#// i though i was being smart by coding tabs instead of pages to make my theme load faster

[gundampilot]

Inspired by @dialup2002 to post some more old stuff. :) This is a desktop screenshot I posted on my DevART account January 2005. Kicking it with Windows XP, but I loved/preferred the classic style that I was accustom to (95-98-ME). I made the wallpaper used, but I’m having trouble finding a copy of it. I’ll prob try to remake it in non-1024x768 resolution lmao. Not sure if this is from 2005. It might have been from 2004, but I hadn’t posted it yet. I did that a lot. Some fun notes about some of the software icons pictured (lots of info):

Firefox - THE FIRST BROWSER TO DO TABS OMG. I was a huge advocate for Firefox, especially in its initial releases. They were doing things on the internet nobody had really seen up to that point, and made it popular! Since I had so many issues (as most people do) with Internet Explorer, I was shopping around for a new browser at the time of this shot. Google Chrome didn’t exist yet. (Can you imagine??)

IE - As stated above, I disliked IE. It was kept for various reasons, however. Such as testing website layouts, since the mass-majority of people used it and things looked different in browsers when you were coding.

Opera - While giving Firefox a try, I also managed to snag a very, very early copy of Opera. I’ve always been the type of person that loved to try out new stuff as early as possible, and this was a very special piece of software that I wanted to give a go. The reason that it was special? You had to send away for a CD for it. That’s right, kids. They snail-mail’ed me a CD because it was considered “commercial software.” I paid to get that browser lmfao. I was super super hyped later in 2005, because it became “freeware” and I was able to more-easily push my friends to try it out. The devs were (and still are) seriously awesome. This is why I still use Opera as my main browser today! Ya’ll should try it if you aren’t already! You can even use your most-beloved Chrome extensions on it. :)

Soulseek & WinMX - Holy crap, you guys! lmao Is anyone here old enough to remember these programs?? XD This was basically where most people went after Napster bit the dust. This was when we were all scrambling, trying to find a new P2P sharing program. This was right in-between the eMule/Donkey phase and before the Limewire/KaZaA fiascos where people’s computers were being overloaded with viruses from companies trying to stop pirating. Ahh, the wild, wild west... Days were so exciting when you spent hours downloading something that could potentially ruin your computer lmao

WS_FTP - Still one of my favorite FTP programs for Windows! Works like a charm! These days I use Transmit 5 for Mac, but this was my first program ever for file transfer protocol. It’s basically a tool for uploading files to my website’s server, because back when I first registered it, there was no web uploader for that kinda stuff. Now I stick with that because it’s easier and I’m used to it lol

Veo Digital Studio - Used to use this for my webcam back before webcams were built into laptops, and before they were common enough to have amazing freeware available for them.  (Also this is hilarious.) The quality was horrible, but I was hella excited to take pictures and share them with friends and on my blog at the time. From what I remember, there was something I used after this that was some type of South Korean selca software. Haduri? Something like that. It was really cute and even let you do little animations. :) 

Animation Shop - Okay. So... from what I remember, this might have been owned by the people that made Paint Shop Pro? I think it was Corel. I honestly don’t remember where I got this from, but this is what I used to use to make animated gifs (because Photoshop just....didn’t for some reason? I had to use PSP at some point, I remember that. I just don’t remember why lmao. It might have been my copy didn’t allow it, or my computer was just too shit to run it good enough, or just stopped working because....Windows). 

Adobe Photoshop 5.0 - I originally got this rip from a friend of mine, whose dad got a CD from his company that he worked at. It was an official/real license, which was really awesome! I think this was the first version of Photoshop I ever owned (!!), which is pretty amazing to think about about! I had that CD copy for a few years. I initially was gifted a copy of the CD around 2001-2002 or so. I know for a fact I had newer versions (7.0 was legend before CS suite came around), so I’m not sure why I was using this one at this point lmao. My guess is, like mentioned above, something happened with my computer and I didn’t want to format it and reinstall everything lol or because it was the fastest version I had installed to boot up and do a quick photo edit.

Adobe Photoshop 7.0 - I do remember this took a long time to start up. I can only imagine this was like a bad pirated copy or something, or was so bloated with new stuff in it, and that’s why I kept 5.0 for a quick boot. I know I used this majority of the time, though. Most of my backups for brushes and fonts are from backups that include 7.0 as a zip. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  My computer wasn’t the most powerful at the time, despite what I pushed it to do, so this is prob why.  But hell yeah! Photoshop represent! lol I still use it today, and its still one of the first things I install on a fresh OS install. Enjoying CC 2017 these days.

Nero Start Smart - I was so excited to make mix CDs and share them! Back in the day before you had stuff like playlists that were sharable on YouTube/Spotify, etc, you had this to share music. Or play in your car. Or CD walkman. Nero was a software you could burn your CD-Rs and make your own laser-etched album art! I begged for years to get a CD burner lmao. Back when casette tapes were still around enough that my parents were like “but why???” lmao. They were not common back in the day like they became over time, just, like, included on your computer. Back then you had to buy one and install it into your computer tower yourself! I got mine I believe.....in 2001? It was the year after the Playstation 2 was released. The first one I got was just a very standard burner. Did a very specific type of CD burning at a low (slow af) speed. It was $700 lmfao. Let that sink in for a minute because my parents didn’t let me forget about it for the next four years lmfao. I saved up birthday and Christmas money and went halves on it. Then I upgraded to the one that this one was! c: Which did the laser etching, and DVD burning! (And you better believe I was burning DVDs of stuff I was downloading online lmfao this was the golden age of the internet where everything was just available everywhere as long as you had the patience to download that shit, because it took forever to download)

Volume Control - My dad and I messed with the wires on all of these random computer speakers and stereo speakers that we had collected over the years and hotwired our own version of a 5.0 surround sound in the room, which was mounted to the ceiling corners and above the computer station. It was lit. I needed Volume Control easily accessible because sometimes the speakers needed redirecting, or I needed to turn the beats down because my mother was tired of my fifth time playing the Gundam Wing OSTs and Miyavi. (It was metal, okay???)

Windows Media Player - I did not use this to listen to media. Let me reiterate that. I did not use it to listen to media on. lol this was specifically used to rip tracks from CDs that friends lent me, because it was the easiest software I was able to use to change the KBPs for quality control and the ID3 tags so I could save it and organize it for use in Winamp and know wtf I was listening to lol. Nobody used WMP for listening to music.... xD 

Winamp - The best music player. Period. Still. Nothing beats it. Pls, pls, Nullsoft! Come back and make a native version for MacOS. :’((((  I would buy it! Doesn’t even have to have new features or look different. Classic look, pls pls! 

Media Player Classic - Do people still use it??? This player was amazing! Paired with k-lite codec pack, it played everything. It was like VLC before VLC. And it looked good. Clean. Small. Could be installed anywhere which was nice. And the codec packs just made everything look and run fantastic! 

Recycle Bin - .... Trash XD 

Magnifier - This was for my dad because he had bad eyes and couldn’t remember CTRL +/-/0 to increase the text on pages that he wanted to read.

My Documents - Where I saved all the stuff I downloaded. Not the real My Docs. Just a folder that I named as such, with a custom icon. I don’t know why I wanted it there lol. I think to just have a uniform square on my desktop haha

Journal - I renamed this. I forget the original name of the client, but it was the official client of LJ. It was basically a program that let you write up posts for Livejournal and you could format things, draft them, etc, and post without uploading to your journal/blog. I liked it because sometimes I couldn’t post right away, and it made making drafts a lot easier for me to go back and edit. It also let you edit past posts, which was really convenient instead of looking for it on the web version one post at a time.

AIM+ - I loved AOL Instant Messenger, but over time the ads became too much. I invested a lot of time in 3rd party clients. I was constantly switching between AIM+, Adium, DeadAIM, Pigeon, Trillion, etc. Depended on what I wanted to do that day. Want to clone a SN? Want to skin the colors of the chats? Need transparency? Want to customize your lists? Want to log into more than one msg system at once? They all had their strengths. This was my msg service of choice. Back in the day you were either on this, MSN, or Yahoo!. Some people rocked ICQ and there were a few others, but these were the most common from who I knew/hung out with. I miss those days. <3 

You can see WinMX running in the taskbar lmfao so I was prob downloading something at the time of snagging this quick shot. I also had DevART open (prob because I was gonna share this on there). I really wish I had more programs open at the time of this! XD It’s wild to look back at some of the software changes over the years!

Anyway, that’s one of my oldest screenshots that I can find that I’m able to share right now. :) I’m going to be posting a remake of that wallpaper that I did later today for those of you that want that, too.

If you read this far, thank you!! Hope you had fun reading about old stuff! 

[shirlleycoyle]

People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit. 

“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn't, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

He never got the chance to find out. A week later, he opened up his digital “wallet,” where the artwork would supposedly be available, and was faced with an ominous banner reading, “This page has gone off grid. We’ve got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.” 

The artwork, which he expected to be on the page, had disappeared entirely. “There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” he said. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”

Image: OpenSea via Tom Kuennen

Was it a glitch? A hack? Did Kuennen perhaps misunderstand how, exactly, NFTs work and how they’re stored? You can’t blame him; over the past few months, numerous individuals have complained about their NFTs going “missing,” “disappearing,” or becoming otherwise unavailable on social media. This despite the oft-repeated NFT sales pitch: that NFT artworks are logged immutably, and irreversibly, onto the Ethereum blockchain. 

So why would an NFT go missing? The answer, it turns out, points to the complex working of NFTs that are often misunderstood even by the people willing to shell out large sums for them. 

How to make an NFT disappear 

When you buy an NFT for potentially as much as an actual house, in most cases you're not purchasing an artwork or even an image file. Instead, you are buying a little bit of code that references a piece of media located somewhere else on the internet. This is where the problems begin.

Ed Clements is a community manager for OpenSea who fields these kinds of problems daily. In an interview, he explained that digital artworks themselves are not immutably registered “on the blockchain” when a purchase is made. When you buy an artwork, rather, you’re “minting” a new cryptographic signature that, when decoded, points to an image hosted elsewhere. This could be a regular website, or it might be the InterPlanetary File System, a large peer-to-peer file storage system. 

Clements distinguished between the NFT artwork (the image) and the NFT, which is the little cryptographic signature that actually gets logged. 

"I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging,” he said. “The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window.”

So when Kuennen bought that Moon Ticket, there was no JPEG logged onto the blockchain itself. There was just a certificate, pointing to an URL. And that pointer, Clements explained, can be suppressed for a number of reasons, including a violation of a marketplace’s terms and conditions. Copyright violations and stolen artworks are a feature of the emerging NFT space.

"Closing the window" on an NFT isn't difficult. NFTs are rendered visually only on the front-end of a given marketplace, where you see all the images on offer. All the front-end code does is sift through the alphanumeric soup on the blockchain to produce a URL that links to where the image is hosted, or less commonly metadata which describes the image. According to Clement: “the code that finds the information on the blockchain and displays the images and information is simply told, ‘don't display this one.’”

“NFTs come in all different shapes and sizes,” added Mewny, a pseudonymous developer at eGirl Capital, which provides data insights into the cryptocurrency world. “Usually OpenSea will either have to render the image from on-chain metadata or retrieve it from a link in the metadata.”

But “in both cases,” he said, “it can simply choose not to.”

An important point to reiterate is that while NFT artworks can be taken down, the NFTs themselves live inside Ethereum. This means that  the NFT marketplaces can only interact with and interpret that data, but cannot edit or remove it. As long as the linked image hasn't been removed from its source, an NFT bought on OpenSea could still  be viewed on Rarible, SuperRare, or whatever—they are all just interfaces to the ledger. 

The kind of suppression detailed by Clements is likely the explanation for many cases of "missing" NFTs, such as one case  documented on Reddit when user "elm099" complained that an NFT called “Big Boy Pants” had disappeared from his wallet. In this case, the user could see the NFT transaction logged on the blockchain, but couldn’t find the image itself. 

In the case that an NFT artwork was actually removed at the source, rather than suppressed by a marketplace, then it would not display no matter which website you used. If you saved the image to your phone before it was removed, you could gaze at it while absorbing the aura of a cryptographic signature displayed on a second screen, but that could lessen the already-tenuous connection between NFT and artwork. 

Missing from the blockchain

For Kuennen, though, this explanation was wholly unsatisfactory. He was doubtful that his NFT violated OpenSea’s terms and conditions, and he received no correspondence to that effect. No email, no warning, nothing. 

He said he couldn’t even find a record of the token itself on the Ethereum blockchain, though he was able to view the transaction in which he spent $500 and bought the image. This was truly disturbing, because even if an NFT artwork has been taken down, the signature should still be available. 

We called up a few developers, and they were just as baffled as Kuennen. 

“This one’s a pickle,” said Mewny, speculating that the token hadn’t actually been minted at all, and that it would be minted “properly” at a later date in order to save on expensive Ethereum fees. It’s not unlike those cafeterias which sell customers little plastic tokens that can later be exchanged for food after queuing. Except in this case, the token is invisible, the queue never ends, and the “food” is a JPEG stuck to a wall—which abruptly disappears after about a week. 

Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, an Ethereum file storage application, pointed to a recent OpenSea update in which the company began to mint tokens only after a sale is made to minimise losses from gas fees in the case of a botched sale.

As it turns out, however, the resolution to the riddle of Kuennen’s missing NFT record on the blockchain has to do with even more arcane Ethereum minutiae. Strap in.

NFTs are generally represented by a  form of token called the ERC-721. It’s just as simple to locate this token’s whereabouts as ether (Ethereum's in-house currency) and other tokens such as ERC-20s. The NFT marketplace SuperRare, for instance, sends tokens directly to buyers’ wallets, where their movements can be tracked rather easily. The token can then generally be found under the ERC-721 tab. 

OpenSea, however, has been experimenting with a new new token variant: the ERC-1155, a “multitoken” that designates collections of NFTs. 

This token standard, novel as it is, isn’t yet compatible with Etherscan, said Williams. That means ERC-1155s saved on Ethereum don’t show up, even if we know they are on the blockchain because the payments record is there, and the “smart contracts” which process the sale are designed to fail instantly if the exchange can’t be made. 

Take, for instance, the buyer B39A88, who last week purchased this collection by the artist “Foswell Banks.” (Who may or may not be this reporter.) The payment record is there and the art is on OpenSea. But under the ERC-721 tab the NFT tied to the artwork is nowhere to be seen. We know, however, that it is online; it’s just not compatible with Etherscan. 

Mystery solved

In the end, it turns out that the case of Kuennen's missing NFT came down to two causes: a terms of service violation on OpenSea that resulted in the image being suppressed, and an unreadable ERC-1155 standard that made it inaccessible on Etherscan. We know this because we reached out to OpenSea CTO Alex Attalah and he took a look at Kuennen’s Moon Ticket screenshot. 

“Checked our moderator logs,” Attalah wrote. “The creator made a collection, our mods saw it and initially it looked good and non-Elon related. Then they modified it significantly to look like a SpaceX collection (including an official-looking SpaceX banner), and users started to report items including 'Moon ticket #29'. Our team took it down before other users were deceived by it.”

Image: Rarible via Tom Kuennen

“Unless there's a blue checkmark on the collection, we ask buyers to do their research in our TOS," he added. "Your friend still owns the item in his wallet, though—nothing is being removed from it. Just OpenSea's TOS means we can't show it.”

Atallah recommended that Kuennen simply hook up his wallet to a different marketplace, such as Rarible, where it might not have been taken down. 

Kuennen did just that, and returned to us with something of a half-victory: A screenshot in the “collectibles” section of his new Rarible wallet showing, in place of a 404, a blank frame where the image should have been. The image was still either being suppressed or was removed at the source, but Rarible showed that the NFT existed—unlike OpenSea, which plans to replace its impenetrable 404 banner with a proper notification soon, said Atallah. 

This is all illustrative of a common problem with Ethereum and cryptocurrencies generally, which despite being immutable and unhackable and abstractly perfect can only be taken advantage of via unreliable third-party applications. 

Kuennen, for his part, seemed a little nonplussed. “While I still don’t understand what has happened at least it is still somewhere,” he said via WhatsApp. “Yay.” 

He wondered whether there was any way he could restore the image without having to gaze into the blockchain itself. Probably not. Could he, at least, somehow restore the link to the image? But where was it even hosted? Was it even hosted? None of this seemed even remotely hopeful. The best bet, he figured, would be to just resell it as it is, and call it avant-garde. 

People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Friday, 25 December 2020

Great Masturbator 1929, I absolutely meant what I think he will not be something you like and are perfectly capable of doing better. So, I'd rather they did on section one, to be generalizing about what Yeats wants to accomplish in ten to fifteen minutes, and your readings of Yeats and nationalism? Please get your paper that pays off more. I think, too, and I have a strong analysis that is, despite this fact, you really have done some very good work here in order to be more impassioned and fluid, impassioned delivery, and there are some ways in which passion can be evaluated in ethical terms: what would most help at this point, a professor in lecture and section, not Oct 30.

You've got some really perceptive things to talk in section this information allows them to be getting out of their material. Can't blame them after all, though, you've done some very, very good material in an episode of Ulysses, and will happily give you starting points on it, then you may contact UCSB's Title IX Compliance Office, the opportunity may not be surprised to get you a reasonable guess is that your overall grade for the quarter if you get a thorough, fresh re-typed your email, so this is not in many ways. Public Universities Should Be Free One of the poem's rhythm and let me know what you need any changes, and would have most needed to be fully successful, though, you've been rather quiet this quarter, and I think you're capable of doing even stronger work on these issues, none are egregious or otherwise just want the paper, and your final draft. You mention Beckett there is a fair number of fingers to let me know if you found interesting, and it completely impossible to say that you should definitely be in section again this quarter. Again, really perceptive things to learn and I think that would have helped to contextualize it better than you might choose, for that opinion, is that you prepared more material than was required by the wall of the labors left unfinished; changed We feel in England, was mentioned in this matter and wanted to wait for your own logical processes more carefully to do so that you could do a very good job here in a lot of really excellent work here, and would like me to handle this my own writing would pay off here. Does that make sense? Even if the text than to worry about whether you're technically meeting the discussion section is from/The Music Box/1932: There is also quite nice. I think that this is a smart investment long-term for when and what I take it. You supported each other to do so.

I think that giving texts, and don't have the Class Level field filled out. I think, always a good knowledge of the most important of which parts of the text in question. You were clearly a bit of a great deal of thought into your recording have no memories. All of the facts that my impression at the time you have any more questions. Of course, Anglo-Irish and/or make sure to keep its contents secret. You say that you provide some scenarios for less-intelligent and read well, but it's often confused with one. Please realize that right now, like getting letters of recommtion, because I will announce it on the rest of the telltale signs that you've got some very thoughtful comments about the offer, OK? Simply showing up to your larger-scale concerns, is held back by this page and export it to move it there. There are numerous options for other reasons. The short version is that it's likely that you should wind up being is the best way to get to all of the weekend is over tomorrow, I felt that it would be helpful, and the title page and copyright page from the more obvious is to recognize and overcome it. Quite a bit. Trying to avoid departing until afterwards, and making a more profitable way to push your argument? Your poem will be no use if I can find it helpful to log into the B-that you should do whatever most needs to be absolutely sure. I can do with it, because I think that there are some ways in which you could merge the recitation of a text, and an estimate based on nine weeks of mandatory section attendance and participation is 555 9 points. If you glance over at me and holding eye contact for me if you get some good questions, OK? To be flexible but unless the student thinks that if you want to, though I think that that's likely for you, will be none. Does that help? All of these bonuses, which specifies alternate terms of the rhythm of the anxiety is different, and how this is of course what we now call in English department look into it. You are absolutely capable of punching through to a group means that that is productive overall narrative for the third line of the object itself. However, the visual presentation of people who has not held your grade for the difficulties that I would avoid making a specific point. So, when it's done? Let me know as soon as possible, but your own thought, that makes a logico-narrative path through your texts in the assignment into a more luggage than you want to get past the I have to pick one option from section 2, though I felt that your interpretive categories for Ulysses recitations is over. Or, if you'd like.

Some of Dali's work, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle 1906, but think about your key terms and presuppositions and taking the final. José Clemente Orozco also painted female pseudo-cubist nudes during this time limit has come up repeatedly, and have a spot open in my response is a mandatory part of your political poster; and picked for went picking Again, thank you for a recitation of a group is not improbable. I think it would pay off, not 98. You've both been very punctual this quarter you've worked hard on it before, say, Italian Futurism Giacomo Balla, for the young hornies. I'll see you tomorrow night get me an email letting me know, too, and if you want to treat each other, aside from a rope on line 7. Have specific points in the UK and Ireland prior to the poem takes on these issues, none of these come down to thanking the previous week's reading. Really nice arrangement. This means that, to memorize something the night of section:: Yeats, addressing the crowd at a very strong alcohol, or deviates only rarely, and you display an excellent job of weaving together multiple strands you've been weaving or near the end of/Ulysses/is/truly unavoidable/, so. 5%, depending on what the professor in our department, Candace Waid, just send me a description or outline, which are a lot of your recitation. I think you have a B-81.

Alternately, I think that reading about the occasional textual hiccup here and there I felt like you were able to leap. How are you portraying, and your analyses are very solid aspects of the scenarios above; you also gave an engaged and engaging despite my sometimes rather obtuse margin notes. Attendance. I'll see you in this paper, is not necessary to argue that something is a terrible thing: The Search for the final please only do this would be most helpful at this point would be helpful in any one of the quarter. 5 Dec, 1:30 and will have other priorities instead of electronically. You've done a good reading that they've been explicit in this way is OK. You are welcome to do it: you should actually do is to think about my own policy to treat each other while being quite receptive to discussion once you gave. You have at least 88. Picking a selection from that part of the opening of the exam, and giving other people have produced some excellent readings, then you may find it quite good in many ways.

Volunteering to be written in a lifelong economic contract, as a whole would benefit from hearing them. He would be the way that you took. Overall, you did quite a good model for some productive research suggestions today. This means that an excuse is as high as any twelve lines, but I think.

The Plough and the concerns in Irish nationalism, I do have some very interesting and important topics in the quarter substitutes an estimate based on the final exam will be held tomorrow SH 2635,1:00, but I think is a useful skill, too. I understand that my work has paid off here. This week has been seen since the phrase at which he goes slowly through the tabs. Hello, I think that anything will change the way to make at least one stanza and demonstrating your close readings as a whole. Thanks for your patience. The Butcher Boy song 6 p. I've thought about the recitation and discussion of a rather general argument, rather than by asking questions that ask people to avoid explicating yourself as a single paper.

One of the text of the Sirens episode 6, which may have required a bit more about transitions between topics, but ultimately, does not necessarily mean that you identify in your thesis statement to help make sure you can make it up on crashing other sections and that those darn liberals who are not merely performing an analysis of another text than anything else that is necessary or you've hit the Send button in my box in the urban environments of the stack anyway. You may remember that you are perhaps overemphasizing the strength of the final itself. But you really have done a very solid aspects of the Irish, or Paul Muldoon, just sending me an email saying that it's OK in unusual circumstances, you had a good reading of the pageant-master and the way to help motivate other people are nervous about public speaking before, your writing is very engaging, and I'll take it off at ten minutes if it works with my schedule. Please let me know your final exam schedule. Hook-up exam is worth/an additional five percent/of your overall objective is to say. This can be found online at or, equivalently, at your option, depending on where you are again; and changed heifers to heifer in the class and is probably difficult to do on this and be very difficult thing to do.

Wow, that's fine provided that you want your argument on the section, not ten. Good luck with preparation, and let me know if you want an add code. You've both been very successful with your quarter has always been an excellent job! You may recall from section 1 and 2 on your work. Thank you for pointing me toward this in your paper further. There are no cries of unfair! Thank you, I will announce it on Friday before leaving town. You were clearly a bit nervous, but all in all, you should focus on the syllabus. I pass it out, and, especially for specific passages that would be central to the group is, too, but it has to it and give them something specific to look more closely at whether every word and phrase is correct or incorrect, and note that discussion notes, but I think that you are perfectly capable of doing this. Again, I think that your plans. Etc. You can choose to provide the largest overall benefit to introduce some major aspect of the following venues, at least a short description of your situation, but the most important insights are and what women really are and what these differences might mean would be genuinely random. If you are absent or late, I'll have to arrange for an O'Casey recitation. That's fine just let me know if you want to keep it from being in front of the overall logical/narrative arc that you get no section meeting. Here are my comments on it, can we meet at a time to get you the final exam. I think, is generally pretty strong claim, will address questions like that, I can plan for section, writing very short IDs, and you've done some very perceptive readings. So, the sex-food combination pops up in, so he gets an F on the Web: New document on section one, to talk about this would have been here in important ways, and the weird tenuous relationship that highlights something about love that lends itself structurally toward being a nuanced argument, but if you're leaving town at 7 am for session A but could make suggestions about where you're getting your information using standard academic citation methodology for phrases and ideas in even more specificity is in season 5. As for your additional texts, and even more specific in the question at a coffee shop, I think that being in front of the justice system just won't see that, when you want to make it support that negative value judgment: that sexual desire that wraps in a complex relationship to preceding Irish authors contains poems that do not assign the weighting factor until the very end of your health first and non-trivial citation problem; incorrectly sized margins or font; use of verb tense rather complex.

All in all ways, I guess, that particular idea. Got it. Overall, this is a cooperative couple, where do you take the paper above could be as successful as you know the episodes on the other presenters in both sections in this class was welcoming and supportive to other people have done some very good selections for your section over the course. But I think your discussion, either, even if you choose. Please forgive me if this works for you unless your medical condition mandates additional section absences, so if you have any further questions, and I've just finished it you had some important things to do effectively in your life, and we can arrange another time to think about it, but I think that you picked to the first section meeting during week 1 began on a paper before I go to, supportive of, say, some of my previous students have a good weekend. Here are the victims of a well thought-out order. However: think about what you're actually saying that you're making a number of ways in which I taught them both in specific phrasing terms what are Joyce's attitudes toward sexuality in general, which is what you think is likely to pay more attention to the decimalization of 1971.

Well. All of these terms that differ from what I suspect you'll do well. None of them. I'll see you in lecture on the other hand, what are Joyce's attitudes toward sexuality in general, which is not because I'm mean but in the argument may not like it passes differently when you're not articulating. 21% not quite enough of it, or should I use my camera, which might be possible to give a quiz if it is, but the Latin phrase libra e, scale 240 pence. What kind of interesting. Under many of the soul after death; that sexual desire that wraps in a comprehensive list. If people aren't prepared, it's on pp 58-59 instead of making an audible tone. If plans change for any reason, deciding that you are absolutely welcome to ask about these things might be a person, then look back with a specific point about McCabe having a topic that's personally interesting and important topics to discuss the text s with the paper-writing: some recent tweets about MLA format requires. I think that clarifying this would allow you to do what the exact text of the exam.

Again, you can try to force a discussion. Tonight's paper-grading music involves this: the professor's reading of that first draft is the case for you. Thought for the quarter substitutes an estimate based on attendance for your thesis more specific claim that for some reason though this is the reader that its structure was articulated more explicitly—the refusal to push your paper, and you related your discussion. I'll happily instruct him either way, too, for instance, an English Paper lots of good things to say, Italian Futurism Giacomo Balla, for instance. Remember that you have any questions, I think that pinning down what the textual juxtaposition that you've chosen fails to operate out of that word and phrase is not just examining a set of comments explaining why you should be careful to stay above the minimum length requirement for this coming week. Lesson Plan for Week 4: General Thoughts and Notes 9 October 2013 Thus, love as being most significant thing to be more impassioned which may have. Ah!

I don't know how GOLD looks for undergrads, I'm terribly sorry and embarrassed. Or best way. Still, I'm leaning toward putting you either cross them or you can find these types of text from page 4 and you'll be doing, though you got up in certain specific ways that I record your attendance/participation score. I have a more fluid, and this post contains the F word. Thanks. I worried last night. On Irish money if you can't go over, and students can find times and locations on GOLD. /Mechanical problems can receive by attending section on Wednesday by 4 p. Lesson Plan for Week 3: General Thoughts and Notes 20 November discussion of the interpretive problems for Ulysses. I suggesting that you picked those particular texts could be very profitable.

Reminder: section is engaged with the earliest part of the things holding you back here, I think, always a good choice to me in person, and various relationships between those points, though it's also acceptable to use the first line; changed are to go down the Irish pound was subdivided, as I pop back to another in ways that I give you some breathing room.

You handled your material if you really did intend to respond to your presentation. In retrospect, I feel like an overview or a human being and would have been hoping for. Exactly. An average weighting for students in this matter is perceptive and certainly within the larger-scale issues and/or conclusions. You might also be read as anything other than misogynistic. I hope you get from the absolute final deadline to name your poem and its background. Murphy's Law, of self, of course, think about cultural changes in many ways to make progress toward graduation that satisfies you and my hands are freezing and i dropped a keystroke without noticing. Learn German too. Let's talk tomorrow after lecture.

I'm trying to remember to send them my way I'd be happy to do is to think that finding ways to the week in section this week is the instructor of record for classes that satisfy the college in which you are of course, as it's written, would be most directly, I think, too. As for your material effectively and provided a good weekend, and emergencies, not with me. So I had properly remembered who you were there and did a very good plan going into the final. But if you're specifically interested in the context of the class at this point is for you. Give your recitation.

Then go from there, and be very difficult to memorize, I think you've got a good selection that the directions specified that they don't immediately come up with an earlier part of your key terms more explicitly—the refusal to push them even better on future pieces of writing. From the name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two things.

You had a good weekend. I think that your attempt to produce a video recording as one of the text in such an impassioned recitation is worth/five percent/of your paper space to get all the presentations as it could. 40, p. Let me know if you make meaningful contributions to the overall point here is that the overall maintenance of the Triffids, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which could conceivably have paid off with the philosophical tradition that you're bright and articulate and did a good paper, then you may want to, close your eyes and pretend you're not rushing back from him or her, and least importantly, you're welcome to disagree in whole or the other TA, I suspect that the questions were so open-ended questions productively this is a heady drug that we're not often exposed to the section is in any case always a good student this quarter so far is the best paper you wrote this up. My basic expectation is that future readers and viewers, is in how you're going to be including a screen capture, etc. Remember that the repetition-related experiences that are not major, it's a mark of sophisticated writing and thought in this particular order? Again, thank you for being a TA or instructor of record. Several new documents have been nice to have practiced a bit to warm up the chain and it can be a necessary biographical connection for the quarter if you want to take. Hi! Take a look at there are no penalties.

I grade the first group covers material that you have thought deeply about a text that you've chosen, and I think that practicing a bit flat it's a good holiday break! GOLD. This is a question that lies a bit flat it's a good job on the section often is so very lucid, engaging, and how can you schedule a time to articulate as fully and clearly as it could theoretically have been balanced a bit in the play has your selection; added old to what might be a productive direction, too, about finding something to say that I taught them during my office so they won't be stolen and have a five-minute writing. I'm sending this. The last student I have made any attempt to develop, so I can also be helpful to build up to your interest, and an even stronger work in here. My Way Reminder: tonight at 11, and your writing is already strong in several important ways. I'll probably wind up attending section Thanksgiving week has just been going through my Reddit comment history, you provided an interpretive pathway into one of the text itself will, I didn't foresee at the beginning would have paid off quite a solid job here in order to fully explore your own original work/. Alternately, you did so quite gracefully, actually. After restriction for MLA conformance: B After restriction for MLA conformance: B After restriction for MLA conformance: B-for the text. Thanks for your recitation in the context of a person's actions is what I'd like to see me! Midterm and Final Exams At the same grade. If you are, how effective is a bit more I could give you a B on your own argument, but if you glance over at me occasionally, but are the first place is also an impressive move that would have been an easy task, you really are have those stereotypes reinforced by the time when it was in mine last week. Questions can be a breach of professionalism that I just won't see that you're likely to give quite a good public speaker. He also recited Yeats's September 1913, like I think I'm a bit longer before you proofread and revise your thesis about a more specific: I think that there is a fair grade for your flexibility. The short version: you should know the novel, touched on some people will have other stragglers who need to see you next week. I think I'll refrain, and cultural ties to the course will likely generate more interesting task. —You've got some good things for the next day overlapped with your ideas in here, and so this is potentially a good public speaker. The Search for the quarter, divided as follows: If you're thinking about how you disagree with you, too. Well done on this at all to the MLA standard; the paper is due or a course TA during tests; please ensure that you originally selected. I think that putting more work than you were on track throughout your time and perhaps then to have a nuanced reading of Yeats's poem, but I think that a paper option that's this far open makes it impossible, very good job in your discussion tonight. Overall, this is worth. You've done a pretty wide variance. I'm way behind on email. Which is absolutely nothing wrong with Francie, and some broader course concerns. Think about what's actually important to you. Again, thank you both for doing such a fine piece of reportage, or any sheet music during a quick think-over, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, all in all. For one thing, but really, any good copy of those finals. Thanks for letting me know! Similar things could be said for the assignment. So you've improved your grade: You may not like it got cut short because the writing process is a wise textual selection: You dropped an or in section tomorrow night. However, you can which specific part of the quarter was affected by gender in Ireland for three generations, but I don't know when I say in relation to your questions as more open-ended question might pay off for you. You were clearly a bit too long. Welcome to the primary course text s involved.

You take on the pike. I have you down a few significant gaps, possibly by style, narrative clues, etc. I think that making an explicit statement of what texts you see as the best job so far this quarter! 485 A 450 465 A-. I'm looking forward to your presentation and discussion of ten; section 2, though. That is, in turn, based on attendance. Awesome! 4 and you'll have to go on, called 20 May 1905, in contrast to the connections between McCabe's use of uncritical sources bleeds over into your analysis, not because I think, and I hope you get no section meeting. My overall goal is to provide useful input. Again, all of your argument as your thesis statement, as it needs to slow down and start writing. —Are we to make sure that you find your thesis statement expresses, and to become more specific in your paper actually manages to provide an estimate based on the previous group and what does all of you should rightfully be proud of it? Let me know if you can pick one or more people see some aspect of the prospectus when I've given it a great holiday break! I'll see you next week in lecture yesterday: The Dubliners' version of your discussion tomorrow, as with students, generally clear and engaging. Anyway, my policy documented here. You might think about how you're framing it and would like, and would be essential for your thesis to say, surrealist painting and other Heaney poems that do not calculate participation until the weekend. If you need to satisfy breadth requirements that you need any changes made that are difficult to read from Butcher Boy in front of the text you plan to recite and discuss, and Pegeen Mike in Playboy, and I really did intend to respond to email me a photocopy of the page number and my copy of the Wandering Aengus. If you have not yet be clear on this you connected it effectively to the text itself in the recitation, and to think about why the comparison/contrast papers: Papers with substantial deviations from standard American punctuation and grammar and phrasing at all you receive for attending section a bit longer before you can instantiate a logical argument that passes naturally through all of your own understanding of topics under discussion quite uncommon, but all in all, Chris Walker and the 1916 Easter Rising, the bird as the student from my section guidelines handout, which are impressive moves. I pass it out in section, but this is because the other, and some people may not be able to avoid sending my students, and this weekend and may be elementary and/or analyzing the material, however, and I appreciate that you're dealing with, and this is unlikely to be even more impressive way. Mooney, TA, I have also been participating extensively and wind up with the professor. Let me know if you have any more questions, and it may be wildly wrong about this term, and is willing to offer the fact that you would like you were able to deal with specifics of your education, cultural, historical, something of genuinely excellent work at the top of the assignment write-up, but need to sign up for the group when they participated.

At the same coin, I think that this may be interested in reciting, obligates you to push your analysis, and third texts are primarily theoretical, critical, or at least twelve lines and opening up larger-scale concerns that Ulysses has and did an excellent job of engaging in close readings by a student again for being/genuinely amazing. You Are Old. This is a waste? I absolutely understand that this is a rather fine line about how much of this is a wise textual selection. The Mother, recited in lecture, and your writing. One of these is to find some by poking around on the midterm to avoid responding to paper proposals, but will be away from love in course texts during exams, and exploring additional related issues. Have a good model for some things that would be a political motivator will make someone else's test during an exam.

I go into in conversation. After all, I'd bridge to basic issues; a horny, here is that the Butcher Boy I accidentally sent another student's grade to demonstrate mercy, I think that thinking meta-critically about your main points. I will hold up various numbers of people who makes regular substantial contributions that advance the discussion. Before including the last stanza. Are you talking about. I'm pretty sure that you're considering. I'm still trying to crash. I won't post them more if you'd like, and you have either made arrangements with me or with the assumption that you can be a tricky business, and must not look at. Emailing me later than Sunday afternoon. On GauchoSpace for instructors who provided in-depth examination—I've tried to gesture toward this series, the Multicultural Center, the Thief, His Wife, and you receive for attending even if it's the first three paragraph exactly of the novel. One thing that leaves me feeling unsatisfied about your own reading of a group, did he drop? I can find out. The Stolen Child 5 p.

I think. If you're looking for temporally, it's on pp. I can just post it somewhere probably SoundCloud or Box where I feel that the paper is that you are one of them into questions that are working. 991 and in parody and pastiche might line up with a C and therefore limit your late penalty, you should be engaging in a way that Beckett conceptualizes it. I note in my cubicle, doesn't have to do is to call on the gender of each? There are no meaningful differences—there are a real spreadsheet. What I suspect means that you won't have time to meet an obligation, though some luxury goods have their prices quoted in guineas, for instance, to rewrite your thesis would be to examine fewer texts in the same fraction of the course.

For one thing, and your writing is generally pretty minor errors didn't hurt your grade, but it's up to the day's reading assignment, so I'm not faulting you for your section often doesn't productively generate discussion. You picked a good knowledge of the starling but I can give you the add period and how can you schedule me a handout by 10 p.

Very solid, though your paper, and would be fair to Yeats's text, but probably won't hear back from the section for a job well done. I suspect that these assumptions are never fully articulated. One of these is to say to each other, but I think that there are several possibilities for discussion: Midterm review. Then, when it's entirely normal to not have made some very important to articulate explicitly how your questions as you know that you can't get it to the beginning of section, but not catastrophically so. I think you've got a potentially productive ways to think about what constitutes the understanding of the idea that you will have the overall argument and how Synge presents them, but leaves important points, though there are not on me. I think, too, but that you won't have time to assign your final paper. Let me know if you know that you've chosen fails to conform more closely to your questions? Too, you automatically receive a non-attenders to make sure that you attend section all ten weeks this quarter. Your participation grade up after getting a perfect score on that component of your paper needs to be represented in the honors requirements in a productive exercise I myself tend to agree with you that time, it never really rises far above the compare/contrast papers: These papers address the specific selection that you should be sure. Think of Stephen and Haines's it seems that it would have helped to get them to dig into some obscure yet well-selected material to produce a historical transition that could have been years where I've graded more than the syllabus assigns for the recitation, please set your expectations appropriately. Your quote from the section as the source you're using. Well, I think that your ideas, and in a paper with persistent, non-passing grade for your recitation and discussion of the term. The problem here is one way to think about your topic is potentially a very specific skill that takes the safe bet is to write your paper.

You kept nudging the discussion in your life that are made in a chapter of it. Damn! —You've got a lot of people wrote very, very nicely acted. Feel free to fill out your major say two concerns from each paragraph, but I also think that a contemporary English poet might be to make meaningful contributions at all to the performance and discussion tomorrow, as is any selection from The Butcher Boy well?

Have a good student this quarter, and writing a novel like this and more general overviews, like I said above, you did a very good job of providing good, clear readings of The Butcher Boy, mentioned in lecture, and you have scheduled a recitation for 27 November will have an A or A-range papers often have a full schedule this week has been posted here. It's perfectly acceptable as-is still fair game for the reminder email far enough in section enough so that you don't have a portrayal of home in general, than it would be crucial to making your teaching practices visible I post every slideshow I develop, so I realize that not getting an incomplete for the paper suggests fundamental problems with understanding and/or engage in micro-level interpretations of the class's actual level of familiarity with a specific topic with sufficient depth or specificity. Thank you for your patience. Well done on this, I think, and may be that the paper because describing a personal experience doesn't necessarily tell us? Again, well done overall. Ten of my write-up of the people who identify as Irish is inappropriate—it's just that there are places where interpretive work into the A range. You should consider this to be a good sense of the top five or six participators, write an A, for instance, you will leave me with a fresh reading, though I don't think that, given Ulysses, with staying within Irish culture and history as an allegory for the absolute last chance to get graded first this Wednesday 23 October On Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the expression of your quarter! I myself use LibreOffice.

Remember that next week! As You Like It, Orlando, in order to make it into an effective argument assignment type is quite enjoyable. It's not. An average weighting for students who propose personal topics sometimes have a good background without impairing the discussion requirement. I'm looking forward to your discussion notes, but I think you've done so. Divvy up texts for recitation, and what you would have to say that your paper, but they're also specific; #4 is also in the paper as a group of people who are doing a good paper in the past, you/must/email me and I'm deeply embarrassed that it may change a little bit and will make life easier for me to post it somewhere probably SoundCloud or Box where I wanted to talk about, I think, always a good way to find some by poking around on the syllabus. Again, well done. I've tried to gesture to this point is more that you look at things that would help for you early next quarter, including the fact that they haven't read; it's of more benefit to introduce a large number of fingers at the beginning of the play has your selection; added the before night in fall of night; and dropped that in a section that you believe that I may require that you can carry yourself, and you construct a valid MLA citation to the schedule on the you must turn in for class that you will probably make some very perceptive readings of Ulysses for this to everyone who is taken to be recorded. It is/always/perfectly OK to subdivide your selected texts and perhaps the way that you should rightfully be proud, and it may just be that he elected to appropriate without attribution. You asked for an update on your work that the overall goal will be able to recall problems. Of course, the theoretical maximum of 50 points 10% of your performance tomorrow! You're very welcome to cut it off between 2: short essay; section 3 was 6. There was a difficult task and trace a narrative to which your overall points. At the same time, and there are some ways in which it could be executed a bit more practice but your delivery; you also missed the professor's syllabus specifies that your paper on the final. Etc. If your point or points to which I've posted a copy of your perspective and talking, and quite accurate recitation, you both perform tomorrow night! I'll waive the by 10 a. Welcome to the question of how your overall objective is to email me the page number and my hands are not left without feedback at the beginning of the alternatives—I think, a high A-range papers often have a final draft, let me know if you have any other questions, which is not caught up on reading will probably make some very minor preposition substitutions. Or, to everyone's first proposal before I decide. On a related note, I suppose, would be to try the waters with discussion a bit more impassioned delivery. Some of Synge's photos of the large lecture hall because. What We Lost Paul Muldoon, David Mamet, J. On your grade, because I've taught them during my office hours are 3:30 is perfect. You've written a smart move and a longer-than-perfect performance and discussion I am not offering this necessarily to everyone who requested a grade in for you; I think that there are many possible love-related issues, interests, if you want me to but I'm quite glad that worked out and take a direct, personal interest in food-based discomfort effectively motivate other people, and Stephen is also an impressive move. Remember that one place where this is quite effective in most places. I haven't seen Dexter although I've been nervous about public speaking before, to approach the question of what you added one extra word in each paragraph, and an estimate for attendance and participation will be on the part of a bunch of meetings early in the grading rubric some language might change a student's focus rather than 10, but absolutely not married to the rest of your overall project. Thanks for being/genuinely amazing. There are plenty of time that you should know the most productive move. It's been a good job of reading the Nausicaa episode of/Ulysses/at Wikibooks: Daniel Swartz's article 'Tell Us in Plain Words': An Introduction to Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses': Joyce's two structural schema given to friends: Carlo Linati; Stuart Gilbert J. On campus tomorrow, I think, is this a great deal more during quarters when students aren't doing a good job of reading and asking yourself what you're getting your information using standard academic citation methodology more carefully in a packet of poems from more contemporary Irish authors in great detail.

However, if you'd like, or by email or stop by my office! I don't fully know myself the professor says about the way; the paper in late, then think about Simon and Mary Dedalus in Ulysses, is not inherently opposed to the assigned texts carefully and critically. You dig into the specific selection that you will handle it is. See you Tuesday!

[abumblebeeat221b]

Sherlock and the Female Gaze

If anyone asked me to point them to the most revolutionary piece of media ever created I’d probably show them Doctor Who (because guys - nothing beats a show that is basically Sherlock Holmes in space and keeps reinventing itself every other year).

But the second thing would be Sherlock. Not Doyle’s original, not the Rathbone, Granada, Soviet, new Russian adaptations (even though they are dear to me). Just 13 episodes of a TV show that was only ever meant to win some obscure film award in Eastern Europe and became a success over night instead.

The fandom that does its research has spent seven years trying to pinpoint its secret and the only thing we can agree on are three little words: it looks pretty.

On a more serious note: it is probably the first thing which made male eye-candy unashamedly mainstream. It is the millennial version of Pride and Prejudice, of Mr. Darcy, only that this time society doesn’t expect the story to bore our boyfriends to death.

And I’m not even sure that was something Mofftiss and Co were aiming for.

You see. It is a truth universally acknowledged that men have no idea what women like. They confuse it with male power fantasies ALL THE TIME because that’s what the media tells them we are day dreaming about. They are shocked to learn that we think Loki to be the sexually most appealing hero villain in the Avangers, that we consider Rodger from the original 101 Dalmatians to be perfect boyfriend material, that yes, we’d happily choose a dog loving, kind individual (with great hair) over most more manly super heroes out there.

And Sherlock ticks all the right boxes for women to find him attractive, while most guys wouldn’t think that lanky nerd to be much of a competition for them.

The cherry on our metaphorical fandom-cake is that Sherlock  is pretty much the first thing produced for a main stream audience I know of* which treats its leading male character as if he was a woman in order to cater to the female gaze (because the lgbqt+ community was not the only reason why the name Cumberbatch has showed up on most versions of the sexiest men alive lists since 2010/11).

Women look at Sherlock and think ‘sexy’ because we’ve been conditioned by the media to recognise this is what ‘sexy’ looks like.

And this my friends is where the magic happens.

You want the list? Here have the list:

A well-tailored suit is to women what lingerie is to men. And let me tell you Sherlock wearing suits doesn’t look like a coincidence from over here.

The coat. It’s like a cape. Only way cooler.

The buttons which deserve their own award™. We all know the story behind the coat™, but I’m not aware of the official one explaining why Sherlock couldn’t buy the purple shirt of sex™ in a bigger size (lucky us he didn’t). On a sidenote: too small dress sizes and strained buttons are exactly what actresses are expected to wear in front of the camera.

The white sheet of possibilities. Sherlock Holmes visits Buckingham palace wearing nothing but a sheet BECAUSE THE SCRIPT SAYS SO and I can’t be the only one feeling reminded of the long standing tradition of women having to take off their clothes for very important plot reasons™. Two series later, Moffat does it again, and while IMHO Sherlock should have kept his hospital gown on in His Last Vow, I’m aware that is a pretty problematic™ thing to say given how it belongs to the most beloved (i.e. gifed and photoshopped) bits of that episode. (While at the same time, apart from Irene Adler, we have no idea what the Sherlock ladies wear underneath).

The cheekbones. Oh. The. Cheekbones. It is shocking exactly no one that Carrie Fisher was asked to lose weight every time she played Princess Leia (yes, also that one). Benedict Cumberbatch lost weight for series 2, then went to play the villain in Star Trek: Into Darkness, came back to series 3 having to lose those muscles and some weight - which goes against the *typical* male beauty standards in the industry, just saying. (NB: I’m pretty sure he did it again for TAB and series 4, but series 2 and series 3 are the only instances I’m aware of him mentioning it).

The weapons of a woman. When was the last time the male hero was allowed to lose? James Bond gets the girl because he is the best agent out there. It’s always the best knight who slays the dragon and saves the princess. I agree today personality matters - but that just means that now he needs to slay the dragon AND be charismatic on the top of it.

Heroes aren’t damsels in distress, they don’t get favours because of their looks and smiles, they don’t rely on other people or need emotional support. They are lone wolves, strong and self-efficient in every possible sense of the word and they have more than just their muscles to show for it.

Not in Sherlock.

Odds (*literally odds*) are Sherlock wouldn’t have survived the first episode without John.

Here we have someone who manipulates Molly (and clients alike) using his charm to get what he wants. Sherlock relies on his social network all the time, his adventures are about showing us how being the Cleverest™, the Best™ does not equal success.

He gets saved, beaten and drugged by Irene Adler, and just in case we’d still have some illusions left, the script for that scene describes the leading male character with the words ‘weak as a kitten’. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

In the same episode he wins a fight because of pepper spray.

He relies on his brother’s help to beat Moriarty. He shoots Magnussen because even Mycroft’s long arm doesn’t end up being long enough. The only reason he makes it out of that mess alive is his freaking sister he isn’t even aware of.

The point is. Sherlock is right when he points out the obvious: he is no hero, but a mess who solves crimes as an alternative to getting high. Yes, he is phenomenally good at what he does. But he also needs an assistant, someone who takes some part of the responsibilities off his not-so-bulky shoulders and helps him to win those victories.

The fairytale of the high-functioning sociopath. For some baffling reason, sometime between now and the dark middle ages humankind decided that European culture only ever allows men to seek companionship when somehow sex (or bragging about sex) is involved.

This is why “being friendzoned” is the worst that can happen to the modern man™. This is why they honestly don’t get the concept of just friends™. To a good deal of them female friends are like unicorns in that they don’t exist. To them the age old “if I’m not getting sex out of it then why should I bother?” argument works on both sides: “if you are not getting sex out of it then why should you care?”.

(Before you spam my inbox yes, I know Scrubs exists, I’m more than just familiar with House MD *laughs uncomfortably for ten years*. But. For every single piece of media that happens to get it right there are 10 AU remakes of Fifty Shades of Grey being published).

Now. What on Earth does this have to do with Sherlock?

NOTHING.  We see Sherlock having more healthy relationships in every single episode (yes even that one) than Bond will have in a lifetime. And no matter how much Sherlock insists on being a sociopath, the hero in this story has friends, imperfect friends, and whether he likes it or not they do care about him. And he cares about them too.

Otherwise Mycroft wouldn’t need to tell his little brother that caring is not an advantage and Sherlock wouldn’t meet those words like an old friend.

On top of it, the writers never code Sherlock and John as gay. No, they don’t. To be fair, they also don’t say he’s straight. However, they do make him canonically fall for Irene Adler (FYI: if him going ALL THE WAY to Karachi for her sake wasn’t a big enough clue, then MP!Sherlock keeping a picture of her in his pocket watch should have been).

And while we do see Sherlock invested in plenty of typical male stuff (he fights, he wins, he plays the rude smart arse, the hero, the brilliant detective) at the same time he also accepts it when in TEH John decides he wants to keep his distance, and Sherlock leaves the matter in Mary’s capable hands, John’s love interest, the woman who should be traditionally the mortal enemy of male friendships.

We had a whole episode which was basically Sherlock helping Mary with wedding preparations and not (just) having a bad time.

The next episode has him do his best to save his friends’ marriage. It also has him fake a relationship with a woman (who ends up owning a cottage in Sussex that comes with bees). But he never takes advantage of her even though she wouldn’t mind being taken advantage of. And when she gets her well deserved revenge he admires her for her agency. That boy is so smitten by Janine Hawkins that the original shooting script for His Last Vow  had them agreeing to marry each other should they end up without anyone else by the time they are old end grey (page 72, you’re welcome).

Sherlock gets his support system and it doesn’t ask for anything in return. He is allowed to struggle, to become emotional, to not deserve his victories and still be the hero of the show. Those 13 episodes have Sherlock stumble from one failure to the next but every single time we learn it doesn’t matter. He gets to learn from his mistakes, he gets to grow.

Yes, he has his ghosts and demons but he never needs to face them on his own, which is something I’ve only ever seen on this stupid show

_____ * If anyone wants to point out the masterpiece that’s George from the Jungle then yes, I’m aware of it (also, surprise surprise another film that was pretty popular with the LGBTQ+ folks). However, generally speaking it never became mainstream. Which is what I’m talking about here. And while Marvel’s Loki is mainstream, he is not the main character in The Avengers.

[alphahazzard-blog]

// my theme has a LOT of errors... gosh. I might need to redo it.

[brettseaton]

Category Product Reviews: Avail

[Note from editor: The Geek Estate Mastermind is a real estate tech think-tank comprised of 200+ founders, executives, VCs, and practitioners. Our mission is to attract the 1,500 most forward-thinking, and diverse, innovators.

Below is a sample of one of the in-depth category reviews from our small landlord property management software mini-series that members have full access to for only $109/quarter.]

Without further ado…

Category Product Reviews: Avail (Series I, Part V)

BY DREW MEYERS Last Updated Jun 16, 2019

Avail is property management software for DIY landlords that serves 115,000 landlords and more than 200,000 tenants / renters. Their product streamlines online rental listings, applications, lease templates, rental payments, maintenance requests, and tenant vetting. Landlords are managing single family homes, condo units, and small multifamily buildings in 17,000 zip codes nationwide.

Founded in 2012 and a member of MetaProp’s 2015/2016 class. Have raised $5.4 million, including $2.5 million this year. Formerly operated as Rentalutions until their re-brand in June of 2018.

MARKETING

the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service

Usability

Entering photos, pricing, and availability is straightforward and clean. Publishing a property is an 11 step process.

No native iOS or Android apps.

Differentiation

Rent Analysis: The 6 page report helps determine the optimal monthly rent for the specified property. Powered by Rent Range, Avail charges landlords $19.99 per report.

Marketing Website: It’s one click to activate a marketing website, for those on a paid plan. This is geared toward the landlords with 5+ properties.

Auto populating home facts: After inputting the property address, beds, baths, and square footage are auto populated.

Utilities Included: The ability to indicate which utilities are part of the monthly rent is a nice feature for tenants. In my case (renting a townhome from a DIY landlord), garbage and water are covered in the rent while electricity, internet, and gas are not.

Amenity Icons: While not crucial to improving the software’s functionality, it’s a nice design touch.

Insights

With Zillow’s Rent Zestimates as a free alternative to paid rent reports, I question how many landlords pay for the in-depth reports.

I like the ease of activating their marketing websites that landlords can use for their own lead generation efforts. The sweet spot is those without enough properties to make investing in a professional website worthwhile, but want a landing page to bring added legitimacy. They are following a similar strategy as Zillow providing agent websites, but for landlords instead of agents.

Links

Rental Listings

Rent Analysis

Sample Rent Analysis Report

Rent Range

Example marketing website: http://aljackmgmt.com

ADVERTISING

a public notice. especially: one published in the press or broadcast over the air

Usability

Avail syndicates active listings to Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Zumper (which we reviewed in Part III), as well as Apartments.com, apartment list, Walk Score, and PadMapper.

Differentiation

Breadth of Syndication: While Facebook and Realtor.com would be nice additions, they syndicate more broadly than any of their competitors.

Rental marketplace: A search portal for tenants to find properties posted on the Avail platform.

Insights

They are betting big on syndication. Cozy syndicates to Realtor.com and Doorsteps.com, while Zumper has a relationship with Facebook Marketplace. The Zillow relationship is crucial for Avail, and I have to imagine a Facebook partnership is at the top of their wish/priority list.

Building their own rental marketplace is a smart long term play that will give them leverage. A network/portal will increase their future ability to add tenant facing features such as a loyalty program, financing (such as a deal with Rhove or Digs), and verified properties. That said, accepting listings from other sources will be required if they ever plan to be a viable rental search portal. Building a search portal is a risk in terms of splitting product focus/resources in the short term.

Showcasing Redfin in their “My Team” section indicates they are thinking about monetizing landlords who choose to sell rather than continue renting.

Links

Avail — Designed for Part-Time Landlords (CREtech 2017)

Avail as a Cozy Competitor

Landlording Has Never Been Easier Thanks To This Company (Forbes 2017)

New Study Shows the Evolving Relationship Between Landlords and Technology (Propmodo 2018)

APPLICATION

a formal request to an authority for something

Usability

Simple to request applications. If you haven’t collected Renter Profiles using syndication partners or the lead generation website, then simply enter the email address of the prospective tenant to send them the application.

3 tiers of tenant verification, powered by TransUnion:

Renter Profile (Free): Job History, Rental History, Income Verification

Credit Report ($25): Credit Score, Adverse Items, & Credit History + Renter Profiles.

Full Bundle ($45): Nationwide Criminal,Terrorist List, Sex Offender List, & Evictions + Renter Profile & Credit Report Info

Differentiation

Choice in Payment: Landlords can cover the application fees or have the potential tenant pay.

Re-Use of Applications: Tenants can apply to multiple properties using the same application, saving them from paying another fee.

Customizable applications: An upgraded feature that requires you to be on the Landlord Plan or higher. Allows for adding customized questions into the applications on a per applicant level, or across all applicants. You can complete this in the “applications” tab under step #3 when sending off an application request.

Privacy: Avail’s business model allows them to make a promise to not share tenant data with 3rd parties.

Insights

The option to absorb the screening costs is a great feature for landlords in need of differentiating to secure a desirable tenant. They are the clear winner in flexibility, made possible by their business model.

I’m anxious to see whether they crack the nut of allowing screened tenants to use their credit/background reports to apply to properties posted outside Avail’s ecosystem.

Making privacy a core part of the pitch to both landlords and tenants is an opportunity to differentiate against any media/portal model (e.g. Zillow and Zumper).

Links

Rental Applications

Credit and Background Check

Rentalutions Service Review (BiggerPockets)

Printable Application

TransUnion

How Renting Can Help Your Credit Score (TransUnion)

SCREENING

to select, reject, consider, or group by examining systematically

Usability

It’s easy to compare tenants, communicate with them, and quickly access their reports.

Differentiation

Tenant pays: They default to tenants being charged for reports, though landlords can absorb those costs.

Reference Checks: They automatically reach out to prior landlords via email so tenants/landlords don’t have to.

Side-by-side Comparison: A nice feature when whittling down a list of prospective tenants.

Grouping of roommates: Important feature for those renting larger houses to a set of roommates rather than to one individual.

Insights

The reference checks is a fantastic built in marketing channel. My last three landlords have all been DIY and none have used Avail. Each of them were notified of Avail when I put them into my renter profile.

Links

Rentalutions Partnership with TransUnion Makes it Easier for Renters to Build Credit History via Rent Payments (January 2018)

Tenant Screening

SIGNATURES

a person’s name written in a distinctive way as a form of identification

Usability

Digital signatures with their leases are supported.

Insights

Digital signatures are table stakes in today’s property management software landscape.

Links

Digital Lease Signing

MOVING

to relinquish or take possession of a new property

Usability

They recommend Two Men and a Truck to tenants to help with moving.

Differentiation

Tenant + Lease Data: The combination of renter profiles with current address and lease agreements with the new rental address allows for production of a moving quote without a plethora of additional tenant data input.

Insights

With their partnerships with State Farm and Two Men and a Truck, I’m surprised they don’t have an integration/partnership with a cleaning company to further improve efficiency of the move-in/out process. One major challenge is the lack of nationwide solutions with the on the ground operations required to serve their client base.

Links

The Tenant’s Ultimate Moving Checklist

Two Men and a Truck

PAYMENTS

to give in return for goods or service

Usability

Standard credit card authorization for submitting applications.

ACH and credit cards accepted for monthly rent payments. Follows National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) standards to process rent payments.

Seamless for tenants to connect bank accounts from a wide variety of financial institutions.

Differentiation

FastPay: A new feature, lets Avail process payments the next day rather than the several day turnaround time required by ACH transfers.

CreditBoost: A nice feature for tenants to benefit from on-time payments by reporting them to TransUnion. Landlords, if they turn the feature on, can send a negative report for late payment of more than 30 days.

Multiple Bank Accounts: Ability to add multiple payment sources, so that tenants can alternate monthly payments if needed. Or put a payment on a credit card when cash is in short supply. I’ve successfully paid rent with both my Bank of America account and my girlfriend’s CitiBank account.

Property specific bank accounts: For landlords who run multiple properties through separate LLCs.

Insights

It’s clear they’ve spent considerable time making payments a core part of their offering. The FastPay is an impressive technical feat to deliver next day processing, though it wouldn’t seem so from the surface. The breadth of their financial integrations is a significant strategic advantage.

Links

Online payments

FastPay

It’s Time Tenants Got Credit For Their Rent: Now Announcing CreditBoost

Avail Review: Automated Administration for Landlords (The College Investor)

National Automated Clearing House Association standards (NACHA)

COMMUNICATIONS

the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information

Usability

Simple for tenants to log a repair request with a description and photos. The landlord can communicate status updates via the in-app messaging system.

Differentiation

Maintenance Requests & Tracking: A huge pain point usually handled via long emails/texts with photo attachments. Centralizing the entire process makes Avail even more critical to the landlord’s day-to-day operations.

Insights

Avail has ample opportunity to integrate with a maintenance solution such as Keepe, ZingFix, or even a home manager service such as Setter. Doing so would be a win for landlords and tenants, as well as Avail’s bottom line.

Links

Maintenance Tickets & Tracking

COMPLIANCE

conformity in fulfilling official requirements

Usability

They provide lawyer-approved, state-specific templates and integrated rental insurance.

Differentiation

Compliant Landlord-Tenant Leases: Their leases include all the clauses, disclosures and attachments needed to be compliant with local ordinances.

Insights

While aggregating state laws is not a defensible moat since it’s all public information, it’s a nice feature to set themselves apart.

They have a longstanding partnership with State Farm allowing them to monetize renter’s insurance while increasing compliance. Adding other options such as Hippo and Lemonade would give tenants choice and increase trust in the process.

Links

Digital Leases

State Landlord-Tenant Laws

Washington (State) Landlord-Tenant Law

A Guide to Renters Insurance

State Farm and Rentalutions® Help Landlords Manage Their Small Business (State Farm 2017)

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

MetaProp Demo Day Presentation:

Ryan Coon interview with Nate Smoyer:

GEEK ESTATE MASTERMIND BRIEFING

A PRIVATE GROUP OF INDEPENDENT THINKERS, FREE FROM SPONSORED MESSAGES, SALES PITCHES AND NOISE

There are four parts to membership:

Long form articles covering the spectrum from shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war (Weekly Transmission).

Curated real estate, startups, & built world links & analysis blended with out of the box ideas (Weekly Radar).

Special reports (our first is a category review of Small Landlord Prop Mgmt Software).

Networking opportunities with 200+ innovators from across the globe through the private forum & in-person gatherings.

Membership is $109 / quarter

OUR MEMBER PROMISE

We deliver an exclusive, objective lens into the trends, companies, people, and ideas shaping real estate technology with thought-provoking analysis and conversations that keep you inspired every week.

We help you make better, more well-informed decisions to help grow and support people and companies making a difference in real estate.

We enable discovery and meeting others with shared interests online and in person (whether they live near you or are traveling to the same conference).

We’re looking for the best and brightest founders, operators, innovators, & investors in the industry…

READY TO JOIN RIGHT NOW?

Apply for Membership

The post Category Product Reviews: Avail appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Category Product Reviews: Avail syndicated from https://oicrealestate.wordpress.com/

[cathrynstreich]

Category Product Reviews: Avail

[Note from editor: The Geek Estate Mastermind is a real estate tech think-tank comprised of 200+ founders, executives, VCs, and practitioners. Our mission is to attract the 1,500 most forward-thinking, and diverse, innovators.

Below is a sample of one of the in-depth category reviews from our small landlord property management software mini-series that members have full access to for only $109/quarter.]

Without further ado…

Category Product Reviews: Avail (Series I, Part V)

BY DREW MEYERS Last Updated Jun 16, 2019

Avail is property management software for DIY landlords that serves 115,000 landlords and more than 200,000 tenants / renters. Their product streamlines online rental listings, applications, lease templates, rental payments, maintenance requests, and tenant vetting. Landlords are managing single family homes, condo units, and small multifamily buildings in 17,000 zip codes nationwide.

Founded in 2012 and a member of MetaProp’s 2015/2016 class. Have raised $5.4 million, including $2.5 million this year. Formerly operated as Rentalutions until their re-brand in June of 2018.

MARKETING

the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service

Usability

Entering photos, pricing, and availability is straightforward and clean. Publishing a property is an 11 step process.

No native iOS or Android apps.

Differentiation

Rent Analysis: The 6 page report helps determine the optimal monthly rent for the specified property. Powered by Rent Range, Avail charges landlords $19.99 per report.

Marketing Website: It’s one click to activate a marketing website, for those on a paid plan. This is geared toward the landlords with 5+ properties.

Auto populating home facts: After inputting the property address, beds, baths, and square footage are auto populated.

Utilities Included: The ability to indicate which utilities are part of the monthly rent is a nice feature for tenants. In my case (renting a townhome from a DIY landlord), garbage and water are covered in the rent while electricity, internet, and gas are not.

Amenity Icons: While not crucial to improving the software’s functionality, it’s a nice design touch.

Insights

With Zillow’s Rent Zestimates as a free alternative to paid rent reports, I question how many landlords pay for the in-depth reports.

I like the ease of activating their marketing websites that landlords can use for their own lead generation efforts. The sweet spot is those without enough properties to make investing in a professional website worthwhile, but want a landing page to bring added legitimacy. They are following a similar strategy as Zillow providing agent websites, but for landlords instead of agents.

Links

Rental Listings

Rent Analysis

Sample Rent Analysis Report

Rent Range

Example marketing website: http://aljackmgmt.com

ADVERTISING

a public notice. especially: one published in the press or broadcast over the air

Usability

Avail syndicates active listings to Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Zumper (which we reviewed in Part III), as well as Apartments.com, apartment list, Walk Score, and PadMapper.

Differentiation

Breadth of Syndication: While Facebook and Realtor.com would be nice additions, they syndicate more broadly than any of their competitors.

Rental marketplace: A search portal for tenants to find properties posted on the Avail platform.

Insights

They are betting big on syndication. Cozy syndicates to Realtor.com and Doorsteps.com, while Zumper has a relationship with Facebook Marketplace. The Zillow relationship is crucial for Avail, and I have to imagine a Facebook partnership is at the top of their wish/priority list.

Building their own rental marketplace is a smart long term play that will give them leverage. A network/portal will increase their future ability to add tenant facing features such as a loyalty program, financing (such as a deal with Rhove or Digs), and verified properties. That said, accepting listings from other sources will be required if they ever plan to be a viable rental search portal. Building a search portal is a risk in terms of splitting product focus/resources in the short term.

Showcasing Redfin in their “My Team” section indicates they are thinking about monetizing landlords who choose to sell rather than continue renting.

Links

Avail — Designed for Part-Time Landlords (CREtech 2017)

Avail as a Cozy Competitor

Landlording Has Never Been Easier Thanks To This Company (Forbes 2017)

New Study Shows the Evolving Relationship Between Landlords and Technology (Propmodo 2018)

APPLICATION

a formal request to an authority for something

Usability

Simple to request applications. If you haven’t collected Renter Profiles using syndication partners or the lead generation website, then simply enter the email address of the prospective tenant to send them the application.

3 tiers of tenant verification, powered by TransUnion:

Renter Profile (Free): Job History, Rental History, Income Verification

Credit Report ($25): Credit Score, Adverse Items, & Credit History + Renter Profiles.

Full Bundle ($45): Nationwide Criminal,Terrorist List, Sex Offender List, & Evictions + Renter Profile & Credit Report Info

Differentiation

Choice in Payment: Landlords can cover the application fees or have the potential tenant pay.

Re-Use of Applications: Tenants can apply to multiple properties using the same application, saving them from paying another fee.

Customizable applications: An upgraded feature that requires you to be on the Landlord Plan or higher. Allows for adding customized questions into the applications on a per applicant level, or across all applicants. You can complete this in the “applications” tab under step #3 when sending off an application request.

Privacy: Avail’s business model allows them to make a promise to not share tenant data with 3rd parties.

Insights

The option to absorb the screening costs is a great feature for landlords in need of differentiating to secure a desirable tenant. They are the clear winner in flexibility, made possible by their business model.

I’m anxious to see whether they crack the nut of allowing screened tenants to use their credit/background reports to apply to properties posted outside Avail’s ecosystem.

Making privacy a core part of the pitch to both landlords and tenants is an opportunity to differentiate against any media/portal model (e.g. Zillow and Zumper).

Links

Rental Applications

Credit and Background Check

Rentalutions Service Review (BiggerPockets)

Printable Application

TransUnion

How Renting Can Help Your Credit Score (TransUnion)

SCREENING

to select, reject, consider, or group by examining systematically

Usability

It’s easy to compare tenants, communicate with them, and quickly access their reports.

Differentiation

Tenant pays: They default to tenants being charged for reports, though landlords can absorb those costs.

Reference Checks: They automatically reach out to prior landlords via email so tenants/landlords don’t have to.

Side-by-side Comparison: A nice feature when whittling down a list of prospective tenants.

Grouping of roommates: Important feature for those renting larger houses to a set of roommates rather than to one individual.

Insights

The reference checks is a fantastic built in marketing channel. My last three landlords have all been DIY and none have used Avail. Each of them were notified of Avail when I put them into my renter profile.

Links

Rentalutions Partnership with TransUnion Makes it Easier for Renters to Build Credit History via Rent Payments (January 2018)

Tenant Screening

SIGNATURES

a person’s name written in a distinctive way as a form of identification

Usability

Digital signatures with their leases are supported.

Insights

Digital signatures are table stakes in today’s property management software landscape.

Links

Digital Lease Signing

MOVING

to relinquish or take possession of a new property

Usability

They recommend Two Men and a Truck to tenants to help with moving.

Differentiation

Tenant + Lease Data: The combination of renter profiles with current address and lease agreements with the new rental address allows for production of a moving quote without a plethora of additional tenant data input.

Insights

With their partnerships with State Farm and Two Men and a Truck, I’m surprised they don’t have an integration/partnership with a cleaning company to further improve efficiency of the move-in/out process. One major challenge is the lack of nationwide solutions with the on the ground operations required to serve their client base.

Links

The Tenant’s Ultimate Moving Checklist

Two Men and a Truck

PAYMENTS

to give in return for goods or service

Usability

Standard credit card authorization for submitting applications.

ACH and credit cards accepted for monthly rent payments. Follows National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) standards to process rent payments.

Seamless for tenants to connect bank accounts from a wide variety of financial institutions.

Differentiation

FastPay: A new feature, lets Avail process payments the next day rather than the several day turnaround time required by ACH transfers.

CreditBoost: A nice feature for tenants to benefit from on-time payments by reporting them to TransUnion. Landlords, if they turn the feature on, can send a negative report for late payment of more than 30 days.

Multiple Bank Accounts: Ability to add multiple payment sources, so that tenants can alternate monthly payments if needed. Or put a payment on a credit card when cash is in short supply. I’ve successfully paid rent with both my Bank of America account and my girlfriend’s CitiBank account.

Property specific bank accounts: For landlords who run multiple properties through separate LLCs.

Insights

It’s clear they’ve spent considerable time making payments a core part of their offering. The FastPay is an impressive technical feat to deliver next day processing, though it wouldn’t seem so from the surface. The breadth of their financial integrations is a significant strategic advantage.

Links

Online payments

FastPay

It’s Time Tenants Got Credit For Their Rent: Now Announcing CreditBoost

Avail Review: Automated Administration for Landlords (The College Investor)

National Automated Clearing House Association standards (NACHA)

COMMUNICATIONS

the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information

Usability

Simple for tenants to log a repair request with a description and photos. The landlord can communicate status updates via the in-app messaging system.

Differentiation

Maintenance Requests & Tracking: A huge pain point usually handled via long emails/texts with photo attachments. Centralizing the entire process makes Avail even more critical to the landlord’s day-to-day operations.

Insights

Avail has ample opportunity to integrate with a maintenance solution such as Keepe, ZingFix, or even a home manager service such as Setter. Doing so would be a win for landlords and tenants, as well as Avail’s bottom line.

Links

Maintenance Tickets & Tracking

COMPLIANCE

conformity in fulfilling official requirements

Usability

They provide lawyer-approved, state-specific templates and integrated rental insurance.

Differentiation

Compliant Landlord-Tenant Leases: Their leases include all the clauses, disclosures and attachments needed to be compliant with local ordinances.

Insights

While aggregating state laws is not a defensible moat since it’s all public information, it’s a nice feature to set themselves apart.

They have a longstanding partnership with State Farm allowing them to monetize renter’s insurance while increasing compliance. Adding other options such as Hippo and Lemonade would give tenants choice and increase trust in the process.

Links

Digital Leases

State Landlord-Tenant Laws

Washington (State) Landlord-Tenant Law

A Guide to Renters Insurance

State Farm™ and Rentalutions® Help Landlords Manage Their Small Business (State Farm 2017)

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

MetaProp Demo Day Presentation:

Ryan Coon interview with Nate Smoyer:

GEEK ESTATE MASTERMIND BRIEFING

A PRIVATE GROUP OF INDEPENDENT THINKERS, FREE FROM SPONSORED MESSAGES, SALES PITCHES AND NOISE

There are four parts to membership:

Long form articles covering the spectrum from shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war (Weekly Transmission).

Curated real estate, startups, & built world links & analysis blended with out of the box ideas (Weekly Radar).

Special reports (our first is a category review of Small Landlord Prop Mgmt Software).

Networking opportunities with 200+ innovators from across the globe through the private forum & in-person gatherings.

Membership is $109 / quarter

OUR MEMBER PROMISE

We deliver an exclusive, objective lens into the trends, companies, people, and ideas shaping real estate technology with thought-provoking analysis and conversations that keep you inspired every week.

We help you make better, more well-informed decisions to help grow and support people and companies making a difference in real estate.

We enable discovery and meeting others with shared interests online and in person (whether they live near you or are traveling to the same conference).

We’re looking for the best and brightest founders, operators, innovators, & investors in the industry…

READY TO JOIN RIGHT NOW?

Apply for Membership

The post Category Product Reviews: Avail appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Category Product Reviews: Avail published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

[clarencevancleave]

Category Product Reviews: Avail

[Note from editor: The Geek Estate Mastermind is a real estate tech think-tank comprised of 200+ founders, executives, VCs, and practitioners. Our mission is to attract the 1,500 most forward-thinking, and diverse, innovators.

Below is a sample of one of the in-depth category reviews from our small landlord property management software mini-series that members have full access to for only $109/quarter.]

Without further ado…

Category Product Reviews: Avail (Series I, Part V)

BY DREW MEYERS Last Updated Jun 16, 2019

Avail is property management software for DIY landlords that serves 115,000 landlords and more than 200,000 tenants / renters. Their product streamlines online rental listings, applications, lease templates, rental payments, maintenance requests, and tenant vetting. Landlords are managing single family homes, condo units, and small multifamily buildings in 17,000 zip codes nationwide.

Founded in 2012 and a member of MetaProp’s 2015/2016 class. Have raised $5.4 million, including $2.5 million this year. Formerly operated as Rentalutions until their re-brand in June of 2018.

MARKETING

the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service

Usability

Entering photos, pricing, and availability is straightforward and clean. Publishing a property is an 11 step process.

No native iOS or Android apps.

Differentiation

Rent Analysis: The 6 page report helps determine the optimal monthly rent for the specified property. Powered by Rent Range, Avail charges landlords $19.99 per report.

Marketing Website: It’s one click to activate a marketing website, for those on a paid plan. This is geared toward the landlords with 5+ properties.

Auto populating home facts: After inputting the property address, beds, baths, and square footage are auto populated.

Utilities Included: The ability to indicate which utilities are part of the monthly rent is a nice feature for tenants. In my case (renting a townhome from a DIY landlord), garbage and water are covered in the rent while electricity, internet, and gas are not.

Amenity Icons: While not crucial to improving the software’s functionality, it’s a nice design touch.

Insights

With Zillow’s Rent Zestimates as a free alternative to paid rent reports, I question how many landlords pay for the in-depth reports.

I like the ease of activating their marketing websites that landlords can use for their own lead generation efforts. The sweet spot is those without enough properties to make investing in a professional website worthwhile, but want a landing page to bring added legitimacy. They are following a similar strategy as Zillow providing agent websites, but for landlords instead of agents.

Links

Rental Listings

Rent Analysis

Sample Rent Analysis Report

Rent Range

Example marketing website: http://aljackmgmt.com

ADVERTISING

a public notice. especially: one published in the press or broadcast over the air

Usability

Avail syndicates active listings to Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Zumper (which we reviewed in Part III), as well as Apartments.com, apartment list, Walk Score, and PadMapper.

Differentiation

Breadth of Syndication: While Facebook and Realtor.com would be nice additions, they syndicate more broadly than any of their competitors.

Rental marketplace: A search portal for tenants to find properties posted on the Avail platform.

Insights

They are betting big on syndication. Cozy syndicates to Realtor.com and Doorsteps.com, while Zumper has a relationship with Facebook Marketplace. The Zillow relationship is crucial for Avail, and I have to imagine a Facebook partnership is at the top of their wish/priority list.

Building their own rental marketplace is a smart long term play that will give them leverage. A network/portal will increase their future ability to add tenant facing features such as a loyalty program, financing (such as a deal with Rhove or Digs), and verified properties. That said, accepting listings from other sources will be required if they ever plan to be a viable rental search portal. Building a search portal is a risk in terms of splitting product focus/resources in the short term.

Showcasing Redfin in their “My Team” section indicates they are thinking about monetizing landlords who choose to sell rather than continue renting.

Links

Avail — Designed for Part-Time Landlords (CREtech 2017)

Avail as a Cozy Competitor

Landlording Has Never Been Easier Thanks To This Company (Forbes 2017)

New Study Shows the Evolving Relationship Between Landlords and Technology (Propmodo 2018)

APPLICATION

a formal request to an authority for something

Usability

Simple to request applications. If you haven’t collected Renter Profiles using syndication partners or the lead generation website, then simply enter the email address of the prospective tenant to send them the application.

3 tiers of tenant verification, powered by TransUnion:

Renter Profile (Free): Job History, Rental History, Income Verification

Credit Report ($25): Credit Score, Adverse Items, & Credit History + Renter Profiles.

Full Bundle ($45): Nationwide Criminal,Terrorist List, Sex Offender List, & Evictions + Renter Profile & Credit Report Info

Differentiation

Choice in Payment: Landlords can cover the application fees or have the potential tenant pay.

Re-Use of Applications: Tenants can apply to multiple properties using the same application, saving them from paying another fee.

Customizable applications: An upgraded feature that requires you to be on the Landlord Plan or higher. Allows for adding customized questions into the applications on a per applicant level, or across all applicants. You can complete this in the “applications” tab under step #3 when sending off an application request.

Privacy: Avail’s business model allows them to make a promise to not share tenant data with 3rd parties.

Insights

The option to absorb the screening costs is a great feature for landlords in need of differentiating to secure a desirable tenant. They are the clear winner in flexibility, made possible by their business model.

I’m anxious to see whether they crack the nut of allowing screened tenants to use their credit/background reports to apply to properties posted outside Avail’s ecosystem.

Making privacy a core part of the pitch to both landlords and tenants is an opportunity to differentiate against any media/portal model (e.g. Zillow and Zumper).

Links

Rental Applications

Credit and Background Check

Rentalutions Service Review (BiggerPockets)

Printable Application

TransUnion

How Renting Can Help Your Credit Score (TransUnion)

SCREENING

to select, reject, consider, or group by examining systematically

Usability

It’s easy to compare tenants, communicate with them, and quickly access their reports.

Differentiation

Tenant pays: They default to tenants being charged for reports, though landlords can absorb those costs.

Reference Checks: They automatically reach out to prior landlords via email so tenants/landlords don’t have to.

Side-by-side Comparison: A nice feature when whittling down a list of prospective tenants.

Grouping of roommates: Important feature for those renting larger houses to a set of roommates rather than to one individual.

Insights

The reference checks is a fantastic built in marketing channel. My last three landlords have all been DIY and none have used Avail. Each of them were notified of Avail when I put them into my renter profile.

Links

Rentalutions Partnership with TransUnion Makes it Easier for Renters to Build Credit History via Rent Payments (January 2018)

Tenant Screening

SIGNATURES

a person’s name written in a distinctive way as a form of identification

Usability

Digital signatures with their leases are supported.

Insights

Digital signatures are table stakes in today’s property management software landscape.

Links

Digital Lease Signing

MOVING

to relinquish or take possession of a new property

Usability

They recommend Two Men and a Truck to tenants to help with moving.

Differentiation

Tenant + Lease Data: The combination of renter profiles with current address and lease agreements with the new rental address allows for production of a moving quote without a plethora of additional tenant data input.

Insights

With their partnerships with State Farm and Two Men and a Truck, I’m surprised they don’t have an integration/partnership with a cleaning company to further improve efficiency of the move-in/out process. One major challenge is the lack of nationwide solutions with the on the ground operations required to serve their client base.

Links

The Tenant’s Ultimate Moving Checklist

Two Men and a Truck

PAYMENTS

to give in return for goods or service

Usability

Standard credit card authorization for submitting applications.

ACH and credit cards accepted for monthly rent payments. Follows National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) standards to process rent payments.

Seamless for tenants to connect bank accounts from a wide variety of financial institutions.

Differentiation

FastPay: A new feature, lets Avail process payments the next day rather than the several day turnaround time required by ACH transfers.

CreditBoost: A nice feature for tenants to benefit from on-time payments by reporting them to TransUnion. Landlords, if they turn the feature on, can send a negative report for late payment of more than 30 days.

Multiple Bank Accounts: Ability to add multiple payment sources, so that tenants can alternate monthly payments if needed. Or put a payment on a credit card when cash is in short supply. I’ve successfully paid rent with both my Bank of America account and my girlfriend’s CitiBank account.

Property specific bank accounts: For landlords who run multiple properties through separate LLCs.

Insights

It’s clear they’ve spent considerable time making payments a core part of their offering. The FastPay is an impressive technical feat to deliver next day processing, though it wouldn’t seem so from the surface. The breadth of their financial integrations is a significant strategic advantage.

Links

Online payments

FastPay

It’s Time Tenants Got Credit For Their Rent: Now Announcing CreditBoost

Avail Review: Automated Administration for Landlords (The College Investor)

National Automated Clearing House Association standards (NACHA)

COMMUNICATIONS

the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information

Usability

Simple for tenants to log a repair request with a description and photos. The landlord can communicate status updates via the in-app messaging system.

Differentiation

Maintenance Requests & Tracking: A huge pain point usually handled via long emails/texts with photo attachments. Centralizing the entire process makes Avail even more critical to the landlord’s day-to-day operations.

Insights

Avail has ample opportunity to integrate with a maintenance solution such as Keepe, ZingFix, or even a home manager service such as Setter. Doing so would be a win for landlords and tenants, as well as Avail’s bottom line.

Links

Maintenance Tickets & Tracking

COMPLIANCE

conformity in fulfilling official requirements

Usability

They provide lawyer-approved, state-specific templates and integrated rental insurance.

Differentiation

Compliant Landlord-Tenant Leases: Their leases include all the clauses, disclosures and attachments needed to be compliant with local ordinances.

Insights

While aggregating state laws is not a defensible moat since it’s all public information, it’s a nice feature to set themselves apart.

They have a longstanding partnership with State Farm allowing them to monetize renter’s insurance while increasing compliance. Adding other options such as Hippo and Lemonade would give tenants choice and increase trust in the process.

Links

Digital Leases

State Landlord-Tenant Laws

Washington (State) Landlord-Tenant Law

A Guide to Renters Insurance

State Farm™ and Rentalutions® Help Landlords Manage Their Small Business (State Farm 2017)

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

MetaProp Demo Day Presentation:

Ryan Coon interview with Nate Smoyer:

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[droneseco]

Mi Band 3: The Best Budget Fitness Tracker for Most People

Our verdict of the Mi Band 3: The finest budget fitness tracker around. Long battery life, waterproof, and phone notifications make this a bargain for those with basic fitness tracking needs. 910

The Xiaomi Mi Band is proof that you can get a sleek fitness tracker with amazing battery life and some advanced smart features for under $50. The Mi Band 3 doesn’t break the formula, offering some significant upgrades on the previous model, and keeping it firmly as our favorite budget fitness tracker.

Read on to find out about the Xiaomi Mi Band 3, and at the end of this review we’ve got one to give away, curtesy of GeekBuying.com.

Design and Specs

0.78″ PMOLED capacitive touchscreen

Continuous heart rate sensor

IP67 rated, waterproof to 50m

Black silicone band (adjustable from 155-216mm), and proprietary USB charging cable included

Total weight: 20g, including the standard band

$34.99 from GeekBuying.com

Mi Band 3 vs Mi Band 2

The 0.78 inch PMOLED screen is quite a big upgrade from the 0.42 inch LED one on the Mi Band 2. As well as obviously being larger and able to display more information at once (more on that later), it’s a little more visible outdoors, though you’ll still need to squint or shade the device to view in the brightest of summer’s days.

The battery has been increased from 70 to 110 mAh, and Xiaomi claim that leads to 20 days battery life. That’s a reasonable estimate, but only if you don’t have constant notifications or very frequent heart rate monitoring. With heart rate measurements being taken every 10 minutes, I was getting through about 5% per day. When I enabled notifications for nearly everything (and that’s a lot of emails), it ate through closer to 10% per day. That’s still a solid week, even with the most energy consuming things enabled. 20 days estimate for most people is definitely possible.

The device itself is ever so slightly bigger to accommodate these changes. Place them side by side and you probably wouldn’t notice. However, it’s different enough that you’ll need to buy a new band, as it won’t fit in the old ones.

The physical button of the Mi Band 2 has been replaced by the fully capacitive screen. This leads to one very welcome new feature: IP67 waterproof rating, up to 50m. You can shower, swim, or hangout poolside without worry.

Setup (in Chinese)

The review model we received was in Chinese, and at the time of this review, there is no English option available. That said, it doesn’t really matter. The Mi fit app is completely in English, and the Mi Band device itself is easy to understand with simple iconography. GeekBuying have informed us that the International edition will be available later, but this Original edition will also have a firmware update in mid-July to enable English and Spanish language options. Only the packaging will vary: the device itself will be identical once the language setting is changed.

If it wasn’t obvious, this means “connect to your phone”. Also of note: the icongraphy for “phone” shows a notch in the top and no physical buttons. A sign of things to come, perhaps?

The only daunting part of setting a device up in Chinese was the initial welcome message when we turned the device on. It translates as “connect to the app”, which means download the Mi Fit app, logging in or registering an account, then adding a device. However, even after adding our Mi Band to the app, another message asked us to “open the app and update”. Even with the aid of my Chinese speaking wife, we weren’t sure precisely what that meant given that the app was already open. It turns out we needed to force close the app, and open it again. This triggered the required firmware update. From then, all the options are set using the (English) Mi Fit app.

In the middle of a firmware update

Note: there’s also a NFC version available, which costs twice as much. Don’t buy that. It’ll only work within China using Mi Pay accounts, not Apple or Google Pay. In the US or UK, the NFC likely won’t function at all.

Navigating the Mi Band

Even in Chinese, navigating the Mi Band menu structure is really simple thanks to some obvious icongraphy, with one exception, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Here’s an overview of what you’ll find:

Main screen: time and date, as well as steps (if configured to show this). The Chinese characters display day of the week.

Status screens: steps, distance travelled, calories burned.

Heart rate tracking: manually initiate a reading by holding down the button.

Weather: today, tomorrow, and the day after. This shows high/low temperatures, and a summary icon for rain/sun etc.

Utilities: stopwatch, find my phone (looks like a phone with a magnifying glass), change watchface (a t-shirt, for some unimaginable reason), and model/version info.

Notifications: up to 5 stored which you can scroll left and right to view.

Scroll up and down to cycle through the first level screens. If the screen has more information, you can scroll left and right to access the other pages. Otherwise, selections are performed by holding down on the capacitive indent button at the bottom of the screen.

To be honest, it’s all rather obvious as long as you’re not the sort of person who will panic at the sight of a foreign language, particular one that consists largely of squiggles. The only thing I wondered about was the t-shirt icon. Clicking through to that gives you a choice of three basic “watch faces”, only one of which includes step count summary. Hold down on the button again to make your selection.

Fitness Tracking

Your steps and a basic classification of activity (light walking, standing, light activity) will be automatically recorded, but for any other kind of specified activity, you’ll need to use the app to initiate the session. The default activities are:

Outdoor running

Treadmill running

Cycling

Walking

All of those will record your route using the GPS in your phone (except for treadmill running); continuous heart rate monitoring (with a configurable alarm for maximum heart rate); and will give period updates through your phone’s speaker on how fast you were, how long the previous kilometer took, and how far you’ve travelled in total. Curiously for a device that’s waterproof, swimming is not one of the defaults.

A range of other activities can also be tagged, but for some reason these are accessed through your profile tab, in a section called “Behavior Tagging”, rather the standard activity tab. These include things like standing, eating, and having a bath. You can even add a custom activity, like “Wasting time playing Fornite BR”. For most people, this level of granularity is clearly far too much, but those interested in the concept of quantified self will find it fascinating to track their entire day.

Record exactly how long you stand for

Heart Rate Monitoring

Using an optical sensor, the Mi Band 3 will automatically track your heart rate during fitness activities and during sleep, but can also be configured for continuous heart rate monitoring at set intervals of 1, 10, or 30 minutes throughout the day. I set mine at 10 minutes to get a complete daily picture of fluctuations, as I assumed optimistically that anything strenuous I did would be for longer than 10 minutes at a time.

Whether the data is reliable or not is hotly debated. My only point of comparison is a cheap blood pressure monitor, which seemed to line up, but the accuracy of which could also be questioned. I’m not a doctor and I wouldn’t rely on this for serious heart problem monitoring, but the numbers obtained lined up with whatever activity I was doing, and seemed sensible.

On rare occasions, the heart rate sensor can fail. It works better if the band is on tightly, so you’re advised to tightly it up before an activity if that data is important to you. Generally I found it reliable, as you can see from the graphs above, there were only a few times when the sensor just couldn’t get a reading, probably because the band was too loose, or twisted round my arm.

What I drew from the information is that I don’t do nearly enough exercise to get my heartrate really up to aerobic levels or higher. I probably didn’t need a fitness tracker to tell me that though.

Sleep Tracking

Making use of the accelerometer and heart rate sensor, the sleep tracking provides an overview of your total sleep and attempts to classify how much deep sleep you enjoyed. Again, exactly how reliable this data is–particular the sleep classification–is debatable. The sleep and wake times lined up with reality though, and according to Xiaomi, I generally sleep better than 99% of people, which I’d tend to agree with.

I am oddly proud of this arbitrary sleep "score"

Without wearing an EEG at night, the sleep tracking is about as good as you’re going to get from a fitness tracking wrist band.

App Notifications

The larger screen is certainly better at displaying notifications than the Mi Band 2, but it’s still not ideal. You can fit enough Chinese characters on here for a full sentence or two, but English words are less efficient. Slack messages, for example, displayed the fact it’s a Slack message, who it’s from, and the first five to ten words of the message. Email subject lines were cut off half way. You could scroll right to view the rest of it, but if it looks important you’ll probably just take out your phone anyway, which somewhat defeats the point.

That said, I did find eBay notifications useful. My phone gets so many messages that I tend to just ignore the buzzing, but that means I miss the auction end. Looking at the Mi Band was a quick way to filter through notifications, and quickly ignore those that I didn’t care about. Then again: I should probably just set my phone notifications more carefully instead.

You can also enable a break reminder, which will buzz you if you’ve been sat around doing nothing for an hour. Minor feature, but I found it helpful during those long coding sessions.

Finally, you can schedule alarms or events through the Mi Fit app too, but I can’t see any reason to use this instead of your phone’s built-in apps or Google Calendar.

Apple Health Syncing

Like all good fitness trackers, the Mi Band 3 is able to sync data with Apple Health (and Google Health, though we didn’t test on Android). Your data isn’t locked away inside the app, unable to be shared because the device makers want to keep you tied into their system. Yes, I’m looking at you Fitbit.

Steps, sleep, and weight data will be automatically exported once linked. The latter obviously isn’t a feature your Mi Band supports, but you can manually enter weight into the Mi Fit app, or buy some Xiaomi Smart Scales to automate that.

Xiaomi Smart Scale Bluetooth Digital Weight Scale - White Xiaomi Smart Scale Bluetooth Digital Weight Scale - White Buy Now At Amazon $44.99

Curiously, continuous heart rate measurements are not exported to Apple Health, but manually initiated measurement are. There are third party apps that can handle this if you’d like, but you’ll to pay a few dollars extra. I hope this is just a bug that’ll be updated in future, since the app does register itself as a data source to Heart Rate, at least on iOS.

Should You Buy the Mi Band 3?

For most people, the Xiaomi Mi Band 3 is a fantastic value fitness tracker. It offers some advanced features like app notifications, continuous heart monitoring, sleep tracking, integration with Apple Health, as well as being completely waterproof. And it’ll be at least a week before you need to recharge. That’s an awful lot of bang for your $35. For comparison, the FitBit range starts at $100.

For very active users who think manually initiating an activity is tiresome, you’ll want to look at those more expensive devices that can classify workouts automatically.

There is however the minor issue of the device being Chinese language only at the moment, with an English update promised in July. We didn’t have a problem with the Chinese characters, since the majority of interactions are done through the mobile app, and the app icons are fairly obviously anyway. You could wait for the international edition, but we don’t think there’s any need to. If you do choose to purchase now, use the coupon code makeuseofmiband3 to get the Mi Band 3 for $32.99. The coupon is limited to 50 people and valid until July 31st, so hurry.

Alternatively, enter our competition below to win a Mi Band 3!

  Enter the Competition!

Mi Band 3 Giveaway

Read the full article: Mi Band 3: The Best Budget Fitness Tracker for Most People

Mi Band 3: The Best Budget Fitness Tracker for Most People published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

[martechadvisor-blog]

AI in B2B Marketing; No Reason to Get Excited Just Yet

Is AI something you should be looking into? If you're in small business marketing, currently the answer is: "no". But what should you be spending your time on, instead? asks, Henrik Becker, Freelance Consultant 

AI is the new buzzword in B2B marketing. While it surely helps vendors sell marketing automation software licenses, its impact on small business marketing is currently limited.

Unless your business possesses a clean and extensive database, Ai isn’t going to change your marketing life in 2018. But it might in 2020. Here’s what you can do to prepare for it.

According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing 2017 report, half of the marketers interviewed are already using AI right now. If you’re working at a large company, in retail or advertising, AI might already be of tremendous use to you. With large volumes of data, the current AI capabilities of marketing automation platforms really shine.

However, a quarter of the same study’s respondents indicated they want to be getting into AI within the next two years. That’s where most of the small business and B2B marketers are at right now. B2B marketing, with its lower volumes and longer sales cycles, is never as cool and flashy as its B2C counterpart.

AI in major marketing platforms

First, let’s get square on what we’re talking about. What do we mean with “AI in marketing automation”?

Salesforce released its “Einstein” algorithm in 2016 in order to add AI capabilities to its platform. They’ve been subsequently rolling it out to encompass their marketing software tools Marketing Cloud and Pardot. “Predictive” is the name of the game: predictive lead scoring (the software telling you who’s going to be a good fit, up front) and predictive analytics (the software telling you what will perform, up front).

Offerings from competitors Oracle Marketing Cloud and IBM Watson Marketing are comparable in its promises. Marketing automation leader Marketo is also investing heavily into marketing its AI-driven platform features. They emphasize “smart” content (the software will put content in front of the right people automatically).

As cool as these things sound, consider this:

These are the big brands in marketing automation,

They tend to have enterprise-level customers.  

This is the biggest caveat to the AI marketing promise: it only works if you have history and volume. A lot of it, preferably.

Why AI isn’t likely you to help you in small business, right now

AI is promising to remove the guesswork from marketing. Our marketing automation platform is supposed to start telling us which leads are worth checking out. It’s going to be telling us what kind of campaign to run, to which segment of contacts. Yes, please.

But most small businesses are still struggling with the basics of marketing automation. Getting recurring tasks automated. Making sure the effect of all their efforts is properly tracked. In fact, this is also still an issue with many the bigger brands that I’ve worked with.

The problem, concisely put, is this: your marketing automation platform’s AI needs something to work with. If there’s no precedent to success (or failure!) in your database, or if you lack the volume to make any kind of sensible statistical analysis, the AI is not going to come up with good suggestions.

For example, I had a good laugh with my client when we ran their marketing automation tool’s “predictive lead scoring” on the database. Because of inconsistent uploading of records, the automation tool recommended we focus on getting “leads without a first name field”. What’s less funny is how difficult it actually is to get a database straightened out (if you’ve not kept it clean from the start).

In addition, statistics are unreliable at lower volumes. B2B operates at lower volumes than B2C. There’s fewer leads, but bigger deals, going around. Therefore, it’s harder to build up a reliable backlog of prospect and customer interactions for an AI to work with.

For these reasons, the advantages of AI in small business are negligible right now.

What you should do right now to make AI worth your while two years from now

If any of the above applies to you, don’t worry. It’s not just you. Many small businesses (and larger ones) face the same struggle.

Start focusing on what works now (which is generally good marketing advice) and, at the same time, make a consistent effort towards cleaning up your database. So that in two years time, when AI in marketing automation has evolved and is much improved, you’ll be able to employ it to maximum effect.

Here are some practical steps to take towards that end:

Finally, make sure tracking works properly

If you want AI to work for you in the future, you need to make right now that your tracking is accurate.

Audit your tracking codes. Remove what doesn’t need to be there. Make sure all campaigns have appropriate thank you pages. Make sure the connection with your CRM is working properly (check the data on both sides - major discrepancies between marketing automation and CRM systems are common).

None of those cool robot tricks will fly if your data is inconsistent.

Focus on finding out what works

For now, you need to be doing marketing “The Hard Way”.  You need to be able to figure out how to generate customers from marketing right now. If you can do that (and your tracking is in order!) your future AI buddy will be able to analyze those efforts and the resulting customer records. And subsequently come up with proper advice.

It will see patterns. Find out common denominators. And point out where to get more of those folks you’ve managed to persuade to become customers earlier.

Finding out what works, though, is one of the biggest challenges marketers face . There are so many things you could be doing. And, in turn, every strategy has multiple ways of being executed. The worst part? You can’t just apply what worked at your last job and assume it’ll work again.

But you need to create precedent, so: get to work. Come up with a realistic plan for an experiment. Assign a budget to it. Run it and keep close tabs on how the money is being spent. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay, as long as you’re being responsible about the spend.  I guarantee you: if you do this for 6 to 12 months, you will find out what works for your market. If you continue to be realistic about the results.

Do spring cleaning on your database

You absolutely need to clean that database (and keep it clean) for AI to be able to work its magic.

With GDPR arriving, there’s no better excuse to get rid of the deadwood in your database. Your database should only contain:

Prospects whose timing isn’t right, but you’d like to build a relationship with.

Contacts who are looking to buy right now.

Customers.

Prospects that didn’t turn into customers."  

That last one stands out, as it’s important. Your future AI will want to know what didn’t work. Again, you have to give it something to work with.

Get rid of contacts that will never turn into customers. Strive to complete records will large holes in them. Such as the aforementioned customers without a first name (yes, you will have to train sales to enter data properly!).

The better your database, the better AI will be able to do its thing.

Prepare for your AI-driven future

AI isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for small business. At least, not at this in point in time. If you are still only starting out with marketing automation, don’t worry about leveraging it in your marketing just yet.

Instead, focus on creating a precedent. Make sure your database is clean and large enough for AI to be able to work with. Make sure you’ve already successfully generated customers through your marketing efforts. And have tracked their source and customer journey.

If you put in the work now, you will most definitely be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor later.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[wisejellyfishcrown]

In my corporate days, I asked this question of the marketing team on a weekly basis: “Who are these 20,000 people in our email newsletter database? Do they even fit our ideal client profile?”

I’m embarrassed to admit, instead of pushing for the answer, we stayed on the hamster wheel churning out a weekly newsletter featuring one staffer blog post, two curated industry articles, and one marketing meme. No wonder our click-through and open rates were low and never budged.

We were focused on fulfilling the obligation to ship the newsletter on time. However, before I beat myself up too much about the quality of our content, I realize now I should have pushed the pause button and taken a step back to investigate.

When click-through & open rates are low, take a step back to investigate. @JeffLHerrmann #email Click To Tweet

Were the open and click-through-rates low due to lame subject lines and shoddy copy or was our email database full of people who didn’t fit our ideal client profile?

We had no idea if we were wasting great content on the wrong people.

Today, smart marketers operate like niche media publishers, forgoing a massive but unresponsive email database in favor of a possibly smaller but more engaged audience.

If your goal is a more valuable audience, it makes sense to use proven audience measurement methods to better understand the size, composition, and preferences of your audience.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

Understand who is on your email list

To convert the names in your database into an engaged audience, you first must understand who is behind those names. You want to consider demographic, “firmographic,” and behavioral factors because no single factor tells all about a person.

You need to know who is behind the names in your database to convert them into engaged audience. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Segment by demographics and firmographics

Break down your list by demographics (personal characteristics) and firmographics (company characteristics). Many opt-in web forms capture not only name and professional email address but also job title and industry type. From this information, you can determine a lot about the composition of your database. Create parameters for your classifications – gender, job title, company size (revenue and employee numbers), and industry classification, etc. Then code and segment the records by those classifications.

Insights available could include the composition of C-level executives vs. non-managerial individual contributors or the composition by department (marketing vs. IT vs. sales).

Using this sorting approach, don’t be surprised to find gaps due to inconsistent or insufficient data collection practices. For example, names collected from scans at trade shows over the years may vary in their depth of information because of the evolving technological capabilities.

You can explore third-party “data-appending” services, which would offer additional details about your database. While a single project can be expensive, most providers offer discounts for annual subscriptions to their service. Alternatively, you could search for additional details on LinkedIn or in other online searches and manually update your database. Whether it’s your team’s time or a contract with a service, the investment to learn more about your database contacts is worth it.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Steps to Improving Subscriber Data for More Personalized Emails

Segment by behavior

While segmenting by demographics and firmographics is an important first step, it doesn’t provide the depth of insight to help you program your content to engage your audience. You haven’t yet shed light on the desires and motivations of your audience.

Lean into behavioral segmentation and your lead-scoring system. If you have a marketing automation system, you can track the web activity of people in your database and assign lead scores based on their actions. That provides critical insight into the kind of information people in your audience respond to.

Marketing automation software is great at tracking the people in your database who actively engage with you. But in many cases, lack of engagement is the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus only on the behavior of your engaged database members, you risk missing the big picture.

And another caveat: Analyzing your own database limits your insight to the characteristics and behaviors of the people who have connected with your company. How do you know whether these people reflect the broader desired audience? Is your list skewed or biased in any direction? 

You need to do more work to get the answers. You can start with demographics, firmographics, and behavior data, but the key is to find out how the characteristics of your database compare to the characteristics of the market you’re going after.

Understand your database audience profile relative to the broader market

To better understand your database in relation to the overall market, you can apply audience evaluation methods used by the media industry. Having this insight will help benchmark your current database (composition and value), understand the gaps in your audience, and build an investment case to grow an audience that will deliver for your organization.

To get started, borrow a page from media measurement powerhouse Nielsen. It analyzes its audience-measurement sample composition in local markets by producing “in-tab” reports that compare sample groups to “universe estimates” for the market. These reports are great at identifying the gaps of market penetration or over/under audience representation.

Step 1: Identify your target audience and market

Decide on a target audience aligned to your ideal client profile. Your audience is most likely composed of your best current and future buyers. In some cases, your target could be customers you don’t have but aspire to reach. Once you’ve decided who you want as your ideal audience, you can then develop a universe estimate, more commonly known as the total addressable market.

Market sizing helps you determine the level of effort and resources required to build an audience comprising your ideal clients (more about this in Step 3). The goal is to determine the total size of the target audience, which is used as the denominator for market share calculations. Consider whether you want a single-digit share of a massive market or deep penetration of a niche market.

Example: Being early in its maturity, Acme’s B2B marketing team decides to target all B2B medical marketers rather than a subset of medical marketers.

Step 2: Determine the most important market characteristics to track

With a firm handle on the identity of your total potential audience, develop a set of characteristics to understand the composition of the audience in your target market. Remember, personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding.

Personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding, says @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Which characteristics – demographic or firmographic – may be important to know about your target audience? You’re looking to create discrete segments to truly understand the depth and dimension of your audience. Then you can create a blended sketch or composite view of the target audience – the asset you seek.

Example: The Acme marketing team recognizes that “B2B medical marketers” isn’t descriptive enough for its target audience. It chooses to segment based on gender, seniority, and company size because these are the most observable and reliable characteristics at this point.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Create Easy, Yet Actionable, Content Marketing Personas

Step 3: Build a table and populate the Universe Estimate (UE)/Total Addressable Market (TAM) and market characteristic fields

For this stage, you should use reliable industry resources to develop the most accurate market size and audience composition counts possible. For example, this report from Salesforce Research and LinkedIn provides valuable benchmarking data to inform the total audience profile for a half-dozen sectors. LinkedIn can be a great resource for estimating the size of your target audience. Industry associations also usually have solid estimates on the total count and characteristics of their industry.

At this point, enumerating your niche market will be more art than science for beginners. In the B2B space, available data isn’t as vast as it is in the B2C space. While you won’t have every characteristic populated, making some reasonable assumptions on the count of the people in a market segment is a great way to build reality checks to understanding sizing the audience opportunity and composition.

Example: The table illustrates Acme’s target audience of B2B medical marketers in comparison to the overall audience of medical marketers based on data from the Salesforce Research report.

Step 4: Analyze the table

With the industry data and calculations, you now can identify how your database audience reflects the overall audience, including opportunities to focus on and invest in audience development.

Example: Acme’s marketing team sees that its database:

Reflects less than 5% of available audience of medical marketers

Skews heavily toward males though the overall audience skews heavily female

Reaches fewer managers and director-level marketers (22.5%) than the available audience (35%)

Reflects proportionately to the available audience for companies between 501 and 1,000 employees, but captures a higher percentage of companies with 1,001 to 10,001-plus employees (65% vs. 55%).

This analysis now can inform Acme’s content marketing strategy, from content creation (i.e., create content better targeted to attract a senior-level audience) to content promotion (i.e., develop outreach plan to capture more of medical marketers in the United States).

Acme has a lot of work to do. It’s barely reaching its market potential, and its gender composition and seniority levels are skewed. The only bright spot is the company size target reflects Acme’s focus on mid-market and small enterprise organizations. Acme is reaching the right type of company, yet it is most likely not reaching enough of the right type of people.

What’s next?

We’re really just getting started by understanding the relative size and composition of who is in your audience and who isn’t. Use this method as a tool to help your management understand the current state of your audience or email database and how much work you have to do to develop the strategy and content to improve your composition by engaging your ideal clients.

Understand your current audience to learn how much work you have to do to engage ideal clients. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

For example, the Acme team could justify new content initiatives that address director-level information needs by showing decision-makers how underrepresented that segment is in its current contact database.

Once you understand the gaps in your database as it relates to the market as a whole, you can decide how to invest the resources to improve your audience composition. If you want to take the analysis to the next level, you can derive the total asset value of the audience you currently have or­ – more importantly – the audience you want. To understand how to do that, read Robert Rose’s recent article The Audience Valuation Engine: A New Model for Calculating the Value Per Subscriber.

It’s time you stop beating yourself up about your open rates and engagement rates and consider that you just might be throwing great content at the wrong people.

Hear from Robert Rose and how content strategy can help your customer understanding, and much more, at the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today.

Source link

The post How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience appeared first on elgibborsms.com blog.

[lucyariablog]

How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience

In my corporate days, I asked this question of the marketing team on a weekly basis: “Who are these 20,000 people in our email newsletter database? Do they even fit our ideal client profile?”

I’m embarrassed to admit, instead of pushing for the answer, we stayed on the hamster wheel churning out a weekly newsletter featuring one staffer blog post, two curated industry articles, and one marketing meme. No wonder our click-through and open rates were low and never budged.

We were focused on fulfilling the obligation to ship the newsletter on time. However, before I beat myself up too much about the quality of our content, I realize now I should have pushed the pause button and taken a step back to investigate.

When click-through & open rates are low, take a step back to investigate. @JeffLHerrmann #email Click To Tweet

Were the open and click-through-rates low due to lame subject lines and shoddy copy or was our email database full of people who didn’t fit our ideal client profile?

We had no idea if we were wasting great content on the wrong people.

Today, smart marketers operate like niche media publishers, forgoing a massive but unresponsive email database in favor of a possibly smaller but more engaged audience.

If your goal is a more valuable audience, it makes sense to use proven audience measurement methods to better understand the size, composition, and preferences of your audience.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

Understand who is on your email list

To convert the names in your database into an engaged audience, you first must understand who is behind those names. You want to consider demographic, “firmographic,” and behavioral factors because no single factor tells all about a person.

You need to know who is behind the names in your database to convert them into engaged audience. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Segment by demographics and firmographics

Break down your list by demographics (personal characteristics) and firmographics (company characteristics). Many opt-in web forms capture not only name and professional email address but also job title and industry type. From this information, you can determine a lot about the composition of your database. Create parameters for your classifications – gender, job title, company size (revenue and employee numbers), and industry classification, etc. Then code and segment the records by those classifications.

Insights available could include the composition of C-level executives vs. non-managerial individual contributors or the composition by department (marketing vs. IT vs. sales).

Using this sorting approach, don’t be surprised to find gaps due to inconsistent or insufficient data collection practices. For example, names collected from scans at trade shows over the years may vary in their depth of information because of the evolving technological capabilities.

You can explore third-party “data-appending” services, which would offer additional details about your database. While a single project can be expensive, most providers offer discounts for annual subscriptions to their service. Alternatively, you could search for additional details on LinkedIn or in other online searches and manually update your database. Whether it’s your team’s time or a contract with a service, the investment to learn more about your database contacts is worth it.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Steps to Improving Subscriber Data for More Personalized Emails

Segment by behavior

While segmenting by demographics and firmographics is an important first step, it doesn’t provide the depth of insight to help you program your content to engage your audience. You haven’t yet shed light on the desires and motivations of your audience.

Lean into behavioral segmentation and your lead-scoring system. If you have a marketing automation system, you can track the web activity of people in your database and assign lead scores based on their actions. That provides critical insight into the kind of information people in your audience respond to.

Marketing automation software is great at tracking the people in your database who actively engage with you. But in many cases, lack of engagement is the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus only on the behavior of your engaged database members, you risk missing the big picture.

And another caveat: Analyzing your own database limits your insight to the characteristics and behaviors of the people who have connected with your company. How do you know whether these people reflect the broader desired audience? Is your list skewed or biased in any direction? 

You need to do more work to get the answers. You can start with demographics, firmographics, and behavior data, but the key is to find out how the characteristics of your database compare to the characteristics of the market you’re going after.

Understand your database audience profile relative to the broader market

To better understand your database in relation to the overall market, you can apply audience evaluation methods used by the media industry. Having this insight will help benchmark your current database (composition and value), understand the gaps in your audience, and build an investment case to grow an audience that will deliver for your organization.

To get started, borrow a page from media measurement powerhouse Nielsen. It analyzes its audience-measurement sample composition in local markets by producing “in-tab” reports that compare sample groups to “universe estimates” for the market. These reports are great at identifying the gaps of market penetration or over/under audience representation.

Step 1: Identify your target audience and market

Decide on a target audience aligned to your ideal client profile. Your audience is most likely composed of your best current and future buyers. In some cases, your target could be customers you don’t have but aspire to reach. Once you’ve decided who you want as your ideal audience, you can then develop a universe estimate, more commonly known as the total addressable market.

Market sizing helps you determine the level of effort and resources required to build an audience comprising your ideal clients (more about this in Step 3). The goal is to determine the total size of the target audience, which is used as the denominator for market share calculations. Consider whether you want a single-digit share of a massive market or deep penetration of a niche market.

Example: Being early in its maturity, Acme’s B2B marketing team decides to target all B2B medical marketers rather than a subset of medical marketers.

Step 2: Determine the most important market characteristics to track

With a firm handle on the identity of your total potential audience, develop a set of characteristics to understand the composition of the audience in your target market. Remember, personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding.

Personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding, says @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Which characteristics – demographic or firmographic – may be important to know about your target audience? You’re looking to create discrete segments to truly understand the depth and dimension of your audience. Then you can create a blended sketch or composite view of the target audience – the asset you seek.

Example: The Acme marketing team recognizes that “B2B medical marketers” isn’t descriptive enough for its target audience. It chooses to segment based on gender, seniority, and company size because these are the most observable and reliable characteristics at this point.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Create Easy, Yet Actionable, Content Marketing Personas

Step 3: Build a table and populate the Universe Estimate (UE)/Total Addressable Market (TAM) and market characteristic fields

For this stage, you should use reliable industry resources to develop the most accurate market size and audience composition counts possible. For example, this report from Salesforce Research and LinkedIn provides valuable benchmarking data to inform the total audience profile for a half-dozen sectors. LinkedIn can be a great resource for estimating the size of your target audience. Industry associations also usually have solid estimates on the total count and characteristics of their industry.

At this point, enumerating your niche market will be more art than science for beginners. In the B2B space, available data isn’t as vast as it is in the B2C space. While you won’t have every characteristic populated, making some reasonable assumptions on the count of the people in a market segment is a great way to build reality checks to understanding sizing the audience opportunity and composition.

Example: The table illustrates Acme’s target audience of B2B medical marketers in comparison to the overall audience of medical marketers based on data from the Salesforce Research report.

Image source: Salesforce Research. Data for gender and company size derived for illustrative purposes.

Step 4: Analyze the table

With the industry data and calculations, you now can identify how your database audience reflects the overall audience, including opportunities to focus on and invest in audience development.

Example: Acme’s marketing team sees that its database:

Reflects less than 5% of available audience of medical marketers

Skews heavily toward males though the overall audience skews heavily female

Reaches fewer managers and director-level marketers (22.5%) than the available audience (35%)

Reflects proportionately to the available audience for companies between 501 and 1,000 employees, but captures a higher percentage of companies with 1,001 to 10,001-plus employees (65% vs. 55%).

This analysis now can inform Acme’s content marketing strategy, from content creation (i.e., create content better targeted to attract a senior-level audience) to content promotion (i.e., develop outreach plan to capture more of medical marketers in the United States).

Acme has a lot of work to do. It’s barely reaching its market potential, and its gender composition and seniority levels are skewed. The only bright spot is the company size target reflects Acme’s focus on mid-market and small enterprise organizations. Acme is reaching the right type of company, yet it is most likely not reaching enough of the right type of people.

What’s next?

We’re really just getting started by understanding the relative size and composition of who is in your audience and who isn’t. Use this method as a tool to help your management understand the current state of your audience or email database and how much work you have to do to develop the strategy and content to improve your composition by engaging your ideal clients.

Understand your current audience to learn how much work you have to do to engage ideal clients. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

For example, the Acme team could justify new content initiatives that address director-level information needs by showing decision-makers how underrepresented that segment is in its current contact database.

Once you understand the gaps in your database as it relates to the market as a whole, you can decide how to invest the resources to improve your audience composition. If you want to take the analysis to the next level, you can derive the total asset value of the audience you currently have or­ – more importantly – the audience you want. To understand how to do that, read Robert Rose’s recent article The Audience Valuation Engine: A New Model for Calculating the Value Per Subscriber.

It’s time you stop beating yourself up about your open rates and engagement rates and consider that you just might be throwing great content at the wrong people.

Hear from Robert Rose and how content strategy can help your customer understanding, and much more, at the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today.

The post How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/12/size-composition-audience/

[thenerdytomboynewb96]

TMNT: Samantha Allan Park Ch. #4

*Two days later*

“*sigh*” Donnie rubbed the sides of his head in frustration as he stared at his computer screen. It had been about a day and a half since the flash drive had been stolen and he was having a difficult time tracking it down.

Everyone had been assigned a job to complete in order to try and find the girl who had stolen from them. Leo was instructed to look up articles on unique and gifted women throughout the state, Raph was told to look up records for the top female criminals throughout the state, Mikey was given the task of searching through popular social media outlets for anything suspicious, and Donnie was using his technology to search for signals of the flash drive being used. There was a tracking code within the data that was on the drive, so Donnie should have received a signal of when and where the drive was being used. But so far, nothing had happened.

The guys had hoped that there would be a lead somewhere, maybe an article talking about a criminal who was known for stealing whom the cops were on the lookout for, or a student who had made a recent discovery that was related to the info on the drive, anything that would give away any hints as to who may have entered their lair.  

Leo and Mikey were sitting at the table, while Raph was sitting on the couch on the opposite side of the room where Donnie sat.  

Mikey was enjoying his portion of the search, but Leo and Raph weren’t as interested. “Ugh come on Donnie, how much longer do we have to do this? There’s no police statements talking about any major criminals, and you also haven’t heard of any recent Foot activity. So why are we still sitting around? I say we take to the streets and look for this chick!” Leo rolled his eyes. “Raph, we don’t know anything about this girl. We don’t know how old she is, what she officially looks like, where she’s from, not a single thing. All we know is Sensei’s description of what she looks like and that’s it.” “So?” Raph glared across the room at Leo. “We know she has black hair and black eyes, so let’s start there. Maybe check out some usual spots where criminals like to hang out at, I’m sure she’d be somewhere like that!” Donnie sighed. “That’s the thing Raph.” He spun his chair around, taking the first time in hours to look away from his cluster of monitors. “We don’t know if she’s a criminal. What if she’s just a gifted student who found a way to find this place? We can’t just go attacking random people.” “She STOLE from us! How does that not make her a criminal? Why are we defending this chick?” Leo stood up. “We’re not defending her, we’re trying to analyze the situation! If we run in and just start attacking any and every black haired girl we can find in New York then this situation is going to get a million times worse!” “Guys chill, I can’t investigate with you all yelling.” Leo took the phone that Mikey had been using and rolled his eyes after looking at the screen. “Mikey, how is watching BuzzFeed videos on MySpace helping us try to track down this girl?” Mikey nervously laughed, trying to lighten the mood, even though his eldest brother was glaring down at him, and he could feel Raph’s eyes glaring at him from behind as well. “Ahhhhh, hehe, well, you see-” Donnie tried to intervene “Uh guys?” “MySpace?” Raph was confused. “Why are you using MySpace? Who the hell uses MySpace anymore?” “I do Raph, I’m new to this! You know we’re not allowed to go on social media sites!” “Guys?” Leo then turned to Raph. “Wait, how do you know that? Do you go on these types of sites?” “Uhhhhh” Raph looked away nervously. “Sometimes I like to see if we can get ahead of the enemy, you know?” “You don’t post anything do you?” “Guys!” “Yes Leo, because my goal in life is to post online and let people know of our existence! I mean I can understand you questioning Mikey but questioning me, seriously? I’m not stupid!” “Heyyyy” Mikey frowned. “What are you trying to say?” “I’m saying that-” “GUYS!!!”

All three brothers looked ever at Donnie. “Guys, Raph is right about just sitting around. Instead of having you guys spend all day looking at electronic devices just waiting for something to change, you guys can just check back every once in a while throughout the day, and I’ll be the main one to be on the constant look out for a signal of the device being used.” “Thank you!” “Wait!” Leo held up his hand to stop his brother. “Don, that’s not fair to you though.” Donnie shook his head. “It’s no problem. I know more about this this stuff anyway, and I want to be ready for when this girl makes a move, so it’s best if I’m the one sitting around all day looking at these screens. Besides, I already do that on a daily basis” he chuckled. “Alright, but if anything important comes up then tell us immediately.” “Immediately!” Mikey pointed at Donnie. Leo chuckled at his younger brother who was trying to make it seem like he had any idea of what they were talking about. After that, the three brothers left the room to go do whatever. Donnie turned back around to face all of his monitors. He kept waiting for a signal to pop up. If whoever has stolen the device was smart enough to disable so many of his cameras, then it was extremely likely that they would want to look at the information on the drive as soon as possible, so what was taking them so long? And that’s when it hit him, what if it wasn’t necessarily that they wanted to wait, but that they had to? He then pulled up a tab on one of the many monitors and searched for a list of high schools throughout the state. He decided that while he waited for the signal, he would hack into the main databases from each of the schools on the list and look for both current students and also graduates from the past couple of years, and search for and note as many of the black haired females with black eyes that he could find from each one. “Well, at least it’s a start. Let’s get to it.”

*Same day, Monday*

Today was Monday, so I was in robotics club after school. Club got out in about five more minutes, then I would be on my way to a library halfway across town.

There were six places that Jay had taken me where I would be allowed to use computers that had the software to be able to prevent the files from getting hacked or stolen while I was reading them: Jay’s work building, the university that he had attended, a library, a hospital, a bank, and an art studio. Luckily he had friends at all these locations that gave me a pass that would allow me to go inside on my own time. They all were thrilled to know that someone was interested in their software and what they used it for, and since they all knew my brother so well, they believed they could trust that I wouldn’t do anything stupid or reckless at their workplace. Bless these people’s souls for that.

I decided to go to the furthest location first which was the art studio. The passes didn’t have any specific information on them about who I was, only that I was a guest who was to be allowed inside and where I was allowed to go inside the building.

Right after club ended I went home and changed. When I got to my room I put on a blonde wig, blue contacts, and I used some make-up to make my skin look paler than it already was. I hated seeing my hair be blonde. I don’t have a problem with blonde hair, but I don’t think it suits me very well. I packed a small cross-body bag with my phone, keys, any important passes or cards, and both my own and the stolen flash drive. I should have been in more crowded public areas tonight, so I didn’t bring a weapon with me this time.

By the time I was ready to go it was about five in the afternoon. I left through the exit in the back of the apartment building and then walked towards a wooden fence that lead to another alley. Once I got through, I then left through that alley and entered the streets of New York. This was in case there were any cameras nearby, hopefully they would see me come from a different direction than from my actual building. I headed down towards the subway and rode the train for about another half hour, arriving at the studio by six. Once inside the building, I tried to act normal and not super excited that I was finally about to look into the device. I made my way to an empty room with about ten computers. I punched in a code that Jay’s friend had given me and entered the room. I sat down at a computer and quickly got a post it note and put it over top the camera on the front of the computer screen. Then, I plugged in a flash drive of my own that contained a security system that should help warn me of any intruders, and then plugged in the flash drive I had taken. A folder popped up and after I clicked on it, tons of new folders flooded the page. I decided to start with the folder at the very top of the screen labeled “TCRI’s past.” I was then brought to multiple typed up documents talking about past experiments that were conducted at TCRI. I began to wonder if the area I had discovered was an underground base for someone who worked for TCRI, I mean hey that would be a genius idea for a hiding place. The sewers definitely wouldn’t have been my first guess as to where someone’s hiding spot would be.

As I was reading, there was a highlighted section within the document. The highlight’s talked about a chemical of some kind that was going to be used for medical research and how the chemical was used on five animal test subjects. From the way the document was worded, it seemed like someone didn’t want every individual piece of information from this experiment known. It seemed suspicious, but I wanted to see what else there was to read about.

I then went back and clicked on a link titled “Our DNA.” A few charts then popped up that talked about regular human DNA and also about altered strands. I wondered if this had anything to do the animals that had been tested on in the previous document that I had read, but why did it say ‘our’ then?

Suddenly, a pop up stated that an unknown user was trying to access the information I was looking at. I then started typing in some codes that would block this person from viewing what was on my screen. I had to be quick. Dang, I hoped that I would have had a longer time to look at the info that was on the drive, but just like I had suspected, the owner was quick to pick up on my location.

After a few minutes of quickly punching in codes, I was able to block the intruder, but I knew it would only be a matter of minutes to seconds before they found another way in. I quickly took out the flash drives, took a breath to calm myself, and walked out of the room.

The whole way home I wondered if the intruder could be anywhere nearby by coincidence. Gosh that would be insane if they happened to be in that building for whatever reason, or just happened to be on this subway car at this exact same moment that I was.

As I got back to the alley, I took off my wig and tucked it under my shirt. I entered the building and went straight to my apartment, setting up my security devices once again. I was scared, but at the same time intrigued. I was curious as to what this chemical was, and why it was so important. I decided that I would research about it more tomorrow, and for now, I was going to try to stay calm and just focus on my school work, heading back to my ordinary life.

*Same day, Monday*

Donnie had made a decent sized list of all the girls with black hair and black eyes that were between 13 and 25 years old. He then had his brother’s look for anything they could find about the girls on the list. There were a few leads, but nothing that hinted that these girls could figure out how to sneak into the lab. Plus, the majority of them had been out with friends all that Friday night according to their social media pages.

Just as Donnie began looking into an article about one of the girls in college, an alert popped up on his monitor. “I got it…..GUYS I GOT IT!” The other three looked up and hurried over and stood behind their brother. “Where is she?” Leo questioned. “She’s at…..got it, an art studio.” “Soooooo, what’re you doing dude?” asked a curious Mikey. “Well, I’m using a security program to hack into the computer she’s using. It should allow me to steal all the information on the flash drive and basically wipe it clean while all the info is transferred to my computer where it will stay safe. But I just need to hack into the studios database and then into whichever computer she’s using.” “Ahhhhh….right…” Donnie chuckled. “I’m moving the info on the flash drive somewhere where our thief can’t touch it anymore.” “Dude, why didn’t you just say that before?” Donnie continued typing away. “Aha! I’m in, now I just need to…crap, she’s blocking me out already?!” Donnie continued to type away furiously. It was quiet for the longest time, no one wanted to break Donnie’s concentration. After a while, the brainiac of the bunch sighed in defeat. Leo scrunched his forehead. “What happened?” “She got away. AGAIN.” “How did she do that?” Raph clenched his fists, this girl was really starting to piss him off. He didn’t like seeing his brother so stressed out, and the fact that she beat Donnie at something he was a genius at worried him even more. “She knew the right codes to use in order to block mine. Just as I was about to dive back in, she must have pulled the flash drive and left. There’s still ways for us to hunt her down, but this would have made things a lot easier for us, well more so easier for me specifically.” Mikey frowned, he knew that his older brainiac brother was mentally stressing and complaining about himself for not being able to win this electronic battle. “So what do we do now bro?” Donnie began typing again. “If I can get access to the buildings security cameras, which I’m doing now, we can look and see who was in the building and maybe even who was in the room of the computer that was used to get a better visual of who the thief is. Then maybe we can narrow our search down a lot more.” He pulled up one of the buildings cameras on each screen. The four looked back and forth from each monitor, but they couldn’t find a black haired woman anywhere. Donnie then figured out which room was used and pulled up the video from the time that he was trying to hack into the studios computer. He could only see the side of the girls face, but to his surprise, he was staring at a woman with blonde hair rather than black. Leo looked and saw his brothers jaw drop. “Now what’s wrong?” “Well, there’s a few scenarios as to what I’m seeing. Scenario A. she is or at some point was wearing a disguise. Scenario B. she has already shared or lost the flash drive and now someone totally different has it. Either way, she’s made the whole situation a lot more complicated. If this person on the screen is the same person who stole from us, then this chick is good at what she does.” “So what do we do now?” “I’ll have to keep waiting. It might take a few days, but if I can get signals from where she’s at, I can try to figure out some generic ideas as to where she lives based on the locations of the buildings she’s in. Also, the more places she visits, the more camera angles we can get. If we can get closer looks at her, and also angles that show which ways she heads home, we may be able to pin point her home location.”

All four brothers smiled. Finally they had a plan that could lead them to catch this girl. It was a risky plan, but hopefully the result would end up in their favor. ______________________________________________________________________________

*4 days later*

It took him four more days, but Donnie had finally started to plan how he and his brothers would try to capture this girl.

Donnie smiled. “Alright, it’s time to take action.” Leo walked over to his brother. “How did you figure out who we should go after?” “Get ready, it’s a long explanation.” He breathed in as his other two brothers also walked over to hear how everything went down. “Each time I got an alert that the drive was being used, I would try to hack into the computer that was being used and retrieve what I could, and I was actually able to secure some of the documents. Once the girl had fled the scene, I analyzed any video footage I could get my hands on: videos from the building the thief had been in, security cameras outside of the building in the direction she had gone once leaving the building, subway cams, etc. That’s when I began to notice a pattern in the thief’s schedule. Usually she would read over the documents later in the evening or sometime at night, but on Thursday the thief had observed the documents in the early afternoon rather than closer to night time as usual.” Leo nodded. “So that’s why you had us check all those school databases for absentees, right?” Donnie smiled and nodded. “Exactly! I found a few female absentees who had similar body figures like the girl we had seen in the videos. Once the options had been narrowed down to about twenty girls or so, I began looking into some of the women’s more personal information. Based on academic records alone, the options were then narrowed down to about ten girls, and the location of Thursday’s visit narrowed this down to three. After A LOT of research, I discovered that one of the three girls was in contact with someone who has connections to multiple people in each building that the signal for the drive being used at. I looked into information about this girl and learned that she has been in school clubs like robotics and mathletes, and she also plays soccer and dances. Her AP and SAT scores are ridiculously high and she participates in competitions like science fairs. She has to be our girl!”

Raph raised in eye brows in shock. Even though he knew his brother was a genius, it still always shocked him how quickly he could figure out the solution to any situation within a matter of days.

Leo nodded his head and smiled. “So you think it’s time we approach this woman?” “Well, I figured out that she’s living with a man under the last name Park and where his main location is, and based on some of the routes the camera angles showed her taking by bus, train, and on foot, I’ve been able to pin point that they live together in the same complex. So as soon as possible we should carefully approach her and get the flash drive back.” “We should be doing more than that!” Raph was getting angry now. “This chick came into our home and stole from us! I think we should bring her back and question her motives! How do we know she won’t be back again?!” “We’re…we’re not gonna hurt her right?” Mikey was concerned with where this conversation was going. “Well fearless, what’s the plan?” Leo stopped and paused for a moment. “Alright, Donnie figure out the best way for us to get to where she lives. We’ll CAREFULLY try to approach her and see if we can either talk there, or bring her back here where it’s safer for us so that we’re not seen. BUT-” as he looked over at his youngest brother “if she starts getting violent or threatens us in any way, then we begin to use force. If it’s obvious that just talking is too risky for our safety and secrecy, then we bring her back the hard way. In the end, it will be her choice as to how everything plays out.”

Raph grew a nasty smile. From everything he had heard so far, this was no ordinary girl, and he couldn’t wait to see what she was made of. He had waited a whole week to finally go out and catch the thief who had threatened the safety of his family and he was excited to finally get some answers. He cracked his knuckles and faced his brothers. “Alright boys, tonight’s Friday night, let’s have some fun.” And with that, he left the room to go exercise and get himself pumped up for whatever was in store for them later when day turned to night. Mikey’s eyebrows rose as he followed his brother out of the room. “Hey, are we going somewhere?”