not be the most trust worthy but he’ll likely stick with Bam. Maybe I’m just projecting Killua on him (and Gon of Bam for that matter of fact).

In many ways, Khun is a much more traditional character archetype so far, but as this happens to be one of my favourite archetypes I’m here for it.

Then there’s Bam himself. Now one of my readers, as well as a few reviewers have faulted Bam with being somewhat boring. Not painfully so but just a bit plain. Mind you, it’s pretty difficult to stand out in this eccentric cast but I’m also pretty sure it’s a bait and switch. We were told right from the start that Bam is “special”. Ok so every shonen protagonist is “special” but Bam is clearly not what he seems. I have a feeling that the fact may extend beyond his nature to his personality as well. So far the series seems to be fairly morally ambiguous. An straight and earnest protagonist having to deal with that reality can yield some interesting results.

Ok, let’s top talking about the characters I just said we knew nothing about… This week’s episode gave us a bit more information and some very intriguing world building. It seems the known world is entirely contained within the Tower and as such, everyone other than Bam is familiar with the mechanics although not the details. Moreover, climbing the tower doesn’t exactly grant you godhood in the way I imagined. It gives you access to great (potentially even unlimited) power and immortality but it doesn’t fundamentally change you as a person.

And the rankers (those that have made it to the top of the tower) all seem to remain in the middle tower. Can they leave? Do they retain said powers if they do. What can they actually do beyond administer test for other climbers? And why are people chosen to climb in the first place. The tower has a King and some type of administration, why bother with these rituals and tests? There must be a reason.

Every time we get a small piece of an answer, Tower of God raises 3 more questions. But I like it. I think it works so far and the pacing, production and characters are all good enough to make the trip worth while even if we don’t arrive at any answers. Look at me making bold pronouncements with two whole episodes under my belt… Yeah I have no clue what I’m talking about other than, I like Tower of God so far. Rak is a bit loud but he brings some nice levity to the trio.

Did you enjoy this second episode? What was your favourite part?

Tower of God Ep.2 – An Alliance of Convenience Do you ever get lost in a show so much that you actually refuse to believe a full episode has passed when the end credits start rolling.

#action #adventure #anime #drama #episodic #romance #supernatural #surreal #Tower of God

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years ago

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"How A New Blogging Strategy Broke HubSpot's Website Traffic Records Ft. Kieran Flanagan of HubSpot" (Inbound Success Ep. 79)

HubSpot has experienced incredible growth since its founding in 2005, but in the last year, the company's marketing team has broken the company's website traffic growth records with a new strategy.

Kieran Flanagan

This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast, I spoke with HubSpot VP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan about the company's "hearts and minds strategy," and how it has driven 80% year over year traffic growth (and a commensurate increase in new leads).

The results that Kieran and his team have gotten are so strong that they have inspired a change in the way the company's editorial team is structured, and a new approach to how they carry out keyword research, develop editorial calendars, and measure their results.

This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live, the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel.

Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".

Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live

Some highlights from my conversation with Kieran include:

HubSpot is targeting marketers and business leaders and its new strategy does this by appealing to their hearts and minds.

All of the company's editorial content is segmented into those two categories - hearts and minds.

Content for the mind is more tactical in nature and targeted at attracting existing search volume for a particular keyword.

Content for the heart is more emotional and meant to tap into a pain point that their audience is experiencing and wants to solve for.

Because there is not necessarily existing search volume for the "hearts" content (as there is with the "minds" content), HubSpot has an aggressive content promotion strategy for the hearts content.

They started by rolling this strategy out on the company's english language web properties, and it has been so successful that they are now expanding it onto their non-english language sites.

For the minds content, because it is targeted at existing search volume, HubSpot is using a pillar content and topic cluster strategy to establish authority for its target keywords with search engines.

It is relatively straightforward to identify topics for the "minds" content using tools such as Google Adwords, Ahrefs, etc. For the "hearts" content, HubSpot relies upon customer research and interviews to understand the questions they are asking and the pain points they are experiencing.

Kieran believes that when it comes to hearts content, brands must choose a side and be prepared to attract some audiences, and repel others.

Even in a B2B sale, you are selling to individual people, so it's important to appeal to things that matter to the individual, and be problem-focused before you are solution-focused, with your content.

When it comes to content promotion, it is very important for any company (large or small) to have a strategy for getting back links. There are a variety of ways to do this and Kieran talks specifically about the "surround sound" strategy and the broken link strategy.

If you are doing marketing for a smaller company with a lower domain authority, it is more important to produce less content that you heavily promote than to create more content that you don't promote at all.

For the minds content, you should focus on keywords that have a high "search click volume" as opposed to simply high search volume.

Kieran's hearts and minds strategy has resulted in 80% year over year website traffic growth for HubSpot.

Resources from this episode:

Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS"

Visit Kieran's website

Connect with Keiran on LinkedIn

Follow Kieran on Twitter

Listen to The Growth TL;DR podcast with Kieran Flanagan and Scott Tousley

Listen to the podcast to learn how Kieran's "hearts and minds" strategy for content creation has broken all of HubSpot's traffic records.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Kieran Flanagan, who is the VP of Marketing at HubSpot, and the host of The Growth TL;DR podcast. Welcome, Kieran. Kieran Flanagan (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. I appreciate you having me on.

Kieran and Kathleen recording this episode

Kathleen: Yeah. I'm interested to pick your brain. I always love talking to people from HubSpot because, obviously, you guys are at the forefront of the inbound marketing movement, and so rarely do most people get the opportunity to get a peek inside the kimono and find out what's really happening with the company.

I'm excited to do that here today, but before we jump in, if you could tell my audience a little bit more about yourself and just a little bit about what you do at HubSpot. That would be great.

About Kieran Flanagan and HubSpot

Kieran: Yeah. Absolutely. I've really had three roles during my time at HubSpot. Pre-HubSpot, I worked for other SaaS companies.

Then, I was lucky enough to join HubSpot when we opened up our first office outside of Cambridge, way back when I think the company was maybe 300 people. There was a small group of us who were tasked with growing out the international business. I did that for two and a half years. That business grew quite quickly.

Then, I joined another small group of people that were in HubSpot that had the mission of growing a Freemium business - so like a go to market, where you could try our software for free, then you could upgrade as you needed to get more functionality.

That went really well, and I did that for, I think, another two and a half years. Then, HubSpot really just adopted Freemium across the entire go to market.

Today what I do in HubSpot is manage all of the different teams that are responsible for our global demand, and that demand is a mix of leads. We generate leads, turn them into marketing qualified leads, and send them across to sales people, turn into opportunities and customers.

Then, we generate users who use our products for free, then can upgrade through either reaching out and talking to a sales person or actually upgrading themselves and buying the products themselves.

Kathleen: You are based in Ireland, correct?

Kieran: Yes. That's another interesting thing about my work in that I'm based in Ireland. I have a team of about 50 people. Four of them are based in Dublin with me, and everyone else is based in the States. I have gotten very used to remote working and appearing as a box on Zoom to everyone else.

Kathleen: I always tell people that I live my life on Zoom and that soon my headphones are going to grow and become a permanent part of my body, because it's the same for me. I work out of my house, and I'm on Zoom basically 24/7.

Kieran: Right. I usually check every single moment of every single day, and I've still got my AirPods in. I'm never sure if I've taken them out or not.

Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like Zoom needs to sponsor my podcasts because we talk about it so much on here, about how we live our lives on video. It's great. It's the greatest thing. I honestly couldn't do my job without it. I imagine it's similar for you with people scattered all over.

Kieran: Yeah, I'm very passionate about remote work. I believe that it's good for, not only companies, but just good for the world. It's a really great way to redistribute wealth across the different cities, not just all within a small group of cities that just become overly expensive.

Kathleen: Yeah, it also - to me, I used to own an agency. I transitioned halfway through my tenure as an agency owner from hiring everyone locally to hiring folks remotely.

For me, the greatest impetus behind that was really just to find the best person for the role no matter where they happened to be. Boy, what a difference that made to my company. It all of a sudden opened up this world of possibilities that was pretty amazing.

Kieran: Yeah, it's actually the exact same for me. Obviously remote worked, it was just a good thing for me because I took a role that would generally be based in Boston, to take over a bunch of U.S.-based teams. I was allowed to do it because HubSpot allowed me to do it remotely, which was really good of them.

They've done a lot to make remote work within HubSpot. The other benefit was because I was remote, I really didn't mind where I hired people.

It's definitely been one of the best levers to both hire and retain talent into my teams, and having that flexibility and allowing people to work where they want to work within reason. We do have some guardrails, but generally we've gotten pretty good at it over the last couple of years.

Kathleen: That's great. You said you manage all the teams that are responsible for this growth. I think you mentioned there are 50 people, is that right, that you manage?

Kieran: Yeah, it's about 50 people spread across different offices that are regularly charged with growing the global demand of HubSpot.

Kathleen: Wow, that is a lot to wrap one's head around.

How Kieran's Blogging Strategy Broke HubSpot's Traffic Records

Kathleen: One of the reasons I was excited to talk to you is that I was reading that in the last eight months you guys have broken HubSpot's traffic records, which is really impressive because for anyone who's familiar with HubSpot, this is a company that has had astronomical growth, both as a company in terms of its user base, but also in terms of its traffic.

I often think - you intuitively think - that gets harder as time goes on because you've already made those big early gains. You've identified all the low hanging fruit.

I'm very interested to hear how at this stage in HubSpot's evolution you guys are still able to break those kinds of records. What is it that lies behind that success?

Kieran: You are definitely right in that it's definitely harder because you're generally doing everything so there's not this un-hidden channel that you have not tapped into.

You're tasked with "How do I get better at the things that I'm already doing? How do I get better within these existing channels?" Or, "How do I layer on new channels for growth?"

We do that. We're in a fortunate position where we can have teams who are focused on long term bets. We have a couple of those in the works at the moment.

Really the thing that's been very successful for us over the last year is not only that the teams do get better - and they do get better just by the fact that they're super smart - but they also hire other smart people into the teams who bring you fresh ideas.

We've got to grips for our content in terms of segmenting it into what our CMO, Kipp, calls the hearts and minds of individuals. How do you win the hearts and minds of business leaders?

That approach to content marketing means you think about "How do I create tactical content?"

If you think about when you start a blog, or a company starts a blog, they generally think how do I make this blog really appealing to people? How can I get this blog known by a wider audience?

One of the things you can challenge yourself on is, does that actually matter? Does that really matter if you are trying to win the minds of business leaders through this tactical content? Content that does that is really created with promotion in mind, and generally through search.

What we do is we have our content team segmented into a team that are trying to win the minds of business leaders. We're thinking through "How do I create a huge editorial calendar based upon all the things we could create across the things that our audiences are actually searching for?"

We're not just creating content in the hopes that we can drive traffic demand to HubSpot. We actually think promotion first. There's actually existing demand for this content, and we create that content with that demand in mind.

Then, there's also obviously how do you win the hearts of your audience? That's still super important, but that content is more focused on how do you facilitate emotion within people or how do you cause emotion with people? How do you make people feel something about your brand? How do you get people to connect with your mission?

It's harder to directly measure the success of that content through the traditional things, like has it drove the lead, has it drove the user, has it drove our sale?

Generally that's worked really, really well for us over the last year. We've seen a lot of success in doing that. We're just in the middle of replicating that strategy in all of our non-English territories.

Kathleen: Oh, that's so interesting. I have so many questions. In my head I want to separate this conversation into minds and hearts-

Kieran: Yes.

Kathleen: ... Because it sounds like those are two different approaches, or two different prongs within the one approach.

Kieran: Yes.

Kathleen: Let's start with minds because if I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like what you have done is said "Instead of trying to focus on bigger think pieces, or esoteric topics, let's get really granular and figure out what the audience is already searching for and let's scratch that itch, and tap into that pain."

Is that correct?

Kieran: Yeah, exactly. We do both of those things again, because we are very fortunate that we have the resources to have teams for both those things.

I think there are companies of certain sizes that probably need to consider which one of those is the most important one for them to invest in. Yet, the minds team is really focused on "How do we create a whole editorial calendar?" We have this huge editorial calendar broken into all kinds of scientific metrics and ways to figure out the things you create content on.

But, it's really focused on content that attracts traffic through search engines. Not trying to figure out how does this cause someone to feel a certain way that they want to share on social. How do you read this post and then you remember the blog.

We're less concerned about that. It's more of a "Hey, I come in, I want this thing, I found this thing," then there's further information if you want to download that, or there're other ways you can explore more of the HubSpot ecosystem.

It's really tactical content created with promotion in mind, and we create it with search in mind.

For other companies it may be a different platform that they create that content in mind for that's applicable to however they promote their company.

Kathleen: I feel like this sounds to me like the "Field of Dreams" approach. "If you build it, they will come."

Kieran: Yeah, it's definitely "If you build it, and you have a really great promotion planned."

Again, there're different phases of how this would work for a company. HubSpot is a company that has a lot of domain authority, so generally when we created content about something we do a little bit of promotion on that content, it ranks quite quickly.

If I'm in a more early stage company, what I probably want to do is have a plan where I create, within the minds of whoever my audience is, content and I spend a lot more time on promotion than we would probably need to because I'm trying to build up the domain authority of my website.

That promotion could be acquiring the links for it, and all these different ways that you can attract attention to it.

Kathleen: Let's break this down even further.

You mentioned that you guys have this big editorial calendar. You're really trying to map out what are the topics that these business leaders you're targeting are already searching for, and what's going to be really useful for them.

Can you speak to that process and any kind of either strategies or tools that you use to surface those topics?

Kieran: One of the things we use is the cluster and topic strategy. We think about what is the topic that this business leader is interested in learning more information about, because they're actively searching for it.

Let's take the example of content marketing. Content marketing is a topic, it's an all encompassing topic that has many sub-topics.

We will look at content marketing and break that down into the many sub-topics that people are searching for. Maybe people are searching for how do I build a content market and process, how do I create a winning content marketing strategy, how do I measure content marketing, how do I turn content marketing into customers? There's all of these different sub-topics that are related to that topic.

We take one topic and break it down into all the things we could create content around. At the centerpiece we would create a piece of content on that core topic. Maybe it's the definitive guide on content marketing.

Then, we would create all of this other micro content that's applicable to all of the different things that people are searching for given the examples that I've just gone through. We would interlink all that content.

Basically, think about it as a hub and spoke strategy where you have the central piece at the heart of that, and you have all the many pieces around, and they are all interlinked.

Generally if you do that, what you're helping Google to do is understand that you are an authority on this topic. You've not just got one or two pieces of content - you have deeply covered that topic. You have many different pieces of content that are relevant and helpful to the user.

We do that by looking for those topics, looking for all the different keywords that are related to that topic, aggregating those up, deciding on the content we can create, listing out page titles, meta descriptions - all of the information that you actually need - and then prioritizing based upon the available search traffic for each topic.

We also look at things like how relevant is it to our business. We have guardrails in place that it needs to drive traffic, plus it needs to drive the user or lead because again, remember, this is a topic that's tactical within the minds you should expect a conversion.

Kathleen: Got it, okay. It has to be relevant to the business. It has to have a sufficient volume of search traffic.

Kieran: Yes.

Kathleen: I assume that the volume of search traffic, there's not one magic number that every company needs to look for? Is it relative to your company and the slice of market you're going after? Is there a magic number?

Kieran: No, it's definitely relevant to the company.

A topic that has 5,000 total visits available search traffic when you aggregate all this up, may be a lot for a company in a niche market. If you're a company in a broad market, maybe that's not that much at all.

It's definitely specific to whatever company you are, and the product you have, and the amount of all the search traffic you can acquire. The number for HubSpot is probably very different from other companies.

Kathleen: Got it. You have these really tactical, practical topics. Then, you have the ones that are meant to appeal more to the heart.

This is the one that I think is so interesting to me because I feel like a lot of marketers who listen to this podcast, for a lot of them, the concept of finding these topic clusters, going for things of high traffic, being really practical, that's going to feel very familiar. It's much of what we're taught. That's the whole Marcus Sheridan, "They ask, you answer" paradigm.

But, I find, funny enough, many marketers, especially content marketers are really bad at the heart side of things. I'm interested to hear how your team is approaching that.

Kieran: The heart is slightly more difficult to actually pinpoint the content that's going to strike or resonate with your audience because the research piece is harder.

The minds can be more mechanical because you can physically see that there's people interested in this, whereas the hearts are "How do I create things that help people feel some way about my company?"

We actually have a similar setup in terms of how the mind and heart are set up in that we have an editorial team that creates a calendar based upon content that they want to connect to our mission, our products.

The thing that differs is actually their research process. The research process has a lot more talking to people, talking to customers, talking to prospects, talking to other teams within HubSpot, figuring out what actually resonates with those people.

Then, the way that you figure out what's going to work is actually trial and error. You create content, you see that it resonates with people, and you tweak it over time.

The way they differentiate it is the mind has more tools that you can pull in relevant information from. I'm sure your audience knows, search traffic, all these different things.

Whereas, the heart, you're spending a lot more time actually talking to people, doing what you would do if you were building a product, a lot of customer research, a lot of insights from other teams within the company.

Kathleen: Is is fair to say that the heart strategy is more about pain that the customer is feeling?

Kieran: Yeah, exactly. It's more about the emotion you want that person to have about your company.

A good example of this, back in the day for HubSpot, what actually drew me to HubSpot before I worked there was Brian did a piece that was really a call to arms for marketers about why outbound marketing was not the best way to spend your time, why there's this better way of doing marketing.

That's the piece that's more your heart. There's not people searching for inbound marketing back there and there wasn't people searching why they shouldn't do outbound marketing.

That creates a tribe of people who feel that way about outbound marketing and then feel they need to actually make a change and do something else.

Kathleen: Is it about taking a position or taking a stance? Is that part of the heart strategy?

Kieran: Yeah, I think one of the most important things to do as a brand is choose a side. I think you should always have a clear enemy in terms of - a clear enemy is really what problem your product sells.

"One of the most important things to do as a brand is choose a side"

~ Kieran Flanagan (@searchbrat)

Click to tweet this quote

Be very clear about that and know that means that you're going to have both people who are attracted to your company and people who are detractors from the company. That is way better than actually being vanilla and just having people who don't care much about your company.

Kathleen: Interesting. For somebody who's listening, if they're thinking about this in the context of their own company, particularly with the heart strategy, any tips on how to get started on this and how to begin to identify those topics that you might want to cover?

Kieran: On the heart side?

Kathleen: Yeah.

Kieran: Yeah, I think the most important thing marketers can do that they probably don't do enough of is talk to their customers.

I've worked a lot with product and engineering because previous to the role I've done at HubSpot, I was in what we call a growth role. A growth role is basically a collection of marketers, product and engineers who are tasked with creating onboarding and all these different things to help people better use a product, and to upgrade to paid versions of your product.

The thing I took away from working with product is they are so focused on the problem, so focused on stating the problem clearly before they ever jump to a solution. They are really obsessed about "Do we truly understand the problem?"

The way they get there is through a lot of really great research and talking to customers. That's the thing, I don't know if for yourself, but definitely the way I used to work is I would always think about the solution. I would think a little bit about the problem and then I would think about ten solutions because marketers are generally creative. They're always on, looking to try to sell things.

I think on the heart content, I would be super focused on the problem and being able to articulate the problem, and then trying to figure out what would resonate.

What are the points within that problem that really resonate with a customer? They're, “Oh, yeah, I feel that way about this. I feel that way about that.”

Then, you can better understand how to create content that shows them that you have solutions to this thing and that you have a certain position on this thing that you believe in.

Kathleen: It's really interesting that you put it that way. I've now done close to 80 different interviews through this podcast. I've been trying to think about some of the themes that have emerged. People that are having a lot of success with inbound, what do they have in common?

One of the common themes I've noticed is that they are more persona ... I don't even want to use the word persona. They are more problem-focused than they are solution-focused.

What I mean by that is that the marketers who build campaigns and messaging around their products and services don't tend to do as well as the marketers who deeply tap into the person that they are trying to sell to.

Sometimes it means creating content that actually has nothing to do with their products and services. What I've noticed is that particularly at the top of the funnel, in non-marketing speak, the best way to open the conversation is not always to talk about what you have to sell.

It's to talk about something that that person is feeling that they want to solve for, that may have nothing to do with what you do, but you've opened the conversation.

I'm interested to know with the hearts content that you're creating for HubSpot, does it always have some link back to the product, or is it really just purely problem-focused? Does that make sense as a question?

Kieran: No, it definitely makes sense because people are not looking for products and services. They're looking for solutions to problems that make their life better. They're looking for a certain job that they want done and when they visualize themselves doing that thing, it makes their life better in some way.

I think there's a balance because we've always tried to figure out this balance.

There was a time when you talked to a lot of people about what HubSpot was and not many people knew we actually sold software. They didn't know we sold software because we were doing exactly what you just said, which is we were creating content around problems and helping people solve those problems before we ever mention our tools.

I think that's a great way to draw people in, but I don't think you need to be overtly secretive about what you do.

I think if you have a clear viewpoint on something you can clearly state a problem. It's fine to say, “Hey, these are ways that you can sell them. By the way, we also have this thing that can help you do that thing.”

We have it tied back to our products because if you're consuming this content, you're generally on one of our web properties, so it's impossible to miss the fact that we are a software company.

We've worked on that. We're not, in any way, in your face. We're not, “Buy, buy, buy this thing.”

I think there's a thing in content marketing that most people struggle to measure the totality of their content marketing efforts because a lot of the content marketing is the law of serendipity when, if you give value through content, you know good things are happening, but it's not always easy to put a direct metric on it. That speaks to heart content.

Kathleen: How important is it when you're talking about tapping into the problems? The other confusion I see marketers experience is that there are the problems of the individual and there are the problems of the company, because we're talking about a B2B sale here, for you.

Kieran: Right.

Kathleen: How important is it with the hearts content to tap into the problems of the individual versus the problems of the company?

Kieran: That's actually a good question. I think they're one in the same in some respects. Let me try to give the example of one of our personas and see if this is true or not. I don't know if I've thought through that.

We have a persona called Marketing Mary, and when you think about HubSpot ... I'm not trying to just do a sell of HubSpot software to your audience. But I'm just trying to-

Kathleen: It is your day job, so...

Kieran: Yeah, yeah. We have a persona Marketing Mary. That's a person, in a certain company size, who we think is ideal for HubSpot.

The way that we think about how it helps her is that it makes her more efficient at her job, which is good for the individual, good for the company. It actually helps Marketing Mary figure out how she can be more successful to get a promotion because that's something she cares about.

Again, it's good for the individual, good for the company. I think most of the things within B2B, most of your personas what's good for the individual is generally good for the company.

You do want to make it individual-based, because even in B2B, it's the people making decisions, it's not the all-encompassing company making the decision.

You want to try to make sure that person understands how their life is going to be made better using your product, because they're ultimately your customer.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's really what I've observed, too. Going back to looking at all these interviews I've done, again I think a mistake that a lot of marketers make is, in the B2B area, we tend to focus on what does the company need? Yes, that's important.

Kieran: Right.

Kathleen: But, at the end of the day, I don't think you can tap into somebody's heart unless you make it about what they, as an individual, need.

Kieran: Exactly.

Kathleen: It has to somehow tie back to me. As you said, often it is either "I want a promotion", or "I want to look good in front of my boss." It tends to be things like that or, "It saves me time, and it makes my life easier."

Kieran: Yeah, great B2B companies still sell to people. It just happens that those people are in companies and the tool is making their life easier, or helping them to do something within that company.

Generally if you nail that value proposition what you'll see is your product within that company also spreads because that person is a champion of your tool. They start championing that tool within the company itself.

The Role of Content Promotion in HubSpot's Traffic Strategy

Kathleen: Yeah, now going back for a second to the minds content. You talked about how you come up with the topics and one of the things that you mentioned was that promotion is a really important part of this.

Acknowledging that promotion, as you said, is a bit easier for HubSpot because you have such a high domain authority, talk me through just a little bit, for the average person listening, what should that promotion look like, or what does it need to include?

Kieran: The hard facts about this is a promotion plan to getting better search traffic. The reality is that acquiring links still matters.

I think that it seems old fashioned because you hear all these new things that marketers talk about, but it's still super important for acquiring search traffic.

What you would probably want to have is an overall plan on how to acquire links to your site. That can be a lot of different things.

There're tons of different tactics. There's something called broken link tactics where you can go and find these sites that your competitors have links from. You can go find broken links that they have, that are relevant to content you have, suggest they link to you instead because the link they already have is broken.

There're just tons and tons of tactics you can go from. You should really have an overall domain link building plan that acquires links to your overall domain because that's going to help all content on your domain rank better.

You can have very individualistic link plans for certain blog posts. You're probably not going to do that for every single blog post. You're not going to try to acquire links to every single blog post because that's a lot of time commitment depending upon how much content you create. If you're only creating one piece of content a week ...

Again, if you're doing mind content, you may only do that because you don't create content unless there's actually available search traffic. What happens is your quantity actually goes down because you actually don't try to just plaster the internet with things and hope traffic comes in. You're actually way more strategic, so you create less content, but you put a lot more time onto promotion.

One of the teams that I have, they have this thing called "surround sound strategy." Surround sound strategy is trying to make sure that anywhere there's content related to the thing you've created content for, like listicles and "best of" posts, and all of these different things, that your content is also listed within those posts.

That is basically just building relationships with different publishers and things like that. Also, creating content that is better than what's currently available on Google.

So if you go and search something, whatever the top page is, can you create a page that has better quality than what's already ranking at number one in Google? If you can, then generally you are in a pretty good position to get people to link out to your content.

Kathleen: I feel like isn't that Brian Dean's skyscraper technique?

Kieran: Yes, Brian Dean is the person to keep up to date on if you want really solid link building strategies, so his skyscraper technique.

Finding dead back links and reaching out to people to get them to include your content is a really old tactic. I was doing SEO ten years ago and we used that, but you generally find the things that work in SEO still work today if you can do them to a high enough level, if you can do them better than other people.

Kathleen: I think this is the challenge that many marketers feel, especially marketers in small and medium sized businesses, when they hear about back linking.

I've had this conversation so many times over the years. It's, “How am I going to do this in a way that's efficient? I have a small marketing team.” Or, "It's just me, how could I possibly create the content and try to get links for it?"

Many marketers, in my experience, just fall back on "I'm just going to push it out to my Facebook, and my Twitter, and my LinkedIn, and spray and pray."

How does a small marketing team or a one-person marketing team do this?

Kieran: Again, I think if you are being more strategic about the content you create, and only creating content that you think can drive a certain amount of volume.

There's an important part in that is one of the things to think about, in terms of volume, is historically we would think about key word volume. How much key word volume is available for this key phrase?

More and more you should probably think about the available search clicks. The difference there is that with featured snippets becoming way more popular on Google, the amount of search volume available for key word is a lot less than you think. Featured snippets cannibalized the amount of actual clicks different key words get.

So, you would look at search click volume, only create content for keywords that have a higher threshold, whatever your search click volume is. Then, create a promotion plan.

Know that the time spent promoting that content is probably better spent than you creating additional content if you are not able to promote it at all.

If you're not able to promote it at all, you could create 10, 20 pieces of content within a month, and generate less traffic than creating two or three pieces of content that you actually have a real promotion plan for.

The balance of creating content to promoting content shifts from when you're a start-up to when you're a bigger company. It shifts really with domain authority. You'll see that shift happen by just how quickly you start to rank for things when you have a bigger domain authority.

Kathleen: Yeah, you said something I want to clarify because this is really important. You talked about the difference between keyword volume and search click volume.

I think many marketers are familiar with how to find keyword volume. You can go into Google Adwords, or other programs like that. Where should they look to find search click volume?

Kieran: I'll give you one tool, but there's probably many tools. Ahrefs is a tool that has click stream data. That means that you can go into Ahrefs and actually look at the search click volume of a keyword because it has enough data to show you what the effect of images or featured snippets or videos they're going to have on the amount of volume that that keyword gets.

I think it's an interesting way to start to categorize volume of keywords in the world we live in today, where Google is cannibalizing a lot the traffic we get by showing users these different things.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's really interesting. We experienced this this past year.

Last March our traffic really took a bit of a nose dive. We couldn't figure out what was causing it. I had a couple people looking at it. We were digging deep.

It was funny, I actually wound up sitting with someone from HubSpot's SEO team when I was in Boston for partner day, and he helped me figure it out. I think it was a guy named Victor who works for Matthew Barby. He's amazing. Victor is a magician.

Kieran: They're both on my team.

Kathleen: Yeah, he narrowed it down and helped me figure out that essentially we were losing traffic to featured snippets. As soon as we started optimizing for snippets, and started getting some of the snippets, it just came right back up again.

Very interesting what's happening with that, but thank you. I didn't even know he was on your team, so thank you for giving me an hour of Victor's time.

Kieran: I guess one of the things we did really well is, aside from all the different tactics, because actually the most important thing ...

There are three things a successful company does is hire and retain talent, which is priority number one.

Set people up for success in team structures. Team structures become a lot more complex when you grow. There's something you have to continually optimize, which is the second thing to get right. The third thing is actually the tactics. The tactics are not successful if you can't do the first two.

One of the things we invested in a lot in over the past 18 months is building out a really great SEO team. Two of the people you've talked to, so Matt, he's on my team, runs a whole group that acquires all Freemium users, including our search team. Victor sits on the search team.

Kathleen: I've never actually spoken to Matt, but I've always wanted to. So Matt, if you're listening, you could be my next guest.

I've listened to his entire Skill Up SEO podcast series. He's just so smart, and I love the content that he creates. I consider him one of the people I need to follow to understand best practices for SEO.

Kieran: Yep.

Kathleen: You have a good team.

Kieran: They're super smart on that team.

Kathleen: Okay, we talked about understanding promotion. I loved your point about, to me it's the 80/20 rule, you're going to get 80 percent of the results out of 20 percent of the things you do. The 20 percent, in this case, sounds like it's create less content and focus more on promotion, especially if your domain authority isn't really high.

The Results of HubSpot's Hearts and Minds Strategy

Kathleen: Talk now about results. I would love it if you could give me a sense of ... I know broad-brush that you guys have broken traffic records, but can you speak specifically to what kind of traffic growth have you experienced over what time period and how are you measuring the success of your hearts and minds strategy?

Kieran: This is where I'm always not very good on in terms of exact numbers because we're a public company.

I think the best thing to do is even if you go to Ahrefs, you can use it for free. You can look at our domain. You can look at organic search traffic. I think it's something in the region of 80 percent year over year growth. I don't know.

Kathleen: Wow.

Kieran: I would need to go back and re-look the numbers. I could be under or over that because I haven't looked at that number in a while.

Kathleen: If it's anywhere near close to that, that's amazing.

Kieran: Yeah, it's large, but I think that is probably broken out into ... We look at it broken into many different things because we have a core site, we have blog, we have academy, then we have all of the non-English sites.

Any one of those could be that number, or any of them may not. I could be wrong. It's quite substantial.

The cool thing actually we noticed was our demand grew by a similar amount. Not exactly, so it's never going to be if you grow by 60 percent, you get 60 percent more demand. It's always going to be, I think, less. But, it was still correlated pretty well.

The other cool thing was we saw, if you go into this tool called Similar Web, where you can break out your traffic by brand and non-brand. I was doing a lot of investigation, using that tool on our site and other sites.

The growth in brand traffic, people searching for HubSpot, grew in line with our non-brand of traffic, which does show there was a correlation between this law of serendipity, which are people coming into the content that doesn't overtly mention your brand and its informational key words. Then, discovering your company and coming back at some point on a branded key word. We've seen really good growth over the last 12 months.

Kathleen: That's amazing. You mentioned earlier it's somewhere easy to measure traffic growth, and specifically that's an out growth of your mind strategy. You talked about how it's a little bit harder to measure the success of the heart strategy.

Are there any other metrics you're looking at to measure the degree to which you're tapping in on the emotional side?

Kieran: There's a whole series, a whole document, that that team has put together under Meghan Anderson, who is VP of HubSpot, extremely smart, and manages and looks after all things brand.

A couple of things, I'll give you a couple because this is quite large, but you can look at things like direct traffic. It's a good signal that your brand is growing. You can look at branded traffic, again a pretty great indicator that people are searching and care about your brand.

You can look at number of mentions of your brand, which I'm sure people are all aware of, either on social or you can look at placements, the number of people who are mentioning you across the web. You can look at placements, and those placements can be put into different categories of publications, like Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3. I think there are some ways you can do it.

I'll give you another example not from HubSpot. I had a really great conversation on this hearts and minds with the content marketing director called Jimmy Daly. He works at an agency called Animalz. We were talking about this.

His metric for hearts was does our content create one conversation within a potential client. They figure that out by asking them on the phone, "Have you heard about us?" That speaks to a smaller company who thinks about content, and through that hearts lens, and their metric is not so easy to measure. It's something actually that you have to ask people about.

Kathleen: It's interesting because we're struggling with this. Struggling is not the right word. We're grappling with what is the best way to measure that because as a company we've moved more from an agency to really leading as a publisher.

Instead of measuring, for example, subscribers, we're measuring engaging subscribers, like number of subscribers that have really clicked on an email in the last month.

Looking beyond sessions on our website to not only unique users as an aggregate measure of the audience size, but pages per session, and dwell time on the site, things like that.

This is something I'm so interested in because I feel like nobody has really cracked this one yet. There's an opportunity here.

Kieran: I don't think there's ever going to be definitive metrics because it's just so difficult to put your finger on one thing. You can also look at, what you're doing, health of subscribers, in the same way you could look at users of a Freemium product. What is the net new users you add? What is the attention of those users over time? How many of those users actually churn and stop coming back? I think that's a good gauge.

I think most companies would be better served to choose the things that they think are the best indicators, and be happy with those things, and know that they're still not going to be 100 percent of what they need.

Kathleen: That makes sense. It's not a perfect science at this point.

Well, so interesting to hear about all these strategies that HubSpot is pursuing. Now I'm going to pay much closer attention to your blog to see if I can determine which articles are more about the mind or about the heart.

Kieran: We should put a little icon of a heart icon.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: Switching gears for a minute. There's two questions that I always ask everyone that comes on the podcast. In your case I'm very interested to hear what you have to say. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, and before you were at HubSpot you've been at Marketo, you've been at Salesforce, you have a very interesting perspective on this industry.

Company or individual, right now, who out there do you think is doing inbound marketing really well? Who should my listeners go to and look at to see a great example?

Kieran: That's a good one. You can tell me if this is not a good answer and to come back with a better answer.

I've been more focused on what we call the flywheel force and friction than inbound recently. I'm sure you've probably heard of it because you're aware of HubSpot. Just for your listeners the flywheel is basically ... in cap stage you're inbound in a loop, which basically is a tracking gauge to light. Each one of those stages you have force and friction. Force helps spin that loop and friction stops that loop from spinning.

The examples I have are actually specific to some of the customers on the force and friction because they are the ones at most top of mind because that's what we've been looking at.

Kathleen: Oh, yeah. I'd love to hear more about that.

Kieran: Let me give you a couple of examples because they're quite different from giving you companies who are doing really well at creating content. These are actually slightly different.

There's a customer called WashCard who has payment stations for car wash operators.

If you think about one of the things that drives friction in the engaged stage is not showing your pricing, which seems pretty simplistic. If I add my price in, I create better force, because customers generally like experience and transparency.

They're an example of a company that did not even just show their pricing, the simple task of being more transparent around their pricing, actually turned that page into their third biggest source of leads within two weeks.

It's a very small example of how focusing on this idea across your entire flywheel can benefit you.

There's another company called ChargeBacks911 who allows you to integrate their software into e-commerce and handles charge backs right when their customers want to give back their products.

They had some friction again within the light stage where they had an onboarding process that allowed you to set up, that they had some friction within. There was missed expectations, so sales people were setting expectations that they were not fulfilling on. They didn't have the right documentation.

What they did was took the difficult decision to put a sales rep in every onboarding with a new customer. That sales rep could then fill in the gaps. That sales rep could provide that additional context, but also the sales reps understood the friction they were creating by setting the wrong expectations.

I can't share their public numbers, but just by doing that they vastly decreased their amount of churn they were having. They are not the traditional, "here's a company that's crushing inbound," but I think that the force and friction across your flywheel is definitely something that can give you a lot of actionable things to work on.

Kathleen: I love those examples. It's always interesting when I ask this question, because it's a bit of a Rorschach test. It depends on when people hear "inbound marketing" what they think I'm talking about.

Kieran: Right.

Kathleen: That obviously has changed so much over the years, and over time. Even right now if you took a snapshot and asked ten people what it was, you'd probably get ten different answers.

I love that answer. It's very different, and I love how specific you got. I'll be curious to go look at both of those companies' websites to see more of what they're doing.

Kieran: Cool.

Kathleen: Second question is, the world of digital marketing is obviously changing at a lightning fast pace. How do you personally stay up-to-date with all of the new developments?

Kieran: There are three ways.

I'm lucky that we have a Slack channel within our company that is called "What's Next." I get everything sent to me on the Slack channel, as does everyone else who's part of that Slack channel.

I generally get content pushed at me outside of HubSpot through my network, which I find really interesting. I no longer actually go looking for content or subscribe content that much. I just wait until it comes to me. I probably miss out on content, but it suits me because I'm kind of busy.

Then, the other thing I've gravitated towards is I'm an introvert, I started a podcast to be more extrovert and talk to people. Talking to other smart people has been the number one way I've learned above all else. It's the best investment I've made in terms of my own time, and just learning and becoming better at what I do.

Kathleen: Amen. I talk about that a lot on this podcast. I, too, am an introvert although I fake it really well.

Kieran: Same as me.

Kathleen: I started this podcast out of purely selfish reasons because it's a good reason to talk to people I otherwise would not have a reason to talk to.

Kieran: The two of us are on the podcast faking being an extrovert, on the podcast.

Kathleen: Exactly. It's great. It's the perfect tool for that.

Kieran: Right.

How To Connect With Kieran

Kathleen: Kieran, thank you so much. I really enjoyed hearing all of this. It's fascinating to get an understanding for how you, and your team at HubSpot internally are thinking about growth and the approach that you are taking.

If somebody is listening, and they want to learn more about HubSpot, or if they wanted to reach out and ask a question of you, what's the best way for them to connect online?

Kieran: HubSpot, you can reach at HubSpot.com. There's so many different ways if you go there that you can connect with us.

Me, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm randomly called @searchbrat on Twitter, which is one of the worst handles. I've had it for too long. I need to change it. You can just find me on LinkedIn at Kieran Flanagan.

Kathleen: I love it. I will put those links in the show notes. At the end I always tell people to tweet me if they know someone doing really great inbound marketing work. You will laugh because my Twitter handle is @workmommywork, because when I first started on Twitter that described my life. I guess we now have a club of introverts with really strange Twitter handles.

Kieran: Yeah, really strange Twitter handles. Yeah, that's us.

Kathleen: Yeah, so if you're listening, and you found this useful, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice.

As I mentioned, if you know someone doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them.

That's it for this week. Thank you so much Kieran.

Kieran: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Want to stay updated when the podcast is released?

Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll send you the show notes every Monday!

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/blogging-strategy-broke-hubspot-website-traffic-records

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dawnparker · 6 years ago

Text

“Get Killer Marketing Results on a Small Budget Ft. Conor Malloy of Chi City Legal” (Inbound Success Ep. 59)

Can you realistically expect to get great results from inbound marketing if you have a shoestring budget and no dedicated marketer?

Conor Malloy

Just about every marketer I’ve ever spoken with has cited “lack of time” as their biggest challenge, followed closely by lack of budget. That’s why I was so excited to interview Conor Malloy of Chi City Legal for this week’s The Inbound Success Podcast.

Conor and his business partner operate a two person law firm in Chicago and in addition to his full time job as an attorney and partner in the firm, Conor serves as the firm’s marketer. With almost no budget, and with very little time or marketing experience, Conor has managed to generate extraordinary results for his law practice.

Want to learn how he does it?

Listen to the podcast to learn exactly how Conor has set up Chi City Legal’s marketing systems and get helpful insights on building a lead generation machine that requires minimal time and budget to deliver big results.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I’m your host. Today my guest is Conor Malloy with Chi City Legal. Welcome, Conor.

Conor Malloy (Guest): Thank you for having me.

Conor and Kathleen recording this episode

Kathleen: Yeah, I’m excited to have you. As people who listen I’m sure know, the objective of the podcast is really to talk with practicing marketers who are getting great results from their inbound marketing, and surface actionable takeaways – the actionable part being the most important.

I’ve definitely interviewed a wide variety of people in the past, all the way from CMOs of large global brands, huge teams, and six figure budgets, down to agency owners and people with small teams.

You are, I think, my first one man marketing team, if you will, and probably one of the smallest businesses that I’ve spoken to. I’m particularly excited about this because it’s a huge testimony to the fact that you don’t need a giant budget, a giant team, a ton of resources to do this well.

All that being said, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and your company, as well as what you do.

About Conor and Chi City Legal

Conor: Sure. As you said before, I’m a partner at Chi City Legal, so we’re a Chicago law firm that dedicates our time to representing landlords in eviction litigation.

A lot of these landlords, we have some clients that are larger property management groups, but the vast majority of our clients are people would probably otherwise go self represented to court. So we’re trying to provide them with either legal solutions or legal representation.

After I passed the bar exam, I ended up in the incubator with the Chicago Bar Foundation. The incubator was designed to be able to help people develop law firms and practice models that would meet what I would refer to as the justice gap. So it’s people that are either priced out of your regular legal services, or they’re essentially too rich for legal aid. Surprisingly enough, even though people own property, a lot of them fall within that. That’s the background from a legal standpoint.

Kathleen: That’s real interesting. I didn’t realize that. I mean you and I have obviously spoken before, and I know a little bit about company, but I love that idea.

Let me back up, I don’t love the idea there’s this gap in representation, but I love the idea that there are programs in place to try and shore that gap up, and that’s where your company kind of sprang from. That’s really neat.

Conor: Yeah, it’s a great initiative that the Chicago Bar Foundation put through with the Justice Entrepreneurs Project.

Kathleen: So how large is your law firm?

Conor: We are two attorneys, essentially no support staff except for we have an artificial intelligence that does some of our call routing and scheduling.

My partner and I each have an artificial intelligence that schedules those. Then we use SmithAI as our virtual receptionist.

Other than my kids coming in from time to time and doing a little bit of work, that’s it.

Want to check out Smith.ai?

Smith.ai is a superior call answering and intake service for small businesses. Live, U.S.-based receptionists answer, transfer and return calls; qualify leads; intake clients; book appointments, and accept payments. The company’s calendar and CRM integrations keep your systems in sync and your workflows efficient. Plans start at just $60/month and include free spam blocking.

Inbound Success listeners get $50 off their first month with code INBOUNDSUCCESS, which can be combined with the 30-day/10-call free trial for $110 total savings.

Learn more and sign up at https://smith.ai.

Kathleen: That’s awesome. For everyone listening, that is a two person company in which both of the two people in the company are full-time doing something that is not marketing. In your case, you’re practicing law. Marketing is their thing that they do on top of all that.

You’ve been very successful in building and growing your business with the marketing that you’ve undertaken, just the two of you. Could you talk a little bit about exactly what you’ve done, what you’ve put in place in terms of your marketing?

Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget

Conor: Sure. I would say the more traditional route, we have a Facebook page, we have a Twitter account, we have Google Ad Words and things like that.

But with the type of people that we’re targeting, and it’s a very targeted marketing, it’s landlords that are going through the eviction process, or about to go through the eviction process, or just fresh out of the eviction process. So there’s a life cycle that we had to unpack and do which we’re best at.

In doing so with those three segments, we have a mixed bag of direct mail with solicitation. Otherwise, email and then a newsletter.

Each one of those is targeted to specific stages in the eviction life cycle. For example, one of the things that you’re able to do on our website is create an eviction notice, which is the foundational document to start an eviction matter. You go on our website, generate that document for free. Within a few seconds, that document then gets sent, after filling out a form, that document then gets sent to your email with a little bit of instructions on what to do with it next.

Once we get you on our website, and being able to get involved and essentially getting data, we can turn that around and do something a little more actionable on our side.

Kathleen: I’m not sure how big your geographic reach is, and are most of your landlord clients, what percentage of them are finding you through an organic search because they’re looking for a way to create an eviction notice versus how many are coming because you have reached out and contacted them?

Conor: Here is what I can say. Ever since I put in the ability to create that notice, which was towards the end of last year, I can say that off of our website, people have generated 934 eviction notices.

Kathleen: Wow.

Conor: That’s people that for one reason or another, they’re not getting paid, or they otherwise don’t want somebody to be their tenant anymore, generating something. Some of those are repeat performers, but the data that I gave you is largely cutting some of those few repeat visits.

Kathleen: Yeah, and that’s interesting because you do have a very specific clientele you’re going after.

Clearly, you know that by the nature of what you do, eviction is central to the pain or the need that they’re feeling and the notice document is required by law.

What made you realize that creating that tool on your website would be a great marketing opportunity. Did you stumble into it, or was this a part of the plan?

Conor: A little bit from Column A, a little bit from Column B. The big thing is being able to get something out there on our website that was very easy to use, and then when somebody goes on and they create it, they get something of value. They can do it for free if they want to.

We also have some additional services that we offer where if you want somebody to serve on your behalf, you can plug in your credit card information and send that off, and so there are some premium services involved.

But the big thing is you’re putting data from visitors onto our database, and onto our marketing database, and there’s also a consent to people to have us follow up with you.

Once I get your information and I know that if it’s a five day notice well, guess what? Most times I’ll be reaching out to you within about five days to see what happened with that, and being able to help you out with the next steps, whether you use our services, or we also offer document generation and things that for some people are a little more budget oriented. That’s the big thing for us is to provide some sort of value because we need to build trust with our potential clients and also because if you do a legal search for eviction notices, they’re all not created equal and a lot of them we’ve noticed from self represented landlords, that they’re deficient.

You’re going out there, you’re downloading something that is intended to do something, but it’s very deficient under the law, and it jeopardizes your case.

Kathleen: So you have this tool on your site. It’s getting you great results. As a two man law firm, neither of you I’m assuming is a web developer. How did you get the forms set up on your site? Do you have a company you work with that does your web work, or did one of you figure out how to build it? Was there a tool or a service you used to create this self-completable eviction notice form?

Conor: As you said earlier in the podcast, we have to lawyer for a fair portion of our day or we don’t get paid. I do have a bit of a tech background, mostly self-taught. I’ve done web development, I’ve done database development and things like that. But what I need to be able to find are very accessible, off the shelf tools that I can implement into our WordPress site, and reduce the friction.

I visualize the endgame, and I just need to get there in a very, very accessible way.

Like I said a second ago, we use WordPress. It’s a very easy platform to work with, and then we use a service called Gravity Forms. There’s a bunch of online forms that you can use, and then those Gravity Forms connect with a service called Zapier, which takes data from point A to point B to C to D, and those documents get pumped out through another service called WebMerge, which is an online-document assembly service.

Kathleen: Zapier is the most amazing thing ever. I’m sure some people listening know about it, but if you don’t, it is incredible.

It lets somebody with a completely non-technical background, like myself, essentially integrate two completely different software platforms that do not have out-of-the-box integration. It’s awesome.

Conor: Yeah, I can say that we use it in marketing, we use it for our day-to-day functions in our law firm, and I’m looking at my analytics from Zapier right now, and it’s saying that three weeks into my billing cycle, we automated 13,245 tasks within those three weeks.

Kathleen: Wow.

Conor: Yeah, so-

Kathleen: That’s incredible.

Conor: Yeah, and it’s not just little tasks that you don’t want to do, but it’s also tasks that might breed error, so it makes life a whole lot easier.

Kathleen: You said something really important that I just want to underscore. What you said was even though you have a lot of technical skills and you could easily go down the rabbit hole of trying to build this all yourself, because you have to do your day job, what you do is you look for out-of-the-box tools that are somewhat plug-and-play and let them, essentially, do the work for you?

I love that and I feel like some of the best, scrappiest marketers that I know are the ones who go out and find … so, there are so many tools out there. There are tools for everything, and if you can identify the right solution, it really can take a lot of the work out of building things like this, so that’s great.

So, you got WordPress for your website, you’ve got Gravity Forms to collect the information from the landlord, you then send that information via Zapier to, did you call it, WebMerge?

Conor: WebMerge, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kathleen: Okay, and then that produces the final form, correct?

Conor: Correct. Yep.

Kathleen: That’s great. Now, do you have any sense of how many people are landing on that page of your website? How are they finding that landlord form?

Conor: A lot of them. They’re either calling us because they find an ad for us or word of mouth seems to be a lot more common now based on that we’ve been doing this … at least I’ve been doing Chi-City Legal stuff for about two years now.

The word of mouth is definitely growing a little more organically, but when I run Google Analytics or the AdWords, I could either see where people are directly hitting that page because we do have a forms-generation ad that sits out there.

Kathleen: Okay. That’s also I think a great point, which is a lot of people think about email marketing and they think they have to just somehow get found organically, but what I’ve noticed in the course of all these interviews is that inbound marketers are combining the content of the tools they’ve created like your eviction notice generator, and they’re combining that with a boost from paid advertising, whether that’s paid social or Google Pay-Per-Click or what have you, to help it get found.

It sounds like that’s really worked well for you. How do you determine what kind of a budget you put towards your pay-per-click?

Conor: Well, as far as the pay-per-click, when it comes to doing the online forms, we’re looking at something that isn’t very popular out there because we’re competing with online legal forms, and the pay-per-click is not very high. We’re just generally looking for exposure.

One of the things that’s really helpful, especially with Google now, is they love having these advisors contact you and help you be able to develop your AdWords and your keywords, your other words that you don’t want people to connect with.

I probably speak with them at least every couple months to keep refining and keep tweaking our site. I just have an idea of what we want to spend on it because I do have some information based upon what our return on investment is, and there’s a lot of wiggle room to throw money at it because it definitely pays dividends.

Kathleen: Yeah, so you’re doing all of your pay-per-click yourself, correct?

Conor: Yeah.

Kathleen: And that’s another thing I want to just emphasize because a lot of times when I interview people they talk about having an agency do it or sometimes I interview people who are agencies, and all they do is paid advertising, but this is something that is accessible to anyone, to any company of any size and of any budget because you can start with a tiny, tiny budget.

I love what you said about really taking advantage of Google’s advisory services. That’s something they don’t charge for, correct?

Conor: That’s right. Yeah, because there’s … you can read certain articles out there because they save a nice chunk of the money that Google makes off of the ads is their stupid tax, because it’s people that just think, “Oh, I’ll create a whatever ad, put it out there,” and then they’ll give a few hundred dollars as credit to be able to start up your ads. You will burn through that so fast if you have no idea what you’re doing out there. It’s best to start small, incremental change, consult with these guys, and they’ll at least put you in a better spot than when you started.

Kathleen: Yeah, so take advantage of that if you’re thinking about playing around with your own pay-per-click. Be the squeaky wheel with Google.

Conor: Yeah, it’ll get the grease.

Kathleen: Yeah, that’s great. Now, when you look at your pay-per-click spend, are you evaluating it as, “I don’t want to spend more than X overall in terms of a budget,” or are you looking at it as, “I want to keep my cost per lead acquisition under a certain amount”? There’s different ways you can come at this whole budgeting question.

Conor: I believe on the forms we generally sit around 20 to $25 a day for our budget. Usually, we come in fairly low because, again, even for the clicks that we’re getting on there, you’re looking at less than a dollar per click.

Kathleen: Wow, and you’ve 900-some-odd conversions on the forms since you put them up late last year?

Conor: Yeah.

Kathleen: And what percentage of the landlords that fill out the form wind up becoming any kind of a paying client for you?

Conor: Something else that I ended up starting, because we started to notice where a lot of them were creating these notices, and then the notices were just … the data was just sitting there as this … just sitting out there alone, and we were re-keying the data from the notices into our content management system for active cases. So in late January I developed a new system to be able to convert that data. Then that way I could track it. So since January we’ve had right on the dot, up until about maybe about a week ago this was accurate, 100 cases that went from the notice creation to filing.

Kathleen: Wow. That’s great. So, that’s what? About just slightly over 10%?

Conor: Yep.

Kathleen: That’s a great conversion rate by any standard. That’s a great conversion rate. Are you doing any kind of lead nurturing in between when they fill the form out and then when they hire you, or is there any sort of like automated email or any other touch points that you have with them?

Conor: The other thing that happens – and it’s not exactly automated at the point that I don’t see a need for it yet, I don’t want to over-program a solution – but when they create that notice, the creation of the notice also sends data to a Trello card that sits on my marketing board, and I’m able-

Kathleen: Through Zapier?

Conor: Through Zapier, yeah. So, I have a couple columns, whether it’s a five-day notice, so I know … assuming that they serve the five-day notice within a day of getting it, I know what the due date is on it, and I’ll follow-up about then, and I have formatted email. I just click on a thing in Zapier, and it essentially does a canned email.

Then for the 30-day notices, I know when those are coming up, so I can send out a canned email to see if they need any assistance because sometimes they get it and they have a hard time serving the person, and then maybe they need the more premium services off our site to be able to take it to the next step, or they’re ready to go.

Kathleen: That’s great. Trello is a great project management platform. If you’re listening and you haven’t checked it out, essentially, it’s what they call in Agile terms a Kanban Board, but it’s a got a great interface.

You basically just move these cards. They’re structured like cards and you move them across the workflow. It’s actually a very simple, streamlined, really elegant project-management tool if you don’t have a very complex business, and it’s very low cost, so great solution.

Conor: The other part of it is too, so I use that for the marketing, and Trello, it’s free, so we actually use it as our practice management system. All of our active cases are handled through it because it can be very robust. It can run everything from a household project to our firm that has nearly 100 active cases at any given time, so it’s –

Kathleen: Oh, that’s great. Yeah, so you don’t need to overcomplicate things and buy enterprise software to run your projects. It’s amazing what you can do with Trello.

We have a lot of different software at my agency, but we still use Trello just for tracking our blog-editorial process because it’s so easy and user-friendly and people love it.

Conor: Oh yeah. If you like Post-it Notes, Trello, yeah, it’s just moving digital Post-it Notes through.

Kathleen: So true. It is exactly the concept behind it. Well, that’s neat, so you said you can go in and just click something in Trello, and it generates a canned email?

Conor: Yeah.

Kathleen: Another is the Zapier connection?

Conor: Yep, so when it creates that card based upon a notice, it’s going to create a list of potential canned emails. It’s going to be everything from the initial follow-up to, “Hey,” you’re just reaching out again. Then, just for ethical purposes because I have reached out to people, I want to be able to also send non-engagement warnings.

So, because sometimes people think just because this happened or that happened then I’m their lawyer, and so it’s nice to be able to have some sort of a built-in system that makes that very easy to do.

Yeah, Trello creates these checklists. I just check off the list on the cards, and that queues Zapier to create a draft email in my inbox. If I need to tweak it at all I can tweak it, and then otherwise it sends out.

Kathleen: You are the master of scrappy automation. It’s so cool. I love hearing this because it really is such a great example of what you can do as just one person who isn’t even a marketer.

Like, you’ve figured it out, and you’ve kind of hacked this system together, and it sounds incredibly low cost because you’re using your regular email inbox, you’re using Zapier, which certainly has a paid version, but yeah, it’s not expensive. You’re using Trello, which also has a paid version, but you don’t even … it sounds like you’re not even up to the paid version?

Conor: No.

Kathleen: You’re just using the free version.

Conor: Yep.

Kathleen: I mean, I love it. This is amazing.

Conor: As far as what you just mentioned, Zapier, I’m using the highest-end plan, because it’s the backbone of our company anyway, so I could also use it for sort of other stuff. That’s $115 a month.

Webmerge costs us now, because we’ve risen up to do the plans, costs us a couple hundred bucks a month, but again, it’s generating other documents that we need in our practice. So we’re already eating that.

Kathleen: And if there’s ROI there, that spend is totally worth it, though. That’s great.

So a little over 10% of the people that fill the form out become your clients. You mentioned when we first started talking that you use an artificial intelligence program to serve as your virtual receptionist. I’m intrigued by this. Can you talk a little big about how that works?

Conor: Sure. A little while back ago, I just follow certain legal blogs or tech blogs, just general things like that and I found out about something called x.ai. At the point I saw them, they were still inviting people on a case by case basis to be able to test out the software and I was just one of the early invites. What’s great about it is it already sits on something that you’re using. It’s not a different calendering software, things like that.

Amy (the x.ai virtual assistant), she’s sitting out there in the ether and any time I need to schedule something, all I have to do is cc her, reference her and then give her a ballpark based upon some sort of back end instructions on when to schedule something.

So you can go on our website and click, I Want a Consultation. It’s going to say, hey how do you want to do this? Do you want to be emailed for a follow-up time? Or do you want somebody to call you?

And if you want to schedule your own time, Zapier is going to send out an automated email with Amy cc’d and then she’s going to schedule something so I’m not involved in that process. If you want a call back, again Zapier is going to kick something off and it’s going to email our virtual receptionist and say, hey, reach out to so and so and it’s got all that data plugged in there to schedule for a consultation. Maybe even give some information about our practice.

Kathleen: Wow. That’s really cool. And you said the original program was called x.ai?

Conor: Yeah, that’s right.

Kathleen: And is that what you’re still using today?

Conor: That’s right.

Kathleen: That’s great. And that routes calls to you and your business partner, correct? As well?

Conor: I do all the onboarding for potential clients.

Kathleen: Okay.

Conor: When we have active cases, Amy comes into play … There’s Amy and there’s Andrew Ingram – “AI” – so when there’s an active case, if somebody … We’ll give you case updates and if you want to schedule a follow-up to flesh out something that we talked about in the case update, those get routed to my partner because he manages the day to day case loads.

Kathleen: Got it. So you have this incredibly well-oiled, automated machine going in the background that’s fueling your lead generation, your follow-up, your call and appointment setting. Anything you’re looking at adding into the mix?

You’ve been doing this a little while. You seem very plugged into how the tools work. Do you have anything on your wishlist that you want to do next?

Conor: I did up until this morning. Because we’re so intimately connected with active cases and things like that, we’re constantly plugged into the data.

So when you file a case, certain things need to happen along the course of your case in order to advance it. So one of the milestones is somebody has handed your tenant a piece of paper to say come to court on a certain day. One of the things we’re listening for is for that event to happen and then essentially an automated email goes out at that point where we can offer you the court forms you’ll need in court that day. And that’s free for people to be able to download. If you want a consultation along with it, that will be an additional sum, but capturing the pre-litigation, you’re in the midst of litigation, whether you want an attorney or not, it could help.

Conor: And then after the litigation, people are added to our newsletter by accepting the terms of service so when it comes to post eviction compliance issues or it might happen again, we’re always on people’s radar.

Kathleen: What do you put in the newsletter? What kind of content?

Conor: It’s a mixed bag, obviously. There’s self-promotion there, but sometimes there is a pending bill that might affect our clients. We’re letting people know about something that’s actually going to pass in about three days now, concerning notary stamps in Illinois. It might not be necessary for a lot of the court forms that they need. And then just being able to sign up with our services and different coupons, I guess you could say, to try us out.

But a lot of it is just legal information that we’re passing along. We just give people value and we hear from people and we see them sometimes that they love our newsletter. We have opposing counsel that subscribe to our newsletter.

Kathleen: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right?

Conor: Yep, but over time, what we’re looking at is a market of between 20 and 25,000 evictions are filed in Cook County every year. Out of those evictions, between about 80 and 120 are from self-represented landlords, and we are soliciting nearly every one of those self-represented landlords.

Kathleen: Wow, I love your whole system because I think a lot of what you’re doing really embraces the true spirit of what inbound marketing is. It’s about giving away information and helping people and using that to naturally attract that person who needs what you’re selling at the right time.

And the fact that you’re giving away the eviction notice, you’re giving away some of these other court forms, it sounds like it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, which is it’s bubbling up those people who naturally need your service at the time that they need it. That’s fantastic.

Conor: Sometimes with lawyers, these eviction notices, these aren’t works of art. They’re forms and we’re automating them and you don’t have to lock this stuff up. And you’re actually doing people a favor by putting something out there that’s actually compliant with the law. So the service that we provide is standing next to you in a courtroom, not creating some sort of document that’s a dime a dozen.

Kathleen: Yeah, that’s great. Well that is the attitude, I think, that some of the more successful marketers I’ve interviewed have. And it’s surprising how many people do not have that attitude. So kudos to you.

Conor: Thank you.

Kathleen: And I love hearing these stories from somebody who isn’t a marketer by trade. I think those are the most exciting stories. You’re an attorney and you just figured this out because it’s what makes sense. That’s one of the coolest parts about this.

Kathleen’s Two Questions

Kathleen: So, I have two questions that I always ask all of my guests and I’m curious, you come from outside of the marketing world, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?

Conor: What I see … From the company where we don’t use their software or anything else like that and I’ve never used their software or anything … I like the stuff that I get from Rocket Matter. It’s a content practice management system. Some of the stuff that they’re pumping out, a lot of the contributors that are creating content for them, it’s really neat. It’s helpful and it spurs things with me, too, to be able to think, “Oh wait, people are hitting at that angle. That’s really cool.” So that’s big for me right now. Those are one of the few emails that come in that I actually open when I see it in my inbox.

Kathleen: All right so everyone check out Rocket Matter.

Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you as a non-digital marketer who has kind of been forced to become a marketer through this business, how do you stay up to date and educate yourself and keep abreast of all this?

Conor: A lot of times, and it’s just an aggregation, I have the Feedly app on my phone and one of the things that you can select to come through on your Feedly is marketing stuff.

You have your legal things, law.com and Above the Law and Lawyerist and things. Lawyerist is a good one for the marketing stuff as well.

But then I checked off marketing and I’m starting to develop a vocabulary and just a way of getting at that’s non-traditional because I’m just piecing this stuff together.

At first, you’re treading water, but I feel like I’m doing some laps. I’m no Michael Phelps or anything else like that, but I’m moving along with it and that’s really, really helpful to just be able to go through my Feedly in the morning and some of the stuff is just going to catch your eye.

Kathleen: Yeah, that’s great. Feedly is really … It certainly makes it easier to consume all your different content in one place.

How to Reach Conor

Alright, well this was so interesting. I’m sure that lots of the listening audience will be either having questions about some of the specific tools you mentioned or might want to see your stuff in action on your website.

If somebody is looking to contact you or find more information online, what’s the best way for them to find you?

Conor: They can go on our website. They can hit up Amy. She’ll set something up regardless. Or they can contact me directly [email protected] or I’m actually setting something up right now. It’s not out yet, but a Zapier consulting arm to help people to be able to connect the dots with it. So the website is sort of up. It’s saoi.io. It’s a little bit Irish for the Irish speaking audience, but yeah that’s something that I think could help small firms to be able to connect these dots and make it a little bit easier on themselves.

Kathleen: That is very cool. I love that you’re going be on Zapier. Zay-pier, Zap-pier I never know how to say it. But it’s an amazing tool. I love that you’re going to be a consultant.

Conor: I think that it will be fun.

Kathleen: That’s awesome. Alright. Well, I will put those links in the show notes so that everyone can find them. But thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

If you are listening and you got some value out of this, please consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes or Stitcher or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Conor.

Conor: Thank you.

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