#you can find a five year old-ish post on my blog to that effect talking abut harvey xD

[queen-scribbles]

Let's go LET'S GOOO (highlights version, like I did with Arue, so it's not too long)

Ah, see, Lann's full-on camp "seduce you with my awkwardness" no wonder she likes him so much, that's her TYPE just ask Harvey😂

he's so adorable, I love him. She's filing all these compliments away for when she has bad days. "stunning warrior maiden" is still her favorite.

Well, I'm feeling extremely vindicated in her choice of goddess and she's giggling like a smitten schoolgirl right about now, best inconsequential long-term payoff ever (also. he said start a family. they are so having kids.)

not shown, her actual reaction to him proposing:

(guess what I equipped The Second I could?)

Okay, so, she absolutely dip-kissed him(and almost dropped him bc 12-13 STR) before dragging him back to her room. Saving Galfrey can wait, she just got married, bitch, and it was awesome.

[lionheartslowstart]

Snakes and Roses

I’ve been avoiding writing this post for a long time. (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot recently.) I’m not sure why. I think maybe because writing it will force me to examine myself in ways I’m not totally comfortable with. I guess we’ll find out. To be clear, I’ve been sitting on this post since April 2nd, 2019, when I wrote a post called “Snakes and Lillies,” which was about Severus Snape and his many complexities. Snape is a character I have always loved and defended, and someone I talk about a lot. It was only a matter of time before I dedicated a blog entry to him. But it wasn’t until I reached the final paragraph where I had the realization of something I think I’ve always known deep down. I wrote, “He probably never knew what it meant to truly be happy.” And that’s when it hit me, one of the big reasons I love Snape so much is because...well, he reminds me of me. I see myself in him. I relate to him in ways that I’ve never related to other fictional characters before.

The reason this realization hit me in that specific moment, is because the idea of never knowing what it is to truly be happy is something I have thought about myself, even said about myself, to a select few. It’s why I was able to drum up that line so quickly in my writing - it was already there, in my subconscious.

I don’t like to think about my childhood. To be frank, I don’t like to think about much of my life before 2016-ish. I prefer to live in the fantasy world of my creation, that my entire life has been a fog and I’ve sort of “come to” as a fully formed adult. Obviously, that’s not a realistic way to live life, especially in terms of overcoming trauma and bettering yourself, so it’s something I’ve been tackling in the last year or so. I could write my entire life story here, but a) that would probably be the longest post I’ve ever written (and some of them are already pretty fucking long), and b) I don’t want to. But I will include some background information, so my readers can see the parallels I’ve drawn, and the deep connection I feel with Mr. Severus Snape.

In some ways, my childhood was very different from Snape's. In other ways, my childhood was incredibly similar. I didn’t grow up poor, and for that, I’m extremely thankful. My parents weren’t abusive, to each other or to me, and I’m extremely thankful for that as well. Obviously, these were two very important aspects of Snape’s origin story. But for me, it’s not so much the cause as it is the effect. I developed severe emotional problems at a very young age, five years old. I was suicidal, I had extreme outbursts, I was that “weird kid” (and then later I was that “fat, weird kid”), I was misunderstood, and I didn’t have the maturity or vocabulary to communicate my feelings and issues to those around me. As a result, despite having an otherwise loving home, I became isolated. I was isolated from my family, who didn't know how to help me, and who I often felt ganged up on me. I was isolated from my peers, who saw a sad little loner and decided the best course of action was to bully and ostracize me (because we all know that “different” equals “bad”). I was isolated from my teachers, who only saw me as a “problem child,” and who often blamed me for things that weren’t my fault, and who concluded that my outbursts were the result of behavioral problems as opposed to being in psychic pain. I was so lonely. I had two friends, but even they avoided me at school, as they had their own friends, and I, of course, was not invited to participate in that group. I spent most of my days alone, thinking my thoughts, concentrating on school, using my imagination, and generally giving off “sad boy energy.” As much as I try to ignore what I consider to be some of the most painful years of my life, I can’t deny that I am largely the person I am today because of my childhood. It’s my own origin story.

Obviously, I’m glossing over a lot here, specifically the details of my emotional problems and outbursts, but I’m sure you get the gist. So, this is something Snape and I had in common. We were both bullied and excluded, albeit for different reasons. We both felt alone and misunderstood. We also both tended to be reprimanded for our own actions, often driven by pain, but watched as others who hurt us went completely unpunished, or even unacknowledged. (For example, when Snape dropped the branch on Petunia, he was yelled at by Lily, but Lily didn’t scold Petunia for her disparaging comments against Snape.) Things also changed for both of us in our teenage years. For Snape, it appears to have changed earlier, around 11. For me, it took a little longer, more like 14. But in both cases, we suddenly found ourselves accepted for the first time in our young lives, treated like equals. As a result of this, we both became slightly haughtier, a bit superior, and on occasion, not very nice. 

This is where things begin to differ between the young Severus and myself, for a number of reasons. The first is that Snape was a follower, I was the leader. For the record, this wasn’t something I realized until I was an adult, but, indeed, I was the leader of my own little group. I was the one who brought everyone together, I was the one that many people looked up to, had feelings for, or wanted to be near. I wish I had appreciated it more at the time. Snape was more of a pack member, at least initially. It’s not clear who the leader was as he grew older. I’m sure Lucious Malfoy was the leader in the beginning, but he was a fifth year when Snape was a first year, so perhaps by his fourth year, Snape took his place. I’m not sure. However, I doubt it, because he was still mercilessly picked on by the Marauders and other classmates, who probably would have feared or respected him more if he had been the leader of the young Death Eaters. This leads to another difference, which is that Snape fell into a group of people who prided themselves on prejudiced ideations, and were in many ways bullies themselves, though Snape continued to be bullied as well. While I’ve certainly been ignorant, I’ve never espoused bigoted beliefs. I would also assert that I was never a bully per se, but I definitely spoke down to people and probably could have been much less selfish and bitchy than I was.

I mentioned earlier on that I often defend Snape, which is true. I have certainly had Snape-related conflicts with people, some more intense than others. About a year ago, around the time I posted “Snakes and Lillies” actually, I got into a heavy debate with a friend of a friend who maintained that Snape was a bad person who shouldn’t be celebrated in any capacity. No matter what I said, he remained unconvinced, and I walked away from that encounter feeling sour and angry. But why? Because it felt like a personal attack on my character. Everything my acquaintance said about Snape landed like he was saying it about me. I know he didn’t intention it that way, I’m sure he didn't even realize that’s how I was interpreting it. But when people tell me they think Snape is irredeemable, it feels like they’re saying I’M irredeemable.

Our lives may have gone on different paths, but I maintain that Severus Snape and I have the same, or very similar, core. We both grew up with a lot of pain and isolation. We both became embittered because of our respective childhoods, and that bitterness continued to follow us throughout our lives. We both experience a petty and vindictive pleasure when we are able to inflict suffering on those who have hurt us (though I’m sure he and I have very different ideas on who deserves it and who doesn't, as well as what levels of revenge are acceptable). We also both have the capacity for an incredibly deep and never-ending love, though most people never ever get to see it. We both have goodness in us that is often overlooked or minimized by others, who are too eager to see the bad things about us. And above all, as I said in my previous Snape-related post, neither of us has ever experienced a true and fulfilling happiness in our lives.

Of course, there is still hope for me, as I’m only in my mid-twenties, and have been doing a tremendous amount of work on myself, as well as in the interest of improving my life. Unfortunately, Snape did not have that opportunity, as his life was cut short in the midst of his mission. However, he was only in his late-thirties, and, had he been able to live, I like to believe he would have been able to begin the process of healing as well.

I’m finding it difficult to articulate why I feel so close to Severus Snape beyond what I’ve said already. Probably because they are feelings that are difficult for me to access. Snape was incredibly flawed, and so am I. Snape was incredibly broken, and so am I. Snape was, in my opinion, redeemable and overall a good person despite many of his questionable actions, which were largely the result of a miserable life. I feel similarly about myself.

I wonder how Snape’s life would have been different if the Harry Potter series took place today, in a climate where trauma and mental illness are more accepted, normalized, and discussed. Would he have been held accountable for his misdirected anger towards his students? Would he have been able to get the help he needed earlier on? What if he, as an adult, was shown more compassion and love? And I already know that many people might then ask, “What about Lily?” Yes, Lily showed Snape compassion and love. Lily cared deeply for Severus, and he was her best friend throughout her entire childhood. But when we are children, especially children who are in the midst of trauma, we don’t always recognize what love looks or feels like. This is something I relate to as well. There have been times when I was faced with real love, but due to the trauma I was still experiencing or working through, I did not truly see or appreciate it at the time. Sometimes, time needs to pass for us to be able to grow, mature, and make it through the trauma. We need to get to a place where we are able to look back and appreciate what we had, and to be able to heal and fully experience love in the present. Maybe, if someone had given Snape more affection and empathy as an adult, he would have been able to heal.

All I know is I find myself wishing I could reach through the pages of my books, or through my television screen, so I can wrap my arms around him and tell him he’s worthy of love, and there’s still time for him to heal and find happiness. Because, that’s what I’ve always wished people had done for me.

[strawberryybird]

So whats your favorite thing about each of your fe3h favs? Anything you could just go on a long rant about for any of them? or interactions between them that you wish had happened or wanted to happen.

Waking up in the morning and going through all of the drunk blogging and “-thank-u-for-weathering-my-deep-need-to-be-liked-and-given-attention-off-main-I-guess” if this isn’t a whole mood on its own I don’t know what is. Anyways it sounds like you had fun and it was definetly fun reading everything. I hope you are feeling okay the day after everything. And to tack on a random question which fe3h character would you want to get drunk with if it was just the two of you?

Hi Hello!! thank u for enjoying my drunk blogging !!! and for the asks!!! (and the lovely comments on my fics actually hi there ur wonderful!!!) i’m currently cursing the damage i’ve done to my sleep schedule and suffering under my (truly deserved) hangover lmao ;p apologies u don’t get drunk me, only uncaffeinated hangover me, but we talk to the same degree and make the same spelling errors lol

ah yes.. im a fountain of moods (all of u still with me here are saints hhhh)

ok content time:

the second one first: i absolutely want to get drunk with ferdinand von aegir. the man’s a hop, skip and a vodka shot away from a mess. i love him. he’d be full of conversation and would buy the rounds every time as a true nobleman should !! he’d probably be really good at instigating drinking games but horrible at playing them.. i love party gay ferdie von aegir.

i’m going to LIMIT the faves i list because truly i love them all very much but i have to at least pretend i have some restraint and i don’t want to make this even More of a wall of text it’s going to become . SO 

edit: ok i started writing this at like. half ten pm. when the fuck did it become monday. 

edit edit: Disclaimer time: these are my conclusions and my conclusions alone. I’m not saying I’m objectively right or correct. I’m very much approaching this from an English Lit-ish point of view because that’s just how I look at a lot of media. I’m not asserting my opinions or conclusions as the only viable to interpret this media, and if anything I say offends you then I am sorry, it was not my intention but I acknowledge that I have hurt you. This is not the exhaustive list of my thoughts on the whole thing, there’s a lot more depth and detail I didn’t go in to.

My favourite thing about Edelgard is the Everything, but notably I really love her proud nature and how in VW it quite directly gets her *spoilered*, and in CF it’s integral to her success (bc it’s her own rigidity within herself that keeps her standing i think) and I Like Tragic Characters (and it’s very elinor dashwood). because it’s one of the qualities that can throw her character into a villainous light & it’s really interesting !! but at the same time.. it’s not quite ‘pride’ purely, and it’s kinda the wrong word. it’s some mixture of determined/stubbon, anger, self-reliance, and that really hard veneer of personality u develop when you’re around people who aren’t healthy for you to be around, and the very very critical need to be right about the choices you made because the weight of the  consequences would kinda ruin you if you weren’t. (the dean winchester effect huh) and wrap that up together with a big scoop of ‘i believe my way is right’ (’and my way Has to be right’) and then u get a lot of what i LOVE about Edelgard’s character

My favourite thing about Dorothea is really how she was the character that Hated the war. genuinely the contrast between white clouds dorothea & timeskip dorothea Breaks My Heart EVery Time I See Her !!!!! that and Spoilers!!! (her last words in AM unrecruited is edelgards name and i literally had to stop and cry about it for five minutes.) she’s one of the characters that post-war doesn’t have a Massive political stake in the war - like there’s her anger towards the current class system (another reason i bloody love her PLEASE give me angry feminine characters) but i think it’s her bonds with edie (or byleth&whoever if recruited) that keep her actually fighting in the war & it’s kinda different and i like that (actually i think she parallels/sends up/contrasts really really nicely with mercedes in that way)

my favourite thing about Marianne is just everything. how she finds worth within herself if you play VW (and the very very harrowing hc that she didn’t if you don’t), how she’s full of a quiet rage for the crest system but you eek it out of her as you play the game. how she’s still loved by the deers despite her appalling mental health (fight me on that canon) and the game essentially has her ‘save’ herself by finding worth and life within herself. i love her so much ok. (i also love her because she committed identity theft.. she and i share a name with the second dashwood sister oho (but i don’t use that name on the internet hhh) (also because my favourite shakespeare play is king lear (no really it is), my birthday is in red wolf moon too, i used to have very long hair i wore in a plait most days for school, little 11 and 17 year old me acted Exactly like white clouds marianne did & genuinely i love marianne von edmund to pieces but God it hurts to see her in game sometimes bc her journey mirrors a lot of mine & i love this character. so much.) WOW that was a lot. am i sure im not still drunk

so claude is not only one of my favourite characters in the whole damn game, but also shares the name of one of my favourite painters so i simply have to love him ;p however i can’t give a proper opinion on him yet because i haven’t finished playing deers yet :( but !! i love how (as is with all the lords) he has a veneer of personality to him, but in contrast to Edie where it’s quite seemless with her actual personality, Claude’s veneer of personality seems very opaque and plastered on. i may or may not just be wildly imagining things but he’s a very different personality in his lower supports with Lysithea than he is in his B support with Marianne, for instance. like, i love characters that are obviously a lot more socially intelligent than i could ever be, and claude is *chef kiss* BEAUTIFUL ON EVERY LEVEL.

i’d wax lyrical about Ingrid too but honestly there’s many better people out there with the good ingrid content than i could do. shortly, i love the New Take on the pegasus knight archetype she brings, and i really like her perspective on femininity !!! she’s such a good character & she brings so much to the game and to the pegasus knight character too!!!!! she’s such a bright personality and altho i wish so many of her supports weren’t centred around make-up (hhh dorogrid fans i pray for you), i think she’s really going to pave the way for whoever’s next in that character slot. (like, you can’t tell me she’s not an offshoot of Phila from awakening lmao)

no ok i’m adding in Hubert because i love this vampire man. i really really love the devoted servant archetype and we all know i love edelgard’s tragedy. and i love hubert. so much. the way he enables edelgard in pretty much everything is just so so interesting to think about, and i love his intensity about it. he’s like the ever present reminder that edelgard’s will kinda has to work otherwise the potential consequences of her being wrong are personified in hubert imo. it’s only touched on in VW in his letter but like. god i wish we got more but it’s a wonderful starting block. i love his comic relief as well, he’s such a fun character to have !!!! and also i have so many hubert fics in my bookmarks that just Get him. i love hubert. oh i love hubert.

i’m going to cut myself off there because . that’s just a LOT. 

as for characters i would sell a limb to have them talk to each other, honestly it’s Edelgard/Marianne. (and only 51% because of all the projection i have going on with those two ok don’t at me i  k n o w). that support chain would be too powerful and honestly i wish they had one becuauese it would have gone so Hard about what Edelgard was doing and what Marianne thought about it, and how they connected over it & they probably would have had their supports set over cups of tea or smth .. it would have been amazing. 

(but i’d rather have nothing than an awakening-level-content support where they talk about eating fucking bear meat instead of talking about how they grew to trust each other with and their ability to save the fate of the world HUH AWAKENING. (i’m salty about fredrobin forever)

also hilda/dorothea supports . we were robbed. they’re best friends and you can’t actually tell me otherwise. they run the disaster bi chat of garreg mach. honestly i just would Love a support chain for them that starts with them talking about self care routines and something really small like accessories or perfume and it goes into how self-esteem and how dorothea has to find the same worth in herself as hilda so easily can. (hilda’s the queen of self esteem she’s a babe) and in CF they could have dialogue and then we cry about it. and in SS they talk about how they both chose their place with Byleth and not at edie/claude’s side like i’m just free balling here it could be Anything and i’d love it. 

also big shocker .. dorothea/marianne supports . they both hate themselves in their profile CAN THEY PLEASE CHAT. 

also i accidentally fell in love with the claude/edelgard ship and i desperately need them to interact on the same level that edie and dimitri get to because.. aren’t there supposed to be three main characters huh intsys .. and like i get what the game goes for with two of the lords embroiled in a personal war against each other at the heart and the third actually finding something close to the truth because he’s not involved in age old grudge matches but at the same time That’s one of the things that really really falls flat for me in the game. dimitri’s villain is edie, edie’s villain is big dragon wife, claude’s villain is the lack of communication that everyone in fodlan suffers from apparently. lack of communication and lies. ymmv with what im saying rn but i would have preferred if all three lords had strong personal ties to each other and in Each Route it was brought up. or just snip dimitri’s dialogue out of CF because i have beef with how that WHOLE moment went down on so many accounts hhhh honestly it makes me angerey to think about lol

.. back on topic- can the lords pls talk to each other because it would be SO interesting in white clouds and i like seeing how their personality presentations clash

also . can i marry manuela yet. my crops are dying here.

.. im so sorry about this but it’s midnight and i’m too tired to edit so. have this. thank you so much for the questions!!!! very kind (and brave) of you to ask me!!!!! i had a lot of fun writing all of this & as always if anything you didn’t quite /get/ i’m happy to re-explain myself!! :)

[indescribablechoices]

Masterlist (updated 06/09/20)

Fics are listed in chronological order according to story progression, not date of posting, and obviously some were written before books were fully released so I’ve taken some liberties with plots. Ones listed at the bottom are for future fics I plan to write, please feel free to send asks/prompts.

MC Masterlist

The Royal Romance (Liam Rys x Alicia Harper)

This Room Where You Should Be  -  After having her engagement party ruined by assassins, Alicia speeds towards a safe house with an injured Drake, not knowing what lies ahead; whether any of her friends or her beloved Liam made it out alive. (will direct to my old blog)

Wish Comes True -  During an interview, Alicia gets herself in a twist over the thought of the holidays, and Liam makes a promise he intends to keep.

Piece by Piece -  A year after their wedding as Alicia, Liam and the others celebrate her birthday.

Where You Abandoned Things -   A figure from Alicia’s past turns up, and Liam learns why his wife has never spoken about her family before.

Reach In A Little Deeper -  When a security threat leaves Alicia and Olivia trapped in a room together, things only get worse when Alicia goes into labour with hers and Liam’s first child.

Count On Me (Maxwell x Penelope) -  Maxwell comes to Alicia for advice. Feelings and an abundance of platonic love follow.

Your Kingdom (D&D crossover) -  After becoming Queen, Alicia begins to look back over her own family tree and finds some things she didn’t expect.

Side by Side -  Liam and Alicia wake up together on their five year anniversary.

Lift Your Chin A Little Higher -  Twenty years after the events of TRR, Liam’s daughter visits the gardens in Valtoria to reminisce about the past, hoping to find comfort for the future.

Enchanting Series (updated 28/04/20) -  The story of Liam and Alicia’s daughter Lyra as she enters the social season in search of a husband. Familiar faces, sibling shenanigans and naturally; romance, all await along the way.

Perfect Match (Damien Nazario x Kai Park)

All I’ve Ever Learned From Love  -  Kai and Hayden have barely spoken since everything that went down with Eros in New York. During a quiet moment, he begins to reevaluate their relationship and what it means for the future. (will direct to my old blog)

Afraid of Falling  -  After talking with Hayden, Kai heads out to find Damien and finally fess up her feelings. But it seems Damien had the same idea.

Nobody But You (NSFW) - After admitting their feelings for each other, Kai and Damien let their desires get the better of them.

Indescribable  - Kai’s life is falling apart when the truth about Damien is revealed.  (will direct to my old blog)

Walking The Wire  -  A rewrite of the reunion scene with some memories more personal to my Kai and hers and Damien’s relationship.

Someone’s Bound To Get Burned -  Kai and the others rescued Damien days ago, but he barely look at her. Kai confronts him, and an argument ensues.

Miss Me When I’m Gone -  Kai and Damien talk about Nadia leaving in a quiet moment together. Discussions about the future ensue.

Take What Comes  -  Distracted texting leaves Kai in an awkward situation when her auto correct decides to propose to Damien.

Dancin’ Merrily -  Kai and Damien spend their first Christmas together as a married couple with their family.

It Isn’t Easy  -  Damien heads home to Kai after a long day at work, but some discussions about the past may affect their future.

My Arms Will Hold You -  Four times Kai Park woke up in Damien’s arms and one time she didn’t. Set across their years of knowing each other.

Dedicating Every Day To You  -  Kai wakes up in the middle of the night and Damien isn’t beside her. She finds him in the nursery instead.

Just One More Thing  -  Damien and Kai head to the local dog shelter and bring home a new member of the family.

Go Gentle  -  Kai receives a phone call from her children’s high school, listing off all of the trouble her son is in. She asks for an explanation from him and delves deeper than she planned.

(Damien Nazario x Hayden Young x Kai Park x Alana Kusuma)

Stay The Course -  On the flight from Tokyo to San Francisco, Damien and Hayden take a moment to talk and clear the air for the first time since everything happened with Eros. Bonding and fluff ensue.

The Things That You Want -   During a quiet afternoon in San Francisco, Damien asks Kai about her feelings for Hayden and makes a proposition that could benefit everyone.

Be Your Safety (NSFW) -   After Hayden walks out in San Francisco, Kai goes after him, and a heart to heart leads to confessions. 

The Human In Me -   Damien comes home on his lunch break and interrupts more than a dance party. 

How Long You Would Wait For Me (Alana x MC focused) -   After receiving the worst news possible, Kai reflects on her relationship with Alana.

One So Small -   Kai is in labour, and needs the people she loves around her.

So Snowy White -   A little glimpse into one Christmas at the Nazario-Young household. Damien pulls a scam. Kai teases her boys. Hayden learns the meaning of a perfect memory.

Let Me Go Home (part one, TH:M crossover) -   Eighteen months after the events in Monaco, Nina brings Sonia home to meet the family.  

It Lives In The Woods (Andy Kang x Maggie Young)

Pull Me Closer -  After their first kiss in the pool, Andy and Maggie head into the laundry room to dry off. 

If I Only Could  -  Andy wakes up from surgery and realises that not everyone made it out of the ruins. (will direct to my old blog)

The Sharp Knife of a Short Life  -  Maggie decides to pay a visit to Jane and Noah’s mother after Noah’s ‘death’ in the ruins.

Tonight  -  Maggie is preparing to go to prom with her friends, but she can’t help but feel the absence of her boyfriend as he rests his still injured leg. But it seems that fate, and Andy, have other ideas.

It Lives Beneath (Tom Sato x Penn Vance)

A Love Like This -   Tom and Penn spend a lazy afternoon together, and Tom has a sudden realisation.

The Haunting of Braidwood Manor (Eleanor Waverley x Hadley Byrd)

So Full Of Love  -  Hadley reflects on her time with Eleanor and begins to worry that she made the wrong choice.

When I Am With You  -  Hadley and Eleanor discuss their plans as the seasons begin to change and reflect on the time they’ve had together.

Your Kiss Is Like A Lost Ghost (AU) -  AU in which Hadley is a reincarnated version of the original governess of Braidwood Manor, and when she returns in present day, she finds herself falling for Eleanor all over again.

Veil of Secrets (Flynn O’Malley x Marli Greene)

Running Out Of Words To Say -  After the events of VoS, Marli heads home for real this time, but will either her or Flynn have the courage to tell the other how they really feel?

Bloodbound (Adrian Raines x Emeline Martinez)

All That Grace  -  Adrian has a beautiful night out planned for him and Emeline to prove his commitment to her, but her all too human immune system gets in the way. Though things always have a way of working out in the end…

It’s You And Me -  An engagement party with Em’s family has Adrian wondering about the future, and the things they can and can’t have together.

We Can’t Tell The Future (AU) -  What if Adrian hadn’t recognised Emeline in time when his body was overtaken by the serum? What if it had other lasting effects on his body?

Open Heart (Rafael Aveiro x Cora Chase) (Kyra Santana x Cora Chase)

Where You Belong (Rafael x MC) -   AU. There is no attack on the hospital, and Rafael leaves Edenbrook for the last time. Cora realises that she has one chance before the man she loves is gone for good.

Guess I’d Rather Hurt Than Feel Nothing At All (Part One) -   Months after their breakup, Cora and Rafael spend one more night together.

Just A Delicate Kiss (Part One.5) -   Cora gets called into Ethan’s office, and her true feelings about Kyra come to light.

Everything You Kept Inside (Part Two) -   After finding out that she is pregnant after a one night stand with Rafael, Cora has a lot to think about.

These Nights Never Seem To Go To Plan (Part Three) -   Cora finally tells Rafael about the pregnancy.

America’s Most Eligible (Mackenzie Harris x Winnie Reed)

Me and My Ripped Jeans and You -  Mackenzie goes over to Winnie’s apartment one afternoon and finds her girlfriend wearing her jacket.

My Sweet Honey Bee -  Mackenzie and Winnie take the next step in their future together.

Desire and Decorum (Luke Harper x Jess Woodmire)

Let This Moment Be The First Chapter -  Jess and Luke visit Luke’s estate together for the first time after its completion and their thoughts turn to the future.

No Beat, No Melody (AU) -   The consequences of the duel.

A Garden You Never Get To See (AU) -   The consequences of the duel, part two.

The One I Was Meant To Find (AU) 

-  Part One: Jess can’t take the pressure any more and runs away from the estate. Mr Harper comes to find her, and in the wake of an impending proposal, they finally admit their feelings for each other.

Losing Sight of You (AU) -  Part Two: The morning after, Jess awakes with the man she loves, but she knows that this happiness cannot last.

Enough (AU) -  Part Three: Left alone and scared for her future happiness, Jess knows that she has to do something before she finds herself wed to the Duke and torn apart from her beloved Mr Harper forever.

Your Kingdom (TRR crossover) -  After becoming Queen, Alicia begins to look back over her own family tree and finds some things she didn’t expect.

The Heist: Monaco (Sonia Alves x Nina Nazario-Young)

This Woman Is My Destiny -   Nina takes the biggest risk she’s ever taken, and Sonia gets a surprise visitor.

Let Me Go Home (part one, PM crossover) -   Eighteen months after the events in Monaco, Nina brings Sonia home to meet the family.

Red Carpet Diaries (Matt Rodriguez x Bailey Johnson)

The Best Day With You -  A little family fluff fic between Matt, Bailey and their daughter Sofia.

Across The Void (Sol x Bo Elara)

Oh, Let’s Get Lost -  Sol and Bo take some time away to themselves, enjoying being in love on a distant planet away from everything else.

A Courtesan of Rome (Syphax x Korina x Sabina)

Lead Me Back Home (Syphax x MC focused) -  Finally away from the grasp of Rome, Korina takes in the life she has built with the people she loves

Mother of the Year (Thomas Mendez x Lori Day)

Surrounded By Your Embrace -  Thomas and Lori celebrate their two year anniversary together. Lori thinks back over their relationship and Thomas gets a present he wasn’t expecting.

Big Sky Country (Sawyer Oakley x Daphne Dehaven)

Scars On Our Hearts -   After Sawyer is injured at the rodeo, he and Daphne get into a fight at the hospital about the decisions they’ve both made.

The Elementalists (Beckett Harrington x Hallie Russell)

Blades of Light and Shadow (Nia Ellarious x Aurora Feathertide x Imtura)

Nightbound (Nik Ryder x Willow Greeves)

The Royal Masquerade (Kayden Vescovi x Ophelia Aster)

Ride or Die (Mona x Rose Wheeler) (Ingrid Delaney x Rose Wheeler)

Distant Shores (Charlie Smith x Emily Hawthorne)

Unexpected Heiress (John Somerset x Marianne Hayes)

The Nanny Affair (Sam Dalton x June Martinez)

Queen B (Ian Kingsley x Briar Hughes)

Platinum (Shane Parker x Adelyn Oliver)

Sunkissed (Samson x Skylar Bell)

Wishful Thinking (Jaime Lewis x Kit Huxley)

Home For the Holidays (Holly Wright x Robyn Joy)

Baby Bump (Myra Dixon x Theo Cassidy)

Rules of Engagement (Leo Rys x Kaylee Buchanan)

Passport to Romance (Ahmed Khabbaz x Nell Shepherd)

[therandombanjo]

Songs From 2018 (one per artist)

Another mixed bag of stuff i either enjoyed a lot, thought was excellent or interesting (regardless of taste… sort of), emerging artists to maybe look out for, and generally music that for whatever reason connected with me in some way, including the odd earworm i just couldn’t shake. Hope you enjoy some of this too and find something new to be taken by. There’s a spotify playlist (below) for easier listening but for the music that wasn’t on there, i’ve posted links next to them so do check them out! Spotify:

(As ever…. as i don’t tumblr or blog or anything (besides this list), this won’t be seen by many (if any?) people so if you like it or think it’s of any worth in any way, please do share this along)

In Alphabetical order:

The 1975 - Love It If We Made It

700 Bliss - Ring The Alarm         (Moor Mother & DJ Haram collab)  

Advance Base - Your Dog      (Owen Ashworth is a longtime favourite and always love what he puts out. Such a gifted lyricist and such an empathetic deliverer, just always cutting deep, just always sounding uniquely him. The records & artists he’s putting out on his Orindal footprint are really impressive too - Julie Byrne, Gia Margaret, Dear Nora - so do keep an eye out on those releases)

Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert - Quantum Theory Love Song

Alasdair Roberts w/ Amble Skuse & David McGuiness - a. The Fair Flower of Northumberland b. Johnny O’the Brine (One of my favourite records this year, a quietly inventive old folk beaut from one of my favourite singers on earth. Included two as a. exemplifies his singing that i love so much and b. better highlights the inventiveness of the record)

Alison Cotton - All Is Quiet At The Ancient Theatre

Amen Dunes - Miki Dora

Anderson .Paak - 6 Summers

Angelique Kidjo - Once In A Lifetime        (From her complete re-imagining of the Talking Heads classic Remain In Light record, with all her Benin spirit infused)

Anna & Elizabeth - Mother In The Graveyard

Anna Calvi - As A Man

Aphex Twin - T69 Collapse

Aqueduct Ensemble - Cut Grass I

Arctic Monkeys - Four Out Of Five        

Armand Hammer - Alternate Side Parking       (Elucid & Billy Woods)

Arp - Reading a Wave

audiobooks - Call of Duty Free

Barry Walker - Late Heavy Bombardment

Beach House - Dive

Ben Vince - What I Can See     ft. Micachu

Big Red Machine - Forest Green          (Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) & Aaron Dessner (The National) project. I’m likely never not gonna be into Justin’s work, he’s always stretching himself with virtually no regard to expectation and always finding interesting and new spaces)

Birds Of Passage - Another Thousand Eyes

Black Midi - bmbmbm      (Heard about them non-stop all year, about being this incredible live band, and all teenagers, so been intrigued for quite some time. Virtually no online presence, remaining somewhat mysterious, and only a couple of pieces to go by, but curious to see what’s coming from them) https://soundcloud.com/speedywunderground/sw024-black-midi-bmbmbm

Blocks & Escher - One Touch     

Blood Orange - Saint

Bodega - Name Escape

Bonny Doon - I Am Here (I Am Alive)       

Bruce - Elo

Capitol K - Fennel Dance

Cat Power - Stay

Channel Tres - Controller

Chris Carter - Cernubicua

Christina Vantzou - Some Limited and Waning Memory

Christine & the Queens - 5 Dollars

Colter Wall - Wild Dogs

Cool Maritime - Mossage

Cornelia Murr - Man On My Mind

Courtney Marie Andrews - May Your Kindness Remain

Damien Jurado - The Last Great Washington State

Daniel Avery - Slow Fade

Daughters - Long Road, No Turns

David Thomas Broughton - Drifting Snow       (An old, unreleased recording lying around, brought out as a seasonal single, and i think it’s beautiful. My favourite live performer, and i would encourage anyone who sees this to check him out both on record and if he's ever in a town near you.) https://davidthomasbroughton.bandcamp.com/track/drifting-snow-seasonal-single

The Dead Tongues - Pale November Dew

Dear Nora - Simulation Feels       (12 years away, and back after renewed interest in their re-issued Mountain Rock LP last year courtesy of Owen Ashworth’s (Advance Base) Orindal Records)

Deux Trois - Roy

DJ Koze - Muddy Funster     ft. Kurt Wagner       (It’s probably fair that “Pick Up” is the best song on the record, but I’m a sucker for Kurt so liked this one a lot too)

Dolphin Midwives - Mirror

Doug Paisley - Drinking With a Friend

Drinks - Real Outside

Durand Jones & The Indications - Don’t You Know

Earl Sweatshirt - Nowhere2go

Earth Eater - Inclined

Emily Fairlight - Body Below      

Empress Of - When I’m With Him

Eric Chenaux - Wild Moon      (Most likely my favourite record from this year, if not any it feels right now. I’m fully begulied by it. Fair play to you if you recognize the sounds you hear as a guitar!)

Erin Rae - Bad Mind      

Erland Cooper - Solan Goose

Ezra Furman - Suck The Blood From My Wound

Fatoumata Diawara - Kanou Dan Yen

Field Report - Every Time

Flasher - Who’s Got Time?

Frog Eyes - Pay For Hire

Fucked Up - a. Normal People or b. Came Down Wrong   ft. Jennifer Castle & J Mascis

Gabe Gurnsey - Ultra Clear Sound

Georgia Anne Muldrow - Blam

Gia Margaret - Groceries     (Wonderful debut on Orindal)

Glenn Jones - The Giant Who Ate Himself

Grouper - Driving

Hailu Mergia - Tizita

Haley Heynderickx - Oom Sha La La

Hatchie - Sure

Helena Hauff - Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg

Hen Ogledd - Etheldreda       (The great Richard Dawson’s experimental group, connecting the ancient/medieval with the present in a way that definitely rewards with more listens)

Hermit & The Recluse - Sirens       (New project from the rapper Ka, who continues to fascinate, with producer Animoss. This time the concept record combining his personal street stories with Greek mythology, with Orpheus vs The Sirens)

Hilary Woods - Kith

Homeboy Sandman & Edan - #NeverUseTheInternetAgain       (Nice to hear Edan once again after so long, and especially with a favourite of mine in Homeboy Sandman)

Ian William Craig - Discovered In Flat

Idles - Danny Nedelko         (Probably my favourite song of the year, and one of the most beautiful, impassioned & dearly needed statements of love & community we need right now. The video moved me to damned tears, it’s so beautiful)

The Innocence Mission - Green Bus

Institute of Landscape Architecture - Melting Landscapes       (field recordings documenting Alpine glaciers and their changing landscape) https://landscapearchitecture.bandcamp.com/releases

James Blake - If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Janelle Monáe - Make Me Feel

Jean Grae & Quelle Chris - Gold Purple Orange

Jeff Tweedy - I Know What It’s Like

Jennifer Castle - Tomorrow’s Mourning

Jenny Hval - Sleep

Jeremy Dutcher - Mehcinut

Jerry David DiCicca - Watermelon

Jessica Pratt - This Time Around         (Massive fan of Jessica and this is without doubt one of my absolute favourite songs this year)

JFDR - My Work (String Version/Live)

John Prine - Summer’s End

Jon Hopkins - Emerald Rush

Joseph Shabason - Forest Run       (From his 2nd record, Anne, a touching record on his mother’s Parkinson’s Disease featuring interviews with her over his ambient, sax-effected work)

JPEGMAFIA - 1539 N. Calvert

Julia Holter - I Shall Love 2

Julia Jacklin - Head Alone

Kacey Musgraves - Slow Burn       (I was late to this record, but i may have listened to it more than any other come December-time.)

Kadhja Bonet - Delphine

Kamasi Washington - Fists of Fury

Kathryn Joseph - From When I Wake The Want Is

Kelsey Lu - Shades Of Blue

Khruangbin - Maria También

Kim Petras - Heart To Break       (There’s actually a chance this is my favourite song of the year)

Kurt Vile - Bassackwards

Lambchop - The December-ish You

Landless - The Trees They Grow Tall

Laura Cannell & André Bosman - Golden Lanes At Dusk

Laurence Pike - Life Hacks

Leikeli47 - Girl Blunt

Let’s Eat Grandma - Falling Into Me

Lisa O’Neil - Factory Girl [trad]        

Lizzo - Boys

Lonnie Holley - I Woke Up In A Fucked-Up America

Louis Cole - Real Life     ft. Brad Mehldau      

Low - Quorum

Lucinda Chua - Whatever It Takes      (experimental cellist & composer who, as well as making expansive, looped soundscapes, also writes and sings in an equally spellbinding fashion)

Lucy Dacus - Night Shift

LUMP - May I Be The Light        (Laura Marling & Tuung’s Mike Lindsay collab)

Maarja Nuut & Ruum - Kuud Kuulama

Maggie Rogers - Fallingwater

Makaya McCraven - Butterss’s

Malibu Ken - Acid King           (Aesop Rock & Tobacco collab)

Marie Davidson - Work It         

Marisa Anderson - Cloud Corner

Mary Lattimore - It Feels Like Floating

Maxine Funke - a. Boy On The Bow or b. One Step a. https://maxinefunke1.bandcamp.com/track/boy-on-the-bow b. https://maxinefunke1.bandcamp.com/track/one-step

Mich Cota - Kijà/Care                (Two-spirit Canadian Algonquin artist who, after seeing her supporting Baby Dee at Cafe Oto very recently, had me excited for the bangers to come!)

Michael Nau - Funny Wind

Milo - Stet

Miss Red - Dagga

Mitski - Nobody

Moses Sumney - Rank and File

Moulay Ahmed El Hassani - Yak Ennas Mlklil Darou Labas 

Mount Eerie - Tintin In Tibet      

Mountain Man - Rang Tang Ring Toon      (8 years since their last record, and so good to hear their harmonies once again. Ever as beautiful and transportive, but this time more wiser. It’s a really lovely record and such a needed balm)

Nap Eyes - Every Time The Feeling

Nathan Bowles - Now If You Remember          (Didn’t know this was a cover, originally by Julie Tippetts, but it lodged itself in my head pretty good. Aquarium Drunkard rightly suggested an album or two back that, if Banjo Futurism is a thing then Nathan Bowles would likely be leading the pack. The remainder of this record definitely reflects that)

Nathan Salsburg - Impossible Air

The Necks - Body https://thenecksau.bandcamp.com/album/body

Neko Case - Hell-On

Nils Frahm - My Friend The Forest

Noname - Ace       ft. Saba & Smino

Nostrum Grocers - ‘98 gewehr         (Milo & Elucid collab)

Oliver Coates - A Church

The Orielles - Bobbi’s Second World

The Other Years - Red-Tailed Hawk

Ought - Desire

Our Native Daughters - Mama’s Cryin’ Long      (New group project with Rhiannon Giddens, of Carolina Chocolate Drops, inspired by New World slave narratives and reclaiming/restoring black women’s stories)

Panda Bear - Dolphin

Parquet Courts - Wide Awake

Penelope Trappes - Burn On

Peter Broderick - Words Of Love       (An unreleased Arthur Russell song Peter got to record after befriending friends and family of the great man. Part of a free album Peter released of Arthur Russell covers at Christmas featuring one other unreleased song. Do check it, it’s lovely)

Phosphorescent - Christmas Down Under        (I could pick many from this record, but the sci-fi-like presence in the vocals gives it a strangeness and position i really loved)

Preoccupations - Espionage

Pusha T - Come Back Baby

Richard Swift - Broken Finger Blues        (Such a dear and sad loss. I actually included this song a few years ago when Aquarium Drunkard featured it, so feel like i should select a different one from this most-recent record.... but dammit if it doesn’t highlight the very best of Swift’s talents).

Richmond Fontaine - Horses In Las Vegas https://richmondfontaine.bandcamp.com/track/horses-in-las-vegas

Robby Hecht & Caroline Spence - Over You

Rocheman - Parades I & II        (Caught/discovered Rocheman supporting Jenny Hval earlier this year in a church, and was really into it so I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here)

Rosali - I Wanna Know

Rosalía - Pienso en Tu Mirá

Rosanne Cash - She Remembers Everything

Roy Montgomery - Outsider Love Ballad No. 1   ft. Katie Von Schleicher

Saba - Life

Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes - BOA

Sam Lee & Peter Wiegold - Rambling Boys

Sandro Perri - In Another Life 

Sarah Davachi - Third Hour

Sarah Louise - Bowman’s Root

The Scorpios - Mashena

The Sea & Cake - Any Day

Seabuckthorn - Disentangled

Seán Mac Erlaine - Cotter’s Dream

Serpentwithfeet - Bless Ur Heart

Shad - Magic    ft. Lido Pimienta

Shannon & The Clams - The Boy

Shit & Shine - You Were Very High

Sidi Touré - Djirbi Mardjie

Sidney Gish - I Eat Salads Now

Snail Mail - Heat Wave

SOB x RBE - Paid In Full

Soccer Mommy - Your Dog

Sons of Kemet - My Queen Is Harriet Tubman

Sophie Hunger - I Opened A Bar

Sophie Hutchings - Repose

Sorry GIrls - Waking Up

Sourakata Koita - Ha-Madi     (I don’t usually include too many - if any - reissues, but i love kora music and this record, “en Hollande” (’84), was a great discovery this year)

Stella Donnelly - Boys Will Be Boys      (I was sure i had this in last year’s list when it was a single, but appears not so including it now with the album release).

Steven A. Clark - Feel This Way

Suuns - Make it Real

Swamp Dogg - Answer Me, My Love

Szun Waves - Constellation

Terje Isungset - Blue Horizon     ft. Maria Skranes   (all the music is played by intruments made of ice)

Theo Alexander - Matter of Balance

Tierra Whack - Black Nails or Hungry Hippo      (A record of 15 one-minute tracks, full of ideas and all kinds of fun. Check out the “Whack World” short film for the record) 

Tim Hecker - Keyed Out

Tinashe - Throw A Fit     (Came across this song randomly via a Youtube video of dancer Jojo Gomez, and the attitude of it all just kind of thrilled me)

Tirzah - Gladly

Toby Hay - Bears Dance

Tom Demac & Real Lies - White Flowers

Tomberlin - Seventeen

Tracey Thorn - Queen

Tracyanne & Danny - It Can’t Be Love Unless It Hurts    (I think, actually, that Jacqueline off the record would edge my choice here, but i needed a little more Tracyanne (Camera Obscura) in here to highlight the two of them)

Tropical Fuck Storm - You Let My Tyres Down     (Aussie band made up of various Aussie bands, most recognizably Gareth Liddiard of The Drones, with an excellent debut record “A Laughing Death In Meatspace” that along with their name fits the music on this record. It’s acerbic, feral, sardonic, and plain great)

Ty Segall - Every 1′s A Winner        (Just an absolute killer Hot Chocolate cover, of all things!)

Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton - Heron Dance

Valee - Womp Womp     ft. Jeremih

Valotihkuu - Walking Through Dew Drops On The Lawn

Vera Sola - Small Minds

Vince Staples - FUN!

Virginia Wing - The Second Shift

Witch Project - Manifest

Womans Hour - Don’t Speak       (So great to hear them finally return)

Wooden Shjips - Red Line

Y La Bamba - Mujeres

Yo La Tengo - a. You Are Here and b. Ashes

Yoshinori Hayashi - Overflow

Zilla With Her Eyes Shut - Whatever It Is

[dorothydelgadillo]

"Insider Tips From A Facebook Ads Expert Ft. Ali Parmelee of IMPACT" (Inbound Success Ep. 63)

What does a full-time Facebook Ads expert do to get great results for her clients?

Ali Parmelee

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, IMPACT's Lead Facebook Ads Strategist Ali Parmelee shares the exact process she uses to develop Facebook ad campaigns and track and measure the performance of ads. 

This isn't Facebook ads 101. Ali is sharing advanced tips, in detail, for marketers that understand the basics of Facebook advertising but want to up their game and improve their return on ad spend (ROAS).

Listen to the podcast for step-by-step instructions on building Facebook ad campaigns like the pros do.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and this week my guest is Ali Parmelee who is the Lead Facebook Ads strategist for IMPACT. Welcome Ali.

Ali Parmelee (Guest): Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Ali and Kathleen recording this episode

Kathleen: Yeah I'm excited to have you here. It's not often that I get to interview my own colleagues for this podcast so this is kind of a special treat. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and about your background?

Ali: Sure. So I am newer to the IMPACT team. I used to be a co-owner of THINK Creative group out of Connecticut and we merged into IMPACT over the summer. So I've been with IMPACT for about five-ish months and trying to bring all of our Facebook and inbound methodologies over with us. So my team came over with us and I am focusing on driving Facebook and Instagram ads for IMPACT now.

Kathleen: Yeah the first time that I saw you, met you, heard of you was at a HubSpot Partner day event a few years ago when you were actually up on stage with someone from HubSpot talking about how to do Facebook ads right. I was really impressed by everything you were doing and how deep you were going specifically into Facebook ads. So we were really excited to have you guys be a part of the team because it's given us some capabilities we didn't have before.

Ali: Thank you. Thank you. That was fun. That was two years ago. I spoke with Daria and my previous co-founder of THINK and it was a great time. I love talking there.

Kathleen: Yeah. Well we're gonna pick your brain on Facebook ads here today. So you know you are very specialized in terms of what you work on. And while you, I think you have in the past, you have done broader marketing strategy, you've worked with clients across the range of their different marketing needs but you've gone really deep specifically with Facebook ads. And what I find interesting about that and one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on is that it seems to me like everybody's either doing Facebook ads or talking about doing them these days. It's become kind of ubiquitous which is funny to me because when I first got into Inbound marketing I remember actually HubSpot used to say, "Inbound marketing is about attracting buyers and not spending them with ads," and they were very kind of anti-advertising and that's really changed. It seems like they recognize that ads have an important place in the inbound marketing methodology. But I'd love to hear your take on that.

Ali: No, absolutely. I definitely have a varied past were over the years I won't say my age but I've been doing this for quite awhile and I've done everything from writing copy, doing PR, to running full inbound campaigns. My previous company we were HubSpot patterns as well so I used to run social media campaigns and everything. And one of the things that I think has ended itself to me having the successes that I have with Facebook ads is I really think you have to be a strong utility player to do Facebook ads right. Because there's so many different elements with it.

A lot of people think that Facebook ads is boosting of that you're simply just taking an idea and doing a pretty general ad but you have to think about the strategy behind it. It's just as strategic as everything else that you do with inbound marketing.

And that's why why I talk about Facebook ads and doing it the inbound way it is ... to go back to your question here it is something that totally works together with inbound marketing because you don't wanna feel like you are spamming people but you're helping to get it in front of them. Because at this point people's feeds are so over-saturated and flooded you have to make sure that they have the opportunity to see it which they don't get to with how low the normal reach is now anyway.

Kathleen: I will say done well they for sure work because I mean I'm a marketer, I know what's happening when I go into Facebook. But there have definitely been times when I have purchased things because I'm like, "Okay I have seen this ad so many times I need to click through and see what it's all about." A great example is I think I'm a devotee now of Aaptiv which is an exercise app and it literally was just that it showed up enough in my feed. And I was like, "Alright, darn you Aaptiv I'm gonna check it out."

Ali: That's funny.

Kathleen: It does work, for sure if it's done well.

Ali: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kathleen: But it sounds like if I'm hearing you correctly what you're saying, at least in my mind the way I'm seeing this, is it's almost like there's the iceberg and the little bit of the iceberg that you see above the surface is the things people see that is, "Hey do you wanna boost your post?" But that there's this giant iceberg under the water of additional knowledge and expertise and methodology that you can take advantage of to do it really well.

Ali: Absolutely.

Ali's Process for Building Facebook Ads Campaigns

Kathleen: I'd love to have you talk about that a little bit more. So when you work with a client, and somebody comes to you and says, "I wanna do Facebook ads," walk me through what that initial conversation is like from the 50,000 foot kind of strategic view.

Ali: Yeah, absolutely. And if I keep talking too much just yell at me because I can talk forever about this, I get so excited. So it's honestly very similar to onboarding and talking to people about inbound marketing. You have to understand the goals. Like I was starting to say before it's not just about saying, "I have this lead generation tool that I want to put out there," or, "I wanna get more sales." We need to understand what the KPI, the key performance indicators, are that we're going after. Are you trying to increase your overall brand awareness? Do you need more unique site visitors? Are you trying to get leads and more email addresses? Are you trying to get sales? Do you have old inventory that you're trying to move? We have to understand what the overall goals are. And then we come up with strategies.

So it's very similar to an inbound method strategy that way. So once we start understanding what your goals are we can start to put together a blueprint of what that means. So we have some clients who in the past have wanted to start blogging. As we all know blogging is fantastic but it's not a silver bullet that happens overnight, we have to get more people coming to the blog. So we have clients where they had been running, they had been posting blogs now weekly multiple times a week for six months, they were not seeing really any traction with it. Through our strategy of not boosting but we call it amplifying because we do it through Facebook ads manager and I'd written a blog that's on IMPACT's site, we can-

Kathleen: We'll link to that in the show notes.

Click here to read Ali's blog on Facebook Ads v. Boosted Posts - Which Is More Effective?

Ali: Yeah. So there's a big difference between that because this is where you're making sure that you're using the pixels, you're creating segmented audiences that you're going after for this. And instantly from the first week where we went from not having any amplification going to actually having amplification going for it they went from maybe 50 views to over 800 views for the blog. And that was with a very minimal spend.

Ali: That was about $15 a day. So again when we get started we wanna know what the goals are. We want to talk about budgets and timelines for how quickly we want to reach those goals because they all play a factor with each other.

Kathleen: So you're having that conversation big picture about goals and timelines and budgets. Is there ever a situation where you say Facebook ads are not right for this?

Ali: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. If it is ... so a couple of those scenarios would be I particularly love e-commerce and I focus on e-commerce. If a product their average order value is under $50 you are going to have to have a big budget and do a big volume to make your money back on it. So doesn't mean you can't do it but what I've done in scenarios like that is we look at how can we group or bundle products so it can get the average order value up instead of just saying, "Nope, sorry it won't work for you." So I've talked with say coffee drop shippers where it's $20 for the average order value but if we sell subscriptions for them instead now that makes that a guaranteed three months $60 and it makes more sense for them to do it. So there's ways around that.

Ali: So we look at average order value. We also look at are their goals realistic with their budgets. Because I have audited accounts where people say, "It's just not working." I'll go in, I'll look at their targeting and they're targeting four million people at a dollar a day and it's going to take them two years to see any results. So it's also setting realistic expectations with people too. And also for people to know that this is not just ... while you get very quick results it is not a silver bullet, you have to continue to work at it and it's not something that you start and stop. They have to be willing to understanding that this is part of your overall marketing strategy, your digital marketing strategy because you have to stick with it for a minimum of three months to make sure that it's working properly for you because it's a lot of split testing. A lot of theorizing and then going back and tweaking to get it running smoothly.

Kathleen: What about on the B to B side? Are there situations when it's not a good fit on that side as well?

Ali: You know it can be harder on B to B but not necessarily. There are so many tips and hacks that you can do. If you have a good size email list part of what we'll do is we'll start to audit first and see, "Can we find enough of these people in here," or, "Can we find enough look alikes, is it at least a 200 person seed audience that we can work off of to start trying to build look alike audiences?" You know one of my mentors actually sold an MRI machine through Facebook ads. So you can sell anything. It's a matter of can you get the targeting right which is super critical and can you build a campaign structure the right way to make sure that your messaging gets across.

Kathleen: So let's take it a layer deeper and let's talk about targeting. I think it would be really interesting because these things change so quickly. Can you break down what are all the different targeting options and the ways that you can come at this?

Ali: Absolutely. So this is something that seems like such a very simple straightforward methodology but it's something that when we go into audit accounts we don't see people who aren't working with tried and true Facebook advertisers that have a similar setup are doing. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll see people think of a campaign because of the naming conventions with Facebook. It's campaign ad set ads. So they think of a campaign as, "Oh I want to promote this one idea, this one concept." But that's not how we approach it. We look at the campaign as the objective that you're able to select from Facebook. So they give you about 10 to 12 objectives you can pick from: brand awareness, traffic, conversions, video views, product catalog sales. And so we will always build our campaign structure by objective. And then where you would normally ... when you go into ad sets that's where we do our targeting.

Ali: So for example when you go and look and audit any of the accounts that we're running we really never have more than 10-ish campaigns at once ever going, and that's a lot. It depends on what the ad buys have. There are some campaigns I'm running where I only have three active campaign objectives running right now but we're still spending $40,000 a month. It's just how we structure it. So for ad sets when we get in there ... now this is where you start looking at the different target audiences that you're going after.

Ali: So think of this like the buyer's journey where you've got the top of funnel, you've got the middle of funnel, you've got the bottom of funnel. Top of funnel you are only ever going to target lookalike audiences, ice cold people, people who have never heard of your brand, never been touched by your brand, they just know a little bit about the concept and that's how we're targeting them. What we typically will do in there is this is where all lookalike audiences go and this is where interest and behaviors go.

Ali: Now a sort of micro-tip on that is we start out by breaking those all down separately, we don't go and take a 100 different behaviors and put them all in, we'll clump similar ones. So for example one beauty client that we have we'll do retail stores, so Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Sephora, places like that will all be in there. But I'm not gonna put those with other interest categories because I wanna see what's working, what's resonating. So we'll make sure that we split those out. Same thing with even the look alike audiences. I may do a look alike audience of the top five percent of time spent on site and that is one ad set. Then I do another ad set which is Facebook engagement for the last 180 days or 90 days and I build that custom audience to make a look alike and that's it, that's who I'm going after. And then I do the same for Instagram.

Ali: So we have a set list that we kind of start off with as the lowest hanging fruit and that's always gonna be look alike for top of funnel. Then middle of funnel we take those same custom audiences that we built the look alikes off of and that's who goes in middle of funnel. So now it's not the look alike but it's the actual top five percent of time spent on site, it's the Facebook engagers for 90 days, it's the Instagram engagers for 90 days. It's people who have viewed content but not added to cart. That's all middle of funnel.

Ali: And then bottom of funnel that's where we're going back and trying to get people across the finish line. So maybe it's e-commerce and you've added to cart but you haven't purchased. We're gonna keep following you around. Maybe it's an annual timeline download and you've landed on the landing page but you haven't downloaded it. I'm gonna remind you it's still there for you to download.

Kathleen: So talk to me more about why at the top of the funnel you're only using look alike audiences?

Ali: So top of the funnel typically you're going to use objectives that are cheaper. And so with that we want to make sure that when we're casting the widest net we're not spending the most amount of money. You're gonna pay more for clicks and conversions when you start doing conversion objectives for middle and bottom of funnel. Top of funnel you might be doing video views, you might be doing traffic, brand awareness. You may even still be doing conversions but you're going to have enough things going that you're casting the widest net, we want to make sure that it is truly a cold audience that then you're trying to help refine and build into a more interested audience for you.

Kathleen: So you want a cold audience or is there any reason ... you know you talked about it being look alike, is there any reason you wouldn't try to develop a cold audience based off of demographic targeting?

Ali: Yes. So we could absolutely do that too. We have some clients who specifically even have states that they target because they're best performing states. So we might say this is our ...

Ali: States, so we might say this is our women who are 35 to 65 in Texas, California, wherever. The one thing that I usually will say though is we start with a narrower top of funnel in these different micro niches because Facebook honestly is very good at helping to figure out who the audiences are for you to target. You ... it also takes the emotion out of it because you have your own theories of who you think is right, but let's let Facebook actually build the data for us and then see how can we then hone that down even more. So, for example, we have a newer client right now where we've started with all of the lookalikes and then we went back and added in as a second phase some of the behaviors and interests and more of the demographics because we were able to see, okay, this, these age groups are the core age groups who are engaging.

Ali: So let's trim this back to these age groups and now let's add in a layer of these behaviors, and this is a new ad set that we test.

Kathleen: And you're, are you learning that from seeing the results of the lookalike audience?

Ali: Yes.

Kathleen: Okay.

Ali: Exactly. Data analysis is a huge part of Facebook ads. You have to understand what you're seeing and reading and then how to react to it. It's not just building these ads and a lot of times you'll see with Facebook, there's a lot of churn because people are great at getting things going, but they're not necessarily great at the longer haul of keeping it going. So the better you are at data analysis, the better ... and you're going to have a, you're ... the better you're going to be able to create results and the longer relationships you're gonna have.

Kathleen: Now you begin with the KPIs and the targeting, and then really at some point you need to make decisions about budget.

Kathleen: Can you talk me through how you think about budget? You know, because having been in agencies for a long time, I know that the big question everyone says how much did I spend? And usually there's some sort of an it depends answer in there. And then there are people who come and say this is what I'm prepared to spend and it's completely arbitrary and has nothing to do with any kind of logical reasons. So I'm curious how you approach that conversation.

Ali: Yeah, absolutely. So as we're going through KPIs, I get a good sense of approximately how much testing we're going to have to do. And so this is something that's really big and important for people to understand. Facebook ads is truly all about testing and so the more budget that you have to be able to test, because the way, as I was saying, I might only have a handful of objectives at the top level, but then when we get to ad sets, each of those ad sets need their own budget.

Ali: So say for example, I have a top of funnel conversion. So actually this is a good example, right now for one of our e-commerce clients, we're prepping for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we're doing a lot of testing in there. And so we have eight ad sets in each of three top of funnel campaigns right now. So that's 24 different ad sets I have to put budget to. And it has to be equal budget so that I can see what's actually performing well with the different audiences and then be able to make proper decisions for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So I have some clients where I can tell from the KPIs that they're more of sort of a dipping the toe in the water starter level of what they're looking to do. The base level that I tell people is you need to feel comfortable spending at least $3,000 a month just on the ad spend, not the implementation or the management or setup, but just on the ad spend alone. Because that gives you enough latitude to be able to scale up, scale down and get faster results.

Ali: Certainly, I've had clients who have said, well, I don't know, I'd rather start with 1500. That's fine, but you have to understand that everything is relative. So I'm going to need, if you want to cut the initial budget down to 1500, then where it would normally take me six to eight weeks to establish benchmarks for you, it's now going to take 12 to 16 weeks to do that because we're just prolonging everything. And the budget, the metrics might be slightly different depending on the time of year. Like I would not advise anyone just starting instantly right now because the cost per click is double what it normally is going to be right now. So ...

Kathleen: Because of the kind of ...

Ali: Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Yep.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting. Now, okay. We covered KPIs, we covered targeting, we covered budget. One of the things that I'm hearing you say is that there's a lot of testing you ... there's a lot of data analysis, there's a lot of like watching results. I'd love to learn more about, you know, how much time are you spending in a given week just looking at this stuff? How frequently are you looking at it? Is it daily, is it hourly, is it weekly, what does that cadence look like? And is it dependent upon spend?

Ali: It's dependent upon spend and goals. So, I'm in there every single day for all of my clients. And then depending on the budgets and how many, how much testing we're doing. So that example where we have the 24 live top of funnel ad sets right now I'm in there hourly checking to see what's going on and do we need to make changes because we're even testing the same exact copy, same exact image, but square versus vertical. To see because again, from reading the data we are seeing that, this is a crazy statistic, but 90 percent of their purchases are coming from mobile through Facebook and Instagram.

Ali: So with that being said, right now we're testing a hack to be able to do a vertical image. It's not something that you can typically just do straight up in Facebook ads. You actually have to create it as a, what we call a dark post. So it looks like it would if it was an organic post on your actual page, but it never hits your page. We just create it and then take it and run it as an ad. But the theory, what this is, the vertical images takes up more space on a phone. So I want to take up as much space as I can and right now those are converting really well for this client.

Kathleen: That's interesting. For anyone who doesn't know, can you explain more about the dark post thing? How do you create it? What is it?

Ali: Yeah. So basically in ads manager, when you go to create an ad, and I haven't actually even gotten to this part of it. I've explained a little bit of how I set up the campaign structure and then the ad set structure.

Ali: But, so the idea is with this, sorry about that. The idea is with this, that what happens is you take the same creative. What we do is we build a master ad set, a master campaign, and then master ad set. So we will never ever turn these ads on in the set. And then we take that one ad and then we drop it into each of the different ad sets. So in those 24 different ad sets that I've been talking about, I'm running the same exact ad in every single one. 

Okay. So for creating a dark post, this is something that is never going to actually live on the page itself. It will just be an unpublished post. Which then we turn into an ad. Now we make the master ad campaign that is never turned on, but this is this one ad. So within the master ad campaign we will create this ad that then we take this singular ad and drop it in any ad set that we want.

Ali: So the difference with this is is I'm not going, in this example where I said we have 24 different active ad sets top of funnel. I'm not creating 24 ads over and over and over again. I'm taking this one ad that we created once and then I'm dropping it in each of the different ad sets. And here's why this is so important. Have you ever seen those posts or Those ads where it's got thousands of comments and likes and you think to yourself, oh my gosh, this is amazing? These people clearly have a lot of interactions, you're getting ... you might have some negative sentiment, you have positive sentiment. But that all happens because you're taking one post ID, you're creating this ad and you're dropping it over and over. So all of those likes and comments and shares follow it around and are cumulative and instead of having to optimize it 24 separate times.

Kathleen: So you're taking the one post, but you say you're putting it in different ad sets.

Kathleen: Does that mean that the ad itself across all those ad sets appears identically, but you're targeting is different in each of those cases?

Ali: Exactly. So this way I'm able to test does a testimonial ad perform better versus maybe an explanatory ad? Or does a video format versus a single image versus a slide show work better with the same copy? And I take that and the interesting thing is is I have examples where top of funnel I've split and tested single image versus slideshow where it's the same exact copy and it's a draw. It's a 50/50 for one of my clients. However, that same client, middle of funnel, I've tested slideshow versus single image and I now know I would never waste my time or money on a slideshow again because it does not convert middle funnel, only a single image does. But this allows me to be able to see that.

Kathleen: Really then it sounds very similar to how we approach AB testing with other things. You know, the rule with any good AB test is you only change one variable. So that's kinda what it sounds like we're talking about here.

Ali: Exactly, exactly.

Kathleen: Yeah. Interesting. Once you have all of this setup, you then need to proceed with putting together the creative.

Ali: Yes.

Kathleen: Any takeaways or advice on how to approach that creative so that it's gonna perform well?

Ali: Yes. So especially for top of funnel, people don't want to feel like you're spamming them. They don't want to feel like, how did they figure out how to find me? This is an ad. I don't want this. If they start to hide your ads, that counts as negative sentiment. People may not realize this, but the more negative sentiment you get, the worse your optimization is. So it's gonna cost you more.

Ali: Facebook will ding you for it. If you continue to get lots of complaints, they'll even shut down your account on you. So you have to be really careful. We call ... we practice what we call ad camouflage. So what this means is, this is how ... you may have heard me talk about doing Facebook ads that are inboundy. You wanna be helpful, you don't want to sound like you are selling, you want it to seem conversational. So this is where we, first of all, Facebook does not allow you to put too much text on your images. We try to actually not put text on our images at all because we want it to feel organic. We'll use hashtags in our body copy because we want it to look like an organic post. We will specifically not select the call to action button that you have the option to pick for Facebook ads, unless we're forced to, it will force you to on videos and slideshows.

Ali: But otherwise we will not because we want it to feel as organic as possible.

Kathleen: Hm. And with images, I heard you earlier mention normally they need to be horizontal instead of vertical.

Ali: Yeah. So for single image ads you're going to do, that's a very horizontal format. Vertical you do in sort of the super duper hack of doing the page post itself. And so that's where you can't even pick a headline, you can't pick a CTA, this, it looks and acts and breathes like a post that you would do normally. It just is dark, it's unpublished.

Kathleen: And that's really for mobile.

Ali: And that's, yeah, that's what we're finding is working well for mobile where you have a lot of mobile conversions. And then there's also square. So I have some clients where when I start auditing their assets that they're giving me, they may have fantastic artwork that I can pick from but they're all vertical.

Ali: So now that we've had this, this one option, if it works for them, that's great, but sometimes it doesn't. So what we do there is we'll crop them down to squares, which then we can use those four slideshows and they're also great for Instagram.

Kathleen: Okay. And same for video I would assume? That there are certain times when you want certain formats.

Ali: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, video and Instagram stories is a whole other beast that we haven't even gotten into. But you're gonna look for more vertical with some of those. Again, it's testing because you might just have your own theory on it and that's what I'm doing right now. I am testing vertical against horizontal for that same client, the beauty client.

Kathleen: Why do you think vertical works so well? Is it again the mobile?

Ali: Yup. Yeah, I mean and that's why data analysis is so important. You know, not only am I in the accounts every single day, but I am running comprehensive reports every Monday. And then I'm meeting with my clients depending on how engaged we are, anywhere from multiple times a week to every other week to review the analytics together and hear what they have coming up and then make plans together about what makes sense moving forward.

Kathleen: Just out of curiosity, would you think that the guidance on vertical versus horizontal video would change if you were targeting a B to B customer? Like are they more likely to be looking at this on a computer, on a laptop or a desktop and therefore would horizontal make more sense for that kind of an audience?

Ali: You know what, you would think so, but there's no rhyme or reason with it. So many people use their phones nowadays, even if they're at their desktop. I know I have my phone right next to me and I have it open and I'm scrolling through things. Multitasking, you know, I'm a little different because I'm trying to be targeted by ads so I can see what everyone else is doing.

Kathleen: You're the only person who's like, please send me more ads.

Ali: Oh Kathleen, I'm not kidding. I have a Chrome plugin that allows me to strip out any organic posts from facebook so I can only see ads.

Kathleen: Oh my God, that's just the opposite of everyone else's reality. I love it.

Ali: So, you know, but mobile, I mean, it really is for me, even with some of the things that I'm targeted, think about it. Like I have two young kids and you know, as I'm putting them to sleep and I'm sitting there next to them in bed, I'm scrolling through while I'm just waiting for them to fall asleep. And that's why there's, it's so important for all these best practices. You do want to test out vertical. You wanna make sure if you're doing videos for that reason right there alone, that you have captions go like all, all in your video for you. So ...

Kathleen: What's the best way to do captions?

Ali: So, there are a couple of different services actually that I'm gonna start testing out. Facebook has an automatic translation for captions. It can almost be like a fun drinking game to see how bad they are when they come back. For the most part, it's close enough that it makes it not that bad a job. However, if there's any lengthier ... If there's any lengthier videos, that's when I would absolutely go through a transcription process. If it's three minutes or under, it'll take 15 to 30 minutes to do it. So, it's not that bad.

Kathleen: Any particular transcription services that you've used?

Ali: Actually I haven't tested it yet. The one that everybody in my community keeps talking about is called Rev.com.

Kathleen: That's what I use to transcribe my show.

Ali: Oh.

Kathleen: It's great. It's quick, and it's very reasonably priced. And it's pretty accurate.

Ali: Good to know. That's good to know.

Kathleen: Two thumbs up on Rev for me.

Ali: Good to know. Thank you.

Kathleen: Yeah. Great. So, the other thing that you do that's very interesting, and you kind of talked about it already. But, I wanna just circle back to it, is do you have a very particular way that you organize everything on the back end?

Ali: Yes.

Kathleen: Can you address that a little bit?

Ali: So, in terms of that, so I started to talk about how we will do top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. And, we, again it sounds very basic. But, keep ... so one tip I can say is keep your naming conventions the same. So, that it's really easy to scan through. Because as you keep managing clients for a long time or managing your own campaigns, you need to be able to quickly go and see what is what and where it is. So ...

Kathleen: Especially if there's multiple people jumping into your account.

Ali: Exactly. So, we'll always do a naming convention of what phase of the funnel it is. And, then we'll say what objective it is. So, it'll be like TOF-Conversions, TOF-Traffic, TOF-Videos.

Kathleen: TOF meaning, top of funnel.

Ali: Top of funnel. Exactly. And, so we keep a very, very streamlined way of doing that. And, then we follow the same naming conventions as you keep going down to access. So, it'll be LLA-Look Like Audience. And it will be FB-90. So for us that means Lookalikes of Facebook engagers for 90 days. And, so come up with your own system that is going to make sense and try to stick with it as much as possible.

Kathleen: Great. This is so interesting. So, I'm curious to know. Do you have any good tales of like using all these systems that you have? What kind of an impact has that had for the accounts that you do Facebook ads for? What are the terms that people expect to see?

Ali: So, again, everybody is different. And, that's part of the goal setting too, is understanding what your profit margin is, what your cost should be, what your normal threshold is. Here's actually another tip that I would say, is also look at those goals for the different levels of the funnel as well. Because while you might have a blended cost per sale across for acquisition, you're going to pay more top of funnel. Or, you need to look and see what that actually is. Is it because now you're retargeting. You're able to spend less, because you're targeting such a micro niche of who you're going after. So, when I'm setting up all my weekly reports, I actually have it so that I'm looking at what my sales are, my cost for acquisition, the average order value for top, and then for middle, and then for bottom. So, that I know am I on target? Or, am I not on target with this?

Kathleen: Yeah.

Ali: So, that's really important. 

Okay so one example, like I was saying is a college advisor that we have worked with now for many years. And, she is fantastic. She shares so much good information. She is the epitome of what an inbound marketer should be because of all the great information she shares. So, she has this one piece of content that she gives away for free. It's the annual timeline calendar. So, this is something that tells you for each month of the year, here are all the things that you need to have on your radar for everything from standardized tests to essays to getting any recommendations and referrals and visiting colleges.

Kathleen: I could've used that. I have three kids who've now gone through that process, and it would've been nice to have that.

Ali: She is amazing. Well, clearly I didn't target you. But ... so, anyway, what this is, is she does a full process with this. So, this is actually a great kind of multi-channel example too. Because we do the inbound marketing for her. My team does that. So, we do everything from having a landing page where they can go to get to get this. So, we've built that out for them. We do emails that go out to the database. Because this is refreshed information, she refreshes it every six months, it's something that people want to re-download and re-engage with. So, she already has a great following for that.

Ali: Then, we do an organic social presence for her with it. And, then with the ads, now I'm amplifying everything that we're doing. So, this is something where just looking back at August and the metrics. So, we launched it August 1st, and all of a sudden we jumped up for them because of doing ads and doing very, very strong presence, I can tell you looking at this we had ... 3,821 people who downloaded it in August.

Kathleen: Wow.

Ali: Of those, 2,486 of them came from paid social.

Kathleen: Hm.

Ali: This is because we did not just say this is a campaign. This is a gated piece of content that we wanna put out there. We used our strategy where we did top of funnel. And, so we shared information about blogs that were relevant to not knowing what you need to be doing. And, then we also took ... she does Facebook Lives every single month. And, so we took her Facebook Lives and we turned those into ads. And, so then we retarget anyone who's watched at least 25% of the video to then be hit with the middle of funnel ad. And, that middle of funnel ad is the offer to download this annual timeline.

Ali: Then, if you've hit the page to download the annual timeline, but you didn't actually download it, we hit you to remind you there's still time to download it. So, that's at bottom of funnel to try to convert and get them across the line.

Kathleen: Got it. Now, when you look at the ad efficacy and ROI, in terms of metrics, what are looking most closely at? Is is cost per click? Is it cost per acquisition? Is there some other metric? What are the KPIs that are most important there for you?

Ali: So, it depends on the different stages of the funnel, and again back to what the KPIs are that we set. But, I'm always going to be looking at a few different key areas. So, again, if it's legion versus eCommerce, for eCommerce I'm looking at returns on ad spend. The purchase conversion value, the budget. How much of the budget is being spent that we've set? How many purchases? I'm also looking at link clicks. It's really important to look at outbound link clicks and the CTR. So, the click through rate, CTR, is something that you always want to be a bare minimum of 1%. If it's under 1%, this is where we have a CRO problem. And, you have to start working backwards to say I'm getting a lot of activity on the ad. But, I'm not getting enough people who are clicking through. Or, they're bouncing. They're not happy. They're not staying there.

Ali: And so you have to start then becoming a sleuth in terms of what's going on, on the site as well. So, I'm looking at those, as I mentioned, link clicks. And, relevance is also another one. So, relevance, you can get up to a 10 score. So, this client, the college advisor. She ... we do the blog amplification for her. She has such a very strong presence through her ads campaign and her inbound marketing that I don't have a single ad that's running for her that's under an eight relevance. She's just phenomenal. Because we've honed the targeting so much. If you start to see that your relevance is three, four, something's wrong. You have to either tweak that ad set or kill it.

Kathleen: And, relevance is a score that Facebook gives to you?

Ali: Yes. So, this is ... that's determined ... there's a couple of different things that go into it. But, I like to look at how many link clicks are you getting? Are you getting shares? Are you getting comments? Is it positive sentiment? Negative sentiment? All of that goes into the relevance.

Kathleen: Wow. It's fascinating how much goes into this, because you know, going back to what we first talked about in the beginning. It's so easy to just think, oh yeah. I'm gonna boost my post for $50.00 and just see what happens. Sure, I'm sure you can get some results there, but it really is such a science.

Ali: Absolutely.

Kathleen: No wonder people hire Facebook ads experts, because it's a lot.

Ali: It really is. It is. And, that's why even sometimes people say, well don't you wanna learn other channels? And, yes. I'm interested in learning other channels. But, this changes all the time. There's so much that you need to stay on top of that I have all I can to just keep working on clients and keep myself learning as well.

Kathleen: You are plenty busy.

Ali: Yes.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: Now there's two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm gonna do a twist on one of them with you. I always ask, the first question is, company or individual. Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? But, you're so deep in the Facebook ad space, I'm gonna amend that to be, company or individual. Who do you think is killing it with Facebook ads right now?

Ali: So, I am very privileged to have a great community. It's a very similar community to the inbound community as well where we all support each other. We have our own Facebook groups that we participate in. We share the hacks and tips and tricks. So, there are a handful. I particularly love a few people. Scott Seward and Dee, they are Right Hook, and they're out of Australia. And, they are just wonderful. They're great with eCommerce. I love my mentors. I've learned from Kat Howell, who I would not know anything if it weren't for Kat Howell.

Ali: And, then honestly, a lot of just my peers in the group. They're wonderful. I work with them often, and we all have little bits of golden nuggets, I call them, that we share with each other, that helps. Because, like I said, some things do change. And, so we are constantly posting. But, there's a really strong community out there. Kat Howell by far, has changed the way I approach Facebook ads.

Kathleen: Oh great. Now I think I know the answer to this, because I think you just said it. But, I'm gonna just double check anyway. With things changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? Is it primarily through this group of ... community of practice if you will?

Ali: Absolutely. So, there's a couple of great groups out there. The Facebook ad hacks. So, Kat Howell has a couple of different varieties. I'm part of her mastermind group, and I could not imagine not being part of it. You can go through, she even has really great simple programs, Facebook ads that convert. I've gone through a lot of the different programs, but now I have this community. There's other good communities out there too. So, actually, Scott and Dee, they started their own eCommerce heavyweights Facebook group. That's another great one to be a part of.

Ali: Oh God. There's some other really strong podcasts that are out there too. I can even help ... I'll grab a couple and give them to you if you want to post them.

Ali's Favorite Podcasts and Facebook Groups:

The Ecommerce Influence Podcast  eCommerce Heavyweights (Facebook Group)  Facebook Ad Hacks (Facebook Group)

Kathleen: That would be great. I'm always on the hunt for more podcasts to listen to. I'm a total podcast junkie, which is probably why I have a podcast. Fantastic. Well, I'll definitely include links to all of that in the show notes. But, if somebody is interested in learning more about this wants to ask you a question, wants to reach out to you, what is the best way for them to find you online?

Ali: They can find me on Facebook. I pretty much will become friends with everybody, because that's what I do. I'm on LinkedIn as well. They can go through, I have some articles that are posted on the impact blog as well on Facebook ads. So, read through those as well. And, you can email me too.

Kathleen: Great. All right. Well, thank you so much, Ali. This has been super interesting. I mean, I still feel like my head spins every time we get to this level of depth of Facebook ads. But, every time I talk to you, I learn so much more. And, I'm sure that everybody listening feels the same. It's really interesting.

Ali: Well, thank you for having me. I know I can go on and on. So, apologies if I rambled too much.

Kathleen: No. Don't apologize. It was great.

Ali: Wonderful.

Kathleen: And, if you're listening, and you liked what you heard, I would very much appreciate it if you would give the podcast a review. I know I say this every week, but it really does make a difference. So, if you go onto Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on and leave a review that would be much appreciated. And, if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them.

Kathleen: That's it for this week. Thank you again for listening.

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from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/expert-facebook-ads-tips-ali-parmelee

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

There’s a cute bit in the Philip K. Dick story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” where one character warns another about the lurking threat of kipple, all the useless objects that clutter up our lives.

“When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself,” he says. “No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment...but eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

Games are full of kipple. Empty cardboard boxes, old crates, coffee mugs, desks piled high with papers you can’t read and manila folders you can never open.

But Arkane’s latest, Prey, does something neat with kipple -- it weaponizes it.

Like most games you might call "immersive sims" (Deus Ex, Thief, BioShock, System Shock), Prey asks players to spend a lot of time rooting around in cabinets, trash cans and other nooks/crannies in search of hidden gems: useful resources buried in the rubbish.

Unlike those other games, Prey makes that rote and repetitive action scary. It introduces an enemy early on called the Mimic, a common but utterly alien creatures that tends to hide by taking the form of a piece of kipple, then leaping out when the player draws close.

While the nuts and bolts of actually fighting Mimics once they’re revealed can be annoying (they’re small and move erratically), their sheer existence make every otherwise innocuous, kipple-strewn corner of Prey’s Talos I space station feel threatening and alive.

And shucks, that space station. Can we just take a minute to appreciate the way Prey handles space, and sets the player up to tell their own stories within it? 

The game came out a month ago at this point and I know it may have slipped past a lot of people (there are a lot of games!) but after finishing it, I wanted to quickly call out some of the neat things Prey does that are worth celebrating.

Holistic level design

Prey takes place on Talos I, a fictional space station orbiting Earth’s moon. Once the player moves past the opening scene, pretty much the entire station is accessible, and the player can also get outside and jet around the station’s exterior (though they take damage if they go too far.)

That means pretty much every space in the game is understandable and accessible from multiple perspectives, both internally and externally.

A player can spend five hours moving through the station from the Arboretum to the Hardware Labs, then exit into space through an airlock and retrace their path externally in a few minutes. If they happen to float by a viewport on the way, they might glimpse the aftermath of a particularly frenetic fight they had two hours ago, or spot the open hatch of a maintenance duct they crawled through to circumvent said fight.

This is important because it reinforces the illusion that the player is somewhere else. It makes Talos I feel like a real place, a holistic environment that can be explored, learned, and mastered.

This kind of environmental design isn’t easy -- there’s a reason most games run through a linear series of discrete levels -- but when done right, it helps the player feel embodied in your game.

There are lots of great examples of other games that nail this sort of holistic level design, but I’m just going to take the lazy way out and say it’s like Dark Souls. That game had fantastic, complicated environments that all fit together perfectly, lulling players into feeling that they were exploring a real place. Prey achieves something very similar, with the added benefit of being set on a floating space station that can be circumnavigated from the outside.

Dynamic enemy placement

Also like Dark Souls, the lion’s share of Prey is devoid of friendly life. Thus, the game's interlocking environments are chiefly defined by what enemies you find there and what stuff you can pick up.

The enemies also respawn or repopulate across Talos I in some fashion, ensuring (for better and for worse) that players can never fully relax when backtracking. More importantly, there are moments when the nature and number of enemies spread across the station changes in accordance with the narrative.

That gives players new challenges in known settings, keeping those locations feeling fresh and, more importantly, rewarding players for learning and exploiting the environments of Talos I.

Fluctuating power curves

Prey takes a lot of direct inspiration from games like System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex, asking players to navigate Talos I while fighting/tricking/sneaking past enemies and collecting items, weapons and upgrades.

Since those resources are placed throughout the station and basically the whole thing is open to players from the jump, there are lots of different paths players can carve through the game -- and lots of ways that progression can be impacted by how threats shift and change.

For example, let me lay out my emotional journey through Prey. After about an hour, I was intrigued and felt pretty safe: I had plenty of healing items, a weapon or two, and (naive) trust that the game’s designers had balanced the difficulty level (Normal) so that I couldn’t totally ruin myself.

This seems fine

Five hours in, I was ruined.

I’d burned through all of my healing items, ammunition, and upgrade tools. All I had left was a wrench and a few EMP grenades, which were useless against the monstrosities that stood between me and everything I needed  -- a shotgun, for example, or the fabrication plans for medkits.

I considered restarting the game, but decided to stick with it and sneak past everything in my way. I was terrified. Prey was the worst!

Ten hours in, Prey felt too easy. I’d managed to get both a shotgun and the medkit plans, as well as some schematics for other Useful Things. I was practically bursting with ammo and healing items, and I’d learned the enemies and environments well enough to know no fear.

This is it, I thought. This is the part in every game where you make the jump from underpowered to overpowered. Assuming the endgame was nigh, I caught myself thinking wistfully about how much more immersive and real Talos I had felt when I was inching through it in total abject terror. It would be kind of nice to go back to being underpowered, I thought.

Twenty hours in, I decided it wasn’t actually that nice! I was totally out of healing items (again), out of ammo (again!) and barely surviving as I sprinted across the station, using every trick I knew to try and get away from the enemy.

By this point I’d cleaned out most of Talos I and was having a hard time replenishing my resources and  getting from zone to zone, much less accomplishing quest objectives. With no immediate endgame in sight, I thought again about giving up -- or at least reloading an earlier save.

After ~26 hours of play, I finished Prey. I had to make some late-game upgrade choices to counter troublesome enemies, and chase some side objectives that took me through new (resource-rich) areas of the station, but at the end I felt, if not godlike, at least god-ish.

Most games like this take you from the same start to the same end; the player starts at the bottom of a smooth power curve and spends the game climbing to the top. Prey stands out because it affords the player space to slip, fall, and get back up again, only to slip up in a totally new and terrifying way.

I mean space in a literal sense as much as a figurative one. When lead designer Ricardo Bare talked to Gamasutra earlier this year about the team’s approach to level design, he said the goal was to create a kind of “mega-dungeon” in space “with lots of immersive, simulation-based systems.”

Enter the Mega-Dungeon

By way of example he mentioned the studio’s 2002 first-person RPG Arx Fatalis, which took place inside a giant network of caves.

But my dumb stupid brain went somewhere else -- to the sorts of “mega-dungeons” that are popular in some tabletop role-playing game circles, especially in the 20th century.

If you didn't play D&D or whatever in the '90s, know that these were often sprawling, isolated areas with ridiculously complicated layouts (think like, a 12-level underground dungeon surrounded by a network of caves) and, most importantly, threat levels that varied depending on how far players were willing to explore.

That means players could effectively set their own difficulty by choosing how deep to delve. Pair that with the relative freedom tabletop RPGs afford players in choosing how to circumvent challenges, and you get an experience that's often light on narrative (there's something real bad going on in these caves/dungeons/ruins! Check it out!) but well-suited to letting players tell the story they want to tell.

Making games that give players lots of room to tell their own stories is tricky business. I think if you look at Prey, you'll find some good examples of how that can be done well. 

Players can go almost anywhere and do almost anything (including finishing the game) relatively early on, but Talos I’s interconnected environments are filled with enemies of varying difficulty, letting players choose how to play and what to risk. The threats in those environments change over time, rewarding players for learning the levels and increasing the odds they’ll go through dramatic shifts in power level as they adapt to new challenges.

Of course, there’s a big downside to all this that you’ve probably already sussed out. Prey gives the player finite resources, but the enemies seem nigh-infinite. You might clear out a section of the station, only to come back hours later and find fresh monstrosities lying in wait for you.

That has a chilling effect on the player’s creativity; after all, why risk experimenting with new weapons and tactics when you know that freezing an enemy with the industrial-strength glue gun and bashing them to death with your wrench will A) be ammo-efficient B) totally work and C) present minimal risk of damage?

70 percent of the time, this works every time

This problem really rears its head in the end-game, when the player is likely to be criss-crossing Talos I and facing new enemies while moving through spaces that have already been picked clean.

Still, it's a minor complication in an otherwise great example of good level design and interesting power/challenge systems. I know a ton of interesting games will come out this year (like every year!) but if you have the means to take a look at Prey, do so! 

And if you want a bit more from Ricardo “Mega-Dungeon” Bare, check out this hour-long conversation Gamasutra Editor-In-Chief Kris Graft and Contributing Editor Bryant Francis had with him while streaming Prey on our Twitch channel last month. (I’m not in it, so it should be pretty watchable!)

Alternate blog titles: Beat, Prey, Love; Prey You Catch Me; Let Us Prey; The Prey's The Thing

[double-birds-blog]

Picking Up the Pieces

By Chase Woodruff

Here’s a needlessly elaborate version of a hypothetical first proposed to me by sometimes Double Birds contributor Adam Felder: On Sunday evening, just before the Cardinals open the regular season against the Cubs at Busch Stadium, an Omnipotent Time-Traveling Baseball Genie appears before you in a blinding seraphic vision. He offers you a deal: he will guarantee that the Cardinals win 100 games and the World Series this season, but they will do so at the cost of having traded away or released every single player in the organization over this past offseason. Tell the genie to snap his fingers, and the Cards will open play on Sunday night with an equivalently talented roster full of random major-leaguers—some you like, some you don’t, some you’ve never really thought about or even heard of—and will go on to be World Series champions. If you want, the genie will wipe your memory to maximize your enjoyment of their title run, and there will be no adverse effects on the organization’s long-term outlook.

If there were ever a time that Cardinals fans should want to take this deal, it’s now-ish. The Big Three who formed the competitive heart and cultural soul of the team for almost a decade are nearing the end of the line; one of them is already gone, and the other two will be before long, one way or the other. There’s some above-average young talent on the roster and plenty of promise in the farm system, but nothing that quite yet resembles a new core. The Cubs look to be in a dominant position in the NL Central for years to come, and few things would be sweeter than immediately answering their first world championship in 108 years with the Cardinals’ twelfth.

Still, there’s no way I take the deal. For me, the experience of watching the Cardinals and the thrill of seeing them win—whether it’s a World Series or a division title or a getaway-day game against the Brewers in mid-June—has too much to do with the connective tissue between the present and the past. I’d ultimately rather watch Alex Reyes and Carlos Martínez and Matt Carpenter and, yes, a mobility-scooter-riding Yadier Molina try to battle their way into contention in the next few years than watch a guaranteed world champion full of players I’ve got no history with. My love of the Cardinals depends on the sense—even if it’s really more of an illusion—that there’s a naturalistic order to who they are and how they came to be, that they’re not just an arbitrary collection of interchangeable run-production and -prevention machines.

This is not everyone’s perspective. It’s probably not most people’s perspective, these days. Free agency forever changed the way fans conceived of their relationship to the local nine, and much in the last few decades has reaffirmed that shift. The internet turned fantasy sports into a phenomenon and put everyone in charge of their own dream team. The sabermetrics revolution made heroes out of general managers and stats geeks and punctured many of the game’s old player-driven pieties. Games like The Show and Out of the Park allow us to simulate running our favorite clubs to astounding degrees of depth and realism. The democratization and fragmentation of media have brought fans into the conversation like never before; to follow a baseball team in the age of blogs and Twitter and text lines is to swim in a sea of nonstop amateur analysis and debate about how the team is run.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, of course. The reserve clause thoroughly deserves its place on the ash heap of history. Advanced stats have helped us better understand the game than ever before, and the digital counterculture that grew symbiotically with them, from Baseball Prospectus to FanGraphs to the SB Nation network and beyond, is home to some of the best baseball writing you’ll find anywhere. No small part of the fun of modern baseball fandom comes from thinking like a GM would: agonizing over lineups, wishcasting trades, debating extensions and call-ups and position changes and defensive shifts and future free agents. There’s a reason why I’ve spent an unhealthy percentage of my spare time in the last ten days on OOTP 18 saves and fantasy drafts.

But if you’re looking for signs that baseball fandom’s new analytics-driven, GM-centered normal is starting to bump up against its own limitations, and maybe twist into something more sinister, you can find them. Outflanked by smarter, nimbler outlets on the analysis front, traditional media have retreated into roles as access brokers, peddling scoops and laundering spin for front offices and skewing the conversation back towards the interests of management and ownership. Sabermetrics evangelists created a movement just popular and sacrosanct enough for Major League Baseball to co-opt, and the communal DIY ethos of its mid-aughts heyday has given way to the era of MLB Advanced Media’s opaque, proprietary Statcast™, doled out on MLB Network or by approved media outlets in doses just frequent enough that you don’t forget they’re Powered by Amazon Web Services™.

You could see the results in something like last month’s World Baseball Classic, which managed to achieve a degree of success despite the steady stream of cold water being poured on it by team executives fretting about injury risk and spring-training disruption and the pundits and columnists dutifully echoing their concerns. For many in and around the game, the obvious excitement and emotional stakes for players and fans of every country not named the United States—not to mention some great baseball—weren’t enough to make the tournament anything more than a novelty, if not a nuisance. One thing it was, of course, was an opportunity to roll out the newest Statcast™ metric, Catch Probability™, which will grade outfield catches on a scale from One Star Plays™ to Five Star Plays™. If you don’t think we’re headed for a world where Randal Grichuk can make a Papa John’s™ Four Topping Catch™ Measured by MasterCard™ Presents Statcast™ Powered by Amazon Web Services™, I’ve got a Papa Slam to sell you.

If modern baseball has become a cult of the front office, then Cardinals fandom is one of its most radical sects. That was evident even before this spring, when a substantial minority of Cards fans began talking themselves into being okay with needlessly showing Yadier Molina the door, but it’s certainly unmistakable now. Few fanbases in sports are more reliably willing than we are to trust the process, to accept that Mo Knows, to prove that we are the savvy dispassionate experts to every other team’s fickle emotional mob. There are different strains of this frame of mind out there—dull Cardinal Way moralism for some, I Fucking Love Sabermetrics triumphalism for others—but they’re united by an abiding faith in the system, in upper management, in the virtues of technocracy.

It wasn’t always this way, not even in the Moneyball-chic days of the mid-aughts. Walt Jocketty built some of the best Cardinals teams of any of our lifetimes by trading aggressively for the elite veteran talent other teams couldn’t afford; whether in spite of or because of the star power he assembled, he never had much of a profile of his own. Even after he’d become a casualty of the new era represented by Jeff Luhnow and the MV3 had shrunken to an MV1, the formidable twin presences of Albert Pujols and Tony La Russa remained most central to the Cardinals’ identity.

That all changed over the course of a single offseason, though, and both the Cardinals and their fans leaned hard into their new self-image as the team that actually definitely didn’t want Pujols back, anyway, thanks. It helped immensely, of course, that the club was finally starting to reap what had been sown by Luhnow—who, ironically enough, had left at the end of 2011 with the other two—and results were very good. They hired a room-temperature bowl of oatmeal as field manager and it didn’t seem to matter much. The legend of the 2009 Draft Class grew. Michael Wacha, compensatory draft pick for the loss of Pujols, embodiment of the Cardinals’ drafting and development wizardry, pitched us to the World Series and we all said, See?

As recently as a year ago, many of us still wanted to believe that that particular golden age hadn’t ended yet, that the Cardinals were still the team of the Wacha who’d outdueled Clayton Kershaw twice and not the Wacha who’d been trotted out by the bowl of oatmeal to give the season away a year later. The Cubs looked to have surged ahead over the course of an offseason or two in part by doing what the Cardinals wouldn’t, hiring a competent (if profoundly obnoxious) manager and spending aggressively on top-tier free agents to augment their cost-controlled young talent. But plenty in St. Louis still managed to convince themselves to trust the system. “TIME TO SHINE,” proclaimed the Post-Dispatch on Opening Day 2016, after one of the most disappointing offseasons in living memory. “Grichuk and Piscotty are the centerpiece of the Cards’ plan to ramp up offense and stay on top with homegrown talent.”

It’s one of the great fallacies of our time, in baseball and elsewhere, that a well-intentioned managerial class can serve a set of interests distinct from those of ownership and capital. The Cardinals have been enormously successful in persuading fans that their emphasis on “homegrown talent” and “internal options” and aversion to spending big on the free-agent market had everything to do with sound front-office strategy and nothing to do with the club’s league-high profit margins. It’s not at all dissimilar to corporate elites’ success in convincing an entire generation of young people that temp jobs without benefits and plummeting homeownership rates are just part of The Flexibility That Millennials Want. So maybe it’s not a surprise, then, not entirely coincidence, that in the space of a week, 2016 taught us two indelible lessons about the terrible shit that can happen when we place too much faith in technocratic managerialism. The system won’t save you, because that’s not what the system was designed to do.

And now we move forward; it’s Todd Ricketts’ world, we’re just living in it. Dexter Fowler arrived to remind us of all the ways in which a player can be valuable that don’t show up on FanGraphs or a front-office spreadsheet—and to spell it out quite explicitly in case anyone missed it—but the truth is that not much could have changed in the Cardinals’ offseason, and not much did. We may or may not have to wait until 2018 for a test of whether Bill DeWitt is willing to adapt to the new reality, but Fowler wasn’t it, and Edwin Encarnación probably wasn’t, either.

If the Cardinals somehow manage to put together a run in 2017, it will be an especially gratifying season, because it will mean that some combination of the many things we want to be true actually are: that Aledmys Díaz is for real; that Carlos Martínez is a true ace; that Fowler can produce like he did last year; that Lance Lynn is Lance Lynn again; that Stephen Piscotty can be not just good but great; that Waino is not finished; that Yadi is going to live forever. If it all breaks right, though, for once the credit shouldn’t go to the system, or the process, or the Way. The fun won’t be because this was all part of the plan, but precisely because it wasn’t.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

There’s a cute bit in the Philip K. Dick story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” where one character warns another about the lurking threat of kipple, all the useless objects that clutter up our lives.

“When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself,” he says. “No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment...but eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

Games are full of kipple. Empty cardboard boxes, old crates, coffee mugs, desks piled high with papers you can’t read and manila folders you can never open.

But Arkane’s latest, Prey, does something neat with kipple -- it weaponizes it.

Like most games you might call "immersive sims" (Deus Ex, Thief, BioShock, System Shock), Prey asks players to spend a lot of time rooting around in cabinets, trash cans and other nooks/crannies in search of hidden gems: useful resources buried in the rubbish.

Unlike those other games, Prey makes that rote and repetitive action scary. It introduces an enemy early on called the Mimic, a common but utterly alien creatures that tends to hide by taking the form of a piece of kipple, then leaping out when the player draws close.

While the nuts and bolts of actually fighting Mimics once they’re revealed can be annoying (they’re small and move erratically), their sheer existence make every otherwise innocuous, kipple-strewn corner of Prey’s Talos I space station feel threatening and alive.

And shucks, that space station. Can we just take a minute to appreciate the way Prey handles space, and sets the player up to tell their own stories within it? 

The game came out a month ago at this point and I know it may have slipped past a lot of people (there are a lot of games!) but after finishing it, I wanted to quickly call out some of the neat things Prey does that are worth celebrating.

Holistic level design

Prey takes place on Talos I, a fictional space station orbiting Earth’s moon. Once the player moves past the opening scene, pretty much the entire station is accessible, and the player can also get outside and jet around the station’s exterior (though they take damage if they go too far.)

That means pretty much every space in the game is understandable and accessible from multiple perspectives, both internally and externally.

A player can spend five hours moving through the station from the Arboretum to the Hardware Labs, then exit into space through an airlock and retrace their path externally in a few minutes. If they happen to float by a viewport on the way, they might glimpse the aftermath of a particularly frenetic fight they had two hours ago, or spot the open hatch of a maintenance duct they crawled through to circumvent said fight.

This is important because it reinforces the illusion that the player is somewhere else. It makes Talos I feel like a real place, a holistic environment that can be explored, learned, and mastered.

This kind of environmental design isn’t easy -- there’s a reason most games run through a linear series of discrete levels -- but when done right, it helps the player feel embodied in your game.

There are lots of great examples of other games that nail this sort of holistic level design, but I’m just going to take the lazy way out and say it’s like Dark Souls. That game had fantastic, complicated environments that all fit together perfectly, lulling players into feeling that they were exploring a real place. Prey achieves something very similar, with the added benefit of being set on a floating space station that can be circumnavigated from the outside.

Dynamic enemy placement

Also like Dark Souls, the lion’s share of Prey is devoid of friendly life. Thus, the game's interlocking environments are chiefly defined by what enemies you find there and what stuff you can pick up.

The enemies also respawn or repopulate across Talos I in some fashion, ensuring (for better and for worse) that players can never fully relax when backtracking. More importantly, there are moments when the nature and number of enemies spread across the station changes in accordance with the narrative.

That gives players new challenges in known settings, keeping those locations feeling fresh and, more importantly, rewarding players for learning and exploiting the environments of Talos I.

Fluctuating power curves

Prey takes a lot of direct inspiration from games like System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex, asking players to navigate Talos I while fighting/tricking/sneaking past enemies and collecting items, weapons and upgrades.

Since those resources are placed throughout the station and basically the whole thing is open to players from the jump, there are lots of different paths players can carve through the game -- and lots of ways that progression can be impacted by how threats shift and change.

For example, let me lay out my emotional journey through Prey. After about an hour, I was intrigued and felt pretty safe: I had plenty of healing items, a weapon or two, and (naive) trust that the game’s designers had balanced the difficulty level (Normal) so that I couldn’t totally ruin myself.

This seems fine

Five hours in, I was ruined.

I’d burned through all of my healing items, ammunition, and upgrade tools. All I had left was a wrench and a few EMP grenades, which were useless against the monstrosities that stood between me and everything I needed  -- a shotgun, for example, or the fabrication plans for medkits.

I considered restarting the game, but decided to stick with it and sneak past everything in my way. I was terrified. Prey was the worst!

Ten hours in, Prey felt too easy. I’d managed to get both a shotgun and the medkit plans, as well as some schematics for other Useful Things. I was practically bursting with ammo and healing items, and I’d learned the enemies and environments well enough to know no fear.

This is it, I thought. This is the part in every game where you make the jump from underpowered to overpowered. Assuming the endgame was nigh, I caught myself thinking wistfully about how much more immersive and real Talos I had felt when I was inching through it in total abject terror. It would be kind of nice to go back to being underpowered, I thought.

Twenty hours in, I decided it wasn’t actually that nice! I was totally out of healing items (again), out of ammo (again!) and barely surviving as I sprinted across the station, using every trick I knew to try and get away from the enemy.

By this point I’d cleaned out most of Talos I and was having a hard time replenishing my resources and  getting from zone to zone, much less accomplishing quest objectives. With no immediate endgame in sight, I thought again about giving up -- or at least reloading an earlier save.

After ~26 hours of play, I finished Prey. I had to make some late-game upgrade choices to counter troublesome enemies, and chase some side objectives that took me through new (resource-rich) areas of the station, but at the end I felt, if not godlike, at least god-ish.

Most games like this take you from the same start to the same end; the player starts at the bottom of a smooth power curve and spends the game climbing to the top. Prey stands out because it affords the player space to slip, fall, and get back up again, only to slip up in a totally new and terrifying way.

I mean space in a literal sense as much as a figurative one. When lead designer Ricardo Bare talked to Gamasutra earlier this year about the team’s approach to level design, he said the goal was to create a kind of “mega-dungeon” in space “with lots of immersive, simulation-based systems.”

Enter the Mega-Dungeon

By way of example he mentioned the studio’s 2002 first-person RPG Arx Fatalis, which took place inside a giant network of caves.

But my dumb stupid brain went somewhere else -- to the sorts of “mega-dungeons” that are popular in some tabletop role-playing game circles, especially in the 20th century.

If you didn't play D&D or whatever in the '90s, know that these were often sprawling, isolated areas with ridiculously complicated layouts (think like, a 12-level underground dungeon surrounded by a network of caves) and, most importantly, threat levels that varied depending on how far players were willing to explore.

That means players could effectively set their own difficulty by choosing how deep to delve. Pair that with the relative freedom tabletop RPGs afford players in choosing how to circumvent challenges, and you get an experience that's often light on narrative (there's something real bad going on in these caves/dungeons/ruins! Check it out!) but well-suited to letting players tell the story they want to tell.

Making games that give players lots of room to tell their own stories is tricky business. I think if you look at Prey, you'll find some good examples of how that can be done well. 

Players can go almost anywhere and do almost anything (including finishing the game) relatively early on, but Talos I’s interconnected environments are filled with enemies of varying difficulty, letting players choose how to play and what to risk. The threats in those environments change over time, rewarding players for learning the levels and increasing the odds they’ll go through dramatic shifts in power level as they adapt to new challenges.

Of course, there’s a big downside to all this that you’ve probably already sussed out. Prey gives the player finite resources, but the enemies seem nigh-infinite. You might clear out a section of the station, only to come back hours later and find fresh monstrosities lying in wait for you.

That has a chilling effect on the player’s creativity; after all, why risk experimenting with new weapons and tactics when you know that freezing an enemy with the industrial-strength glue gun and bashing them to death with your wrench will A) be ammo-efficient B) totally work and C) present minimal risk of damage?

70 percent of the time, this works every time

This problem really rears its head in the end-game, when the player is likely to be criss-crossing Talos I and facing new enemies while moving through spaces that have already been picked clean.

Still, it's a minor complication in an otherwise great example of good level design and interesting power/challenge systems. I know a ton of interesting games will come out this year (like every year!) but if you have the means to take a look at Prey, do so! 

And if you want a bit more from Ricardo “Mega-Dungeon” Bare, check out this hour-long conversation Gamasutra Editor-In-Chief Kris Graft and Contributing Editor Bryant Francis had with him while streaming Prey on our Twitch channel last month. (I’m not in it, so it should be pretty watchable!)

Alternate titles for this blog: Beat, Prey, Love; Prey You Catch Me; Let Us Prey